I’m completely powerless for 19 years, then suddenly I’m supposed to have autonomy and know what to do with it? Sorry, my only skills are sitting really quietly pretending I don’t exist, taking any treatment without getting mad because I don’t know where the line of “not okay” should be drawn, and spontaneously crying.
‘In the center of Bebelplatz, a glass window showing rows and rows of empty bookshelves. The memorial commemorates the night in 1933 when 20,000 “anti-German” books were burned here under the instigation of Goebbels. There’s a plaque nearby that says something like “Where they burn books, they will also burn humans in the end.” ’
Interesting but rarely mentioned: most of the content burned that night came from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (institute for the science of sex) headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute and Hirshfeld himself were some of the first to openly campaign for the right to have sex with someone of the same gender, the right to transition if you did not identify with your birth sex and for the general acceptance of queer people. The team had already performed the first SRS operations in Germany and in addition, the institute advocated sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women’s emancipation. Photographs of the night of the book burning are plastered across history books world wide, but the queer movement that was destroyed that night often goes unmentioned.
Gay people from 1950-2010: we are human just like you, we’re not another species or a subculture, the only difference is that we are attracted to the same gender.
Gay people in 2018: straight people are stinky, WIG!
