Just a few years before President Eisenhower kicked off the biggest LGBT witchhunt in the US’s history which became known as The Lavender Scare, over in Germany they were having their own gay persecutions too. Not long after the end of WW2 when Germany was trying to re-build itself, and the LGBT community was emerging once again, even though it was still illegal to be gay. In 1950 when a nineteen year old hustler Otto Blankenstein was arrested by the police he tried to save his own neck by revealing names of his ‘friends’ which started a wave of arrests destroying the lives of more than 200 gay men.
These became known as The Gay Trials of Frankfurt, and exactly like U.S’s Lavender Scare, they became a very little known part of our gay history but they are now finally the subject of a new documentary appropriately called The End of Silence.
The film is the brainchild of young Vietnamese/German filmmaker van-Tien Hoang, who hopes by telling exactly what went on in those days, will remind Germany of all the gay men who had to face injustice when the country was still recovering from the Second World War. He hopes too that passing their stories on to people all over the world will help them learn from the some of the tragedies of the past.
Hoang is in the final stages of raising the last amount of funds to complete the documentary, and would love it if you wanted to help him ensure that this important part of our history is brought to the screen. You can find out more HERE.
P.S. queerguru recently talked to Josh Howard about his new documentary The Lavender Scare : check that out HERE.
Labels: 2017, gay history, Germany, politics
