Political differences, not Rohm’s sexuality, were the real reason he was killed and the Brownshirts decimated, but homosexual “decadence” became one of many convenient Nazi scapegoats.īent dramatizes not only the way gay men got caught in this crossfire but, in the compromised character of Max, the terrible means by which some fought to survive. This purge, one of many turning points in Hitler’s consolidation of power, targeted one of his allies and potential rivals, Ernst Rohm, the openly gay leader of the Nazis’ paramilitary wing, the Brownshirts. Sherman said he also found Bruno Bettelheim’s 1960 memoir of his time at Dachau, The Informed Heart, “hugely influential in my writing,” particularly about “the psychology of being in the camps.” Sherman’s play follows Max, a gay man in Berlin rounded up with his lover, a dancer named Rudy, after the infamous Night of the Long Knives in 1934. She would show me one paragraph in one book here, a sentence in another there, and so I was able to piece together a mosaic of certain facts.” Whatever her attitudes on the subject, Sherman recalled, “She was an excellent librarian-she remembered everything. “I spoke to an old librarian there and asked her, ‘Are there books that talk about homosexuals in Nazi Germany?’ She was very homophobic she asked me, ‘Do you mean the Nazis as homosexuals?’ I said, ‘No, I mean the Nazi treatment of homosexuals.’”
In the absence of a detailed English-language history on the subject, then, Sherman found himself doing research at London’s Wiener Library, a comprehensive collection of literature about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Sherman later caught an article in Christopher Street, a gay magazine in New York City, titled “The Men With the Pink Triangles,” that would further inform the writing of Bent (the article’s author, Richard Plant, had written a book on the subject, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, but couldn’t find a publisher until after Sherman’s play premiered). He asked Griffiths and Greig about it they said they’d done some research on the subject. The mention of “pink triangles” was, in his recollection, no more than “one sentence” in the play. “It was in three parts, showing gay life in three historical eras: one was in Victorian England, the second was in Germany before the war, and the third was at the time of Stonewall,” Sherman recounted in a phone call from a writing workshop he was leading in Austria (“Hugely ironic,” he noted). He was in London in the mid-’70s working with a small company called the Gay Sweatshop, whose production of his play Passing By had “renewed my determination to continue writing for the theatre,” when he sat in on a rehearsal of Noel Greig and Drew Griffiths’ As Time Goes By. It certainly wasn’t known to Sherman, a Jewish-American who lost family members in the Holocaust.
Indeed, even the mere fact that they were among the minority groups rounded up and sent to Nazi detention and death camps-alongside Jews, gypsies and communists-was not then widely known. What’s easy to forget amid the inexorable march of history is not only how far forward gay liberation has moved but also how little was popularly known in the mid-1970s about gay life under the Nazis. Life has changed rapidly and radically for gay people in the West since then, as much or more than it had changed between World War II and the dawn of AIDS. The reclamation of that hated symbol as a token of pride is just one of the legacies of Sherman’s play, which premiered on London’s West End in a production starring Ian McKellen, and on Broadway in 1980 with Richard Gere in the lead. As he put it recently, “It was one of those awful clichés-you could see the light bulb going off over my head.” That eureka moment led to Bent, Sherman’s path-breaking 1979 drama about the Third Reich’s persecution of homosexuals, and that in turn led to the widespread adoption of the pink triangle-a sewn-on badge of shame for gay men in the Nazi concentration camps-as a gay rights logo during the AIDS-ravaged 1980s and beyond. It was a passing reference to “pink triangles” in As Time Goes By, a 1976 play about a century of gay life, that caught Martin Sherman’s attention. Meet the Education & Community Partnerships Team.