|
|
|
Sunday, October 11, 2026
Via Daily Dharma: The Path of Happiness
Via FB \\ The pink triangle
When Allied soldiers liberated the concentration camps in the spring of 1945, they freed political prisoners, Jewish survivors, Romani people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the other men, women, and children the Nazi regime had systematically targeted. The men wearing pink triangles were a different matter.
Under the U.S. Army handbook governing the occupation of Germany, prisoners convicted under Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing sexual acts between men, were classified as common criminals. They were not to be released. They were to be transferred to civilian prisons to serve out their remaining sentences. The camps had been liberated. For gay prisoners, the imprisonment simply continued under new management.
Paragraph 175 had existed in German law since 1871, but the Nazis weaponized it. In 1935, the regime rewrote the statute to expand the definition of criminal homosexual behavior to include kissing, hugging, or even homosexual fantasy. Heinrich Himmler established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion in 1936 to coordinate enforcement across the Gestapo. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested under the law. Approximately 53,000 were convicted and sentenced to prison. Between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.
Those sent to the camps wore downward-pointing pink triangles sewn onto their uniforms, part of the color-coded classification system the SS introduced in 1937 and 1938. Red triangles marked political prisoners. Green marked criminals. Purple marked Jehovah's Witnesses. The pink triangle placed gay men at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy, where they were singled out for abuse by guards and fellow prisoners alike. They were assigned the most punishing labor details. They were subjected to medical experiments, including forced castration. An estimated 65 percent of gay men sent to the camps did not survive.
The men who did survive came home to a country that still considered them criminals. West Germany retained the Nazi-era version of Paragraph 175 until 1969, when it was revised to decriminalize homosexual acts between men over 21. The law was not fully repealed until 1994. East Germany had reverted to the pre-Nazi version of the statute in the 1950s and enforced it until 1968, convicting some 4,000 men in the process. Tens of thousands more were convicted across both German states in the postwar decades under laws that had roots in Nazi legislation.
Gay survivors were not recognized as victims of National Socialism. They received no reparations. Asking for compensation would have required them to identify themselves publicly as gay in a country where homosexuality remained a criminal offense, making them vulnerable to immediate arrest. Most stayed silent for decades. The few who tried to claim reparations were turned away.
Heinz Dörmer spent nearly ten years in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. After liberation, West German authorities kept him incarcerated for another eight years. In 1982, he applied to the German government for reparations. His application was denied. He died in 1998 at 86 years old, having never received a cent of compensation or a word of official acknowledgment for what had been done to him.
Another survivor, known only as Heinz F., spent nine years in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. After the war, he told no one what had happened to him. He was afraid. "Nobody wanted to hear about it," he said in an interview for the 2000 documentary film "Paragraph 175," tears on his face. Gay ex-prisoners were regarded as criminals, not victims. That was the official position of the West German government, and it remained the official position for decades.
Germany did not overturn the postwar convictions under Paragraph 175 or offer compensation to surviving victims until March 2017, when Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet approved legislation to do both. By that point, most of the men who had survived the camps, served additional prison time, been denied reparations, and spent their lives unable to speak about what had happened to them were dead.
The pink triangle the Nazis forced gay men to wear as a badge of degradation was reclaimed by gay activists in the 1970s, after the 1972 publication of "The Men with the Pink Triangle," one of the first survivor memoirs from a gay concentration camp prisoner. It became a symbol of resistance and then of pride, appearing on protest signs, in pride parades, and eventually on everything from flags to bumper stickers. The men who actually wore it in the camps mostly never saw that reclamation. They died alone, uncompensated, legally classified as criminals by the country that had tortured them, waiting for an apology that took seven more decades to arrive.
See less
Today in "Sometimes we are our own worst enemies" we have: PETER ANDREAS THIEL
| |||
| This Day in Gay History | |||
October 11 | |||
1967 -
PETER ANDREAS THIEL is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 391 on the Forbes 400 in 2020, with a net worth of $2.1 billion. As of June 25, 2021, Thiel has an estimated net worth of US$7.24 billion and is ranked 385th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He is famously conservative and, more than just occasionally, weird.
Born in Frankfurt, he moved with his family to the United States as an infant. He spent a portion of his upbringing in Southern Africa before the family settled in California in 1977. He studied philosophy at Stanford University, graduating with a B.A. in 1989. He then earned his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1992. After graduation, he worked as a judicial law clerk for Judge James Larry Edmondson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, as a securities lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell, as a speechwriter for former-U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett, and as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek in 1998, serving as chief executive officer until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
After PayPal, he founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco. In 2004, he launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, and served as its chairman through 2019. In 2005, he launched Founders Fund with PayPal partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Earlier, Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake for $500,000 in August 2004. He sold the majority of his shares in Facebook for over $1 billion in 2012, but remains on the board of directors. He co-founded Valar Ventures in 2010; co-founded Mithril Capital, serving as investment committee chair, in 2012; and served as a part-time partner at Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017.
Through the Thiel Foundation, Thiel governs the grant-making bodies Breakout Labs and Thiel Fellowship, and funds nonprofit research into artificial intelligence, life extension (by blood transfusions from younger people), and seasteading (floating, independent city-states). In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed him as gay (though he maintains he came out of his own accord.) The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker. A co-founder of The Stanford Review, he is a conservative libertarian who is critical of high government spending, high debt levels, and foreign wars. He has donated to over 50 political figures on the American Right, including Donald Trump and Meg Whitman. He also maintains a political action committee, Free Forever.
Thiel is difficult to encapsulate in the space here. He is a collection of contradictions. He is a gay man who is also a conservative christian. He is a professed libertarian who bankrupted a press outlet. He is a capitalist who believes capitalism is incompatible with Democracy. He is someone we need to watch.
Vice President J.D. Vance has had a long, collaborative relationship with Thiel, one that has aided Vance from his time in venture capital to his role as an Ohio senator, and now as Vice President of the United States.
Peter Thiel is deeply entwined with JD Vance’s political and professional trajectory through a mix of financial backing, mentorship, employment, and ideological influence, and this relationship has shaped Vance’s rise to national prominence
Vance launched his own venture capital firm in 2019 under the name Narya Capital, which sought to invest in startups in overlooked cities and reportedly received backing from Thiel and other billionaire investors like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as Axios reported.
Thiel also reportedly brought Vance, who had established himself as a critic of Trump, to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 to smooth over his relationship with the former president, according to The New York Times.
Vance garnered more support from Thiel during his successful Senate run in 2022, receiving record-breaking donations of about $15 million from Thiel, which marked the largest amount of money donated to a single Senate candidate ever.
Thiel has written: "...I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron... In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms... Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom." He has been quoted as saying that he thinks that a monarchy is the most efficient form of government.
Thiel married his long-time partner Matt Danzeisen in October 2017, in Vienna, Austria. Danzeisen works as a portfolio manager at Thiel Capital. They have a baby daughter.
In the summer of 2021, it became known that Thiel began providing information as a "confidential human source," or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who specializes in investigating political corruption and foreign-influence campaigns.
Charles Johnson, a longtime associate of Thiel's and a notorious figure in the far-right movement that Thiel has subsidized for a decade, revealed in a statement that he helped recruit the billionaire as an informant by introducing him to Buma.
A source with knowledge of Thiel's relationship to the FBI, whose identity is known to Insider but who insisted on anonymity, corroborated Johnson's account, telling Insider that Johnson brokered a relationship between Thiel and Buma. Insider was able to confirm through an additional source that the FBI added Thiel to its formal roster of registered informants.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute "With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 | ||
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Via Tricycle \\\ The Voice That Shaped Zen in the West
|
|
|
|
|
Via White Crane Institut \\ TIM MILLER
| |||
| This Day in Gay History | |||
October 10 | |||
1982 -
TIM MILLER is an American political consultant and writer known for his role as communications director for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign of Jeb Bush and for being an outspoken Republican critic of former U.S. president Donald Trump.
Miller was an Iowa staffer for John McCain in the 2008 GOP presidential primary campaign, and later served as national press secretary for the 2012 presidential campaign of Jon Huntsman. In his role with the Huntsman campaign, Miller was credited by Esquire for making its daily email to reporters "surprisingly hip". After the primary, Miller joined the Republican National Committee as its liaison to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
In 2015, Miller was hired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush to be a senior adviser to his presidential exploratory committee, Right to Rise PAC, and went on to serve as the communications director for Bush's presidential campaign. During the campaign, Miller drew notice as a "vocal critic" of Donald Trump. Following a 2016 South Carolina GOP primary debate, Miller followed Trump around the spin room heckling him until Miller was "hip-checked" by Trump campaign strategist Corey Lewandowski.
In 2020, Miller co-founded the advocacy organization Republican Voters Against Trump, which sponsored television and internet advertisements featuring lifelong Republicans explaining their decision to vote for former vice president Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump, and served as its political director. He has been characterized as a "NeverTrumper" and was included by the Washington Post on a list of Republicans "who hate Donald Trump the most". In November 2020, Miller announced he had left the Republican Party.
In 2000, Miller graduated from Regis Jesuit High School in Aurora, Colorado and graduated from The George Washington University in 2004 with a BA in Political Science. Miller is homosexual and out. He attributes his decision to take the risk of coming out in 2007, while still working on Republican campaigns, in part to the Larry Craig scandal. He and his husband, Tyler Jameson -- VP of government relations at Impossible Foods in Redwood City -- live in Oakland, California with their child.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute "With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 | ||
Via Daily Dharma: Whole Within One’s Self
|
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)