Next Wednesday, July 9th, I will be at the Long Island GLBT Center to lead a discussion on LGBT persecution overseas.  The event accompanies a wonder and poignant exhibit about LGBT victims of the Holocaust.  If you are in the New York area, please join me to view the exhibit and participate in the discussion. [details here]

The following is some background on the exhibit.

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“The Long Island GLBT Community Center has been selected by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to host one of its touring exhibits, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals: 1933-1945.”  The exhibit will be making its only scheduled 2008 appearance in New York at The Center from June 23rd to July 30th. 

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Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany sought domination over Europe and, in what is now called the Holocaust, the total annihilation of Europe’s Jews.  As part of its effort to create a “master Aryan race,”  the Nazi Government persecuted other groups, including Germany’s homosexual men.  Believing them to be carriers of a “degeneracy” that threatened the nation’s “disciplined masculinity” and hindered population growth, the Nazi state incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps tens of thousands of men as a means of terrorizing German homosexuals into social conformity.  Through reproductions of some 250 historic photographs and documents, Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945 examines the rationale, means, and impact of the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate homosexuality that left thousands dead and shattered the lives of many more. 

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This exhibition, the first in a series about the lesser-known victims of the Nazi era, has been made possible in part by support from The Duane Rath Endowment Fund and the Foundation for Civil Rights. “