I'd like to reiterate what @jewishmuppet said. I'm a trans and bisexual Jew. I've been out since I was four. My parents were accepting and they made sure I was exposed to queer and Jewish histories. I've spent years studying the Holocaust and studying gay culture in the US. I know what I'm talking about.
There isn't a single gay culture, not really. People talk about it, but they mean gay culture in their country, and usually gay, lesbian, and transgender people have different groupings within that. A Chinese gay man is going to have a different experience than a lesbian in the US. People in countries where people are arrested or potentially killed for being queer are not having the same experiences as people in countries where being gay is more acceptable. That's just how it is. And for most people, myself included, this is a culture you discover when you're older. You're not a child going to ballrooms and drag shows; you start doing that as a teen or an adult (if you choose to. No shame if you don't interact with the wider queer community at all). This is not your experience from infancy onwards.
I grew up Jewish. I grew up attending Seders and lighting yartzheit candles. Our house always had a mezuzah. This was my culture since birth, and it's my mom's culture, and my grandparents' culture. And when I talk to Jews in other countries, we have similar experiences. Yes, we have different minhagim, but we're celebrating the same holidays. I say the same prayers as a Jew living in Israel or Argentina or Russia. If you know Hebrew, you can speak to Jews all over the planet because they know it too. We have a unified culture, even if it's been tweaked a little here and there.
That culture was nearly destroyed. My great-grandparents' village is fucking gone. They escaped prior to the Holocaust, but there's nowhere to go back to. I can't find any info on it because their records and letters are in Yiddish, which their children never learned. (My grandfather and great uncles threw out a lot of stuff from the Old Country.) I don't speak a lick of Yiddish, so even with the letters, I couldn't find my way back to where my great-grandparents lived. There are stories of Jews returning to their homes to find everything Jewish destroyed. I remember one story of a Polish man returning to his town to find that the synagogue had been used to house cattle during the Shoah and was unusable (because of all the feces), and the grave markers in the cemetery had been removed and used to pave roads. (You can still find roads with fragments of Hebrew on them throughout Europe for this reason.) Everything was gone.
There's a difference between a community you enter as a teenager or adult and the community you're born into. Right now, my gaming community could implode and I'd be upset, but I wouldn't be devastated the way I'd feel if the US stopped existing. Hell, I was involved in leftist circles that ate themselves alive (iykyk) and that sucked, but I recovered. I don't think I could if my entire childhood was eradicated. If I couldn't go back home or find people who spoke my language, if the cemetery that housed my grandparents was desecrated, if all the important cultural buildings were filled with animal droppings.
You know how when you visit your hometown after you move away, and the ice cream place you really loved went under and it became a gas station? I think we all have an experience similar to that. It hurts, but imagine that on the scale of thousands. It's not just the ice cream place where you celebrated birthdays; it's your school, your library, your soccer fields, your favorite restaurants, your movie theaters, your malls, your parks, your clubs, your house, your neighbor's house, your best friend's house, all gone.
Look, gay culture in Germany was eradicated, too. We know this happened. But those men got to go back to their cities that were still standing. The same people were there. Of course, not all—I won't pretend that Germany didn't lose people in the war and buildings weren't destroyed. But people still spoke GERMAN. Yes, they were occupied, but their culture was intact. It wasn't suddenly impossible to get German food or hear German songs or read German books. That was true of every country hit by the war. Yes, it was tragic, but their culture remained. They got to remain German.
Jews suddenly had nothing. Our culture was gone. Our little pockets of Yiddish were gone. That culture was ripped from us and from the places we lived. We carried it to different countries, mostly the US and Israel, but it was an effort. There was a concentrated effort in trying to keep Jewish culture going. We built ulpans and yeshivahs to keep our culture going. We worked at ensuring our children knew our heritage and history.
Gay people just... didn't have to do that. Not because they didn't have kids, but because their larger culture was still intact and gay culture was usually transmitted through other ways, outside the families. (Cause let's be honest, if you were a homosexual who had kids in the 1940s, you were closeted and likely didn't tell your kids.)
Yeah, the numbers show how few homosexuals were in the camps, but that's not the important part. The important part is what Jews lost that homosexuals still had. That's why it's so important for queer people nowadays not to compare themselves to those murdered in the Holocaust. They don't have the same culture and their entire way of life wasn't destroyed.
And while I'm on an infodump, this happened to the Roma as well. I'm not Romani and I'm not well educated on how they handled life after the Holocaust, but their culture was also nearly eradicated. (And in some places, 100% of Roma was killed, so they lost whole towns and communities as well.) They suffered in the way that Jews suffered, which was markedly different from homosexuals, communists, "asocials", and everyone else killed in the camps. The only people I'm okay with comparing themselves to Jewish people are Romani people, because that suffering was so similar. And again, the numbers don't matter. There were fewer Roma at the start of the Holocaust, so fewer of them died, but the harm to their community was similar.
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
