Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
You know, there was a gay community in Germany before the Nazi period which had all the characteristics of the community we have now – including community centers, balls, newspapers, a scientific research institute – everything. I am struck by the ignorance among gay people about the past – no, more even than ignorance: the “will to forget” the German gay holocaust. That we forgot about these hundreds of thousands of people and about the fact that out of one hundred years of gay life, in thirty of them we had a virtual vacuum – that we forgot in such a radical way is, I think, something of a warning…. If there really is a social crisis beginning, gays are in a position similar to that of the Jews in pre-Nazi society.
Guy Hocquenghem (April 1980)The End of Straight Supremacy appears in the second decade of the twenty-first century – a particularly dangerous time for Gay people. The “will to forget” that Guy Hocquenghem spoke of in an interview in the Gay Community News in 1980 is at work today in new and newly frightening ways. Gay people have been particularly good at forgetting what is painful. Given the reality of the pain, it’s hard really to resent this coping mechanism. But it has made Gays particularly vulnerable to new forms of oppression. The unique danger of today is that we are continually being erased even as we are told we are being acknowledged. Sometimes this erasure is merely conceptual, a sapping of our community and energy through assimilation. Sometimes it is physical: Sometimes we are killed. Conceptual and physical erasure are forms of violence against us – a violence that is systematic, not random; calculatedly political, not casual; continuous, not episodic. Gay people in recent years have experienced an escalation in this violence. And we are tired. We are tired of being hated. It is easier to close our eyes. To dream. To forget.
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- Information
- The End of Straight SupremacyRealizing Gay Liberation, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011