Written by Evgenia Skvortsova and Nikolai Kolya Nakhshunov, edited by Romain Pinteaux, illustrated by Jingyuan Luo.

This publication was produced with support from History Unit at n-ost and funded by the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) and the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) as part of the Education Agenda on NS-Injustice

“For this reason I consider that troops composed of boys of twenty, under experienced leadership, are the most formidable.”
—Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel.

Estimations suggest that between 5,000 and 15,000 queer people were sent to concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Tens of thousands more were convicted of homosexuality, imprisoned, and subjected to conversion therapy, castration, or execution. The pink triangle—which the Nazis forced homosexuals to wear in the camps—has become one of the main symbols of the LGBTQI+ movement’s struggle for equality and existence, as well as a symbol of remembrance for those who suffered discrimination and repression, especially in its inverted form—since the 1960s in the gay liberation movement and later in the global fight against HIV/AIDS. Yet it is difficult to accept that the Third Reich’s population of approximately 79.4 million in 1939 included no more than a hundred thousand queer people. We are going to address those who were not deported and killed.

Another important symbol of queer liberation movements is the slogan “We are everywhere,” which still appears on Pride posters. Yet when we turn to history, this slogan becomes troubling. If we were truly everywhere, it means we were not only among the oppressed but also in positions of power—plotting, scheming, and committing violence. The podcast “Bad Gays” by writers Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller exemplifies this reality, illuminating the less-than-heroic traits of famous (and obscure) queer figures, including Nazis and their supporters.

According to Jack Halberstam, one of the leading figures in contemporary queer theory, “the purpose of any such investigation should not be to settle the question of homosexuality in the Nazi Party, but to raise questions about relations between sex and politics, the erotics of history and the ethics of complicity” (Halberstam 2011, 148). Adopting this approach, we ask: why did gay men participate in a regime that destroyed their own kind?

In our article, we focus specifically on gay men because their collaboration with Nazism presented a paradox. While Nazism exterminated gay people, it also glorified men and masculinity. Even among those with only a superficial knowledge of history, Nazism—also known as German fascism—is associated with male power. 

The Nazi soldier, the elite of a totalitarian society, embodies performative masculinity in a literal sense [1]. His actions and image convey a specific cultural understanding of masculinity: machismo, militarism, heroism, and whiteness. He is both cruel and unapproachable, yet he can also evoke unbridled sexual desire—as if he has just stepped off the set of an erotic photo shoot or gay pornography film [2].

Let’s  try tracing, how fascist culture both suppressed and appropriated homosexuality to forge identities through violence and the othering of difference. Contrary to the repressive hypothesis —which claims that power can only restrict— we argue that Nazi totalitarianism was not merely a regime of sexual repression, nor was it asexual. It was a regime of total control over sexuality. It purged all “dirty” and queer elements while striving to engineer a certain “idealistic” gender and sexual type in its laboratory. This regime still manifests itself nowadays in forms of homonormativity and homonationalism (see Marhoefer 2016), compelling us to turn to history.

Gay Men Between Camps and Barracks / From Männerbund to Männerstadt

The history of sexual desire has never been homogeneous or linear. It has evolved through strange encounters, embraces, and exclusions that may seem unpleasant—or even disgusting—from today’s vantage. When discussing this history, we primarily follow Michel Foucault’s work on the history of normalization (Foucault 1978), in which same-sex desire was appropriated by various regimes of power-knowledge, becoming visible and defined in medical and legal terms. Some sexualities were normalized, others pathologized, and others simply ignored. We will be less interested in the development of views on homosexuality or the intellectual history of the concept itself. Rather, we focus on how homosexual desire was or was not integrated into society, the role that desire played in forming or destroying social ties, and how it was both persecuted and glorified—of course, in secret. 

The radical state homophobia that characterized Nazism began long before the Nazi movement existed. In 1871, when the German Empire was proclaimed, Paragraph 175 was included in its Criminal Code. “Unnatural vice” (widernatürliche Unzucht) between two men was punishable by imprisonment or loss of civil rights. Obsessed with imperialist and militaristic ambitions, Emperor Wilhelm I and his chancellor Otto von Bismarck sought to extend the rules enforced in the Prussian army to all of society. They subjected even personal relationships to strict discipline—especially between men, who were universally regarded as potential soldiers and defenders of the fatherland.

However, as German imperial power declined, the state relaxed its regulation of homosexual relations. Although Paragraph 175 remained in effect during the Weimar Republic, Berlin became known as the capital of sexual freedom and scientific progress in sexuality research during the early 20th century. In 1897, German-Jewish doctor Magnus Hirschfeld and his colleagues established the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee—the world’s first organization dedicated to protecting gay rights. He later founded the Institute for Sexual Science to study sexual variation. Dr. Hirschfeld devoted his life to decriminalizing and normalizing (while sometimes pathologizing) homosexuality, producing hundreds of scientific and activist works. For many contemporary LGBTQI+ activists, he rightly occupies a special place in the pantheon of queer movement activists.

However, the development of knowledge about sexuality also has a dark side, strangely intertwined with Nazism. Dr. Hirschfeld was a follower of the Enlightenment tradition, characterised by a penchant for experimentation, coercion, and totalitarian rationalism, and his racist views and affinity for eugenics were no secret to his contemporaries. For example, he justified medical sterilization for people sterilization for people with perceived intellectual disabilities (see Marhoefer 2022). On the other side of the ideological spectrum,  there were the “Masculinists”, adhered to the opposite extreme and looked at the ideals of German Romanticism. They criticized Dr. Hirschfeld and his supporters for believing in a “third sex” as a distinct category of person, situated between male and female. Instead, the Masculinists advanced ideas about the superiority of homosexual men, their bond with one another, their misogyny, and sometimes their anti-Semitism (see Chapter 3 in Hewitt 1996).

One of the movement’s main voices was the magazine Der Eigene, founded in 1896 by Adolf Brand—a proponent of egoistic anarchism—which later became a community of the same name. Its supporters’ “thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism” (Brand 1898, 100–101; cit. in Oosterhuis 1991). To them, “Greek times” represented an era not only of male domination, but also of flourishing pederastic culture, when older men could sexually exploit younger ones, and of the aesthetic ideal of the naked, athletically built white body [3]. This vision was overlaid with the idea of the “Männerbund,” entirely in keeping with the spirit of German national romanticism. According to this concept, the “instinctive sympathy” (Oosterhuis 1997, 197) between men was the foundation for heroism, patriotism, and defending their homeland—which men do closely together, back-to-back or in other positions. It is important to note that Masculinists neither invented the Männerbund nor gave it an erotic connotation; they merely revealed the strange intimacy that can develop between men in moments of crisis.

What crisis? The concept of the Männerbund—which embodied German popular resistance during the Napoleonic Wars—resonated powerfully with nationalist sentiments in early 20th-century Germany. The empire led, then lost, the world war in a crushing defeat. The country plunged into economic and social collapse. Meanwhile, women gained rights to public participation, the “communist threat” loomed larger, and the carefree bourgeoisie indulged in amorous pleasures for all to see. Returning defeated from the battlefield to a country in economic decline, many soldiers found themselves traumatized. Familiar social hierarchies and markers of identity were losing their value. This existential and material fragility profoundly influenced younger generations as well. Though they hadn’t experienced the brutalities of war firsthand, they could hardly envision a peaceful civilian future under such conditions. Frustrated by the empire’s broken promise and unable to adapt to new realities, they yearned for predictability—for a time when man was master of the world, when his status was guaranteed by his gender alone. They longed for a fantasmatic system that had never actually existed. Thus, in search of reassurance, many men renounced their families and egalitarian relationships—including romantic ones—and joined hierarchical male brotherhoods that promised a non-contradictory worldview, protection by older comrades, and the restoration of former national glory. This is precisely what the Nazi Party, the NSDAP, ultimately becomes: “Machismo in uniform,” as the historian Richard Bessel put it (Bessel 1984, 153; cit. in Dillon 2018, 388).

Yet resentment and dreams of restoring former glory were not the only forces that motivated young Germans. Something else drew them to the NSDAP—a party filled with fair-haired young men just like themselves. The history of the Institute for Sexual Science founded by Hirschfeld and his colleagues is telling. Founded to address the sexual issues facing German society, the Institute was looted and destroyed on May 6, 1933—just months after the Nazis seized power—by the German Student Union and the Stormtroopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA), the NSDAP’s main combat organization until 1934. Though the SA’s backbone consisted of First World War veterans, it also attracted many young men. Many of them were indeed drawn by the SA because of its position as the elite of the new society and the sense of community that it created. When accused of recruiting very young boys into combat units, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter responded: “Exactly, and from these will grow those whom we do not have today, namely German men!” (Völkischer Beobachter 1928; cit. in Dillon 2018, 389).

The stormtroopers lived, slept, worked, sweated, and showered together. Perhaps they even loved each other. The 1931 Christmas edition of the Hamburger Tageblatt published the following note: “We have lost everything, we have gained everything. We gave up father and mother and fiancée and friend, gave up money and goods and our blood. Some of these things we gave easily, some with more difficulty, but we have all gained one thing that no man or God can rob from us—we have gained our comrades” (Hamburger Tageblatt 1931; cit. in Wackerfuss 2015, 174).

Yet these “sentimental” Nazis were also capable of rape and murder. Impulsive and coarse behaviour, drunkenness, sudden outbursts of violence, intimidation of civilians, and crude treatment of women that often were fatal, were commonplace among them (Oosterhuis 2017, 567). These same men would later organize and participate in one of the bloodiest catastrophes in human history.

Masculine nationalism and sexual modernism—resulted in a thorny mixture of homoeroticism and homophobia (ibid., 566)—converged in Ernst Röhm, chief of staff of the Sturmabteilung (SA). Described as a “swashbuckling mercenary, father and drillmaster to his troops, straightforward and tactless” (Plant 1986, 62), Röhm embodied the cult of virile comradeship that defined early Nazi paramilitarism. His personal motto—“Only the real, the true, the masculine held its value” (Hancock 1998)—captured his faith in a hypermasculine ethos that prized male strength, loyalty, and martial camaraderie. A close confidant of Adolf Hitler and reportedly the only man permitted to address the Führer informally, Röhm symbolized both the vigour and moral ambiguity of the Nazi revolutionary movement.

Röhm’s homosexuality was an open secret within Nazi circles and a weapon for his political opponents. Despite the party’s public homophobia, Hitler initially defended Röhm, declaring that “private life cannot be an object of scrutiny unless it conflicts with basic principles of National Socialist ideology” (Fest 144; Bleuel 1973, 97–98; cit. in Plant 1986, 61). He characterized the SA—Röhm’s “Spartan boys”—as “not an institute for the moral education of genteel young ladies, but a formation of seasoned fighters” (ibid.). Within this aggressively masculine culture, homoerotic undertones were tolerated as long as they reinforced loyalty and soldierly unity. But this uneasy coexistence of homoeroticism and homophobia would soon unravel.

As Röhm’s political influence grew, so did the SA’s independence and its reputation for disorder. The stormtroopers' rowdy behaviour and persistent rumours of homosexuality among its leader threatened the Nazi Party’s carefully cultivated image of moral purity. When Röhm’s personal correspondence with physician Karl-Günther Heimsoth, who was close to der Eigene—discussing his sexuality—was leaked to the press, the scandal intensified. Left-wing parliamentarians taunt him with shouts such as 'Hot Röhm', 'Heil Gay', or 'SA, Trousers Down! ' (Reichardt 2002, 680; Wackerfuss 2015, 182; cit. in Dillon 2018, 391), turning Röhm’s sexuality into a weapon of political humiliation.

The situation worsened when Röhm’s ties to masculinists came to light. The group had campaigned for the repeal of Paragraph 175—the law criminalizing homosexuality—which the Nazis themselves enforced ruthlessly. After Hitler consolidated power as chancellor in 1933, the SA’s political usefulness declined. Its mass militancy and overt homosociality no longer fit the needs of a regime pursuing centralized, bureaucratic control. Röhm’s open homosexuality and his push for power increasingly became liabilities to Hitler’s new order.

By June 1934, Röhm’s defiance and the SA’s semi-autonomous power had become intolerable. During the Night of the Long Knives (30 June–2 July 1934), Röhm and many of his top lieutenants were arrested and executed on charges of treason. Official statements condemned Röhm’s “gravest neglect, conflicts, and pathological tendencies” (cit. in Biedroń 2025). Hitler justified the killings as moral purification: “The Führer gave the order for the merciless excision of that ulcer; in the future, he will not allow individual persons with pathological tendencies to implicate and shame millions of decent people” (ibid.). Nazi propaganda framed the purge as ethical cleansing—ridding the movement of “pathological” elements to restore its supposed moral integrity. In reality, it is now admitted that it served a dual purpose: eliminating a political rival and extinguishing any lingering tolerance toward homosexuality within the Nazi ranks.

After Röhm’s purge, Heinrich Himmler assumed control of the SA and soon became Reichsführer-SS, head of the Schutzstaffel—another paramilitary organization that is responsible for Nazi state terrorism. Under Himmler, the SS replaced the SA as the regime’s dominant force. This transition marked a decisive shift in sexual politics: while Röhm’s era had permitted limited sexual privacy, Himmler’s rule abolished it entirely. Homosexuality was now redefined as both a racial and moral threat. “Homosexual panic” became a defining feature of Nazi ideology and state policy (see Giles 2001).

That same year, the Gestapo launched a large-scale campaign against homosexuals. They destroyed publications, raided clubs, collected denunciations, and called for the death penalty for gay people from public platforms and in newspapers. In response to homophobic sentiments of the masses, Paragraph 175 was amended to increase punishments for coercion, crimes involving minors, prostitution, and bestiality. The law also replaced “unnatural vice” with simply “vice”—a change that allowed virtually anything to fall under its scope, including embraces and glances (Hancock 1998, 636). 

In 1936, Himmler established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. Simultaneously, the Nazi-controlled psychoanalytic establishment became complicit in this sexual policy. The Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute—systematically cleared of Jewish practitioners and critics of the regime—was reconstituted as the Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie (the Göring Institute) under Matthias Göring, a relative of Nazi politician and military leader Hermann Göring. By 1938, it offered conversion therapy against homosexuality and claimed hundreds of supposed cures among men referred by Nazi organizations (Whisnant 2016).

Those convicted under the new law were first imprisoned, then sent to concentration camps along with other “deviants” like sex-workers, homeless people, or mentally impaired, and the Jews. There, they were subjected to forced labour, sexual violence, and medical experimentation. Some of these experiments revealed an overt sexual, voyeuristic preoccupation on the part of their captors. To determine whether convicted homosexuals were “curable,” prison guards brought female inmates to male compartments and observed if the men would seize this opportunity to copulate. Doing so, they acknowledged that homosexual acts might be situational. If these traumatized prisoners showed no sexual interest in the opposite sex or consistently showed attraction to the same sex, they were deemed incurable and treated with escalating brutality.

In 1937, the official SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps ran the headline “These are enemies of the state!” (Das sind Staatsfeinde!). The article defined homosexuality as a “degenerate and racially destructive phenomenon.” It declared that present-day Germany should reach back to “the primeval Germanic point of view” by instigating “the eradication of degenerates” (Burleigh & Wippermann 1991, 191–192). These words spread far and wide, marking the beginning of a period of homophobic terror. Its victims were anyone who disagreed with the regime’s policies and could be suspected—even slightly—of “vice.” In the same year, Himmler told SS lieutenants: “We must be absolutely clear that if we continue to have this burden [homosexuality] in Germany, without being able to fight it, then that is the end of Germany, and the end of the Germanic world. Unfortunately, we don’t have it as easy as our forefathers. The homosexual, whom one called ‘Urning,’ was drowned in a swamp. The professorial gentlemen who find these corpses in the peat-bogs are certainly unaware that in ninety out of a hundred cases, they have a homosexual before them, who was drowned in a swamp, clothes and all. That wasn’t a punishment, but simply the extinguishment of abnormal life” (Ibid., 193).

Himmler opened his speech by meticulously citing statistics on homosexual men in German society (Ibid., 192). His obsession with the topic was evident as he insisted that any “impure” sex threatens the degeneration of the nation, race, and people. Yet beneath this lofty rhetoric lied his own fixation on other men’s sex lives—a preoccupation that was itself sexual in nature, though far removed from what is commonly understood as such.

The Nazi regime’s biopolitics of total control over sexuality assumed the racial and sexual hygiene of bodies, predominantly male. Ideally, soldiers should abstain not only from sexual relations with non-Aryan women, communists, or sex workers, but from sex altogether. This coexisted with a hyper-sexualized aesthetic of the body that could only be displayed among men—and with the reality of brutal, systematic, unpunished rape. Meanwhile, the private sphere dissolved as such. Men were obliged to publicly demonstrate their exclusive love and devotion to the state—to their comrades and older brothers.

These tendencies—often unconscious and unarticulated—became especially evident when Germany unleashed what would later become World War II. The Nazis intensified their persecution of homosexuals, introducing the death penalty for homosexual acts, legalizing the deportation of gay men to concentration camps, and debating compulsory castration (Giles 2001, 248–249). Yet simultaneously, they sent masses of single men to the front, creating conditions where these men could seek pleasure with—or at the expense of—one another. Women, meanwhile, were treated as second-class citizens: mothers who became obsolete with age, mere reproductive machines or instruments for sexual release.

Like Nazism itself, the Nazi male state (Männerstaadt) emerged from romantic ideals and white nationalism. Yet it had nothing to do with queerness: the Nazis imposed a homosocial ideal, glorifying brotherly and comradely feelings between men. Its sexual regime was characterized by homonarcissism—a radical rejection of anything different or non-homonormative. Under this regime, social outsiders—queers, Jews, non-Aryans, and women—were deemed conceptually and biologically inferior. The only solution for building a new society was the extermination of anything alien or “deviant.”

Fantasies About Purity 

The Nazis' homonarcissism was paradoxical: they persecuted homosexuality while encouraging male communities and homosociality—the unification of people based solely on gender identity, which also carries a sexual dimension, i.e. how they controlled their own bodies, as well as those of others. So what were the Nazis really fighting against when they stigmatised people as “deviants” and put pink triangles on their prison uniforms?

In Male Fantasies (1987; 1989), Klaus Theweleit was among the first to analyse Nazi sexuality without resorting to homophobia. His predecessors often linked Nazi hypermasculinity with homosexuality—as when Theodor Adorno claimed that “totalitarianism and homosexuality go together” (Adorno 2005, 46). Theweleit identified a glaring contradiction in this approach: conceptions of homosexuality are so diffuse, so shaped by defensive processes—even among analysts themselves—that the concept offers little real understanding of what homosexuality actually is. Instead, it triggers prejudices, false ideas, and personal defence mechanisms, leading to the reassuring but strained conclusion that homosexuals are always fundamentally others—aliens or enemies utterly unlike ourselves (Theweleit 1987, 54–55). Yet both otherness and alienness are relational. The objects of antagonistic feelings like fear or hatred are deeply rooted in those who experience them. Similarly, the object of fantasy cannot be separated from the one who fantasizes (Ibid., 45). The fact that the Nazis persecuted some homosexuals while glorifying others may reveal something uncomfortable about the Nazis themselves: their belief system was riddled with contradictions, some of which were indeed psychic in nature. But simplified conclusions that homophobia is perpetuated by closeted gays are absolutely misleading for understanding a complex system of oppression and its transhistorical appeal.

Theweleit draws on Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire, a pioneering text of queer theory. Hocquenghem centers homosexual desire on two key ideas: desire as a positive and creative (Hocquenghem drew primarily on Deleuze and Guattari), —and the exclusion of the anus from sociality (Theweleit 1989, 312). Homosexual desire challenges normative boundaries and categories. It represents an “unformulated return of the libido” (Freud 1977, 148; cit. in Theweleit 1989, 312) and undermines key forms of repression consolidated by the social exterritorialization of the anal area: “Whereas the phallus is essentially social, the anus is essentially private. The anus has no social desiring function left because all its functions have become excremental: that is to say, chiefly private. (. . .) The constitution of the private, individual, 'proper' person is 'of the anus, ' the constitution of the public person is 'of the phallus.' The anus does not enjoy the same ambivalence as the phallus, i.e., its duality as penis and Phallus. Of course, to expose one’s penis is a shameful act, but it is also a glorious one, inasmuch as it displays some connection with the Great Social Phallus. Every man possesses a phallus which guarantees him a social role; every man has an anus, which is truly his own, in the most secret depths of his own person (Hocquenghem 1993, 96–97).”

In this context, Theweleit argues that "homosexual longing" is not simply one form of sexual desire among others—as liberal reformist arguments for tolerance suggest. Rather, anal penetration represents the opening of social prisons, admission into a hidden dungeon that guards the keys to the recuperation of the revolutionary dimension of desire (Theweleit 1989, 313). 

Here, “revolutionary” means “desire to desire” (Ibid.). From the perspective of the Nazis' seemingly monolithic social organization, this desire to desire—or desire for its own sake—was unacceptable. Yet they found it natural to violate others' boundaries in sophisticated ways. The Nazis' repression of the anal expressed itself in two forms: stigmatizing the passive sexual role as a sign of "moral decay," and enforcing strict army discipline through heavy, uncomfortable uniforms, goose-stepping, and corporal punishment—particularly flogging.

At the same time, Nazis viewed homosexuality as more or less permissible for men with a “homosexual” disposition, or for men who were thought to engage in it as transgression (Ibid., 327). As a result, over half of those convicted under Paragraph 175 avoided punishment. The Nazis showed considerable tolerance toward party members and Aryan youths on trial, actively seeking acquittals for them. Many Nazi leaders—including Hitler himself—employed homosexual bodyguards, rendering these compliant gay men untouchable (see Giles 2002, 263–265). Yet Nazi transgression reached its peak in the concentration camps. These spaces became a true homonarcissistic dystopia where homosexuals were exploited as objects of harassment, sadism, and both so-called “scientific” and sexual experimentation.

Psychoanalyst Elena Pasynkova, drawing on clinical work and activism in conflict zones like Palestine and Ukraine, notes the particular vulnerability of queer people when scientific knowledge about homosexuality is absent or excluded: “Sexualised jokes common in post-socialist and Western societies are rare in cultures where sexuality isn’t constantly discussed. This doesn’t mean same-sex relationships don’t exist there. In Palestinian schools, for instance, such relationships are as common as in Western schools—a result of gender-segregated education and lighter punishment compared to extramarital heterosexual relations. Society overlooks them despite widespread awareness. Similarly, sociological studies show that outside the family, boys are more frequently targeted for rape due to greater accessibility and lesser consequences. In Arab communities less influenced by university education, homosexual tendencies may be expressed more openly, confusing Western observers. Men can display affection toward each other more freely—not perceived as sexual—because they lack the Western practice of monitoring every gesture and tone.”

Theweleit and many researchers referring to him concluded that the Nazis were misogynistic. They sought to maintain the imaginary integrity of their male ego by oppressing the feminine within both their psyches and their social environment. This could be seen as an attempt to preserve the monolithic and pure ego, as well as a broader social and sexual homogeneity that asserts itself through the suppression of all that is heterogeneous (on the combination of the heterogeneous and the homogeneous in fascism see Bataille 1979). Several theories also link Nazi anti-Semitism with their misogyny, as the idea of “Jewish” as “feminine” was prevalent in nationalist circles (Geller 2003).

However, when femininity becomes the subject of positive propaganda—through the creation and enforcement of the ideal Nazi wife image (Rupp 1977)—the concept of femininity itself as a social and sexual construct becomes problematic. The suppression of both the 'feminine' and the anal shares a common thread: their perceived alienness, impurity, fluidity, and affectivity. In this sense, the Nazis' aversion to queerness can be understood as a rejection of non-monolithic gender and sexuality—forms that are simultaneously transgressive and transgressed, desiring and desired.

Far-right violence involves a paradoxical form of transgression: it is restrictive rather than liberating, fundamentally contradicting transgression itself. After all, transgression not only violates the Law but also confirms its significance. Therefore, the Nazi uprising can be seen as a form of recogniton, rather than of disavoval. The Nazis violated their own laws, including sexual norms, normalizing rule-breaking from a position of ego-driven infallibility and permissiveness (cf. Theweleit 1989, 325). Notably, Röhm—like many others convicted under Paragraph 175—claimed he was bisexual and only masturbated with other men, thus technically avoiding violation of the law (Herzer 1995, 214). In other words, he did not engage in anal sex as an act of desire-driven transgression. Without affection or openness to new experiences, transgression becomes destructive and fruitless, leading to extreme egocentrism and totalitarianism.

Fascinating and Sexless

Nazi aesthetics embody this totalitarian drive—the means and methods the regime used to present itself and mesmerize its followers.

In her essay Fascinating Fascism (1980), Susan Sontag examines Leni Riefenstahl, a key figure in the Nazi regime and Hitler’s favourite film director (“my perfect German woman,” as he called her). Riefenstahl’s iconic films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) glorified aggressive masculinity and Olympic physical perfection, as well as the supposed biological and physical superiority of the Aryan race. The two parts of Olympia are tellingly titled “The People’s Festival” (Fest der Völker) and “The Festival of Beauty” (Fest der Schönheit). 

Fascist aesthetics include but go far beyond the rather special celebration of the primitive (…) More generally, they flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force (Sontag 1980, 91). 

The figures marching through German streets and sports stadiums resemble clean-shaven, muscular androgynes, resembling the most common types of sculpture in Ancient Greece. They seemed almost devoid of genitals or other human characteristics. Dressed in uniforms or Olympic suits, they appeared to have stepped directly from a Nazi poster. Even when straining with effort, their images remained iconic and polished to perfection—so much so that one was not able to tell whether they were looking at a real person, an erotic doll, or a machine of erotic domination. 

Fascist dramaturgy centres on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly dressed and shown in ever-growing numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a frozen, static, “virile” posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, exalts mindlessness, and glamorizes death (Ibid.).

This aesthetic of physical perfection is, at its core, deeply utopian—not because physical perfection doesn’t exist or because bodies lack the right to be beautiful. Rather, its utopianism lies in combining the “sanctimoniously asexual” with the “(in a technical sense) pornographic” (Sontag 1980, 92). The “triumph of the will” is actually a triumph of aestheticizing political life, as Benjamin characterized fascism (2008, 41): a performative expression of bodily superiority and purity—not only racial and physical, but also gendered and sexual.

The central myth of Nazi aesthetics is radical bodily equality—achievable only through eugenics and racial hygiene. Constrained by this myth, individuals discipline themselves to appear pure, ideal, and flawless. Bridging these observations with contemporary clinic, Elena Pasynkova continues: “Once positioned within a power structure, a subject has limited options for navigating the position this power grants them. In any social structure, sexual relations are strictly prescribed at the mythic level—though this doesn’t directly coincide with the structure itself. However, following Foucault, if we emphasize visibility as a form of control over sexuality, we find this control across various modern regimes, regardless of their authoritarianism or how subjects perceive themselves. Widespread social media only exacerbates this.”

 … or large-scale modern media such as propaganda posters, mass cinema, television, and radio, which—even when they allow for subjective reading and ambiguity—still profoundly shape individual identities. Under Nazism, subjects were obliged to express their gender in an “ideal” way that combined sterility with mass appeal perfection. At the stage of gender performance, Nazism’s main objective was to embody the unique and exceptional “Aryan spirit”—as opposed to the materialistic eroticism of the Weimar Republic and the USSR, which were considered the two most sexually liberated depraved states. Propaganda presented an aesthetic ideal of a desirable yet immaculate body, aligned with post-Christian values and free from signs of gender and sexual diversity (see Bernauer 1998).

Christina Wieland describes the striving for aesthetic utopia as integral to the fascist state of mind (2015). The fascist utopia seeks to establish a total state of mind (Wieland references Bollas) that eliminates all opposition and claims access to all objects (Chasseguet-Smirgel): “This 'moral void' simplifies violence. The empty subject must find a victim to contain the void 'and now a state of mind becomes an act of violence (…) To accomplish this transfer, the Fascist mind transforms a human other into a disposable nonentity, a bizarre mirror transference of what has already occurred in the Fascist’s self experience’” (Ibid., 22; cf. Bollas 1993, 203). Annihilation of the other creates a sense of emptiness and purity, particularly regarding one’s own body, gender, and sexuality. However, ultimate purity is unattainable—"contamination" awaits the individual from the moment they acquire speech. Language itself is inherently ambiguous, to say nothing of the psychic upheavals that occur in intersubjective relationships and human vulnerability to nature. To reproduce itself, the fascist state of mind requires total war (Wieland 2015, 23), which fuels its narcissistic ambitions by achieving superiority over the other and destroying the other as a phenomenon. This drive toward total annihilation resembles 'the Nirvana principle' (Low 1920, 73; cit. in Freud 1955, 55–56), which—unlike the pleasure principle—seeks to eliminate affection to avoid the fluidity and variability usually associated with enjoyment.

The sexualized other embodies the differences and paradoxes that totalitarianism struggles with in relation to the body, gender, and sex. The Nazis excluded and labelled this other “dirty” not only because of its perceived repugnance and disorderliness, but because its existence threatened purity itself. The sexualized other is perceived as alien because inhabiting this queer body, gender, and sexuality means accepting yourself as you are and recognizing that others can derive pleasure from it—just as you potentially can (cf. Zupančič & Fishzon 2018). This subverts the concept of homonarcissism, which is based on the superiority of a homogeneous body, gender, and sexual act. Homonarcissism cannot tolerate this subversion, since any homogeneity—even represented by idealized images of brutal male statues—is merely someone’s fragile and bitter fantasy.

Nazism does not create the homonarcissist—it fosters him to emerge from the shadows, insecure and lacking self-confidence. The Nazi-type leader beckons to him from an imagined past of “former glory” and guides him into violently claim power in the present day: “A cult of aggressive male inferiority already exists and may develop further as the authoritarian leader’s strengthened role fuels hysteria among his subjects—including men. Against this backdrop, one might ask: What is masculinity? Why does its definition seem so simple and almost intuitively understandable, even to many psychoanalysts trained to comprehend the limits of such identity categories?” — concludes Elena Pasynkova.

Conclusion

Queer people remain targets of authoritarian regimes (e.g., Khrushcheva 2021). However, liberal democracies are not immune to authoritarian and totalitarian backlash. Fascism adapts to modern conditions by embracing new media, technologies, psychologies, and ideologies. Sexualized fascism is firmly rooted in homosocial and gender-narcissistic communities, such as the “manosphere.” These communities promise ultimate self-expression but demand constant visibility and competition with others. This reproduces similar dynamics of surveillance, conformism, and exhibitionism that once defined Nazi mass culture.

Yet like the Nazis, contemporary traditionalists longing for “natural” masculine omnipotence develop an obsessive need to break rules rather than show sincere care for one another or find genuine joy in being vulnerable before another human. This reveals their membership in a group whose members share essentially nothing except their genitals—which themselves vary in shape and size.

Among gay men (and other men), masculinity becomes violent and narcissistic when it loses its authenticity and hardens into a rigid category hostile to anything fluid and queer. Choosing monolithic masculinity—whether consciously or not—is like stepping back into the closet from which gay men once emerged. In these challenging circumstances, critical analysis must neither ignore the Nazi past nor be romantic and overly optimistic about contemporary authoritarian tendencies. Instead, we must learn from these tragic lessons and continue doing so, taking small but meaningful steps forward toward the dysphoria mundi that Paul B. Preciado aptly describes as “forms of life that announce a new regime of knowledge and a new political and aesthetic order from which to think through the planetary transition” (Preciado 2025).

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