In 1937, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the paramilitary SS and one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, delivered an unhinged speech to his deputies. Nostalgic for a bygone era when their forebears had disposed of homosexuals by drowning them in bogs, Himmler insisted that from then on, all gay men in the SS would be sent “to a concentration camp,” where “they will be shot.” And in 1941, Hitler decreed the death penalty for gay members of the police and of the SS, though the measure carved out an exception for youthful victims of “seduction.” In the end, between five and fifteen thousand gay men were sent to concentration camps, where around sixty percent of them perished.
Of course, these ideas did not die with Hitler. The two German states that rose from the ashes of World War II continued to criminalize the “seduction” of young men until the end of the 1960s. Propaganda, legal commentary, and sexology in East and West Germany alike continued to espouse the belief that rapacious homosexuals were recruiting from the ranks of Germany’s youth. Different from You and Me, a 1957 film directed by Veit Harlan, who was also responsible for the rabidly antisemitic Jud Süß during the Nazi era, revolved around a teenager lured into a homosexual lifestyle by a gay antiques dealer. That same year, the West German Constitutional Court, ruling on the constitutionality of the laws that criminalized male homosexuality, heard from expert testimony that “every person is homosexualizable.”
In the United States, too, fears of queer seduction proliferated, especially in the wake of gay liberation efforts of the early 1970s. In response to the successful passage of nondiscrimination ordinances in cities across the country, revanchist Christian fundamentalists fought back against what they perceived as the social and moral corruption of gay rights. In 1977, Anita Bryant, the singer and citrus spokeswoman, launched the campaign “Save Our Children”—so named because queer people were purportedly corrupting students and turning them into homosexuals—to repeal Miami-Dade’s nondiscrimination measure. She could have been quoting Hitler when she told a church congregation that “homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit. And to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America.” The following year, Republican California state senator John Briggs attempted to ban lesbians and gay men from working in public schools.