Comment by baumschubser
5 days ago
> unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s
Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi's SA forces, was gay. People did not join the Nazi movement because of the impeccable life style of their leaders, but their political program. Same with AfD or Trumpists.
Sure, the history is full of gays who were closeted or whose homosexuality were open secrets. But those have always been kept plausibly deniable towards the public, not open like this at all.
Röhm was actually known to the public to be gay for some of the time that he was in power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6hm_scandal He wasn't quite 'openly gay' in the modern sense, but he didn't really put up much of a pretense.
The fact that the title of that article includes the word "scandal" would imply that his peers weren't actually ok with his homosexuality, no?
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The article you reference points out that, not only did Röhm lose all support in the Nazi party once he was "outed", but that Hitler had him executed due to, in part, his homosexuality. And: "After the purge, the Nazi government systematically persecuted homosexual men."
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Vito, an important member of the New Jersey crime family DiMeo (Italian Mafia) during the early 2000s was gay as well