Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 2: You're a weekly reminder that sometimes we run rewinds. You
Speaker 2: probably didn't know that, but I'm recording an introduction for
Speaker 2: both of the old episodes, and this is the introduction
Speaker 2: for the second one. Because I do episodes mostly in
Speaker 2: pairs because they come out twice a week. You've probably
Speaker 2: figured that out. Anyway, Here's an episode that I care
Speaker 2: a lot about about gay resistance to fascism. Hello, and
Speaker 2: welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Margaret Kiljoy, and this week I'm talking with Shreen. How
Speaker 2: you doing good?
Speaker 3: Actually, I know I said the first time you told me,
Speaker 3: I just said I was like basically doing bad. But
Speaker 3: after the recording the first part. I don't know if
Speaker 3: people know that record them back to back, but I
Speaker 3: feel much better than I did earlier. So I feel
Speaker 3: good after hearing about all these cool fucking people. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Cool. And our producer Sophie is on the line as well. Sophie,
Speaker 2: how are you?
Speaker 1: I'm great? Drinking a cream? So does Zva live in
Speaker 1: my best life?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: So speaking of aftertastes and Nazis, And there's this I
Speaker 2: actually don't know how to do this segway. But you
Speaker 2: are listening to part two of our two part series
Speaker 2: on gay resistance to Fascism, and so you're probably a
Speaker 2: little bit confused if you haven't heard the episode that
Speaker 2: came out Monday. So you should go back and listen
Speaker 2: to it if you haven't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you really should. It's a really good episode, and yeah,
Speaker 3: you will learn about a lot of really cool people.
Speaker 3: And this is coming from a very big cynic, so
Speaker 3: this is good.
Speaker 2: It's like, try to impress the cynic is like an
Speaker 2: interesting not.
Speaker 3: Even about impressing. It's like, will I still be miserable
Speaker 3: by the end of this, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Like it's like, yeah, you know what.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well this one is going to be Oh I
Speaker 2: don't want to spoil it, Okay. So where we last
Speaker 2: left off, there was like a motley crew of queers,
Speaker 2: artists and medical students in Amsterdam who just pulled off
Speaker 2: a like heist movie level antics to blow up a
Speaker 2: Nazi records storehouse. And today we're going to bring things
Speaker 2: back to Germany. So Germany, there's a country called Germany.
Speaker 2: Weymar Germany is the period from nineteen nineteen after Germany
Speaker 2: got its fucking ass handed to it in the First
Speaker 2: World War to nineteen thirty three, when Hitler came to
Speaker 2: power and did the whole Hitler thing that I presume
Speaker 2: most people are familiar with on some level. And Weymar
Speaker 2: Germany had a lot going for it, right. It was
Speaker 2: a republic, for one thing, which is a step up
Speaker 2: from dictatorships and such. People could like vote and shit,
Speaker 2: and there was free speech, there was free assembly, There
Speaker 2: was no state religion, some of the gay laws weren't
Speaker 2: being enforced, although they were still there. And the government
Speaker 2: was based out of a city called Weimar, which is
Speaker 2: how they got the name Weymar Germany. But Germany was
Speaker 2: completely fucked economically. World War One left their economy in shambles.
Speaker 2: Hyperinflation took over. Everyone was hungry and you know, fucked,
Speaker 2: and then they had the fucking worldwide depres after all
Speaker 2: of that on top of it.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that's the reason why the Nazis worked,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. They had to like kind
Speaker 3: of get the desperate, do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Like they had to really and like then Hitler quotes like,
Speaker 3: oh he can save us, kind of thing. I think
Speaker 3: they had to have the previous shitty part in order
Speaker 3: to even do that totally part, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Totally because people are so fucked they're like, I'll try anything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, exactly yeah.
Speaker 2: And then so most of the stuff I'd been exposed
Speaker 2: to about by Our Germany, which focused on really cool stuff,
Speaker 2: because by Our Germany it was this very interesting artistic
Speaker 2: time period, and mostly I'd heard about the cabaret scene,
Speaker 2: all the sort of decading queer artists who try to
Speaker 2: live fancy, free lives while they're basically starving, and all
Speaker 2: of that is like true and interesting and beautiful, but
Speaker 2: it's only one part of Germany's culture at the time,
Speaker 2: and actually only one part of it. It's queerness and
Speaker 2: it's queer culture. You've also got this really messy assortment
Speaker 2: of different organizations that have different names but get called
Speaker 2: like the Vondervogel or the German youth movement or the
Speaker 2: hiking clubs, and these go back decades. They go back
Speaker 2: to the eighteen nineties, and there's this movement that it
Speaker 2: kind of looks like boy Scouts if Boy Scouts was
Speaker 2: like a fuck off huge thing that involved millions of
Speaker 2: boys and girls, both through various levels of formal and
Speaker 2: informal organization, with weird paganism, vegetarianism, nudism and queerness running
Speaker 2: out through the entire thing. So not actually very much
Speaker 2: like boy scouts.
Speaker 3: I would like to be that kind of boy scout.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, well then you're going to love our characters today.
Speaker 2: So millions of German kids formed these hiking clubs and
Speaker 2: spent their days like camping and getting in touch with nature.
Speaker 2: It was an anti modernist movement at a lot of
Speaker 2: parts of it. And whenever people are like, oh, it
Speaker 2: was this, it's like, it's all kinds of different things
Speaker 2: all happening at the same time. But it was kind
Speaker 2: of a lot of it was about leaving civilization behind.
Speaker 2: A lot of it was German nationalists, although it didn't
Speaker 2: have a necessarily an anti Semitic character as far as
Speaker 2: I can tell, at least on any systemic level. Some
Speaker 2: of it was really middle class and some of it
Speaker 2: was really working class, and a lot of it was
Speaker 2: just fucking outright criminal in kind of the best and
Speaker 2: worst ways. There's a French gay anarchist named Daniel Geeren
Speaker 2: who wrote about the movement in the nineteen thirties because
Speaker 2: he would go visit nineteen thirties Germany because it was
Speaker 2: a fucking awesome place to be a gay anarchist.
Speaker 3: But he found it.
Speaker 2: He found this movement increasingly politically polarized between the communists
Speaker 2: and the fascists. And as the whole worldwide depression is hitting,
Speaker 2: more and more youth are finding themselves homeless. They choose
Speaker 2: itinerant lifestyles overstaying still in one place. So the movement
Speaker 2: keeps growing, and it keeps polarizing and doing all kinds
Speaker 2: of weird shit. In nineteen thirty three, huge chunks of
Speaker 2: has come to an abrupt end when Hitler bans all
Speaker 2: alternative youth organizations that aren't the Hitler Youth. A lot
Speaker 2: of the more mainstreams of these groups just basically become
Speaker 2: the Hitler Youth, and in nineteen thirty nine he makes
Speaker 2: participation in the Hitler Youth compulsory. But the youth movement
Speaker 2: went a lot lot of different directions. Not all of
Speaker 2: it went into Hitler Youth, as we'll get into, but
Speaker 2: some of it did. And so we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about gay Nazis now. These are not the cool people
Speaker 2: who did cool stuff.
Speaker 3: Well, got to balance it out, I suppose, But also, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm fascinated where this will go.
Speaker 2: My own experience with boy Scouts. I was a boy
Speaker 2: Scout and my best friend and who is a boy Scout,
Speaker 2: came out as trans like years before I did. And
Speaker 2: so I love that, you know, me and my best friend,
Speaker 2: because people are like, oh, they're letting girls into boy
Speaker 2: Scouts now, and like me and a lot of other
Speaker 2: trans women are like, oh no, they always did. That's
Speaker 2: a that's but so gay Nazis, that's the thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So before Hitler took over completely and the National Socialists
Speaker 2: were just like one of the parties in Germany. They
Speaker 2: were actually the only political party in Wymar, Germany with
Speaker 2: unknown high ranking gay member. Ernst Rohm was the leader
Speaker 2: of Hitler's essay, which are usually called the brown Shirts,
Speaker 2: which are basically the parties like street thugs who operate
Speaker 2: outside the law, like you know when Trump told his
Speaker 2: brown Shirts proud Boys to stand by and stand back,
Speaker 2: a similar sort of organization. And aernstram was really into
Speaker 2: this hyper masculinity thing. He's so anti you know, you're
Speaker 2: so anti feminine that you don't fuck women, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: and he's really into authority and discipline and obedience. Those
Speaker 2: are good manly things, unlike democracy, socialism, anarchism, fucking girls,
Speaker 2: all that weird soft yeah. And this is not to
Speaker 2: say that the Nazis were pro gay. They were just
Speaker 2: kind of pro hypocrisy. I think even before they came
Speaker 2: to the power, they were the most adamantly anti gay
Speaker 2: party in politics. But even the Social Democrats, who were
Speaker 2: the ones who weren't enforcing paragraph on seventy five and
Speaker 2: were part of trying to fight to get paragraph on
Speaker 2: seventy five appealed when they used they used homophobic language
Speaker 2: to try and talk shit on the Nazis. Basically they
Speaker 2: were like, oh, Rom's gay and so, and they like
Speaker 2: published his private letters in order to basically be like,
Speaker 2: if you support the Nazis, you support pedophilia and gayness,
Speaker 2: and the Nazis will corrupt our children, and so no
Speaker 2: one's fucking good at this point, no political party is
Speaker 2: looking good. The Nazis are clearly looking the worst. But
Speaker 2: it's just kind of interesting to me. And this causes
Speaker 2: us split in the gay rights scene. Right, some groups
Speaker 2: like the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which is as magnus Hirschfeld,
Speaker 2: the guy I was talking about a lot. Last episode,
Speaker 2: he warns the gay Nazis. He's like, you know, the
Speaker 2: fucking Nazis are going to come after you too, right.
Speaker 2: But then the other big organization at the time, this
Speaker 2: is really not something to be proud of. They're like,
Speaker 2: what nah, They're not coming after all the gay people,
Speaker 2: just those Jewish gay people buckers. Yeah, but but spoiler alert,
Speaker 2: the Nazis are coming after all the Cays. On June thirtieth,
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty four, on what gets called the Night of
Speaker 2: Long Knives, Hitler has Rom and a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: the other Brown Shirt leaders just murdered and in public.
Speaker 2: Hitler was like, oh, I definitely did this because Rom
Speaker 2: was going to betray me. But it was really transparently.
Speaker 2: Hitler was tired of being made fun of for putting
Speaker 2: up with gay people in the ranks. His pal Mussolini
Speaker 2: like to make fun of him, and they were like, oh,
Speaker 2: you're harboring gays, you know whatever, you.
Speaker 1: Know his pal Mussolini, Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: That's like the very first no homo with consequences or something.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Yeah, totally. And then what's kind of
Speaker 2: interesting is that Hitler probably didn't personally have a problem
Speaker 2: with Rome's homosexuality. He just he was a fucking people
Speaker 2: pleaser and he wanted people to like him, which has
Speaker 2: definitely never happened. Again, there's never been a populist right
Speaker 2: wing leader any time in history, certainly not in the
Speaker 2: past ten years in the United States who has clearly
Speaker 2: not had any problem personally with gay people.
Speaker 3: And no, yeah, yeah, but greatest country in the world.
Speaker 2: Wow, we're the ones who beat these Nazis.
Speaker 3: Okay, so we're the heroes of this story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then fire the conductor for being gay. So
Speaker 2: in private, Hitler would either defend or attack Ro's homosexuality
Speaker 2: depending on the audience, right, Like, sometimes he was like, oh,
Speaker 2: that was in his misspent youth and he's learned better now.
Speaker 2: And other times he's like, ah, us, worldly men, we
Speaker 2: understand that such thing has happened, and are fine. That's
Speaker 2: my Hitler accent. I don't do accents, you should.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I also don't do accents, but I think I
Speaker 3: when I tried, I've learned my lesson.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I'm reasonably certain that if someone put a
Speaker 2: gun to my head and said that I had to
Speaker 2: speak like a British person for two minutes or I
Speaker 2: would die. I would die because I genuinely believe that
Speaker 2: with a gun to my head, I would not be
Speaker 2: able to talk with a British accent.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no no. I did a live reading
Speaker 3: of Twilight once with Bechdel Class another amazing podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I had to voice one of the characters who
Speaker 3: was French for and like in the thing, he has
Speaker 3: an accent, and so I tried before we recorded, I
Speaker 3: was like, can I do this? And I tried to
Speaker 3: have a French accent and I sounded like Jamaican every time.
Speaker 3: It was so I was that was like cemented, like
Speaker 3: Sharin accents are not for you. This is not so yeah,
Speaker 3: but no accents are hard. So I understand, and I
Speaker 3: don't want to do that to the audience.
Speaker 2: Okay. So another one of the people that another one
Speaker 2: of the gay brown Shirts that Hitler has killed, was
Speaker 2: a guy named Edmund Hines who was actually Hitler's cell
Speaker 2: mate after the failed couve nineteen twenty three the Beer
Speaker 2: Hall putsch and he was one of the fucking original Nazis.
Speaker 2: Like literally, he was number seventy eight in the enlisting
Speaker 2: in the National Socialists, and he was gay as hell,
Speaker 2: and when they came for him during the Night of
Speaker 2: Long Knives, he was in bed with a lover.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: By nineteen forty one, Hitler starts suggesting the death penalty
Speaker 2: for gay kids in the Hitler Youth and then they
Speaker 2: pass the death penalty for GAYSS members. But what they
Speaker 2: do instead, I mean a lot of them they kill, right,
Speaker 2: some of those sentences get commuted to go be cannon
Speaker 2: fodder in the war against Russia, which I think they
Speaker 2: actually did to a lot of Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 2: people end up dying that way, get taken out of
Speaker 2: prison and sent to go die on the Eastern Front,
Speaker 2: or they're sent to serve. And it's like all criminal
Speaker 2: dearly Vonger brigade of the SS, which is basically a
Speaker 2: brigade within the SS, that's like all of the worst
Speaker 2: people and the criminals. And I put worst people in quotes,
Speaker 2: but like you know where they like go give criminals
Speaker 2: a chance to go die. I bring all this stuff up. Okay,
Speaker 2: do you know that meme? The I never thought leopards
Speaker 2: would eat my face, said the person who voted for
Speaker 2: the leopards eating people's faces party.
Speaker 3: No, I don't know, this is what I just said.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, okay, okay, no, no, no, I mean it's
Speaker 2: just basically this. It's like someone's like, but I never
Speaker 2: thought the leopards would eat my face, right, the person
Speaker 2: who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party. And
Speaker 2: that's how I feel about the gay Nazis.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the reasons to bring this up in this like
Speaker 2: otherwise conversation about good gay people is that I feel like, Okay,
Speaker 2: when we talk about the bad people in history who
Speaker 2: are gay, we're usually playing into this trope that like
Speaker 2: all of them were closeted, right, h But these gays
Speaker 2: Nazis weren't. They were not closeted. They were open about
Speaker 2: their interests. It was part of their like storied tradition
Speaker 2: of right wing homosexuality that ran concurrently with left wing
Speaker 2: in a political homosexuality.
Speaker 3: And is it just like internalized homophobia or like hatred
Speaker 3: that's I tried to wrap my head around stuff like that,
Speaker 3: like what they tell themselves to legitimize their existence or
Speaker 3: like what they're doing. So it's like, I don't.
Speaker 2: Know, you're just fucking racists, you know, and they're like,
Speaker 2: I like the racist Party, and then they're like, but
Speaker 2: the racist Party hates you for being gay, and you're like, well,
Speaker 2: I don't care. I'm so racist that that's you know.
Speaker 2: It's like we see that a lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like the modern far right in the United States,
Speaker 2: there are like, you know, gay members of it, and
Speaker 2: you're just like, what are you fucking doing? They hate
Speaker 2: you and we'll laugh at you and kill you at
Speaker 2: the first opportunity, and you're like, no, they like me,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: You know, I just thought of it's probably power that
Speaker 3: changes it, you know what I mean, Like, if you
Speaker 3: feel like you're a little bit not untouchable, but like protected,
Speaker 3: you feel more able to be a hypocrite.
Speaker 2: I feel like, right, yeah, no, that that actually makes sense.
Speaker 2: And honestly, like almost everything comes down to power at
Speaker 2: the end.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, ready, okay.
Speaker 2: And so the other reason to bring all this up
Speaker 2: is that I think that we forget that a lot
Speaker 2: of this shit has like really high stakes, the way
Speaker 2: that we talk about sex and sexuality and gender, and
Speaker 2: I would argue that we should be on the lookout
Speaker 2: for when some segment of oh I don't know feminism
Speaker 2: or gay politics starts making common cause with the right wing,
Speaker 2: which obviously would never happen. Now, No feminists would just
Speaker 2: start making common cause with the right wing at all.
Speaker 3: No, no, oh, no white feminism here, yeah, exactly. Oh god,
Speaker 3: I just thought I was I wanted to make like
Speaker 3: a really subtle Harry Potter reference, but I went fast enough,
Speaker 3: and so I just went with that the most. But
Speaker 3: you should know a listener that I was trying to
Speaker 3: talk about Jake k.
Speaker 5: Rowling anyway, me too, That's what I was thinking of too. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 5: so so you've got the gay Nazis. They don't last
Speaker 5: very long, fuck them whatever. But now I want to
Speaker 5: talk about gay pirates.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, let's do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to talk about the Edelwise pirates, who
Speaker 2: are so much fucking cooler, and they're on the opposite
Speaker 2: side of all this. So all the youth from the
Speaker 2: what I was saying, when they're all itinerant doing all
Speaker 2: this crazy shit. They're running around in these like it
Speaker 2: gets a million names buns or bands or clubs or
Speaker 2: clicks or whatever, and they're coming out of the vonder
Speaker 2: Vogel and all these related movements and the whitewashed version
Speaker 2: of history that I'd run across primarily before doing the
Speaker 2: research honestly has them like wandering around the pristine German countryside,
Speaker 2: like singing camp songs and thinking about like marrying their
Speaker 2: heterosexual sweethearts monogamously and popping out pure Ariyan babies and
Speaker 2: all that shit. Right, But like this could not be
Speaker 2: further from the truth, this growing culture of vagabondism and
Speaker 2: has a desire for change because they're all fucking broken, hungry,
Speaker 2: and mainstream societies completely failed them, and more and more
Speaker 2: of them were living in camps and again totally unfamiliar
Speaker 2: to people today, as you know, whatever. A lot of
Speaker 2: the clubs were just gangs. They were the wild gangs,
Speaker 2: and they were in a war against civilization and everything boring.
Speaker 2: Every winter they would like disband in every Easter, they
Speaker 2: would celebrate their click or their gang's rebirth. Their camp
Speaker 2: songs were parodies of the Hitler youth songs. They told
Speaker 2: dirty jokes, They got into fistfights with the Hitler youth. Basically,
Speaker 2: with all the men off to war, the Hitler youth
Speaker 2: were acting like the police, and a lot of German
Speaker 2: cities and so they and they lived criminal lives and
Speaker 2: they fucked and oh my god, did they fuck. And
Speaker 2: it was anything but straight, anything but monogamous. Like it's
Speaker 2: it's like queer enough to like maybe even get me
Speaker 2: a little bit like, oh my, maybe that's not the
Speaker 2: right way to go about these.
Speaker 3: Things, you know.
Speaker 2: So these are not the assimilationist gays. These are street fighting,
Speaker 2: forest fucking, sex working, Nazi robbing, criminal queers.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's like the anarchy of gay Yeah.
Speaker 2: And and they're called the they have a lot of
Speaker 2: different names, but the one I'm going to use now
Speaker 2: is the wild Fry, which means the wild free, which
Speaker 2: was one of their mottos. And they would have like
Speaker 2: things emblazoned while I'll get to that, and they live
Speaker 2: up to the name. History mostly remembers like a subsect
Speaker 2: of them called the Edelwy's Pirates. And and I've got flies.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's a flower. Oh interesting, Okay, I think I know, right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So so I've got information kind of about two generations
Speaker 2: of wild Fry, and one chunk comes from about nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty and one chunk comes from the early forties. And
Speaker 2: so I'm kind of doing my best to give an
Speaker 2: honest like the way that these two connect, but there
Speaker 2: isn't a lot of information about that because all of
Speaker 2: the shit is so hetero washed. But so it's an
Speaker 2: important I'm going to do an imperfect job, but I'm
Speaker 2: going to do the best I can and quote original
Speaker 2: sources and all that shit. And because people when they
Speaker 2: mentioned Edelway's Pirates, they present the sort of like generic
Speaker 2: working class youth subculture who ruled and were brave as
Speaker 2: fuck and they like fought Nazis. There's a movie about
Speaker 2: them called, I think it's called Edewais Pirates.
Speaker 3: But again it gets taken out, yeah.
Speaker 2: Totally, and it doesn't talk about their origins and it
Speaker 2: definitely doesn't talk about gay fucking. And so Daniel Gearen,
Speaker 2: who's the French anarchist who wants to go hang out
Speaker 2: gay folks in Germany, so does. He describes a run
Speaker 2: in with them in his book called the Brown Plague,
Speaker 2: which is a doesn't translate well now, but means that
Speaker 2: it's critical of the rising tide of fashion them. Okay,
Speaker 2: one Sunday on the outskirts of Berlin, we met, by
Speaker 2: chance a strange troop on the road. Needless to say,
Speaker 2: Neither of their short pants, their bere calves, which disappeared
Speaker 2: under their long wolf vests, the bulky and sundry loads
Speaker 2: swaying on their backs, nor their enormous hiking boots distinguished
Speaker 2: them from ordinary vagabonds. But they were very much tuffs.
Speaker 2: They had the depraved and troubled faces of hoodlums, and
Speaker 2: the most bizarre coverings on their heads. Black or gray
Speaker 2: chaplain esque bowlers, old women's hats with the brims turned
Speaker 2: up in amazon fashion, adorned with ostrich plumes and metals.
Speaker 2: Proletarian navigator caps decorated with enormous edelwise above the visor. Handkerchiefs.
Speaker 2: Are scarves and streaming colors tied any which way around
Speaker 2: the neck. Bare chests bursting out of open skin, vests
Speaker 2: with broad stripes, arms scored with fantastic or lewde tattoos,
Speaker 2: ears hung with pendants or enormous rings. Leather shorts surmounted
Speaker 2: by immense triangular belts, also of leather, yeah both daubed
Speaker 2: with all the colors of the rainbow, esoteric numbers, human profiles,
Speaker 2: and inscriptions such as wild fry or rudber bandits around
Speaker 2: their wrists. They wore enormous leather bracelets. In short, they
Speaker 2: were a bizarre mixture of virility and feminasy.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's a sentence. That is amazing, I know.
Speaker 2: And you too can buy all of their costumes from
Speaker 2: our sponsor, the Pirates Store, which is a nonprofit again
Speaker 2: because we're going full pure wholesome with the ads here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a nonprofit store.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, no, what you said in blazon. The first
Speaker 3: thing I was like, they have merch, you know, like
Speaker 3: you know this is that's a good way to spread
Speaker 3: the word.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, and we too. I actually don't think we
Speaker 2: have merch at the time of this recording, but we
Speaker 2: do have advertisers, and some of them are hopefully the
Speaker 2: Pirate Store.
Speaker 3: Yes, we're manifesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's some ads.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 2: So the Wild Fry they're self organized, right, They don't
Speaker 2: have this like overarching structure, but they do sometimes form
Speaker 2: into these larger coalitions, sometimes not. There's thousands of these
Speaker 2: bands and they all have fucking weird, fantastic names. Some
Speaker 2: of them are Black Love, Red Oath, Fear Not Death,
Speaker 2: Bloody Bones, Dirty Guys, Forest and Field Sleepers, Tortoises, Brandy Frush,
Speaker 2: Black Flag, Forest pirates or the Northern Lights.
Speaker 3: Wow. I love that. It's like the Legends of the
Speaker 3: Hidden Temple, like the team names.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, I'll get to why. It sounds like
Speaker 2: fantasy at a second. That's one of the things I
Speaker 2: love about it. Okay. They also they all had their
Speaker 2: own distinct styles of dress, which and they basically the
Speaker 2: basic idea was take some idea from fantasy literature and
Speaker 2: just fucking run with it. Just basically like, try to
Speaker 2: live like you're in a fantasy novel.
Speaker 3: Wow. They're like, what's the what's it called? Uh, what's
Speaker 3: the thing? When you're role playing? It's like LARPing thing, LARPing, LARPing.
Speaker 3: It's like LARPing. It's like LARPing, yeah, but very creative.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so they and unlike a lot of the rest
Speaker 2: of the Vandervogel movement, which was fairly middle class, almost
Speaker 2: all of these are working class kids, and basically they're like, well,
Speaker 2: a fantasy life that sounds better than starving, right, And
Speaker 2: so some of them would dress up as like American frontiersmen,
Speaker 2: others would dress up like pirates. Some were in stereotypical
Speaker 2: German garb and like leader hosen and shit. Others were
Speaker 2: like crusader knights, some were caricatures of indigenous Americans. All
Speaker 2: of them wore edelwise flowers, the single symbol that like
Speaker 2: united all of them and gave them the eventual name
Speaker 2: the Edewis Pirates, and they were into tattoos, including on
Speaker 2: their genitals. Girls and boys both wore earrings and when
Speaker 2: the various gang this is one of my favorite details
Speaker 2: I ran Chris when the various gangs would meet up together.
Speaker 2: Instead of all wearing they're like different colors from their
Speaker 2: different clicks, they all wore like top hats and tailcoats
Speaker 2: and like the finest, like fancy clothes that I'm sure
Speaker 2: they stole.
Speaker 3: Wait, I want to look up what an eda wise
Speaker 3: flower looks like. I want, I want to visualize their merch.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, that's really it's like a starfish.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, huh yeah, they're like for anyone's listening, they're
Speaker 2: they're pretty white flowers with like yellow I don't know
Speaker 2: anything about biology botany.
Speaker 3: I've definitely never seen one before. It's very unique looking,
Speaker 3: but okay.
Speaker 2: Cool, I have a visual Okay, the most influential fantasy
Speaker 2: author for them, which is kind of funny is this
Speaker 2: guy named Karl May, who is this nineteenth century adventure
Speaker 2: novel author who's yeah, so he knows where I'm going
Speaker 2: with this.
Speaker 3: Oh no, oh, no ah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is Hitler's favorite author.
Speaker 1: Favorite author con man, Karl May. Yeah, yeah, I did.
Speaker 3: Not know that.
Speaker 2: There's a whole behind the Bastard's episode about about Hitler
Speaker 2: and about how he loves uh Carl May.
Speaker 3: Wow, Cal, I wonder how Carl felt.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is like I mean, you know, Robert describes
Speaker 4: Karl May as the JK.
Speaker 1: Rowling of the day.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 3: Interesting, That's all I need to know. That's all I
Speaker 3: need to know.
Speaker 2: But I want to know because I think of like,
Speaker 2: I'm in a metal band that takes a lot of
Speaker 2: inspiration from Tolkien, and so are a lot of Nazi
Speaker 2: metal bands, right, and so I think of it like that,
Speaker 2: you know, But I haven't read any Karl May. But anyway, May,
Speaker 2: so these Carl May, Larper's who like rob people in
Speaker 2: these sex work.
Speaker 3: Hey.
Speaker 2: A few years ago a modern queer sex worker focused
Speaker 2: radical publishing project called Underbelly translated some of their songs
Speaker 2: from German. And so I'm not going to sing it
Speaker 2: unfortun I'm sorry everyone, ah darn, but my my favorite
Speaker 2: is just making fun of the Hitler youth for being
Speaker 2: too masculine and normy. And it's called short hair, big ears.
Speaker 2: Such short hair, such big ears. That means the Hitler
Speaker 2: youth must be here, grow long hair, tango nights. There's
Speaker 2: no Hitler youth in sight. Oh ho oh ho. And
Speaker 2: one hears the words on every street there's no Hitler
Speaker 2: youth I'd like to meet? O ho o ho.
Speaker 3: Ain't there fucking poets? Come on? That's amazing, amazing.
Speaker 2: And most of we're like fourteen to eighteen. I'll get
Speaker 2: into that more, but.
Speaker 3: That's the age where you kind of feel like invincible, right,
Speaker 3: Like that's the damn I would have been all over that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They made their living as delivery drivers in various
Speaker 2: unskilled positions, petty crime, non petty crime, sex work, especially
Speaker 2: at various gay bars throughout the city. Honestly, one of
Speaker 2: the reasons I love them so much as they just
Speaker 2: sound like my friends. That's just like a description of
Speaker 2: what my friends do, and especially when we were younger,
Speaker 2: and then they would pull all their money and then
Speaker 2: use it to pay off all their criminal fines that
Speaker 2: they incur or to support their arrested friends, and they
Speaker 2: go to juvenile attention and jail and shit constantly, and
Speaker 2: they break out of juvenile detention constantly. Like the study
Speaker 2: I read of fifty wild fry who had been held
Speaker 2: in detention, almost all of them had broken out at
Speaker 2: least once, and six of them had broken out of
Speaker 2: detention centers more than twenty times. Individuals only.
Speaker 3: That is incredible. Well, yeah, I don't, I know.
Speaker 2: And the more they face repression, the more they just
Speaker 2: resent mainstream society. This is even before the rise of
Speaker 2: the Nazis. A lot of this stuff. They just resent
Speaker 2: mainstream society, and they retreat further and further into their
Speaker 2: fantasy worlds. In the city Colm, where the movement is strongest,
Speaker 2: they coordinated all their gangs, which they called guilds into.
Speaker 3: Of course, they're called guilds, yeah, of course.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah. They coordinate them into rings, which are coalitions
Speaker 2: of each guilt of guilds by district.
Speaker 3: And then each.
Speaker 2: Guild had had a leader called a gang bowl, and
Speaker 2: the bowls of each guild would together elect the ring bull.
Speaker 2: And to be a bull, you had to prove that
Speaker 2: you were strong brave, good at crime, and down to
Speaker 2: fuck down to.
Speaker 3: Fuck like good a cribing down to fuck.
Speaker 2: Yes, all kinds of weird ways, and at least one gang,
Speaker 2: the Eagles of the Mountains. Everyone in it was a
Speaker 2: bowl because they were like no leaders, I guess, and
Speaker 2: each bowl had a queen, which I think might have
Speaker 2: been of either sex, but I'm not entirely sure. All
Speaker 2: male gangs had a beloved who is expected to be
Speaker 2: sexually available to everyone in the gang. Since some gangs
Speaker 2: didn't let girls in, girls formed their own all girl gangs.
Speaker 2: And then some boys wanted to join the all girl gangs,
Speaker 2: and so the girls let them in. And I appreciate
Speaker 2: that because that would have been me. I would have
Speaker 2: been the boy being like, can I join the girl gang? Though?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean girls are nicer than yeah, yeah, than men.
Speaker 3: But I also was thinking, like just guilds and all
Speaker 3: these little factions and stuff. This is like irl world
Speaker 3: of warcraft, you know what I mean, This is just
Speaker 3: like factions and battle and like whatever, like wow, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's art is life and life.
Speaker 2: Are I suspect these kids weren't bored very often, you know.
Speaker 2: And Okay, so each new member when they would join
Speaker 2: was initiated through bizarre and ceremonial baptisms, which were elaborate
Speaker 2: rituals of violence and sex. They would start off with
Speaker 2: fist fights and knife fights and then turn into public sexuality,
Speaker 2: like fucking everyone in the gang, or masturbating in front
Speaker 2: of everyone, or getting off during sex fast enough, like
Speaker 2: literally someone's standing there with a stop watch and you're like, wow,
Speaker 2: get off fast enough.
Speaker 3: So it's like hazing, but.
Speaker 2: For badass yeah, yeah, totally, it's like way more like
Speaker 2: the hat.
Speaker 3: You're cool enough to be cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's hard for me to imagine the frat
Speaker 2: where the hazing iss. Now you've got to fuck all
Speaker 2: of us, but you know whatever, also a mixed gender
Speaker 2: frat m hm. And they would all descend into drunken
Speaker 2: orgies every time someone knew was baptized, of course, And
Speaker 2: there's actually there's I should have saved them in a
Speaker 2: file to make them easily available, but there's actually photos
Speaker 2: of some of these. Some of the like weird like
Speaker 2: and it's like people dressed like pirates with knives and
Speaker 2: all kinds of weird shit. And they would They lived
Speaker 2: in the forests and in squats in the cities. They
Speaker 2: would like each each crew would have it. Each each
Speaker 2: guild would have its own squat basically addicts or cellars
Speaker 2: or un used storage rooms, and they would put a
Speaker 2: single bed in the middle and they called it the
Speaker 2: fucking sofa, and that was like the only sleeping space.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure they slept on floor and they
Speaker 2: would just like this.
Speaker 3: I would not if I wasn't on this podcast, I
Speaker 3: wouldn't think this was true.
Speaker 2: No, I know and like and so so I'll say
Speaker 2: that my main source of this is Daniel Gern's account
Speaker 2: of talking to of the more like crime sex stuff
Speaker 2: is talking to a sociologist a social worker sorry at
Speaker 2: the time, who did a study on these people, and
Speaker 2: that study is replicated in a book, The Brown Plague.
Speaker 2: But yeah, because a lot of the later stuff that
Speaker 2: we hear about edawisepirates just doesn't talk about their drunken
Speaker 2: orgies at all, but.
Speaker 3: Stuff gets erased all the time, right, like as we've
Speaker 3: learned from this podcast and just life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally, okay. So they would like, like one
Speaker 2: account I was reading, they like they would steal and
Speaker 2: sell cars and then they would like in their stolen
Speaker 2: car they would like drive around and like I don't
Speaker 2: remember exactly, was like the guy who steals the car.
Speaker 2: He's like known, is like a car guy that's like
Speaker 2: his name or whatever, you know. And then they like
Speaker 2: go around and rip off payphones. I didn't even know
Speaker 2: they had payphones back then, but they would like go
Speaker 2: and like rip off payphones and then try and get
Speaker 2: all the money out and that they couldn't throw them
Speaker 2: in the river or whatever. And they would fence all
Speaker 2: their stolen goods through bartenders in exchange for alcohol. And
Speaker 2: this gets and this leads a lot of them, a
Speaker 2: lot of them end up like in debt to these bartenders.
Speaker 2: And then like when they age out of the wild fry,
Speaker 2: they just enter like a more mainstream life of crime
Speaker 2: for better or worse.
Speaker 3: Oh, I didn't even consider that they would age out. Actually,
Speaker 3: now that you say that out loud, I know. It's like,
Speaker 3: you can't stay a wild fry if you're not a
Speaker 3: small fry. You have to be by yourself committing crime
Speaker 3: all of a sudden. I don't know. Yeah, that's not fair.
Speaker 2: I know, I know. And it's like because one of
Speaker 2: the things that this reminds me so much of when
Speaker 2: I was like a teenage squatter, but I did most
Speaker 2: of that. One was like nineteen and twenty, and so
Speaker 2: I'm a little bit like, oh, I would have been
Speaker 2: too old to be you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's fucked up, that's not fair. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: like very Peter Panny Lost Boys about them, you know what.
Speaker 2: I mean, totally Yeah, it is just Peter Pan's army. Yeah, yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2: So the Nazis come to power and they refuse to disband,
Speaker 2: and in a lot of cities they're powerful enough that
Speaker 2: they completely just challenge the hegemony of the Hitler youth,
Speaker 2: and in some cities they outnumber the Hitler youth. And
Speaker 2: one of the slogans that they had at the time
Speaker 2: was eternal war against the Hitler Youth. Yes, yes, And
Speaker 2: so they did resistance in a lot of ways, right
Speaker 2: like just by existing they and continuing to like hiking
Speaker 2: camp and wander their resisting Nazi era travel restrictions. But
Speaker 2: they they weren't content with only doing that, and so
Speaker 2: it wasn't long before they go from like street fights
Speaker 2: with the Nazi the Hitler youth to distributing propaganda, like
Speaker 2: when the Allies would drop leaflets on the city. The
Speaker 2: wild fry would run around and like stick the leaflets
Speaker 2: through people's doors and shit. They help people desert from
Speaker 2: the Nazi army. They would rob Nazi warehouses and you know,
Speaker 2: eventually started like killing Nazis who needed a good killing. Actually,
Speaker 2: what you're talking about, like aging out. I think that
Speaker 2: I think that the war like fucks up. The best
Speaker 2: I can tell, the war like fucks up there, you know,
Speaker 2: sort of like their specific organizational structure, it becomes a
Speaker 2: lot looser. And so some of the people that you
Speaker 2: know who get hanged and stuff for this activity are
Speaker 2: like formal at a wise pirates and shit like that, right,
Speaker 2: And so they're still hanging out with like sixteen year
Speaker 2: olds doing all these crimes together, and a lot of
Speaker 2: them get caught and get sent to concentration camps. On
Speaker 2: November tenth, nineteen forty four, thirteen of them or thirteen people,
Speaker 2: six of them who are teenagers and some of them
Speaker 2: are formal otawise pirates get executed without trial and coal
Speaker 2: and I believe for theft, murder and planning to blow
Speaker 2: up at Gestapo headquarters. This is the like most known
Speaker 2: thing that they that they were doing.
Speaker 3: I forgive me if you've mentioned this. Yeah, like demographically,
Speaker 3: what are most of them? Are they like mixed like
Speaker 3: ethnicity wise?
Speaker 2: Oh okay, they do so they are both Aryan and Jewish, okay,
Speaker 2: or at least they specifically refuse to disallow Jews. I
Speaker 2: could not tell you what percent of the movement was Jewish. Probably,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I know that historically they allowed in uh.
Speaker 2: And that was like a thing that distinguished them from
Speaker 2: a lot of it is that they were like what
Speaker 2: fuck all.
Speaker 3: That It was like kind of started I would assume
Speaker 3: by like Aryan people.
Speaker 2: But that were good probably, But I couldn't tell you.
Speaker 2: I couldn't tell you about Jewish participation in the beginning.
Speaker 3: I was just trying to imagine them forever. Reason, when
Speaker 3: I imagine something badass and doing stuff, they're not white,
Speaker 3: so I have to rearrange.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, well, considering like the overwhelming majority
Speaker 2: of Germans at this point are not like really doing
Speaker 2: their best, you know. Yeah, so like I.
Speaker 3: See that my prejudice now, I'm just gonna.
Speaker 2: I think that's fair. Yeah yeah, and so so plenty
Speaker 2: of histories. So they run into this problem where they're
Speaker 2: not seen as political, which in a sense, it's true right,
Speaker 2: because they were not friends with polite society, any polite society.
Speaker 2: There were criminals under the Weimar Republic, there were criminals
Speaker 2: under the Nazis, and they continued to be criminals when
Speaker 2: the Allies liberated the country. The wild fry and Soviet
Speaker 2: controlled areas were treated really harshly, and many of them
Speaker 2: were sentenced to twenty five years in prison. And because
Speaker 2: they're working class criminals, they were never acknowledged their anti
Speaker 2: fascist work until twenty eleven when and the families of
Speaker 2: the Edewis pirates who were killed never received like reparations
Speaker 2: from the German state, unlike other partisans. And the last
Speaker 2: known surviving Edelwise pirate was a woman named Gertrude Koch Coach.
Speaker 2: I don't know who died in twenty sixteen at the
Speaker 2: age of ninety two.
Speaker 3: Well it's a long life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know who else survives? The people who drank
Speaker 2: tap water and eat potatoes. The sponsors of this show
Speaker 2: you will live forever. And this is especially funny because
Speaker 2: now I've been learning about the more about potatoes because
Speaker 2: I listened to buying the bastards, which I feel terrible to.
Speaker 3: Admit on this show not how could you?
Speaker 2: I know? And I'm learning cool people.
Speaker 1: Only what a hack podcast?
Speaker 3: I wonder who produces that show?
Speaker 1: Yeah, loser.
Speaker 2: But anyway, here's some ads for tap water potatoes and
Speaker 2: whatever else gets mixed in there. And we are back
Speaker 2: and we are talking about pirates.
Speaker 3: Yes, when you first started with the Pirates, I don't
Speaker 3: I've never heard of the Edays Pirates, but I was
Speaker 3: curious what definition of pirate you were going to use,
Speaker 3: like the actual like people that were pirates on you
Speaker 3: know what I mean, because yeah, yeah, exactly or like
Speaker 3: just but it's just really funny that there's like dressed
Speaker 3: like pirates. Yeah, they do pyrany thing. Yeah, it's all
Speaker 3: like they're I don't know, it's just kind of funny
Speaker 3: to see it all come together totally imagination.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I mean they lived really similar lives to
Speaker 2: like Golden Age pirates, but they like were doing it
Speaker 2: yeah in costume, you know, yeah, fucking rules honestly, Like.
Speaker 3: It's it's it's yeah, it's like especially at the time,
Speaker 3: it's like if the world is going to shit, just
Speaker 3: you live once, you know, like that's the Yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know, it's it's I like the uninhibited nature of
Speaker 3: their life.
Speaker 2: Yeah I do too, jesus. Yeah. And then one of
Speaker 2: the things I like about them is like it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem like it was like a gay culture as in,
Speaker 2: like some of them are gay, and some of them
Speaker 2: are heterosexual, and some of them are by it was
Speaker 2: just fucking weird. Like I don't think any of them
Speaker 2: knew their sexuality. Some of them probably cared and some
Speaker 2: of them probably didn't.
Speaker 3: And like, yeah, they definitely weirdos unite, right, sorry, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: I mean it's like weirdos all unite. Right. So it's
Speaker 3: like when you're in high school, the outcast are altogether,
Speaker 3: whether they're like people of color or gay or whatever.
Speaker 3: Like that's what happened to in my experience anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we're like when you're yeah, if you're what's the word marginalized,
Speaker 3: marginalized exactly, if you're marginalized and you're fucking weird, you
Speaker 3: will unite because you want a weird community and weird, honestly,
Speaker 3: I think is a great thing. You should be weird
Speaker 3: being a normy boring you know, so stay weird.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah totally. And then okay, so these aren't the
Speaker 2: only queers fighting the Nazis within Germany. Far from it.
Speaker 2: I'm going to tell you about some more of them.
Speaker 2: There's a gad Beck who is a gay, part Jewish
Speaker 2: Berliner who in nineteen forty two he borrows a Hitler
Speaker 2: youth uniform and he marches into the pre deportation camp
Speaker 2: where his lover Manfred is being detained. So he shows
Speaker 2: up in his uniform and he goes to the commanding
Speaker 2: officer and he's like, oh, I need to borrow this
Speaker 2: guy from on a construction project. And so the request
Speaker 2: is granted and the you know, and he starts out
Speaker 2: the camp with with his lover Manfred. But then Manfred
Speaker 2: stops and he says, I can't leave my family basically,
Speaker 2: and he goes back into the back into the camp.
Speaker 2: He dies, him and his family die, but he basically said,
Speaker 2: you know, if I will never be free if I'm
Speaker 2: not free with my family. But so then gad Beck
Speaker 2: spends the next three years helping Jews escape before he
Speaker 2: gets betrayed by a fucking a Jewish spy for the
Speaker 2: Gestapo and he gets arrested, but he survives the war.
Speaker 2: So this is gonna be another one of those like
Speaker 2: who lives, who dies?
Speaker 3: Yeah, little list of me, just listening intently until the
Speaker 3: very end. It's like, okay, well not the next one.
Speaker 3: Maybe the next one will be better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well then, you know, So this guy survives the
Speaker 2: war and he spends his lover doesn't but he does.
Speaker 3: Well, it's nice that, like, even after his lover doesn't
Speaker 3: go with him, he's actually a true like you know
Speaker 3: what I mean, he keeps doing fighting the good fight totally.
Speaker 2: He doesn't just fuck off, which would be exactly perfectly fair.
Speaker 2: I am not judging anyone who fucks off out of
Speaker 2: a place is trying to murder them, you know, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: And he lives to be eighty eight and he spends
Speaker 2: the last thirty five years of his life with his partner.
Speaker 2: So I like when it's.
Speaker 3: A good ending, Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2: Now on to others. Yeah, okay. So then there's a
Speaker 2: Count Albrecht von Bernstaff who's a gay aristocrat and he's
Speaker 2: this he's a short, balding man. He's always impeccably dressed,
Speaker 2: and he wastes most of the war years sitting around
Speaker 2: cafes hitting on waiters, or that's what he wants people
Speaker 2: to think right, I mean he does. He is these things.
Speaker 2: He's a short, balding, well dressed man who hits on
Speaker 2: a lot of waiters. But he's actually he's he's playing
Speaker 2: up the like foppish aristocrat gay man stereotype to draw
Speaker 2: attention from his actual work, which is he's running an
Speaker 2: underground railroad helping Jews and other dissidents get themselves out
Speaker 2: of Germany.
Speaker 3: That's genius, I know. And like that does take like
Speaker 3: front and center, you know, like put the gay out
Speaker 3: front and then let me do my secret good job. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 3: this one could keep him distracted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's like, oh, I'm just a creepy, harmless old
Speaker 2: gay guy, you know, like uh yeah. And he's so
Speaker 2: aristocratic and I kind of love him for this. He's
Speaker 2: so aristocratic that he figures like, all right, I'm doing
Speaker 2: something that is obviously illegal, being being gay, but I'm
Speaker 2: so rich that everyone puts up with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Power. I think it was the last episode.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was this, Yeah it was last, but like Power,
Speaker 3: you can you can get away with more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. And yeah, because because.
Speaker 3: Money, power and money. Sorry, I'm like I have a
Speaker 3: lot of insight thoughts that are just I think, and
Speaker 3: they say it out loud, even if it's like not
Speaker 3: even my right timing.
Speaker 2: But I think that's the point of a podcast.
Speaker 3: Why am my podcast?
Speaker 2: Because otherwise it would be me talking to myself and
Speaker 2: that would be half as interesting as fair but.
Speaker 3: No money and power. So that's how you hack life, unfortunately.
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: And it's like all across history. If you're poor and gay,
Speaker 2: you're fucked, and if you're rich and gay, you're just eccentric,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, very true, Oscar Wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah totally, although it only sort of works out for
Speaker 2: him different points.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but still but that was a bad example whatever.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, it is a It is a
Speaker 2: good example because like he's able to exist in that
Speaker 2: way at all because of that kind.
Speaker 3: Of exactly yeah, who's accepted as what he was, yeah
Speaker 3: versus yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, So the so Count Albrecht he he coordinates with
Speaker 2: gay resistance groups in the Netherlands, and to quote an
Speaker 2: anonymously written article that's coming from an upcoming issue of
Speaker 2: a magazine called Baden that the author let me read before, also,
Speaker 2: Count Albrecht had warned his contacts in Holland about the
Speaker 2: Nazi invasion before it began, so they could prepare themselves.
Speaker 2: In one instance, members of a gay society took measures
Speaker 2: ahead of the German invasion. In preparation for the catastrophe.
Speaker 2: The editor of their paper, Levin Strecht, burned the organization
Speaker 2: mailing list another comrade Aren't. Then Saundhorst committed the entire
Speaker 2: list to memory so that they could find one another afterwards.
Speaker 2: And I really like that because I like, yeah, because
Speaker 2: when I first started doing this, like everyone's like keeping
Speaker 2: these records, and he keeps getting them all in trouble, right,
Speaker 2: and so I'm like, what do you what do you
Speaker 2: fucking doing? Burn your fucking records?
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: But then the guy who memorizes it all makes reminds
Speaker 2: me that I'm like, well, it was so hard for
Speaker 2: them to find each other in the first place, that
Speaker 2: like losing that is losing something really important.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, yeah, memorizing is that's what. That's a
Speaker 3: great solution if you're able to.
Speaker 2: Do that, you know, totally.
Speaker 3: Also Mohammed, of the prophet of Islam, he memorized the Kuran,
Speaker 3: you know, how to read and write, so it works.
Speaker 3: Look at him now you know he's done. Well, yeah,
Speaker 3: I've heard of him, you know. Crazy. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So eventually Count Albrett gets gets found out, and he
Speaker 2: gets arrested, and he gets into a series of concentration
Speaker 2: camps and he gets really horrendously tortured. But his fellow inmates,
Speaker 2: they remember him based on how he kept everyone's spirits up,
Speaker 2: like he would he'd be sitting around in the concentration
Speaker 2: camp and he'd be like, we're all going to have
Speaker 2: the most fabulous party at my house when this is
Speaker 2: all done. You are all invited. Everyone's coming over, like,
Speaker 2: you know, break out all the finest stuff, best party ever.
Speaker 2: And and he didn't survive the camps. He died in
Speaker 2: the camps. But I don't know, hundreds of people, at
Speaker 2: least Jews and gays and gay Jews and at least
Speaker 2: two different countries survived the war because of his efforts
Speaker 2: and him disguising himself himself as a fop, you know,
Speaker 2: and playing into the like being like, oh, yes, homosexuals
Speaker 2: are cowards, we would never do anything bad, you know.
Speaker 3: Use the stereotype to your benefit, just like you know
Speaker 3: what I mean. It's or like not benefit, but like
Speaker 3: your advantage. Yeah, yeah, wow, what a guy.
Speaker 2: I know, I like him, okay. And one of the
Speaker 2: things that it's kind of arc that I ran across
Speaker 2: in a lot of this research, a lot of the
Speaker 2: gay men who survived the concentration camps get immediately re
Speaker 2: arrested because they're gay, right, because you're not allowed to
Speaker 2: be gay, whether it's Nazi Germany or Soviet Union. Well
Speaker 2: East Germany, at least the Soviet Union had more complicated
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, right, I think Hitler had re I know that,
Speaker 2: like Lenin made homosexuality legal, and then Stalin was like, JK,
Speaker 2: fuck all you. But anyway, one guy, for example, that
Speaker 2: I was reading about, I don't have his name in
Speaker 2: front of me. He wasn't as much of a resistance fighter,
Speaker 2: although just existing is resistance. I'm not trying to like
Speaker 2: knock him. He retold his experience where he was taken
Speaker 2: back literally in front of the same judge that had
Speaker 2: sentenced him to a concentration camp previously, because they didn't
Speaker 2: actually get rid of the fucking Nazis, they just like
Speaker 2: cut off the head of it. Yeah, so he gets
Speaker 2: sent back to the same judge who's like you again
Speaker 2: and then sentences him right back to fucking person.
Speaker 3: That makes me so mad.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: People empower, staying power, yeah ultimately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Okay. I want to end with with one
Speaker 2: last short story about a queer poet named Robert Desnos
Speaker 2: and he was poet. Yeah, he was heavily involved in
Speaker 2: the French surrealist scene and he joins the resistance to
Speaker 2: Germany once you know, francis under occupation and like our
Speaker 2: Dutch heroes from last episode or last Monday whatever on hoseay,
Speaker 2: is this a new episode? Is this just a different
Speaker 2: half of the same episode. I don't understand the taxonomy
Speaker 2: of my own job.
Speaker 1: It's a two parter, okay.
Speaker 2: In the last part of this two part episode, perfect, thanks, thanks,
Speaker 2: I'm good at my job. So he works as a
Speaker 2: counterfeitter and he makes fake id's and he also does
Speaker 2: a ton of other stuff. He actually works for a
Speaker 2: collaborationist newspaper as a spy, and he passes along all
Speaker 2: the information he learns by working for a shitty pro
Speaker 2: German newspaper. He passes it along to the Resistance. He
Speaker 2: also wrote for underground papers under a ton of different names,
Speaker 2: and in nineteen forty four he gets caught and he
Speaker 2: gets sent to a series of concentration camps. But at heart, right,
Speaker 2: this guy's a surrealist. So one day, according to a
Speaker 2: Holocaust survivor named Odette, and it's relayed. This story is
Speaker 2: relaid through a writer named Susan Griffin. So Robert's waiting
Speaker 2: in line for the fucking gas chamber, and he just
Speaker 2: jumps up and runs up to a man who's ahead
Speaker 2: of him in line, and he just gets really excited
Speaker 2: and he starts reading the man's palm and he's like,
Speaker 2: look here, look at your lifeline. You're gonna live a
Speaker 2: long life, and you're gonna have three children. And his absurdism, right,
Speaker 2: because they all know what's fucking happening. I think his
Speaker 2: absurdism is so contagious that everyone's just just like breaking
Speaker 2: out laughing, and it confuses the guards so completely that
Speaker 2: the guards send them back to their barracks. Wow, because
Speaker 2: they don't know how to handle these people who are
Speaker 2: supposed to just be like totally given up, who are
Speaker 2: like right riotlessly, rioteously, who are laughing very hard, uncontrollably, and.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's so fascinating.
Speaker 2: And he he doesn't die in a gas chamber.
Speaker 1: He used used the phrase unexecuted in your script.
Speaker 2: Everyone gets sent back to the barracks unexecuted is the
Speaker 2: way I read it. Yeah, and he technically survives the war,
Speaker 2: but he caught typhoid, I believe, in the concentration camp,
Speaker 2: and he dies within a month of liberation. But again,
Speaker 2: that doesn't see him right. I know, I know, are fair?
Speaker 3: What is nothing like?
Speaker 2: Okay? But the reason I want to end on that
Speaker 2: note is because I think people look at some of
Speaker 2: this history wrong, at least like queer history, because they're like, oh,
Speaker 2: did they succeed, Like a lot of the stuff I
Speaker 2: would read being like, oh, they didn't succeed because they died,
Speaker 2: or they didn't succeed because they only blew up eight
Speaker 2: hundred thousand records instead of three million records or whatever. Right,
Speaker 2: but they it to me, it feels like they succeeded, right.
Speaker 2: They they chose resistance and a lot of them, most
Speaker 2: of them didn't survive the war. But they say fucking
Speaker 2: thousands of people and I don't know.
Speaker 3: They died fighting, you know what I mean, Like if
Speaker 3: they did die in a way that they shouldn't have, Like,
Speaker 3: it's just a testament to like I don't know, caring
Speaker 3: more about the world and yourself, and like I don't know,
Speaker 3: I don't know where I'm going, I don't know when
Speaker 3: end when.
Speaker 2: I start them.
Speaker 3: But I think it's pretty bad ass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that they like they they basically they
Speaker 2: proved a fucking lot and they certainly proved like our
Speaker 2: man Willem said at the beginning that homosexual is not
Speaker 2: a fucking synonym for a week, which is what people
Speaker 2: used to treat it as. And no one can fucking
Speaker 2: say that they were cowards, you know.
Speaker 3: No one. Yeah, definitely not, that's the last thing, yeah
Speaker 3: would be. I was thinking though not to like yes
Speaker 3: and but no, yes, And it uh like the vast
Speaker 3: majority of these people that we learned about are our men, correct,
Speaker 3: So it is interesting just to think, like how many
Speaker 3: more people there were that maybe didn't get like attention
Speaker 3: or history and about them, or that were who were
Speaker 3: I mean, there was a there's a spattering of women.
Speaker 3: I'm there for sure. But it does make me wonder
Speaker 3: if again it goes back to power. As a man,
Speaker 3: you have more power, right, and maybe that's why you're
Speaker 3: able to accomplish more, especially I mean back then and
Speaker 3: now what am I saying, But it's interesting to think
Speaker 3: about who gets written about, even in like alt history
Speaker 3: totally because as I'm a filmmaker, I want to say
Speaker 3: in quotes, but come on, I should like whatever imposters
Speaker 3: in drome one on one, but filmmaker imposter syndrome is
Speaker 3: real and it But I was reading about like writing
Speaker 3: like scripts and movies and stuff, and how we're so
Speaker 3: used to just pretending that Western story structure is like
Speaker 3: the default way to tell stories and we forget that,
Speaker 3: like so many cultures have different ways of telling stories
Speaker 3: and like, yeah, it's like Bollywood films are structures so
Speaker 3: differently than ours, and we assume ours is the right
Speaker 3: default way. And I think that's the same with just everything.
Speaker 3: It's all you didn't mention that this is the westernized
Speaker 3: version of it. And it just makes me wonder what
Speaker 3: else is out there, because I know there are more
Speaker 3: amazing people out there. Maybe we don't have to know
Speaker 3: about them, just to know they existed is enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that made any sense.
Speaker 2: No, No, I think that that actually gets it something
Speaker 2: really important. One of the things that I kept running
Speaker 2: across with this is like I think I feel certain
Speaker 2: that there was as many you know, lesbians fighting against
Speaker 2: the Nazis right as there were gay men. And most
Speaker 2: of the people with names that I'm coming up with
Speaker 2: are gay men, and I think partly that's because they
Speaker 2: get written about for being gay in a way that
Speaker 2: a lot of the women aren't being written about. And
Speaker 2: then like it's actually telling that the Oedawis pirates who
Speaker 2: were a mixture of boys and girls, right, they that's
Speaker 2: not a story full of names. You know, there are
Speaker 2: some names we have for that, but mostly you have
Speaker 2: these like anonymous masses of like mixed group of queer
Speaker 2: kids who are like, all right, let's suck up these Nazis.
Speaker 2: And they don't get fucking remembered except kind of collectively.
Speaker 2: And you know, I don't know whether that's better or
Speaker 2: worse or different or whatever, but it does it. You're right,
Speaker 2: It leads to this, like you know, the which stories
Speaker 2: get told absolutely.
Speaker 3: Exactly, Yeah, oh yeah, think about the stuff all the time, yeah,
Speaker 3: because I mean I don't know even like, yeah, the
Speaker 3: history stories or whatever, like what we've even gotten as
Speaker 3: a civilizations about like what we've learned from our past
Speaker 3: centuries of existence, Like even that is curated, you know
Speaker 3: what I mean. It's like it just we just live
Speaker 3: in a matrix is real. But but no, I'm really
Speaker 3: happy to have learned all of this stuff from you
Speaker 3: today and on Monday two days ago because we're not
Speaker 3: recorded at the same time. But but no, I hope
Speaker 3: it makes other people think about this kind of stuff too,
Speaker 3: because it doesn't have to be like this default way
Speaker 3: of thinking of like, oh, this is just the way
Speaker 3: things are because this is the way they are. This
Speaker 3: is the way they are because this is how they
Speaker 3: always have been because certain people make it this way,
Speaker 3: if that makes sense. So it's I don't know, just
Speaker 3: using your brain to philosophize, I think is sometimes a
Speaker 3: good thing. And it's like do some shrooms or something.
Speaker 3: Every other podcast about IM like, do some shrooms. But
Speaker 3: if you're able to, it's I think it's a cure
Speaker 3: for things or just seeing the world a different way.
Speaker 3: Can I shut up moment? God, Okay, I'm shutting up now.
Speaker 2: Yeah. When I when I saw streams, I saw the
Speaker 2: void and it was really bad and dark for months.
Speaker 3: But okay, I stay correct.
Speaker 2: But my experience is not the I'm certainly not anti
Speaker 2: people messing around with this kind of stuff. You know,
Speaker 2: I gave it multiple shots.
Speaker 3: I should have made a blanket. You're right. No, No,
Speaker 3: I mean, but people should.
Speaker 2: I don't know. There's all kinds of blankets that are dangerous.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: All I meant to say was like expand your mind
Speaker 3: and like I like that. I'm leaving this recording being like,
Speaker 3: you know what, maybe we're not so bad?
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, would you say that there's cool people who
Speaker 2: did cool stuff?
Speaker 3: You know, I did cool stuff, but you mentioned it.
Speaker 3: But thank you for having me and letting me ramble
Speaker 3: to no end. Uh, this was really fun.
Speaker 2: Oh thanks so much for being on.
Speaker 1: I'm back again.
Speaker 2: Please, yeah, please, I would love.
Speaker 3: To come back and learn more good things about good people,
Speaker 3: cool cool things about cool What am I doing? I
Speaker 3: must to get all love cool things about cool people
Speaker 3: who happen to be good doing good. I'm doing it again.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna stop talking. This is the end of my sentence.
Speaker 1: Now, Saren, before we send you off, is there anything
Speaker 1: you would like to plug?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I'm Sreen. You can follow me on the internet if
Speaker 3: you want. Twitter is Shiro Hero six sixty six and
Speaker 3: Instagram is just Shiro Hero. I make films. I write poetry.
Speaker 3: I have a couple of poetry books out that I
Speaker 3: self published.
Speaker 2: What's the newest one called.
Speaker 3: Archives?
Speaker 2: Cool?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's basically just emo diaries I've decided to publish.
Speaker 3: It's very personal, but yeah, that's just my I'm honest
Speaker 3: to a fault. And if you want to follow along, great.
Speaker 3: If you don't like me rambling, good because I'm going to.
Speaker 1: Stop now Margaret plugs anything.
Speaker 2: You can also follow me on Twitter at Magpie Killjoy,
Speaker 2: where I try to be clever because Twitter is just
Speaker 2: this awful competition. It's like an arena of people trying
Speaker 2: to acquire enough clout to not starve by being clever
Speaker 2: and having all the right takes. And I always.
Speaker 3: Around takes always. But were you were you? Were you
Speaker 3: on Twitter when it was just like a place to
Speaker 3: like say your thoughts out loud. I look at the
Speaker 3: dumbest ship. It's like Facebook statuses or like whatever, where
Speaker 3: it's just like I'm hungry, like I'm gonna feel my
Speaker 3: test and now it's just instead of being like a
Speaker 3: random thought catalog, it's definitely this one upping the arena
Speaker 3: of death.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, speaking speaking of death, can I can I
Speaker 4: plug Jimmie Loftus's Ghost Church that's on cool.
Speaker 1: Zone Media as well. That will be will be out
Speaker 1: by the time this this episode drops, so check that out.
Speaker 2: By Jamie Loftus, Queen future guest of this podcast.
Speaker 4: Your guest future guests of this podcast, Jamie Loftus. I
Speaker 4: also produce that one, so check it out.
Speaker 2: Sophie produces all podcasts. I think you've already heard me say, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, legally all podcasts are mine, yeah, except except for
Speaker 4: once again.
Speaker 1: The jo Rogod podcast is actually a YouTube show.
Speaker 3: Yes, legally distinct.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, thank you, and we'll be back Monday, right.
Speaker 2: Right, Margaret, Yay, next Monday, forever until the heat death
Speaker 2: of the universe.
Speaker 1: Cool Cool Bye, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 4: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 4: cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 4: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.