It's time for change, isn't it?
stacey_in_ma posting this link today joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/04/case-of-gay-senior-abuse.html moved me somehow to open again a book I read a couple of years ago: The Pink Triangle, by Richard Plant... and I felt the need to share two excerpts in this journal, not that there is a link per se between these and the sad story of Clay and Harold... but because I want to...
First, the last paragraph of the book...
Thus the fate of the gays under the Third Reich may serve as touchstone for all those victims swept away by the hurricane of hatred. To this day, the extent and impact of this catastrophe has not been fully understood. At the end of hostilities, when Allied soldiers first entered the concentration camps, they did not really comprehend what they saw. And despite the overwhelming flood of information about the Nazis' infernal machine, we still have not understood what it may foreshadow. In many ways, the specters of the Third Reich still haunt us - not because a few elderly Nazis may be hiding in South America and not because groups of younger neo-Nazis demand attention with recycled swastika ideologies and emblems. The specters begin to come to life whenever fanatical fundamentalists of any sect - religious or secular - take over a nation and call for a holy war against its most vulnerable and vilified minorities.
And then the very end of the epilogue, which always moves me very much, because it speaks of undomitable love, and the need to not keep silent...
I had been spared, saved from the erupting volcano that had obliterated the country of my birth, my hometown, and many of those close to me. I needed to repress some aspects of the nightmare but never to forget certain others. I would never be able to put Eric out of my mind. His image would always be with me. As I conjured up his likeness, he seemed to be pushing me forward, as he had always done. Forget about the stuttering, he would say. Your being afraid of it just brings it about. If he were here he would tell me to stop stuttering around, organize what I have learned, and put together a chronicle that would throw light on this neglected corner of history. I did not know then that it would involve so much muscle, nerve, and sinew, or that it would take so many years.
WWII has ended more than half a century ago. And today some men and women are still denied the respect of their most basic rights just because they refuse to conform to what society would have them do. Surely that has been going on long enough?