Thailand's gay history preserved

By Isabel Berwick

In 1983 I was an Australian PhD student visiting Thailand to do research on Buddhism when, by chance, the first Thai-language gay magazine appeared on the newsstands. I bought it, and since then I have built up a personal collection of about 2,000 Thai gay magazines. Now, with funding from the Australian Research Council, I am developing an archive in Bangkok of gay culture and literature.

I am doing this to give something back to the Thai gay and transgender community, whose members I have been interviewing and studying for the past 25 years. I am an associate professor in Thai history at the Australian National University, and the archive will help younger gay and transgender people in Thailand, now in their 20s and 30s, who want to study their own history. The magazines are a unique record of how gay culture has developed in Thailand.

My aim is to develop the Thai Queer Resources Centre as an archive that can eventually be donated to a university in Thailand for safekeeping. There's a rich history in these magazines, and apart from a few private collectors in Thailand, no-one has kept them. The police regularly destroy gay magazines - as supposedly pornographic - and mount raids on newsstands.

The previous political regime of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had conservative moral policies, and magazines and other gay businesses were often raided. Somewhat ironically, since the military coup that overthrew Thaksin in September 2006, the climate for homosexual people has improved markedly. There's been a boom in gay businesses, including new gay magazines.

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IN MEMORY OF: Allan Berube

Allan Berube, a pioneering gay historian who chronicled the contributions and tribulations of gays and lesbians in the U.S. military during World War II, died Tuesday at a hospital near his home in Liberty, N.Y. He was 61.

The cause of death was complications from stomach ulcers, according to friend and fellow historian Jonathan Ned Katz.

Taking the step from gay social activist to gay social historian was easy for Allan Bérubé--once he became aware that there was a gay and lesbian history to unearth. Twenty years ago, says Bérubé, X'68, "the assumption was that...you couldn't write gay American history, because there were no sources. Everything was covered up or censored or burned or never existed. Invisible, hidden."

No more. The independent scholar's research and writings--most notably his award-winning 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Free Press)--have helped lay the groundwork for gay and lesbian studies. They've also earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, one of 20 such "genius" grants awarded in 1996.

Allan Berube opened Green by Design in 2007. Since the 1980s he has organized the home offices of writers and researchers and the offices of small non-profits. And he has organized filing and storage systems for private research and archival collections (including periodicals, architectural plans, photographs and personal letters). Since the beginning of 2006, he has co-owned and operated INTELLIGENT DESIGN Antiques in Liberty, NY, which specializes in home furnishings and collectibles from the 1930s - 1960s, and features unusual "finds" that can be repurposed for workspace uses. Since 2002 he has owned and operated Carrier House Bed & Breakfast, also in Liberty, where he designed writing and reading areas for each apartment suite (visit the website to see the suites). He is an award-winning, community-based historian and speaker who has received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship for two decades of creative work. In the early 1970s he was a pioneer activist in Boston who helped set up innovative recycling programs and other community-based Ecology Action projects.

Sources:

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-berube16dec16,1,6474588.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/9702/9702BOBProfiles2.html

http://www.greenbydesignny.com/contact.html

HISTORY: Homosexuals and the Holocaust

Soon after taking office on January 30, 1933, Hitler banned all homosexual and lesbian organizations. Brownshirted storm troopers raided the institutions and gathering places of homosexuals.

On September 1, 1935, a harsher, amended version of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, originally framed in 1871, went into effect, punishing a broad range of "lewd and lascivious" behavior between men. In some cases, castration was performed.

An estimated 1.2 million men were homosexuals in Germany in 1928. Between 1933-45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, and of these, some 50,000 officially defined homosexuals were sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps. Excerpts from Vera Laska, an eye witness.

How many of these 5,000 to 15,000 "175ers" perished in the concentration camps will probably never be known. Historical research to date has been very limited. One leading scholar, Ruediger Lautmann, believes that the death rate for "175ers" in the camps may have been as high as sixty percent.

All prisoners of the camps wore marks of various colors and shapes, which allowed guards and camp functionaries to identify them by category. The uniforms of those sentenced as homosexuals bore various identifying marks, including a large black dot and a large "175" drawn on the back of the jacket. Later a pink triangular patch (rosa Winkel) appeared.

After the war, homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution, and reparations were refused. Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in effect in the Federal Republic (West Germany) until 1969, so that well after liberation, homosexuals continued to fear arrest and incarceration.

DAILY VIDEO: October is GLBT History month

Starting on October first the above video will change everyday featuring a famous gay icon.

Gay Britains celebrate the 4th also

Sept. 4th marks the 50-year anniversary of the publication of the Wolfenden report on homosexual offences and prostitution. It emerged at a time of great sexual ignorance. In the 1950s there were no manuals for the young, and we had to do our best with baffling encyclopaedia entries. Our elders wanted to re-establish the imagined values of Britain's lost empire. They were full of warnings about VD and how Rome fell because of its tolerance of homosexuality. So as well as the disastrous Suez campaign of 1956, there was a tripling of prosecutions for homosexual offences after 1945.

At that time, according to Dr Alfred Kinsey, who had recently published his report on male sexuality, the West End of London had more street-walkers than Havana, and the government was wondering what to do. A royal commission was proposed into prostitution, and liberals in the Home Office suggested that it should investigate homosexuality as well.

I, who grew up when gayness seemed like a life sentence to secrecy and shame, am amazed it ever happened at all.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2161142,00.html