Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 1: the podcast about all the rebels and weirdos and revolutionaries
Speaker 1: who fought against all the worship that the world has
Speaker 1: to offer. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me
Speaker 1: today is Sharine, who is a director and artist, a poet,
Speaker 1: a general jack of all trades, and as the co
Speaker 1: host of the podcast Ethnically Ambiguous. How are you doing today, Shrine?
Speaker 1: I'm doing Hi, Sharine. I have a podcast that I've
Speaker 1: done so many of these, and every intro I've ever
Speaker 1: done is so awkward. I'm Sharin. That's actually something that
Speaker 1: I really appreciate about podcasts. It makes me feel like, um,
Speaker 1: I'm doing okay. Yeah, that's why I to reassure, to
Speaker 1: reassure everybody. But if I can do what you could do,
Speaker 1: it probably better. Um. We've also got our producers, Sophie
Speaker 1: listening on like the voice of God or maybe like
Speaker 1: one of the three norns weaving the fate of the
Speaker 1: rest of us mortals. How are you doing to Sophie,
Speaker 1: that's my favorite intro you've done. I'm great, you know,
Speaker 1: surviving kind of exited for this script. It's a good one. Thanks.
Speaker 1: Thanks cutting some threads. Um, that is a great image,
Speaker 1: and Sophie is like that. I guess that was great. Okay.
Speaker 1: So I figured today we should do something like really lighthearted,
Speaker 1: easy breezy and talk about Nazism. I figure no one ever,
Speaker 1: no one ever talks about these guys, right, Like, when
Speaker 1: was the last time anyone talked about Nazis? So we
Speaker 1: figured we should talk about But more specifically, I want
Speaker 1: to talk about how during the early twentieth century there
Speaker 1: was this like queer accepting culture that was blooming all
Speaker 1: across Europe, which the Nazis tried to crush. But it
Speaker 1: turns out the it didn't it didn't actually work out
Speaker 1: that way in the end, that the Nazis actually spoil
Speaker 1: our alert get crushed. Um, And they took out a
Speaker 1: lot of queer people along the way, but a lot
Speaker 1: of queer people fucked up the Nazis too. So that's
Speaker 1: what we're gonna talk about today. I like that. I
Speaker 1: like a good like I don't know, revenge, Uh yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: this is good. I think you might like some of
Speaker 1: this story. Then obviously not all of this story, unfortunately. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I don't know if you knew this, but there's
Speaker 1: actually not one way to be to be gay. Um,
Speaker 1: a very different yeah. No, I was shocked to learn
Speaker 1: this as well, there's one straight way to be gay.
Speaker 1: Thank you for laughing so much. Uh yeah, the like,
Speaker 1: every culture has had different conceptions of homosexuality and transnis
Speaker 1: and all of these different things, and like to be
Speaker 1: to be clear, like, guys have been fucking guys since
Speaker 1: the beginning of time, girls have been sucking girls, and
Speaker 1: wherever there's been gender, there's been people transgressing gender roles.
Speaker 1: But since Western civilization is like trying it, so I
Speaker 1: almost feel like guilty focusing on this particular conception of
Speaker 1: of gayness and how we developed to our current Western
Speaker 1: conception of gayness. But since Western civilization is trying its
Speaker 1: hardest to be like the one single culture over the
Speaker 1: entire world, I feel like it's worth knowing it's history
Speaker 1: of queerness, or at least some of it. And kind
Speaker 1: of oddly, a lot of the history we have about
Speaker 1: gayness in our culture doesn't come from like the ladies
Speaker 1: who liked scissorin, but instead the the priests and the
Speaker 1: governments that tried to stop us from doing that. Instead,
Speaker 1: So I want to start with this Book of Monsters. Hell, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: lever Month Storum, this is this, it's the It's a
Speaker 1: series of three volumes that was written in Old English
Speaker 1: around the turn of the eighth century, and it's got
Speaker 1: like cyclopses and centaurs and ship in it. But it's
Speaker 1: not just like a collection in alphabetical order. It was
Speaker 1: written in kind of a specific like they picked who
Speaker 1: to put first and who to put at the end,
Speaker 1: and yeah, exactly exactly. It's a monster lay list that
Speaker 1: this guy is writing to try and impress someone, probably,
Speaker 1: which makes it perfect actually, because the very first monster
Speaker 1: in the very first book of Monsters in English is
Speaker 1: a trans woman um or possibly an intersex person. Those
Speaker 1: concepts were very blurry all throughout history, and so to
Speaker 1: quote liber Month Storem from a translation by Andy Orchard, indeed,
Speaker 1: I bear witness at the beginning of the work that
Speaker 1: I have known a person of both sexes, who, although
Speaker 1: they appeared more masculine than feminine from their face and chest,
Speaker 1: and were thought male by those who did not know yet,
Speaker 1: loved feminine occupations and deceived the ignorant among men in
Speaker 1: the manner of a whore. But this is said to
Speaker 1: have happened often amongst the human race. Oh so is
Speaker 1: the person writing this pretending they're not human? Or no? No,
Speaker 1: I think he's It's just like just the way the
Speaker 1: old English works sounds strange, Okay, yeah, sickly. Uh So,
Speaker 1: the very first monster in all of English history is
Speaker 1: a fucking it's me. Um. So that rules. Um but
Speaker 1: I kind of projecting they're they're projecting if that's the
Speaker 1: very first playlist or song in the playlist they chose, Hey,
Speaker 1: look inwards. That's a that's a very good point. Um.
Speaker 1: And the same book also describes, uh it specifically quotes
Speaker 1: like Ethiopians also as monsters and it it's it's not
Speaker 1: exactly a a tome I would like to see live
Speaker 1: on in the modern world in any appreciable degree. Um
Speaker 1: But okay, So fast forward a couple hundred years and
Speaker 1: in the tenth century the Church of England, they were
Speaker 1: passing around these manuals of recommended penance for sinners based
Speaker 1: on their different sins or whatever, right, and one of
Speaker 1: the passages refers to a third gender of person, which
Speaker 1: is the baid ling or maybe bad ling. I don't
Speaker 1: actually know how to pronounce Old English. Um. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go with bad ling. And and we know that they
Speaker 1: meant it as a third sex because the specific rule
Speaker 1: is that any man who quote has sex with a
Speaker 1: bad ling or with another male or with a beast
Speaker 1: ought to fast for ten years and penance well. And
Speaker 1: so this is probably again the same concept. This is
Speaker 1: a concept of someone who is either intersects or trends
Speaker 1: and it's um and it's related to all these other
Speaker 1: effeminate words that they had at the time, or words
Speaker 1: for effeminine men that they had at the time, including
Speaker 1: battle and baden or badden. There's a lot of arguments.
Speaker 1: People like to argue about the ship endlessly on the Internet.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've met the internet, um, but
Speaker 1: it likes to argue about ship like this. There's a
Speaker 1: chance that the word bad comes from this, which I
Speaker 1: will also happily take. I'm like totally down to be
Speaker 1: the origin of monsters and bad. I mean bad, that's
Speaker 1: that's badass. Like I don't even mean that. That's a pun,
Speaker 1: but I think that's really cool. Yeah, and different people
Speaker 1: have tried to reclaim these words in different ways to
Speaker 1: various degrees. But um, okay, fast forward even more, and
Speaker 1: you've got two important pieces of legislation. Who's bigotry has
Speaker 1: echoed throughout the world thanks to colonialism the Holy Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: which stretched from northern Italy up to modern day Germany.
Speaker 1: In in fifteen thirty two, it passed something called the
Speaker 1: I don't pronounced load, even though I took three years
Speaker 1: of it, Constitutio criminalist Carolina. And one of the laws
Speaker 1: in this set of laws is when a human commits
Speaker 1: fornication with a beast, a man with a man, a
Speaker 1: woman with a woman, they have also forfeited life and
Speaker 1: they should be, according to the common custom, banished by
Speaker 1: fire from life into death Jesus. Yeah. Um, So they
Speaker 1: weren't like huge fans of homosexuality, not really. It seems
Speaker 1: like they just kind of hate hate us. Yeah yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: The very next year, it must have been like sweeping
Speaker 1: the Europe at the time, because the very next year,
Speaker 1: Henry the Eighth of England, in fifteen thirty three, he
Speaker 1: passed the Buggery Act, which made anal sex and beast
Speaker 1: reality punishable by death. Um. And it's just so disgusting
Speaker 1: to me that those are always coupled together, like and
Speaker 1: I say this as someone that used to have a
Speaker 1: friend like five years ago that was arguing that point,
Speaker 1: and I'm not I'm not a friend anymore. But like
Speaker 1: I can't. I could not believe someone my age would
Speaker 1: be able to still have any any thought about that,
Speaker 1: and it blew my mind. So I'm very I just
Speaker 1: hate that's just is beyond the upsetting and disgusting to me,
Speaker 1: I just yeah whatever, like yeah, no, no, It's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It just makes me really mad that
Speaker 1: humans are like that. But also like, okay, I studied
Speaker 1: our history in college and the Roman Empire or whatever
Speaker 1: the all a lot of their artworks involved all genders everywhere,
Speaker 1: and their gods are intersects and all this stuff. So
Speaker 1: it's just so ironic to me that they're also birdening
Speaker 1: people alive. I honestly, like the best I can figure out,
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure, but the best I can figure
Speaker 1: out from like all this research I'm doing for this
Speaker 1: episode is that like, not only have there. It's like
Speaker 1: it's not like everyone was just like hiding in the
Speaker 1: closet and afraid of the witch hunters the whole time.
Speaker 1: It seems like it like cycled people would be like, oh,
Speaker 1: being gay rules, and the people like, yeah, it does rule,
Speaker 1: and then I would just have like a whole culture
Speaker 1: of people being like this rules, and then someone would
Speaker 1: get into a moral panic and then murder us all
Speaker 1: and drive the rest of us back into the closet um,
Speaker 1: which is a really cool pattern that we are hopefully
Speaker 1: not in the middle of right now. Well, that makes
Speaker 1: me very nervous the way you said that, But we'll
Speaker 1: keep thinking this story. Stop thinking about that at all, okay,
Speaker 1: do you all? Right? So, so England's law get exported
Speaker 1: all over the world because they are fucking colonialist scum,
Speaker 1: and the Holy Roman Empire's law becomes Prussian law, which
Speaker 1: becomes German law, and then becomes Nazi law and then
Speaker 1: actually stays the law after the Nazis go away too.
Speaker 1: But we'll get to that. So the Nazis didn't invent
Speaker 1: the prosecution of gay people, the persecution of gay people,
Speaker 1: They just turned it up to a lemon Uh. In
Speaker 1: contrast at all, during all this time France when they
Speaker 1: did their whole revolution thing, uh in the legalized homosexuality,
Speaker 1: And that's pretty incredible. I didn't know that. No, I
Speaker 1: didn't either, honestly, And then I hate that. I'm about
Speaker 1: to say something positive about a Napoleon. But um, then
Speaker 1: when he went around and conquered Europe, he he brought
Speaker 1: the French law with him and eradicated anti gay laws everywhere.
Speaker 1: He went. Wow, short King, I know, sure read Hey,
Speaker 1: that's that's pretty freaking cool. Yeah. And so it's like
Speaker 1: so so so Prussia becomes Germany by bringing in Bavaria
Speaker 1: and some other regions, and Bavaria actually had legalized homosexuality,
Speaker 1: but Prussia did not. So in eighteen seventy one, when
Speaker 1: when Prussia becomes Germany, the whole country suddenly as an
Speaker 1: anti gay log and and it's a law called paragraph
Speaker 1: one seventy five, and and it was the law in
Speaker 1: Germany from fucking eighteen seventy one until do you want
Speaker 1: to guess what decade they got rid of paragraph eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy one? What I don't know, I'm genuinely gonna say
Speaker 1: like nineteen sixty or something. No, no, no, it's gonna say.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say you were alive, you were alive.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. I just thought like after fucking I
Speaker 1: don't know, NATO one, maybe they were like in a
Speaker 1: good mood and the sixties stuck, I think about it,
Speaker 1: but that is that is very unfortunate and sad. And
Speaker 1: they did, like they actually they did reform the laws
Speaker 1: in the late sixties and early seventies and like, and
Speaker 1: I think what they did. I don't have the notes
Speaker 1: in front of me, but I think what they ended
Speaker 1: up doing was making it so that there was just
Speaker 1: a higher age of consent for for gayness than for
Speaker 1: straight no us or whatever. Um So, like straight kids
Speaker 1: were allowed to funk at fourteen, but gay kids weren't
Speaker 1: allowed to funk until they're twenty one or something, which
Speaker 1: is like progress, but in the weirdest, most horrible way,
Speaker 1: you know. Um So, this this, this law paragraph one
Speaker 1: seven five is unnatural fornication, whether between persons of the
Speaker 1: male sex or humans with beasts, is punished with imprisonment,
Speaker 1: with the further punishment of prompt loss of civil rights.
Speaker 1: Well and okay, so like most of these laws are
Speaker 1: just about men, right the Holy Roman Emperor one managed
Speaker 1: to include lesbians as well, but so Germany. They actually
Speaker 1: tried to extend it to include lesbians a couple of times,
Speaker 1: but they couldn't reach consensus on exactly like how women
Speaker 1: would go about sucking each other and so like exactly
Speaker 1: what would be illegal, And that's so funny. It's like
Speaker 1: straight guys making lesbian port or something, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, They're just like is this what they do? Yeah? Totally.
Speaker 1: I just like to imagine that there's like this room
Speaker 1: full of dudes and like powdered wigs or maybe like
Speaker 1: hats with spits on them, and they're like trying to
Speaker 1: mimic exactly what they thought. Maybe like one of them
Speaker 1: puts their fingers with some scissors by accident or something,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. So, and in England they tried to
Speaker 1: expand the law to women as well, the English law,
Speaker 1: but they got afraid that if they did, it might
Speaker 1: give women ideas. So the the earl of I don't
Speaker 1: pronounced English names, well, I mean like women can't have
Speaker 1: ideas though, Margaret, like that's so dangerous is yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean this actually ties into my I mean, like
Speaker 1: I think the reason that men hate lesbians is that
Speaker 1: they realized that, um, if women can enjoy each other,
Speaker 1: then the men have no purpose. Um. And I actually
Speaker 1: think this is why they even hate trans women especially
Speaker 1: or also is because like because they could hold on
Speaker 1: too like, well, at least the human race wouldn't continue,
Speaker 1: and yeah, sorry, we're gonna sunk that one up for
Speaker 1: you too. Well, no, I think you're correct, that is why.
Speaker 1: So okay, so the earl of desert, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: call the desert desert. I don't know if I could desert.
Speaker 1: I think desert. Okay, they colonized like half the fucking world.
Speaker 1: They can get their names wrong. How many people does
Speaker 1: one suppose really are so vile, so unbalanced, so neurotic,
Speaker 1: so decadent as to do this. You may say there
Speaker 1: are a number of them, but would be like, at
Speaker 1: most an extremely small minority. And you're going to tell
Speaker 1: the whole world that there is such an offense, to
Speaker 1: bring it to the notice of women who have never
Speaker 1: heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it.
Speaker 1: I think that is a very great mischief. I love that.
Speaker 1: I love the performance. Um, but I was just thinking
Speaker 1: about it, like annihilating the human race, or not annihilating,
Speaker 1: but slowly killing us off. That would be have you
Speaker 1: seen us? Have you seen this planet? Like that's the
Speaker 1: way to save the world lesbians and women? Yeah, the
Speaker 1: man that wrote the men that wrote that, uh, just
Speaker 1: probably so gay. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's the other
Speaker 1: thing we're gonna like there's a lot of different conceptions
Speaker 1: that come up about, like, you know, whether sexuality is
Speaker 1: in it or whether it's like socially contagious and like.
Speaker 1: So that wasn't even part of the question yet. It
Speaker 1: was more just like the act Oh yeah, yeah no,
Speaker 1: I was saying that later in the script, we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about yeah no no. So they didn't they didn't
Speaker 1: expand the law to include women because they couldn't, you know,
Speaker 1: they didn't want to give any women ideas. Um. But Okay,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that there's all these anti gay laws
Speaker 1: on the books, nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, Germany was
Speaker 1: like fucking unbelievably gay through and through, left wing, right
Speaker 1: wing center gay people everywhere, and and of course a
Speaker 1: lot of these people were fighting for their rights, which
Speaker 1: brings us to the Institute for Sexual Research. Uh. From
Speaker 1: nineteen nine to nineteen thirty three, there was a place
Speaker 1: in Berlin called the Institute for Sexual Research, which was
Speaker 1: opened by three Jewish sexologists. The most famous of these
Speaker 1: is a guy named Magnus Hirschfeld. And this place, I
Speaker 1: don't know. As far as I get tell, A ruled right.
Speaker 1: Twenty thousand people visited every year from around the world.
Speaker 1: There was this Museum of Sex, there was a massive
Speaker 1: research archive. UM. They offered consulting on matters of sex
Speaker 1: to gay and straight people, Like if you're confused about
Speaker 1: your sexuality, you could just like show up at the
Speaker 1: institute and someone would um set you straight or gay.
Speaker 1: That I wish I had that now, I know how
Speaker 1: that's so ahead of its time, I know. And they
Speaker 1: did endless scientific research in the homosexuality. Uh, some of
Speaker 1: it seems like really weird today. Like at one point
Speaker 1: they spent a while trying to and this is all voluntary,
Speaker 1: but they tried to transplant testicles from straight men into
Speaker 1: gay men to see if it would cure the gay
Speaker 1: men of their gay um. But they and again this
Speaker 1: wasn't a forced conversion therapy. This was like people being
Speaker 1: like I want to do this or whatever. Um. But
Speaker 1: they kind of dropped anything like conversion therapy pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: and then they moved apparently all their focus to helping
Speaker 1: people navigate homophobic society rather than you know, trying to
Speaker 1: fucking cure them or whatever. They they coined the words
Speaker 1: both transvestite and transsexual. I know transvestite isn't invoke now,
Speaker 1: but like it actually was a word that meant a
Speaker 1: lot to me as something when I was younger before
Speaker 1: identified it as as transgender because I prefer women's cloth. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: words changed and they involved in their meaning and I
Speaker 1: had no idea that's wherely were coined from. That's what
Speaker 1: an amazing little institute. Oh yeah, no, this place is
Speaker 1: just like there's so much cool ship. Um, they pioneered
Speaker 1: this idea. I mean, I'm sure other people came up
Speaker 1: with this idea too, but they pioneered this idea is
Speaker 1: like a scientific thing that if you just let trans
Speaker 1: people exist and you let us like go through society
Speaker 1: the way that we know we should belong in society,
Speaker 1: that we're happier and society is happier and we don't
Speaker 1: like kill ourselves as much. Um, because like you know, homopope,
Speaker 1: society is drive an awful lot of people to hurt themselves.
Speaker 1: And the government hears then they're like, no, we have
Speaker 1: to keep them miserable or also need us to keep
Speaker 1: them scared and miserable and sad. That's actually the truth yeah,
Speaker 1: I genuinely believe that. Um, they're like, I'm miserable, so
Speaker 1: you have to be visible, you know, Okay. And they
Speaker 1: also they performed probably the first gender confirmation surgery in history,
Speaker 1: or at least the one that's known about in Western
Speaker 1: records or whatever. I have a feeling some people tried
Speaker 1: and did this a long time ago too. But this
Speaker 1: woman named Dora Richter in thirty was the first person
Speaker 1: to in in our understanding, to to undergo full like
Speaker 1: gender confirmation surgery. And she actually worked at the institute.
Speaker 1: She was a maid basically, Um, it was one of
Speaker 1: the only places in Germany where trans people could get jobs.
Speaker 1: But I honestly, I don't know how well they were treated.
Speaker 1: It sounded like they all got kind of ship jobs,
Speaker 1: like this woman was a maid, um, and Hirschfeld was
Speaker 1: like traveling around staying in luxury hotels and show it's
Speaker 1: always a negative side, I'm sure everybody. Yeah. And they
Speaker 1: also tied were tied in with the first Western pro
Speaker 1: homosexual advocacy group in history, which was the Scientific Humanitarian Committee,
Speaker 1: which was founded in and they treated homosexuality as gender.
Speaker 1: So this is getting to the there's a lot of
Speaker 1: different conceptions about gayness arguing at the time, and the
Speaker 1: Institute's theory was that homosexuality and gender exists in the
Speaker 1: body and are essentially determined at birth rather than being
Speaker 1: conscious choices, um, which led them down to some strange paths.
Speaker 1: They presented this idea that homosexuals were sort of a
Speaker 1: third sex, halfway between men and women, which implied that like,
Speaker 1: all lesbians are a bit masculine and all gay men
Speaker 1: are like a bit feminine. Um. They did, however, separate
Speaker 1: out transpeople from all of this to not be exactly
Speaker 1: the same as gay people. Um. So it's like progress
Speaker 1: and and they got away with a lot of this
Speaker 1: gayness because even a one seventy five paragraph one seventy
Speaker 1: five was technically a law in the books. The local
Speaker 1: government basically told the police, like, now, I don't enforce this,
Speaker 1: because the local government was like far more progressive. That's
Speaker 1: something at least. But I mean, it's also interesting, this guy,
Speaker 1: Magnus Archfield wasn't out as gay. He was very very
Speaker 1: clearly gay, but he wasn't out, um, And like lived
Speaker 1: with this partner and was active in the gay scene.
Speaker 1: And I don't love everything that this guy did. For
Speaker 1: one thing, um as part of the coalition to abolish
Speaker 1: paragraph on the law that they advocated instead would have
Speaker 1: legalized homosexual prostitution. And he was and Magnus was like, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: take that part out. Not because he hated sex work,
Speaker 1: but because he um, it would be like too controversial.
Speaker 1: It would like, you know, and I don't know, sex
Speaker 1: workers get thrown under the bus fucking constantly, and and
Speaker 1: it also kind of throws on working class gay folks
Speaker 1: under the bus more right, if you do that, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And he was also super fucking assimilationist. I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to like rag on this guy, but I feel like
Speaker 1: you can't understand him. You know, if you had stopped
Speaker 1: like three minutes ago, like he started institution whatever, like
Speaker 1: that's great, but this is an example of like, don't
Speaker 1: meet your heroes, right, If I would have just kept
Speaker 1: him as like at this heroic figure, if you just
Speaker 1: stopped there, it's good to know everything, it's good to
Speaker 1: be so at one point he was like when he
Speaker 1: was trying to convince everyone that that gays were cool,
Speaker 1: he would like bring cops to gay bars and to
Speaker 1: be like, look, we're just like everyone else. And like,
Speaker 1: I like to imagine being in that bar and trying
Speaker 1: to be like, okay, we're we're what, we're like everyone
Speaker 1: else all right, yeah yeah, yeah, totally everyone put on
Speaker 1: your everyone else yeah totally like quick stop sucking in public.
Speaker 1: Um And and they asked, okay, so they weren't the
Speaker 1: only game in town either. Um. The there was this
Speaker 1: anarchist named Adolph Brand who started the world's first game magazine. Again,
Speaker 1: whenever I say like the world's first or whatever, I
Speaker 1: want to like really heavily disclose that, like all of
Speaker 1: these history books are going to call it the first
Speaker 1: whatever and they mean the Western world and you know whatever,
Speaker 1: Still fucking cool. At least started this game magazine in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, um in eight nine six, And the
Speaker 1: name of the magazine translates to the unique. And he
Speaker 1: was really fucking out, Like he kept getting arrested for
Speaker 1: being gay and they be like, are you gay, and
Speaker 1: he'd be like, funck, I'm gay, fuck you, and and
Speaker 1: he but he also and I don't love this guy either.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get to that, but um, he didn't funk
Speaker 1: around with this, like gayness is a feminine thing to him.
Speaker 1: Male homosexuality was like the epitome of masculinity UM, often
Speaker 1: bordering on or falling into outright misogyny, right because it's
Speaker 1: like men who only need men, and which we've all
Speaker 1: run across, you know, I mean both Yeah, with women
Speaker 1: and with men. I would say that happens totally, totally.
Speaker 1: And then the activism that came out of his circle
Speaker 1: was called the Path Over Corpses and which is really
Speaker 1: metal but not actually very cool. And what they did
Speaker 1: is they outed high profile gay men um often often
Speaker 1: leading to those people to kill themselves. And they just
Speaker 1: didn't care. And that's why I was called the Path
Speaker 1: Over Corpses did canceled culture culture culture. We don't even
Speaker 1: Twitter anymore. Yeah, well, well that's one way to go
Speaker 1: about it, but like not, that's not a great way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I I usually root for the anarchists and anything,
Speaker 1: but like I actually not this time, Okay. And then
Speaker 1: there's this this third conception that I think was floating
Speaker 1: around a bit the Western world, but actually, as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell in my limited reading, was far
Speaker 1: more common in like Southwest Asia and northern Africa, which
Speaker 1: was this um and and gay men from the West
Speaker 1: would go visit Southwest Asia to go be a bit
Speaker 1: more free for a while. And it was this conception
Speaker 1: that sexuality and gender weren't things that you are, but
Speaker 1: instead there are things that you do interesting and and
Speaker 1: all of those are going to come up through the
Speaker 1: different characters that we're going to get to. It's part
Speaker 1: of what I'm trying to lay the scene. It's very interesting. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know what else is wholesome besides sexuality is
Speaker 1: I've decided that the show will only be sponsored by
Speaker 1: incredibly wholesome things, the most wholesome things we can think of.
Speaker 1: And so today, so we can we just be sponsored
Speaker 1: by tap water, like the concept of tap water. I mean,
Speaker 1: but what about the potatoes. That's true, I do really
Speaker 1: like potatoes. Okay, tap water and potatoes two things that
Speaker 1: are very I mean, that seems fair. We do need
Speaker 1: more than one sponsor. I'm okay with that. Protect the potato, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So we're sponsored by those things and then maybe these
Speaker 1: other things and we'll be right back. Okay, and we
Speaker 1: are back and uh, of all of these different, you know,
Speaker 1: types of things that are happening, it seems like Hirshfeld
Speaker 1: and the Institute had the longest and most widespread impact
Speaker 1: on the Western world, and the Nazis didn't like that
Speaker 1: at all. It turns out, do you know that famous
Speaker 1: photo of Nazis burning books are like, if you imagine
Speaker 1: Nazis burning books, ye, the image popped in my head.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, um so, and everyone's like, oh, look, the
Speaker 1: Nazis are bad. They burned books. And what usually goes
Speaker 1: on said is that the books they were burning was
Speaker 1: the research library of the Institute of Sexual Research, and
Speaker 1: these photos, Wow, why don't they mention that they should?
Speaker 1: They should at least mention that the caption somewhere what
Speaker 1: the huge pile of books on fire? Yeah, than just
Speaker 1: Nazis naziing Yeah, well, I mean definitely gonna help that
Speaker 1: they were Jewish either, right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Honestly, I
Speaker 1: think the reason it isn't mentioned is because I think
Speaker 1: that most of polite Western society was secretly fucking glad
Speaker 1: that all those fucking books got burned. And like, you know,
Speaker 1: we're erased from history in a lot of different ways,
Speaker 1: and the Nazis liked to racing us more actively than
Speaker 1: the sort of like liberal democracies, but they like try
Speaker 1: and fucking too Um, it's dark but true and unfortunately, Yeah,
Speaker 1: on May sixty three, the Nazis showed up and they
Speaker 1: burned like two books, destroying endless amounts of research into homosexuality,
Speaker 1: trans sexuality, cross dressing, everything. Joseph Goebels, I don't pronounced
Speaker 1: Gobel's name, which I should, because he's like one of
Speaker 1: the famous people in history. Um, he's the chief propagandist
Speaker 1: of the Nazis, and he gives a speech to forty
Speaker 1: people during this fucking book burning. And Dora Richter, the
Speaker 1: first trans woman to undergo gender confirmation surgery, probably was
Speaker 1: killed in this attack. Um, it's possible that she was
Speaker 1: arrested and died in prison shortly after. There are a
Speaker 1: couple rumors that people that don't have as much evidence
Speaker 1: to back them up that she got out, and I
Speaker 1: like to think she got out, but she probably didn't. Um. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Magnus hirsch Felt he sees the writing on the wall,
Speaker 1: like before all this happens, and so he's off on
Speaker 1: a world tour basically trying to figure out where the
Speaker 1: funk to get his gay Jewish asked too, because he's like,
Speaker 1: this is not going to fucking work. I can't stay
Speaker 1: where there's Nazis. But he didn't destroy his own wreck
Speaker 1: birds and lists of names before he left. Oh so
Speaker 1: the Nazis got those, and those are like the one
Speaker 1: things they didn't burn was the list of like all
Speaker 1: the fucking gay people in Germany. Um not clearly, not
Speaker 1: all of them, you know. But but that's a ship.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to hear what happen his xt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, okay, So the Nazis get those, they use
Speaker 1: them in a campaign to eradicate the homosexual blight. Because
Speaker 1: the Nazis minus the gay Nazis I'll talk about in
Speaker 1: a second, um or later, they turned and see homosexuality
Speaker 1: is like something inherent and natural. They saw it as
Speaker 1: a plague that needed to be destroyed. Let it infest
Speaker 1: everything or whatever. Um So Magnus Hirschfeld. He never comes
Speaker 1: back to Germany. He goes into exile in France, and
Speaker 1: he dies of a heart attack on his sixty seven
Speaker 1: birthday on May. Adolf Brand the anarchist who path over
Speaker 1: corpses guys. He was super brave before the Nazis, and
Speaker 1: then when the Nazis come over, he retires from active
Speaker 1: a marries a woman to try and like play straight,
Speaker 1: and then he just like shut the funk up and
Speaker 1: tried to survive the war. Uh. And he didn't because
Speaker 1: an Allied bomb fell on his house in Berlin. Died
Speaker 1: at the age of seventy. The Nazis then expanded paragraph one,
Speaker 1: like substantially. It used to be a gay men can't funk,
Speaker 1: but then it became gay men can't try to excite
Speaker 1: the sexuality of other men. And so that's where the
Speaker 1: plague right like mentality comes in. Like yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: like if I get if this gig even comes near me,
Speaker 1: like yeah, maybe I'll Yeah, I keep thinking about dick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: many people do. It's a natural thought. Okay. So, like
Speaker 1: something like a hundred thousand men who are accused of
Speaker 1: homosexuality are arrested, and a lot of them are like
Speaker 1: this is often like a it's a really easy way
Speaker 1: to blackmail people. It's very similar to like witch hunting.
Speaker 1: You know, like you're mad at some one, just say
Speaker 1: he came onto you and you can get someone arrested. Um,
Speaker 1: So a hundred thousand men are arrested, half of those
Speaker 1: did prison time, ten thousand of them or so. Everyone
Speaker 1: argues about numbers. Uh, were sent to concentration camps, where
Speaker 1: they were forced to wear the inverted pink triangle badges,
Speaker 1: which is where the pink triangles a symbol comes from. UM.
Speaker 1: In the camps, at least by everything I read, they
Speaker 1: were treated socially like kind of the worst. It was
Speaker 1: like them and Jews at the bottom of everything. And
Speaker 1: then gay Jews had to wear like an inverted it
Speaker 1: was both a pink triangle and a yellow star of
Speaker 1: David over top of each other. And they had it
Speaker 1: the worst. I read really gnarly accounts of what they suffered,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to tell you about it. Thank
Speaker 1: you for that. Thank you so much. My imagination is enough. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and about them survive, so sixty of them die and
Speaker 1: there's no law on the books against lesbianism. But the
Speaker 1: Nazis didn't like gay women any better, and so what
Speaker 1: they did is they basically found excuse has to send
Speaker 1: as many of them as possible to the camps uh
Speaker 1: non Aryan ones in particular, and then arian ones would
Speaker 1: get forced to have babies, which again we will leave
Speaker 1: there um. And those who resisted were arrested on imaginary charges,
Speaker 1: like two women were arrested for disrupting their workplace by
Speaker 1: sleeping with women from work. Um. Interesting. So Nazis didn't
Speaker 1: like gay people, but fortunately for history, a lot of
Speaker 1: gay people didn't like Nazis either, and they decided to
Speaker 1: do something about it, which brings us to one of
Speaker 1: the best places in LGBT history, Amsterdam. I fucking love Amsterdam.
Speaker 1: I still got to go there. I want to go there.
Speaker 1: Let's go one of my top places I want to visit.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, I remember, like sitting on a triangle memorial
Speaker 1: is like a dock into one of the canals. It's
Speaker 1: like a triangle memorial. When I was like a baby,
Speaker 1: I barely even knew I was queer, like travel in squatters,
Speaker 1: staying there, Um, it must have been powerful, I can imagine. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: So one of the most iconic acts of gay resistance
Speaker 1: to the Nazis is in Amsterdam after the occupation. It's
Speaker 1: a story that weaves together some of like my favorite
Speaker 1: people I've learned run across in history, at least judging
Speaker 1: by their actions. I actually don't know much about them
Speaker 1: as people, but you know, like they did fucking cool ship.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna start with Willem Arandeis. He was born
Speaker 1: in Amsterdam into a theater family. His parents were costume designers.
Speaker 1: Originally they support he's an artist, right and they support
Speaker 1: him in his art, of his writing and painting. But
Speaker 1: then he came out when he was seventeen is gay,
Speaker 1: and they kicked him out of the house. Um, homosexuality
Speaker 1: was legal in the Netherlands. But um, you know, no
Speaker 1: one liked it. I mean lots of people liked it,
Speaker 1: but you know, society like to frown upon it. So
Speaker 1: he develops his art. He starts taking on commercial art jobs.
Speaker 1: He paints ads, stamps, that kind of ship. He did
Speaker 1: some like tapestries and coats of arms for some cities,
Speaker 1: at least one of which is still around. He did
Speaker 1: a mural for the Rotterdam town hall. And you can
Speaker 1: look up his art. Actually it's really good. Um, anyone
Speaker 1: listening you should look it up because well, because I
Speaker 1: think you should get tattoos of it because the rules.
Speaker 1: But um, it's like more designery than fine art, and
Speaker 1: which I think is cool and so. And some of
Speaker 1: his art is on display it at the met and
Speaker 1: at the reichs Museum in Amsterdam. But he wasn't really
Speaker 1: well known at the time to be real. This is
Speaker 1: he's a commercial artist, not something like yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: everyone every most not every most artists are not really
Speaker 1: well known or famous until after they pass. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And if you want to be a famous artist, UM,
Speaker 1: you should do stuff like Willem goes on to do.
Speaker 1: That's my recommendation to Okay. So he spends years of
Speaker 1: his life partnered with a man named Jan Tison, and
Speaker 1: he supports the two of them barely on his art
Speaker 1: and from on the royalties. From a biography he writes
Speaker 1: about a painter named Matthias Marris who had fought in
Speaker 1: the Paris Commune. UM. But Willem is dirt poor, largely unknown.
Speaker 1: He shifts to novels in five and he publishes novels
Speaker 1: with the names like The Owl House, The Tragedy of
Speaker 1: the Dream, and then this is my favorite because it's
Speaker 1: the most Dutch gay title I've ever heard in my
Speaker 1: life and I love it. In the blossoming Winter radish,
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, perfect, no no notes, you know, I
Speaker 1: want to read it. Um. And the Nazis take over
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty and they start off kind of trying
Speaker 1: to be nice to some of the Dutch people. Clearly
Speaker 1: not all of the Dutch people, but homosexuality have been
Speaker 1: legal in the Netherlands for more than a century, and
Speaker 1: so William is one of the first people to go
Speaker 1: off and join the Dutch resistance, which was actually more
Speaker 1: non violent in character than elsewhere in Europe, but they
Speaker 1: weren't slouchers. By the autumn of ninety four, the resistance
Speaker 1: was hiding or had hidden three hundred thousand people, and
Speaker 1: somewhere between sixty to two hundred thousand people were doing
Speaker 1: that hiding, and over a million people were actively letting
Speaker 1: all of that happen just by like knowing their neighbor
Speaker 1: is hiding somebody and not fucking saying anything about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like allies. Yeah, Yeah, that's a big number. I wasn't
Speaker 1: expecting to hi have a number where that's pretty incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like gives me a little bit of hope whenever
Speaker 1: I want to drag hope out of this kind of thing. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's the point of this podcast, right, Um, there's over
Speaker 1: a thousand, one hundred separate resistance newspapers which reach a
Speaker 1: readership of over a hundred thousand people during the occupation.
Speaker 1: But but William's partner can't handle all the heat in Amsterdam,
Speaker 1: and he he fox off and moves back to a
Speaker 1: small small town somewhere else, and Willem stays in Amsterdam
Speaker 1: and he keeps going. In two, he starts an underground
Speaker 1: newspaper called brendars be Brief, which means letter of insignia.
Speaker 1: In three, emerges with another paper called I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: say the English translations called The Free Artist, which was
Speaker 1: edited by a man named Garrett von der Veen, who's
Speaker 1: another one of today's here is actually but I believe
Speaker 1: tragically heterosexual. No one's perfect exactly exactly, and he doesn't
Speaker 1: get as much screen time in the story. So I
Speaker 1: want to tell you a little bit about our man Garrett,
Speaker 1: he who's I could be mispronouncing his name. I'm actually
Speaker 1: I'm actually sorry, Dutch listeners, but I can pronounce the
Speaker 1: name Schward, which is gonna come a little later anyway. Okay,
Speaker 1: So he starts off his career as a mechanical engineer,
Speaker 1: but he really just wants to be a sculptor. And
Speaker 1: then one day before the Nazi invasion and ship, he's
Speaker 1: standing on the shore when a fully loaded oil tanker
Speaker 1: catches fire, so he the crew flees and gets away,
Speaker 1: but he dives into the water, swims out to the ship,
Speaker 1: extinguishes the fire in the engine room. Whoa, I know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's just like this guy on the shore. He's like, oh,
Speaker 1: ship a fire, I'm gonna go put it out. It's
Speaker 1: like it's like Keanu Reeves helping what's her face when
Speaker 1: someone's car breaks down and helps that person and then
Speaker 1: but no one had, no one has evidence of this,
Speaker 1: and that just my guy just did it. Yeah, need
Speaker 1: to paparazzi to capture it. Yeah, totally totally a good person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so those so the sailors, Um, they're so grateful
Speaker 1: that they buy him a ticket to Amsterdam and pay
Speaker 1: for a year's tuition for him to go to art
Speaker 1: school or like an allowance for him to become a sculptor,
Speaker 1: because that's what he wants to do, is he wants
Speaker 1: to go become a sculptor. So he does. He becomes
Speaker 1: a sculptor because he's performed this heroic deed and and
Speaker 1: his ship is really good, like looking at photos of
Speaker 1: and stuff, a lot of it's still around. But after
Speaker 1: the invasion, Um and I believe he's of Aaryan ancestry,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure. And they asked him to sign
Speaker 1: a paper saying sign this paper to say you are
Speaker 1: of Aaryan ancestry, and he's like, no, funk, no, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to do that, um, because he's a good person.
Speaker 1: So instead he goes underground. He starts a newspaper, and
Speaker 1: most importantly to our story, he starts forging I das
Speaker 1: for for Jews and other people who are hiding from
Speaker 1: the Nazis. So William joins vonder vonder Vine's crew and
Speaker 1: it's made up of like art and dancers and poets
Speaker 1: and ship a lot of them are openly gay, and
Speaker 1: they just start cranking out fake I d s just
Speaker 1: all over the place. Uh. They made more than eighty
Speaker 1: thousand fake I d s. And because everyone over the
Speaker 1: age of fifteen was required by the Nazis to carry
Speaker 1: an I D and Jewish names were like Jewish ones
Speaker 1: were marked with a big J on them. The counterfeiters
Speaker 1: called their services Personal's Proof Central, and they sold the
Speaker 1: ideas but at a sliding scale. So basically, if you're rich,
Speaker 1: you pay a lot of money, and then if you're poor,
Speaker 1: you would pay no money. I love that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: how they financed the whole thing, you know, and I
Speaker 1: to the world should be to be honest. But yeah,
Speaker 1: totally okay. And so then there's a problem. They're making
Speaker 1: all these ideas, but there there's records on everyone being
Speaker 1: stored in a storehouse, so curious Nazis and collaborators, which
Speaker 1: I guess you could just call them Nazis, honestly, that's
Speaker 1: the word for Nazi collaborator, I think. So they just
Speaker 1: they just go and go and double check the ideas
Speaker 1: against the records stored in the warehouse and then bust
Speaker 1: people later. And so but the Dutch resistance had people everywhere,
Speaker 1: including in these records keeping storehouses or whatever, and so
Speaker 1: they're working as fast as they can to falsify documents.
Speaker 1: I think they're basically saying, like, okay, we did this,
Speaker 1: following I D change the records, and they're like okay,
Speaker 1: and they go and they change the records, but it's
Speaker 1: not fast enough. And by the start of they all
Speaker 1: get this sense that like really bad shit is coming
Speaker 1: and so they need to step this up. Um, so
Speaker 1: they come up with a plan and okay, So the
Speaker 1: problem is that there's a bunch of records, right, and
Speaker 1: the records are stored in a building. Right. But but
Speaker 1: buildings are notoriously vulnerable to explosions and like the game
Speaker 1: of paper rock scissors, you know, um dynamite or the
Speaker 1: kryptonite of buildings. One might say, I like when Sophie
Speaker 1: laughs at my scripted jokes. Hey, a lot from Sophie
Speaker 1: is so affirming. I agree it. It's funny and writing.
Speaker 1: And when he said it, thanks, what can I say? So? Okay, So,
Speaker 1: so a lot of this crew are Pacifists. Um, not
Speaker 1: all of them, We'll get to that later, but some
Speaker 1: of them were so. Not only so they devise a
Speaker 1: plan to not only destroy hundreds of thousands of Nazi
Speaker 1: records and and blow up a building, but to do
Speaker 1: it without killing or seriously injuring anyone. Um, which is
Speaker 1: my argument is that these people invented the heist movie. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's funny, to be honest. To be honest, it takes
Speaker 1: a lot for me to laugh out loud, Like when
Speaker 1: I'm watching comedy or whatever, I'm usually just silent and
Speaker 1: I feel like a piece of ship. But I find
Speaker 1: thinks funny. I just don't react it's fine. It's fine,
Speaker 1: I say, you thought that was funny. So it's this
Speaker 1: is not a small plot. In the end, fifteen people
Speaker 1: get arrested for it, and there's so many more people
Speaker 1: involved than that. Um. But to tell it like a
Speaker 1: heist movie, I'm to start with the action on march
Speaker 1: Arndeus and the whole crew of of other people. They
Speaker 1: dress up as like army captains and ship um police captains. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think they march over to the record storehouse and
Speaker 1: they're like hey, they say to the guards, because the
Speaker 1: guards are on you know, they're like, something's up. We're
Speaker 1: gonna be really careful. And so they show up and
Speaker 1: they're like, hey, we we think that there's people trying
Speaker 1: to blow up this building, so we're here to sweep
Speaker 1: the building and check for explosives. Um. Well, I love this.
Speaker 1: I love this. Where's this movie? And so the guards
Speaker 1: believe them and let them in. Uh. And then medical
Speaker 1: students who are with them pull out syringes full of
Speaker 1: sedatives and inject the guards, rendering them unconscious. They drag
Speaker 1: them over to the zoo next door because this buildings
Speaker 1: next to the zoo, and just like leave them unconscious
Speaker 1: in the zoo. Okay, zoo twist, not expecting that last
Speaker 1: thing I thought were gonna say was zoo. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: I love that dish into their plan. They could have
Speaker 1: just left them there, but they put them in right
Speaker 1: now exactly because they didn't want to hurt anybody. So
Speaker 1: they pull all the records they can find, They pile
Speaker 1: them up in the center of the room. They pour
Speaker 1: benzene on them as an accelerant. They place bombs, They
Speaker 1: grab all the blank I d s and all the
Speaker 1: money that they can find, and they get the funk
Speaker 1: out and the building goes boom. Successful heist movie. Yeah
Speaker 1: it wasn't so it wasn't completely destroyed. But the building
Speaker 1: is soon on fire. So the fire department comes and
Speaker 1: they show up kind of late, and then they kind
Speaker 1: of take their sweet time putting out the fire. And
Speaker 1: then when the fire is out, they just keep pouring
Speaker 1: water on the building, just keep going because because they're
Speaker 1: trying to destroy all the records. Because the fire department
Speaker 1: got tipped off saying hey, hey, can you help us
Speaker 1: destroy this building. You can always count okay, the fire department,
Speaker 1: You can always count on them. Like you know, there's
Speaker 1: there's cops, then there's firemen, and there's always a good guy.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it comes for history obviously. The way that
Speaker 1: my dad put it once is that no one becomes
Speaker 1: a firefighter because they enjoy having power over other people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that. I've never put heard it in those words,
Speaker 1: but yes, yes, and opposite for cops, yeah, exactly. Um
Speaker 1: So in the end, they destroyed about eight hundred thousand
Speaker 1: records on people, uh, which and it gets painted as
Speaker 1: this failure because that was only about of the total
Speaker 1: that were stored in the building. Um. But they also
Speaker 1: they make it out with six d blanc ideas and
Speaker 1: fifty thou guilders. And I could not, for the life
Speaker 1: of me figure out how much fifty thousand guilders is
Speaker 1: in today's money. And U S dollars. I tried, I promise,
Speaker 1: I tried someone. I'm gonna say it's a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's more money than I currently have. I'm willing to bet.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's like okay, So sometimes like history is like,
Speaker 1: oh and they kind of failed. I'm like, okay, they
Speaker 1: didn't like single handedly save everyone in Amsterdam all at once,
Speaker 1: but they fucking destroyed eight hundred thousand records and like
Speaker 1: saved thou pens of lives, you know, they put guards
Speaker 1: in zeus. What I would say, it's mostly a success.
Speaker 1: I mean obviously not like stupendously. I don't know. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so there was a trader in their midst, and unfortunately
Speaker 1: for the heist movie and for them and for us,
Speaker 1: we do actually we actually don't know who the trader
Speaker 1: was Judas. Yeah, and they get sold out and one
Speaker 1: by one the conspirators get arrested. William when he's arrested,
Speaker 1: they grab his journal and use it to catch a
Speaker 1: bunch more of the people. And like, just I'm really
Speaker 1: not trying to shame anybody, but if you're going to
Speaker 1: blow up a Nazi warehouse, you should burn all the
Speaker 1: evidence at your earliest convenience. So keep that in mind. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And okay, so fifteen of them are rounded up, William Arandeus.
Speaker 1: His defense in court is basically like I did literally
Speaker 1: all of it. Blame it all on me, No one
Speaker 1: else had anything to do with it. And it's not
Speaker 1: the first time that doing research for this podcast, I've
Speaker 1: run across people using this defense and court um because
Speaker 1: it's it's a cool thing. That cool people sometimes do,
Speaker 1: and it it saves two of his codefendants lives. Two
Speaker 1: of the medical students are like just given like fifteen
Speaker 1: years in prison or whatever, which fortunately means they're given
Speaker 1: a couple of years in prison and then you know,
Speaker 1: the Allies liberate the Netherlands. Um. But he didn't save everyone.
Speaker 1: Along with twelve others, he was marched out to the
Speaker 1: dunes and executed. Um. His last communication was through his lawyer,
Speaker 1: who was also a badass. I'm gona talk about her
Speaker 1: in a little bit, and he said to her, And
Speaker 1: this gets translated a thousand different ways in every retellion
Speaker 1: of it, but he said to her basically, never let
Speaker 1: them say that homosexuals are cowards. Well, yeah, that is beautiful.
Speaker 1: What a life, what a good guy? I know? That
Speaker 1: is I like this show. Thanks, I do too, Um
Speaker 1: any the thing I I mean, like, I was, like
Speaker 1: I cried so many times when I was like researching
Speaker 1: this episode, because mean, this guy just wanted to fucking
Speaker 1: like paint and write novels and like funck his boyfriend.
Speaker 1: And then instead Nazis took over his fucking country and
Speaker 1: he did what he had to do, and like and
Speaker 1: the other guy that's like a sculptor. Yeah, it's you're
Speaker 1: not allowed to express yourself creativity or like as an artist,
Speaker 1: you're you're like you're forced into activism almost because to survive,
Speaker 1: if that makes sense. Totally forced, but you're by default totally.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's Wow. I'm glad to know about these people.
Speaker 1: That is cool. I'm gonna tell you about more of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: more cool people that do cool things. Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: tell you about his boyfriend next. Um, not the one
Speaker 1: who like fucked off because she got too hot, but
Speaker 1: the one that um he dated later and was dating
Speaker 1: during at all. His name was Schward Baker. And um,
Speaker 1: that's the name you can say. Yeah, yeah, totally because
Speaker 1: one of my best friends in Amsterdam his name is short.
Speaker 1: Um and I actually am still not saying it correctly. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, yeah, everyone i'm short knows. Um. Hopefully
Speaker 1: my friend short is listening to this and forgives me. Okay, so, uh,
Speaker 1: he's a tailor, not my friend my friends owns a
Speaker 1: pizza shop, but this guy is as a tailor and
Speaker 1: short bocker. He sewed the counterfeit police uniforms that they
Speaker 1: all wore into the office, and because he was William's partner,
Speaker 1: the defense tried a strategy of like basically be like
Speaker 1: go easy on him. He only did it because he
Speaker 1: was in love with willem Um. And then short was like,
Speaker 1: oh fuck no, like no, I fucking did it and
Speaker 1: I would do it again, like fuck that love so
Speaker 1: again not cowards. But that's like, you know what, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: He could have just saved his ass and then instead
Speaker 1: and this is the gayest part of all and the
Speaker 1: part that I love. Um, right before he dies, he's
Speaker 1: offered one last request and I don't see what you say.
Speaker 1: It is about choking up. He asks for his pretty
Speaker 1: pink shirt, and so he puts on his pretty pink shirt.
Speaker 1: And that's a pretty pink shirt is a translation some
Speaker 1: machine translate shan I you know, but but he asked
Speaker 1: for his pretty pink shirt. Um. He gets marched out
Speaker 1: to the dunes and he gets executed alongside his lover.
Speaker 1: And it was his shirt, his pink shirt, that helped
Speaker 1: people identify the bodies of all the people who got executed. Um,
Speaker 1: that's I. My eyes are kind of water so sweet
Speaker 1: and sad, you know. And then his his his brother
Speaker 1: and his uncle kept fighting and they also died later
Speaker 1: in the resistance. Um. But then you got someone who survives,
Speaker 1: Frieda Belafonte who's a part Jewish, lesbian celliston conductor, and
Speaker 1: she's the first woman in the world to serve as
Speaker 1: the permanent conductor for a professional orchestra. But that that
Speaker 1: comes later because she survives. And it's not very often
Speaker 1: that you get to say the lesbian survives in a
Speaker 1: story like this. You know, Um, she was this promising cellist,
Speaker 1: she won a conducting competition against entirely men, and then
Speaker 1: Nazis takeover, and as someone whose father but not mother
Speaker 1: was Jewish, she was allowed to apply for a special
Speaker 1: dispensation to keep working professionally under the under the Nazi regime,
Speaker 1: at least at the start. But she was like, no,
Speaker 1: fuck you, I'm not going to fucking do that, And
Speaker 1: so she puts down her music career, puts it on hold,
Speaker 1: and she goes underground and starts forging fake I d
Speaker 1: s Um. And after the bombing, she goes underground again
Speaker 1: and she dresses as a man, as she often did
Speaker 1: to avoid detection or for whatever reason that she felt
Speaker 1: like dressing like man. Um, probably being part of an expert.
Speaker 1: Fake ID ring helps when you're trying to go underground,
Speaker 1: you know, Um, I would imagine that's a good asset
Speaker 1: to have. I was just thinking like, how all these
Speaker 1: badass people they consciously like every opportunity that was presented
Speaker 1: to them as like you can save yourself, like you
Speaker 1: can have an easier life if you just like, kind
Speaker 1: of what's the word, like, um, I know, I can't
Speaker 1: think of the word either, but if you just roll
Speaker 1: over and just go along with it, not consolid but
Speaker 1: there's a word that I'm thinking of. That's not the word,
Speaker 1: but it's really cool. But with every opportunity that was
Speaker 1: presented to them, they're still like, no, this is who
Speaker 1: I am. I'm not a coward. Yeah, it's it's not
Speaker 1: even I don't even think the kind of I would
Speaker 1: go on record saying like they didn't even think of
Speaker 1: it that way, you know what I mean, just basically
Speaker 1: did it because that's the right thing to do, and
Speaker 1: they're good people. Totally. Yeah, I think that there was
Speaker 1: like that that's not an option, like why would I exactly? Um,
Speaker 1: But but what is an option is buying fake I
Speaker 1: d s from our sponsor Fake I d ring dot
Speaker 1: is it net or calm Sophie, I think it's it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's definitely dot org okay, nonprofit. Yeah. And so for
Speaker 1: our next wholesome sponsor is the concept of fake I
Speaker 1: d s as well as whatever other ads come after
Speaker 1: I say this and then stop talking. But mostly but
Speaker 1: mostly fake ideas. Yeah, and potatoes, m okay, and we
Speaker 1: are back so free to um So resistance folks smuggle
Speaker 1: her first to Belgium to France, and then she has
Speaker 1: to get across the Alps into Switzerland. But it's a winter,
Speaker 1: so she crosses on foot. She crosses the fucking Alps
Speaker 1: on foot in winter. Holy ship, that is yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like not something I'm trying to do. You know. No,
Speaker 1: I already thought she was a badass, like before the break,
Speaker 1: but now it's like, oh yeah, yeah, confirmed, yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: So she makes it to Switzerland and she starts a
Speaker 1: choir in the refugee camp. Um of course she does
Speaker 1: love her and then uh and then she becomes local
Speaker 1: to you all. After the war, she moves to Orange County, California.
Speaker 1: I actually don't know Orange County is I think we
Speaker 1: don't know? Ship? Okay, it's I mean, like technically, like
Speaker 1: if you're looking at a map, sure, but we don't
Speaker 1: we don't. We don't clip. Los Angeles does not clip
Speaker 1: Orange County. Okay, maybe maybe back then it was more like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is all this hot desert so Cal. We're all
Speaker 1: the same. But at this point, Orange County is like
Speaker 1: a red red, very red, very vaccine anti mask situation
Speaker 1: in Anaheim. Anaheim is part of Orange County and I
Speaker 1: was born there. Well, shout out to Anaheim for doing
Speaker 1: something right. Yeah, just me, just given a strain. Literally,
Speaker 1: all I know about Orange County is that someone I
Speaker 1: went to high school with was an actor on the
Speaker 1: O C. That's that's. That's as much as you should know, honestly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're The theme song just went bursting into my head. Actually, wait,
Speaker 1: I know people from Anaheim going to be like mad
Speaker 1: at me for even saying that. So I had to
Speaker 1: look it up. Oh no, it is the second largest
Speaker 1: city in Orange County. Okay, great because that's also where
Speaker 1: Disney is. So I was like, is it Angeles or
Speaker 1: Orange County? Okay, sorry, anyone out there, uh please don't
Speaker 1: add me, thanks, okay, Okay, Um, So now everyone knows
Speaker 1: that I don't know anything about California. I'm a fucking
Speaker 1: Appalachian girl at the moment. Okay, that's that's that's what
Speaker 1: we're here for. Yeah, honestly, I wish I wish I
Speaker 1: did not know anything about this place. I wish I
Speaker 1: was catapulted into out of space. I don't want to
Speaker 1: be here. I don't want to know anything, said good
Speaker 1: to know. Um, Freida wanted to be there, not l A,
Speaker 1: but Orange County. So she goes to Orange County and
Speaker 1: she starts. She organized the Philharmonic Orchestra and does it
Speaker 1: as a nonprofit and all their concerts are free to
Speaker 1: the public, and she she runs the orchestra for about
Speaker 1: fifteen years, and now she's the aforementioned first permanent conductor
Speaker 1: of an orchestra or whatever. Um, a woman conductor of
Speaker 1: an orchestra. And then one day, after like fifteen years,
Speaker 1: someone's like, and I'm paraphrasing here is and making this
Speaker 1: exact way it goes up whatever, making this part of
Speaker 1: but not the thing that happens, just the words. Okay,
Speaker 1: So one day someone's like, oh, ship, we're letting a
Speaker 1: woman run an orchestra, and so they start talking about
Speaker 1: firing her right because like whoops, we accele woman. But
Speaker 1: then they're going back and forth about it. They're like, ah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but she's like really good, like maybe we should let
Speaker 1: her keep doing it. And then someone's like wait, wait wait,
Speaker 1: but she's also a lesbian, so she gets fired cause
Speaker 1: that person. Yeah, And I feel like it's like worth
Speaker 1: pointing out that, like you know, like like a lot
Speaker 1: of World War two is like the bad guys and
Speaker 1: then the so so guys, you know, like, um, it's
Speaker 1: not like everyone fucking like it's not like Brittain was like, man,
Speaker 1: we're so and not a whatever. Britain's really anti Semitic too,
Speaker 1: is what I'm trying to say. But there's still like
Speaker 1: a scale, you know. I agree, it's there is no
Speaker 1: It's like it's not black and white thinking. There's no
Speaker 1: good and evil, like you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 1: again what you said earlier, people that support Nazis are Nazis,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, People that are like even
Speaker 1: a little bit homophobic or like whatever. It is like
Speaker 1: it's just like I don't know that makes sense. I
Speaker 1: guess that partly black and white thinking, but I think
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, And I'm going to shut up.
Speaker 1: Let you continue. It's black and gray thinking. There's the evil,
Speaker 1: and then there's the slightly less evil, and then there's
Speaker 1: the I know, and then the good. Are the individuals
Speaker 1: who are doing this kind of ship you know, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: And so the Kanu read yeah of our race, Yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: And I'm I'm like trying to picture counter Reeves playing
Speaker 1: her in the movie. Um, but I know that it's
Speaker 1: not allowed. Okay anyway, um okay. So she gets fired
Speaker 1: and she but she keeps working with music the rest
Speaker 1: of her life. And one of her whole things that
Speaker 1: she ends up having to do is that the whole
Speaker 1: story that I'm telling you, this whole bombing plot, people
Speaker 1: took the gay angle out of it. In history, Like
Speaker 1: even though William's last fucking words were like never let
Speaker 1: never let them say that homosexuals are cowards. People were
Speaker 1: just like, look at these great resistance fighters and like,
Speaker 1: never talk about their sexuality. And so it wasn't until
Speaker 1: the nine like history. History is all made up and
Speaker 1: made up by mostly straight white man Yeah, Trust history books,
Speaker 1: the Trust history books. Um ah no, no, no, I mean.
Speaker 1: And so it's in the nineties when she is able
Speaker 1: to like tell them like, no, the fucking the fact
Speaker 1: that we are like gay is fucking part of this
Speaker 1: um and needs to be part of the legacy. Um.
Speaker 1: And she dies. She's a good fucking run of it.
Speaker 1: Another guy, Karl Groger, He was part Jewish, although he'd
Speaker 1: been baptized Catholic. He had been born in Austria as
Speaker 1: father was a lawyer and his father was like defended
Speaker 1: the people who later became Nazis. Um. But young Carl,
Speaker 1: he was a social democrat and he was a medical student,
Speaker 1: and he gets the funck to Amsterdam as soon as
Speaker 1: he can to get away from the Nazis. But then
Speaker 1: the Nazis come after, of course, and he gets conscripted
Speaker 1: into the German Army, and then they quickly figured out
Speaker 1: that he's part Jewish and kick him out, so he
Speaker 1: joins the resistance. He works on a newspaper called ratten
Speaker 1: Kreutz or something rat Poison, which is a fucking punk
Speaker 1: rock name for goddamnpaper. Super metal. Yeah, and he's um.
Speaker 1: I think he's one of the medical students who sedates
Speaker 1: the guards, and I think he's the only one of
Speaker 1: the medical students who gets executed. But I'm not hundreds
Speaker 1: and sort of about that. Um. But his last letter
Speaker 1: to his parents includes the line I believe that with
Speaker 1: this one action, I brought more boon to humanity than
Speaker 1: an entire life as as a physician would have done. Um.
Speaker 1: And he's probably right. No, I think so too. It's
Speaker 1: he's I don't know, it's like, what what will what
Speaker 1: will shift the thinking of humanity versus what you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, like totally, the fact that he had
Speaker 1: even like a nudge of that arrow is so much
Speaker 1: more helpful than versus like, I don't know, I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, oh my god, I was going to say,
Speaker 1: delivering a babe. Maybe I should not see that. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: doctors could do lots and lots of good stuff and
Speaker 1: I'm entirely but he like, but he definitely saves more literal,
Speaker 1: just immediate lives just by fucking burning eight hundred thousand records,
Speaker 1: and he like, yeah, and you're right. He also just
Speaker 1: shows that people can stand up for ship, you know. Okay,
Speaker 1: So then another one. You've got another Willam William Sandberg
Speaker 1: and he's a He was a typographer, which is seems
Speaker 1: like a good skill set if you're gonna become a counterfeiter,
Speaker 1: and he he helped plan the whole thing. And then
Speaker 1: he actually he goes underground and he survives. He's hidden
Speaker 1: by a dentist friend after the bombing, and he keeps
Speaker 1: up his typographic work. He like keeps doing his art
Speaker 1: while he's underground, and he releases nineteen experimental typographic pamphlets
Speaker 1: because he's a fucking artist, um, while he's on the run.
Speaker 1: And I kind of love that too, like he said,
Speaker 1: asides art a little bit. But then he was like, oh,
Speaker 1: but now I have all this time to work on
Speaker 1: my art because I'm hiding from that. I gotta express myself.
Speaker 1: I'm an artist. Yeah, And and he designs the plaque
Speaker 1: for all of his dead friends, um that hangs on
Speaker 1: the building where the attack happen. And he goes on
Speaker 1: to direct one of the more important museums in Amsterdam,
Speaker 1: the stead Lick, where he he constantly runs into trouble
Speaker 1: for trying to present art that involves sexuality, because Nazis
Speaker 1: aren't the only shitty prudes around. Um. Then there's a
Speaker 1: Rudy Bloomgarten who's a very nonpacifist Jewish resistance member. Before
Speaker 1: before the bombing. He tried to assassinate a high up
Speaker 1: Nazi collaborator after the bombing. When they came to arrest him,
Speaker 1: he shot the arresting officer and got the funk away. Um.
Speaker 1: He was caught later in a nearby city. He didn't
Speaker 1: survive the war, but like, fuck it. He blew up
Speaker 1: a Nazi warehouse and shot a Nazi And I don't
Speaker 1: what more can anyone else? Yeah, like, yes, thank you
Speaker 1: for that. You gave us a good life. Okay. Another
Speaker 1: nonpacifist was Johann Brauer. And almost everyone else is like
Speaker 1: artists and students and ship right, But Johann was a
Speaker 1: bank robber, uh, at least in that but and more
Speaker 1: than that. So he's a bank robber in the twenties.
Speaker 1: And then he murders a guy who's blackmailing him about
Speaker 1: the bank robbery, and then he goes to prison for
Speaker 1: murdering the guy's blackmailing about the bank robbery. And then
Speaker 1: he gets out, and then he gets his PhD and
Speaker 1: like Spanish mysticism, uh, and he converts to Catholicism and
Speaker 1: then he fights in the Spanish Civil War on the
Speaker 1: Republican side, which is like not what most Catholics are doing.
Speaker 1: Most Catholics are specifically on the fascist side of that one.
Speaker 1: And then he comes back from the Spanish Civil War
Speaker 1: and becomes a professor and the Nazis to come take
Speaker 1: over the country. They fire him because they figure he
Speaker 1: was a murderer and he probably shouldn't be teaching kids,
Speaker 1: which I actually think he should be teaching kids, because
Speaker 1: so he up himself the blackmailed. Come on, come on, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a well rounded guy. He could teach kid Yeah, exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: And so he blows up their records and I think
Speaker 1: he gets executed. I wish I want to find out
Speaker 1: more about this guy, because he's sucking. Yeah, he sounds
Speaker 1: really fast, and I know I want to be friends
Speaker 1: with him. He's a complete wing nut who always throws
Speaker 1: down when you need when you need it, you know, Yes,
Speaker 1: I love that, love it. Love the con Yeah. I
Speaker 1: love a good scam. Yeah, totally. The guy who helped
Speaker 1: them figure out where to place the explosives was named
Speaker 1: Martinists Knight Kniehoff. He was a World War One vet
Speaker 1: who fought against the German invasion as part of a
Speaker 1: regiment of bicycle infantry. I was not aware that bicycle
Speaker 1: infantry was a thing until I I read about this man. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, me either. The more you say it, the
Speaker 1: more I'm like, can I am I managing? Just like
Speaker 1: an army of bicyclists in their little spio outfits. That's
Speaker 1: that's what I imagine. A bicyclist is a little like
Speaker 1: skin tight, you know what. I like the brand? Yeah, no, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: not like whatever shrine. As much as a man in
Speaker 1: uniform was very handsome, I think a man spito is
Speaker 1: more handsome. I'm fully okay with the great thank you
Speaker 1: this version of Yeah. And so he's like the explosives
Speaker 1: guy for him. Uh, he looks up the he gets
Speaker 1: the blueprints of the building from an architect who's one
Speaker 1: of them, and he suggests, okay, here's where you should
Speaker 1: place the bombs. And he wasn't caught. I don't think
Speaker 1: he actually went on the actual raid. He just told
Speaker 1: them where to place the bombs. And after the war
Speaker 1: they had a hunger winter, which is never a good
Speaker 1: time when you're when your country is a hunger winter
Speaker 1: where twenty Dutch people starved to death or frozen to death. Um,
Speaker 1: because I've never heard that term before. Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: even heard about the Hunger Winner until reading about this guy. Um.
Speaker 1: And then he because war has all kinds of unintended
Speaker 1: consequences um or intended consequences, I guess sometimes. And so
Speaker 1: he he hangs out at his house and hands out
Speaker 1: all of his food to two kids until his supplies
Speaker 1: are exhausted. Um, and he survives, and he's mostly remembered.
Speaker 1: First poetry. So I like that the speedo wearing um
Speaker 1: explosive sky from the heist movie. I'm talking about these
Speaker 1: like real people as if they're whatever anyway, Um, they aren't.
Speaker 1: I mean, no, he's a poem. And as I mean,
Speaker 1: a good heist movie is like there are real heists
Speaker 1: in the world, we just call it a heist, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. But in a highst movie, there
Speaker 1: are a bunch of different characters with a bunch of
Speaker 1: different like backgrounds of qualifications. So this just makes sense
Speaker 1: to me. There's a poet, there's a bank robber, there's
Speaker 1: a sculpture, there's an art I can keep going. Okay,
Speaker 1: another guy who was named CNIG and after the bombing,
Speaker 1: he just like goes back to school his medical school,
Speaker 1: like nothing happened. But then He just gets arrested while
Speaker 1: he's staking his medical exam and he he's one of
Speaker 1: the people who gets saved by by Willem by his admission,
Speaker 1: and he goes to a concentration company. He's freed when
Speaker 1: the Netherlands ise liberated. And then you got your noble
Speaker 1: because you need a random noble in all of this too,
Speaker 1: write you need a rich guy. You need so Edwards
Speaker 1: Samuel Adrian von Moossen Broke Broke uh moose Chin broke.
Speaker 1: He was. He was basically nobility. He also didn't like
Speaker 1: the Nazis, and so he fights against the German invasion.
Speaker 1: And then the Dutch army capitulates, and you know, the
Speaker 1: Netherlands gives up. So he he and his friend drive
Speaker 1: off to join the British army and then he joins
Speaker 1: and fights with the British Army as far as France
Speaker 1: before he's captured by the Germans. He escapes the Germans,
Speaker 1: he makes his way back to Amsterdam. He joins the resistance,
Speaker 1: helps blow up the records. Then he goes into hiding,
Speaker 1: but he was tracked down, arrested and executed um and
Speaker 1: he spent three months in prison with his arms chained
Speaker 1: above his head in a cell and his his father
Speaker 1: was also sentenced to five was since to five years
Speaker 1: in prison because he had sent a postcard to his
Speaker 1: kid that was like good luck and its like was
Speaker 1: probably good luck blowing up the Nazis. But um sad yeah,
Speaker 1: Um okay, then you have a double agent cop, because
Speaker 1: you needed a double agent cop, the only good kind
Speaker 1: of cop. I would say that. I agree, Um. Cornelius Ruse.
Speaker 1: He's supposed to be policing the Jewish quarter, but instead
Speaker 1: he's actively helping Jews escape, including at least in one case,
Speaker 1: high ding them in his house. And he's the one
Speaker 1: who steals the police the two police uniforms that he
Speaker 1: then gives to short in order to have them copied. Um.
Speaker 1: And he also uh after the attack, he's passing along
Speaker 1: all the police information about how they're trying to catch everyone. Um.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, because he's passing along those documents, when one
Speaker 1: of the people is caught, they find the documents, they
Speaker 1: trace it back to him. Um, and he's executed alongside
Speaker 1: his comrades. Every time you introduced someone like, I'm just
Speaker 1: so curious where it's going to end up, like and
Speaker 1: then they were executed or and then they got what
Speaker 1: you know what I mean totally um good another another
Speaker 1: good person uh, Henry Hobart Hobbard stat Uh. He arranged
Speaker 1: the explosive heist in the first places. They needed to
Speaker 1: steal the explosives to blow up the other place, right. Um.
Speaker 1: And so one of his relatives was a cop, and
Speaker 1: he gets the relative cop double agent to sneak out
Speaker 1: the explosives to him, which he then used personally on
Speaker 1: some like railway lines to to funk up with the
Speaker 1: just sunk up the Germans. But then he um, he
Speaker 1: gives bombs to the the bombing plot and he gets
Speaker 1: executed for that. Uh. And then there's Garrett Vonderveen who
Speaker 1: I was talking about earlier, the sculptor Um. Before the bombing,
Speaker 1: he actually wants set fire sculptor. This is the guy
Speaker 1: with the ship. Yes, I've been curious about the guy. Okay,
Speaker 1: So before the bombing, he actually set fire to an
Speaker 1: employment office for the same purpose, but he didn't do
Speaker 1: a very good job of it, so it didn't really
Speaker 1: do much damage. Then he had the more successful bombing, right,
Speaker 1: and then he goes on underground. He stays on the
Speaker 1: run for two years, and he gets it gets increasingly desperate.
Speaker 1: At one point, he and two others carry out another
Speaker 1: raid that scores them like ten thousand blank ideas instead
Speaker 1: of like the six d they grabbed the time before.
Speaker 1: But more and more of his friends are winding up
Speaker 1: in prison and so he can't have that right, so
Speaker 1: he tries to raid the prison to set them free.
Speaker 1: Six times, um. Six times he tries, and six times
Speaker 1: he fails, like he just won't sing quit attacking the prison.
Speaker 1: And then the last time he attacks the prison is
Speaker 1: on May one. He and twenty eight others were let
Speaker 1: in by a friendly guard but they I know, But
Speaker 1: they get attacked by a guard dog and Vondervin shoots
Speaker 1: the dog um, which everyone hears, and so a firefight
Speaker 1: breaks out. Vondervin gets shot in the back and paralyzed
Speaker 1: from the waist down and somehow still escapes. Uh Like,
Speaker 1: maybe he's carried away by a comrade. That's like the
Speaker 1: more likely thing, but I don't know. This guy just
Speaker 1: like doesn't know how a fucking quit, So it's like
Speaker 1: kind of easy to imagine him just like crawling away,
Speaker 1: yes exactly, And a friendly doctor treats him and they
Speaker 1: are all caught a couple of weeks later, and he
Speaker 1: was tried and executed another The ending is always the
Speaker 1: one that was like, where's it gonna go? Okay, one more?
Speaker 1: One more? No, no, no, no, I love really only
Speaker 1: wrote one more. Um, that's fine. Okay. So so even
Speaker 1: their fucking lawyer is cool. Okay. The woman Yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So Lao Mazarel, I'm listening. Yeah, no, no, no, I
Speaker 1: think you are. Solo is down for the struggle before
Speaker 1: the Nazis, during the Nazis, and after the Nazis. She
Speaker 1: represents immigrants and refugees and queers and Romani folks. Before
Speaker 1: the Nazi invasion, she tried and failed to get the
Speaker 1: Dutch government and the synagogues to destroy all the records
Speaker 1: about who's Jewish. Basically, she's like, this ship is gonna happen.
Speaker 1: Have you seen Germany? You should get rid of your lists,
Speaker 1: and they're like yeah, we like lists, you know. And
Speaker 1: then it happens that she's like seen, yeah, I told
Speaker 1: you yeah, and her her smart lady, I know her,
Speaker 1: her Jewish husband goes on the run with her her kids,
Speaker 1: who are so because their kids are part Jewish or whatever.
Speaker 1: Get get in trouble too, and uh, they actually I
Speaker 1: have the war two. And she frees people like legally
Speaker 1: when she can and illegally when she passed to. One time,
Speaker 1: she like literally jumps on a train to drag Jewish
Speaker 1: kids off of them, basically being like, you can't kill them,
Speaker 1: They're like under my legal protection or whatever. Yeah, oh
Speaker 1: my god, I love these people. And she was originally
Speaker 1: gonna go with everyone on the night of the bombing
Speaker 1: and helped do the bombing, but in the end she
Speaker 1: decided not to go because she was too short to
Speaker 1: realistically pass as a cop um. So as soon as
Speaker 1: I read this, I like message my my lawyer friend
Speaker 1: and was like I found you in history um and uh.
Speaker 1: And then after, you know, after the Nazi thing is
Speaker 1: over or whatever, she becomes In addition to fighting for
Speaker 1: all these other things, she also becomes an anti census
Speaker 1: activist because she's like, I've seen what happens when governments
Speaker 1: keep lists of people. You know what, yes, yes, I've
Speaker 1: always you know, the census always drives me the wrong way.
Speaker 1: I don't understand it. This woman she does what's that
Speaker 1: They also never seem to do it right in America. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: what's the whatever. But I do like that because she
Speaker 1: was the one that Willem I hope that's his name,
Speaker 1: that he told her that. I just don't let anyone
Speaker 1: say gays aren't counts, right, or homosexuals or whatever the
Speaker 1: word he so if because she was the one, the
Speaker 1: only person that was told that. She probably is the
Speaker 1: one that kind of like wrote like or helped write
Speaker 1: what happened in the history and stuff, right, That's that's
Speaker 1: what I would assume. I think, so m she also no,
Speaker 1: I just was gonna say, that makes her really cool
Speaker 1: to me. Like in nineteen forty six, I just didn't
Speaker 1: even make it into my script, but like in ninety
Speaker 1: six she um forms or helps form one of the
Speaker 1: like main gay rights organizations, um, and just like she's like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: Like I think she's probably as a straight too, I
Speaker 1: don't know whatever, she's married as kids, that doesn't make
Speaker 1: her straight, but you know, she's just like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: fucking absolutely get involved in LGBT ship as soon as
Speaker 1: this happens a true ally yeah, like in an actual
Speaker 1: sense of the word, like allies and like the two
Speaker 1: of us are invading a country together, you know, like
Speaker 1: mm hmmm, mm hmm. Yeah, no, totally. Um, I like her,
Speaker 1: like all these people. I like all I like all
Speaker 1: these people. This is you know, before I hopped on
Speaker 1: Happy the best day, you know what I mean. But
Speaker 1: you know, I'm pleasantly surprised these people are. So I
Speaker 1: want to look up all these people when we're done
Speaker 1: with this and just excuse me. I mean, I'm a
Speaker 1: very cynical person and I don't have faith and humanity.
Speaker 1: I think we are terrible. Um, and I unfortunately think
Speaker 1: the bad at weighs the good because bad usually wins.
Speaker 1: But this kind of stuff really gives me hope that
Speaker 1: like actual good people will keep doing good things, you know,
Speaker 1: and there's a reason like jumping in the ocean and
Speaker 1: helping a ship not be on fire, like you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, There's always going to be that I
Speaker 1: don't know what I'm saying, But there's always a point, Yes,
Speaker 1: there's always a point in every podcast where I start
Speaker 1: to philosophize. So this is the point where is the
Speaker 1: right time I'm here for? But um, but no, I
Speaker 1: think I think, especially in the culture that we are
Speaker 1: in now, which I don't like, how there's like you're
Speaker 1: being observed at all times. There's cameras everywhere or like you,
Speaker 1: and when you're not being observed, you want to be
Speaker 1: the observer and like record something or take a photo
Speaker 1: or there's all these outside forces that influence your accents,
Speaker 1: your actions. Unfortunately, um, even subconsciously. I think that happens,
Speaker 1: whether it's like posting something or you want to share,
Speaker 1: especially as artists. If you want to share something, there's
Speaker 1: going to be a reaction and you have to be
Speaker 1: on line to even feel relevant in all this stuff.
Speaker 1: So I think if we just dial all that back in,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, doing good things just to do
Speaker 1: them versus like like I hate when celebrities are like
Speaker 1: I fit the homeless today, just like go through the homeless,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, go do any money. You
Speaker 1: don't have to tell us about it, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. If they're actually good, they would just do
Speaker 1: it and not say a word. How would they get
Speaker 1: how would they get compliments on the Twitter? And so
Speaker 1: performative But that's just prus it's performative, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Um, But maybe one day the good my
Speaker 1: way the bad. But the current trajectory, I don't know. Man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's ah, I don't know. We'll see
Speaker 1: what happens, but I like this kind of show to
Speaker 1: give me hope. I'm I'm glad. Uh yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I I One of the things I like about how
Speaker 1: all of them are artists and stuff is that they're
Speaker 1: not doing it for cloud. You know, they're just doing
Speaker 1: it because they're like, well, I'm an artist, but I
Speaker 1: also gotta I gotta do this ship now, like exactly
Speaker 1: like some of them, you got to use their skill sets,
Speaker 1: like the typographer or whatever. But the cellist isn't like
Speaker 1: I'm playing cello for the revolution. The cellis is like,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm making fake ideas now, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are very talented people in their own rend because
Speaker 1: they're notable in whatever they're doing. Yeah, not that it
Speaker 1: matters to be notable, but you know what. And then okay,
Speaker 1: so the the this whole plot I've been calling it
Speaker 1: like the Amsterdam plot and all my notes, it doesn't
Speaker 1: have a cool name in history that I've able to
Speaker 1: been able to find, like even the group of them,
Speaker 1: they don't get called like, I don't know, the cool
Speaker 1: gay artists who blew up Nazis or whatever blew up
Speaker 1: Nazis warehouses. They just get called the Garrett Vonderveien Group
Speaker 1: because there's a strike guy there who like helps run
Speaker 1: some of it. Um, I don't know, do you have
Speaker 1: any do you have any name ideas for them? Like
Speaker 1: what do we call the you know, the gay bombers
Speaker 1: of Amsterdam or you know, um not to about you
Speaker 1: on the spot very literally, I mean, this is this
Speaker 1: is so the first thing I thought it was bad.
Speaker 1: It's not good. I thought of glam Squad just on
Speaker 1: the g G train, you know what I mean. I
Speaker 1: was on that. I was on that word. Um. I
Speaker 1: think squad can be a badass edition, but I also
Speaker 1: think it's like predictable and maybe you should just be
Speaker 1: some random word like I don't know the I'm trying
Speaker 1: to come by, Like just find a word that's like bombers,
Speaker 1: but like the person of that, like that's just that's
Speaker 1: not what I want. Well that's what they did, though.
Speaker 1: They showed up and they were like, hey, we're the
Speaker 1: bomb Squad. We're here to check for bombs. That's pretty
Speaker 1: Actually they're the original. They're the very first bomb squad
Speaker 1: that you should ever know what they are. They're the
Speaker 1: O G Bomb Squad. That's what they are. Bombs. I'm
Speaker 1: glad we came up. That's not the greatest, not the greatest,
Speaker 1: but I will finish there. So that's it for today.
Speaker 1: When we come back on Wednesday, we're gonna keep talking
Speaker 1: about this stuff. We're gonna talk. We're gonna move back
Speaker 1: over to Germany, and we're gonna learn more about cool
Speaker 1: gays who did cool gay stuff like fight Nazis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. Thanks. Do you have any uh
Speaker 1: plugs fresh your shoe? Oh? Yeah, that again about being
Speaker 1: observed and needed to stay relevant. Um. If you want
Speaker 1: to follow me on the internet, you're allowed to. I'm
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Shiro Hero six six six um and
Speaker 1: on Instagram is just Shiro hero. And if you want
Speaker 1: to know anything about me, you can just Google me
Speaker 1: and find it there. It's fine. I don't don't. I
Speaker 1: feel very jaded at this point. I have a podcast,
Speaker 1: I have a poetry book. It's all of the internet
Speaker 1: somewhere I don't know find it. Yeah, if you really care,
Speaker 1: you would dig for the information. Any any plugs for
Speaker 1: you at the moment. Uh? Well, I still like plugging
Speaker 1: my new podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff that
Speaker 1: you often listen. I like you plugging that too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just don't know where they can listen to it. No,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure either. I think you actually can't find
Speaker 1: podcasts anywhere, um but legally Yeah, totally so hard to find.
Speaker 1: Or if you're willing to go underground to the to
Speaker 1: find it everywhere you listen to podcasts, you can do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: good show, I like it. See you all, Weinstein. Cool
Speaker 1: People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. Or more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit
Speaker 1: our website cool zone media dot com, or check us
Speaker 1: out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts