Abstract

Plant: The Pink Triangle. Williams: The Spirit and the Flesh. Gay Histories

This article presents information about the books "The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals," by Richard Plant and "The Spirit and the Flesh" Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture," by Walter L. Williams. cared to look. Richard Plant, a gay German Jew who fled to Switzerland in 1933 and to the United States five years later, began his research when he visited Germany in the 1950s. His book, The Pink Triangle, is the first comprehensive account of this hidden aspect of Nazism, drawing on concentration camp records and standard histories of the Third Reich as well as interviews with gay survivors. The Nazis announced their horror of homosexuality early on: "Anyone who thinks of homosexual love is our enemy," declared a 1928 editorial in a party publication. When Hitler came to power German gays were a visible minority group with a flourishing culture and an emancipation movement that had been active since the nineteenth century. In the book "The Spirit and the Flesh," ethnohistorian Walter L. Williams examines a traditional homosexual role in a very different culture: that of the American Indians. Williams describes the berdache as a homosexually oriented male who does the work of women (agriculture and crafts) and whose role has religious sanction. Berdaches are not transvestites; they combine the clothes of both genders as well as cross-dressing.