Words by Stephen McEwen.
‘Ever since, I still find myself awaking in the night, crying. For more than fifty years, this scene is played over and over tirelessly in front of my very eyes. I will never forget this barbaric murder of my love. In front of my eyes, in front of our eyes. As there were hundreds of us who witnessed it. Why are they still quiet about it today?’
Today, ‘Pink Triangle’ is used rather flippantly as way in which to designate a predominantly ‘gay’ social urban area, masking somewhat the tragic origin of the term. Since the war, we have all recognised the yellow Star of David, starkly marked with the word ‘Jude’, as the Nazi enforcement of racial difference on the Jewish public in Germany and its occupied territories. The Pink Triangle is the homosexual Star of David, used mainly within internment and concentration camps as a way in which to signal out sexual deviance, degeneracy and immorality. Within our current historical consciousness, it is often very easy to forget that gypsies, the mentally disabled, political activists, sympathisers and homosexuals were also persecuted, tortured, and murdered for the ideals of the perfect Nazi state and its thousand year Reich. In particular, due to post-war homophobia, the case of the homosexual was oft erased out of history, a disturbing reminder that contemporary societies may have had more in common with the safely compartmentalised image of Nazism than anticipated. Such post-War tension has been no more obvious than in France, where the Vichy government practiced, and sometimes overpassed the ideals of the occupier, and the French police carried out without complaint, the rounding up of all those of foreign origin deemed ‘untermensch.’ It is within this context in which the autobiographical work ‘Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel’, tragically finds itself.
Even though pre-War France was far from modern day Soho, legally, homosexuality has not been criminalised since 1792; this would change after the fall of France in 1940, and the arrival of an occupier, whose Minister of the Interior once proclaimed: ‘the homosexual must be eliminated.’
We read briefly of Pierre’s life before the Nazi occupation, his family’s department store, Catholic morality in pre-War Eastern France, and his dalliances in Alsatian gay and ‘Zazou’ subcultures. But it is the story of a minor theft which was to change his life. He reported that the theft took place on le Square Steinbach, known commonly as a gay cruising ground, so that when the local police registered the crime, they also put his name on a list of homosexuals of the area – the very list which the Nazis would later use in their round-ups. The life story then moves quickly, as did the course of history, to his brutal internment in a camp, the murder of his young lover therein, his release, and subsequent incorporation into the Wehrmacht, which sent him to fight on the eastern Front for the very occupier which had imprisoned him for his sexuality. The final thrust of the text concludes with the silent mental torture of living with his past and his homosexuality in a newly patriotic, Gaullist France – liberation was for everyone else, not for homosexuals. Yet it his writing, matched with his relationship with his mother, to which he ultimately turns. Passionately disgusted at the lack of knowledge and sympathy for persecuted homosexuals, Seel is forced to come out again, again in a country which is only marginally more tolerant than the one in which he had been interned. And so, he writes this autobiography, sacrificing himself for the sake of what he believes is a story which must be told. Pierre Seel’s story takes the individual and makes it history – a history which, until recently, most people were more than willing to forget.
‘Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel’ is available in English translation as ‘I, Pierre Seel, deported homosexual’ from Basic Books.