FEBRUARY 18, 2025 (Editor’s Note): After Vice President JD Vance berated and shocked European allies at the Munich Conference, February 15th, he met, one-on-one with the leader of the Neo-Nazi German far-right AfD.

JANUARY 23, 2025: Elon Musk has endorsed the far-right Alternative for German (AfD) candidate for Chancellor in the coming German election.

We must not normalize or ignore what occurred.

By Charles Francis and Jeff Trammell

Imagine marching with the diverse thousands in Washington, D.C.’s Pride parade, then suddenly you are confronted by hundreds of men, mostly blonde, wearing black, shouting in your face to disrupt the march. Separating you from them are helmeted riot police with German Shepherds. You blink your eyes in disbelief. You hear the anti-gay epithets shouted in German. You recoil at obscene placards depicting stick figures locked in sex with a red prohibition slash. The black, white and red colors of the Reich flash; there is another flag with an Iron Cross. “Proud-German-National,” one sign says. 

1933? Welcome to Christopher Street Day, 2024 in Leipzig, Germany. Named in homage to the site of the Stonewall Riots, Christopher Street Day (CSD) is the oldest Pride event in what was East Germany, formed in 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This year, CSD Leipzig has never held such significance, not just in Germany but for us all.

At the Leipzig CSD, there was an overwhelming number of friends and allies, facing some 700 neo-Nazis at the barricades, but the political significance is impossible to ignore. In recent days, the German far-right extremist group Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the most seats in Thuringia and nearly won the most seats in Saxony. The rhetoric was about immigration and nationalism, but on CSD the target was Pride with a shocking re-emergence of Nazi-era rage against homosexuals. The determination of the marchers on Christopher Street Day was inspirational, in the face of this violent hostility from AfD’s thugs.

But this has happened before. In 1922, a young gay veteran and survivor of World War I, Bruno Vogel, broke with his family and left home while he was attending the University of Leipzig. He formed a same-sex “friendship league” for homosexuals that would meet regularly in a restaurant for community and discussion about homosexual human rights and justice.  Discovered by Magnus Hirschfeld, a German Jewish doctor and researcher who founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, Vogel’s friendship league blossomed both in Leipzig and in Berlin where he went to work for Hirschfeld. In 1929, Vogel wrote an openly gay and pacifist novel “Alf” about two college preparatory school students Alf and Felix and their love ending with Felix’s death in the trenches of World War I. Magnus Hirschfeld assembled the largest library on sexuality, gender and homosexuality in the world. His library, including “Alf”, along with thousands of volumes was ransacked and burned by Nazis in a public bonfire. The Minister of Nazi propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1933, “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state!…..You do well to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.” Vogel left Germany before the bonfire, later to write about it all and be interviewed in London before he passed away. Otherwise, the name of his friendship league in Leipzig may have been lost to history.  It was “Wir,” the German word for “we” or “us.”

In 2002, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum mounted a historic exhibition entitled “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945.” This was the first time the Holocaust Memorial Museum focused on this targeted community. According to the exhibition’s materials, “Concerned that ‘degeneracy’ carried in the male ‘Aryan’ blood would weaken the ‘masculine discipline’ of the German nation,” the Nazis launched their violent assault against suspected queer Germans. The Museum’s exhibition was both courageous and groundbreaking built upon years of research in archives across Germany including the Federal Archives of Germany (Bundesarchiv Koblenz), accessing newly opened Nazi records. 

The museum’s archival research team discovered hundreds of photographs, many of them the booking shots of gay men dragged from their lives in Berlin to prisons and camps. The Holocaust Museum discovered to a degree never before achieved the archival, evidentiary history of more than 100,000 men arrested for homosexuality, one third of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison. Hundreds more were interned in concentration camps to face brutal conditions, torture, and even castration. As recently as 2016, the German parliament, the Bundestag, enacted legislation to compensate the 5,000 surviving victims of this violence, and to expunge the records of some 50,000 men jailed because of their crime: homosexuality.  This is the historic — and contemporary — context of Christopher Street Day ’24.

We cannot normalize or ignore what happened in Leipzig. Every other party in Germany has refused to enter into a coalition government with AfD, for good reason. Indeed, we must widen the frame. From Germany’s AfD to Viktor Orban’s Fidez Party in Hungary; to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France; to Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy Party, LGBTQ citizens are strategic, political targets of the European far-right nationalist parties. “Hands off our children,” they shout in Hungary, while deleting same-sex parents’ names from birth certificates in Italy. Depending upon the outcome of the coming presidential election, they are poised to export their political strategy to the United States. What happened in Leipzig is happening to “wir”, all of us, and we must be prepared for the right wing to ratchet up its assault on our community.

Charles Francis is president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., and author of ‘Archive Activism: Memoir of a ‘Uniquely Nasty’ Journey.’ Jeff Trammell was a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Advisory Committee for the Gay & Lesbian Remembrance Project; and was senior adviser for LGBTQ matters in the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns.

This article was originally published on the Washington Blade’s website.