Although these figures have occupied, to a comical extent, extreme poles on the spectrum of gay male identity, from fey to butch, what they have in common is a callous disregard for those whom they consider their social, physical, intellectual, racial, or cultural inferiors. Their very visibility as avatars of the far right attests to the fact that, to a great extent, their openly avowed homosexuality makes them outliers in their movement. Far more often, historically and certainly today, gays have identified with the left. The nineteenth-century English poets Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds were passionate socialists who, in the universality of homosexuality, saw a means of transcending class barriers. “The blending of Social Strata in masculine love seems to me one of its most pronounced, & socially hopeful features,” Symonds wrote to Carpenter in 1893. “Where it appears, it abolishes class distinctions… If it could be acknowledged & extended, it would do very much to further the advent of the right sort of Socialism.” [...]
But an erotic attraction to politicized masculinity exists among only a small portion of right-wingers who happen to be gay. And given the way in which the medical and psychiatric professions long cast homosexuality as a social pathology, the theory of fascism’s inherent if latent homosexuality is rightly a contentious one. Throughout the twentieth century, both the extreme left and the hard right used accusations of homosexuality as a political smear, as a means of indicting their opponents as degenerates. In the early 1930s, Soviet propaganda portrayed homosexuality and fascism as naturally connected. The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, a Communist-produced tract that was translated into two dozen languages, alleged that the Dutchman found guilty of burning down the German parliament in 1933, Marinus van der Lubbe, was gay—a “vain, publicity-seeking tool” of “homosexual SA leaders.” (Nazi propaganda, meanwhile, portrayed the Reichstag Fire as a Communist plot.) In the same year, Stalin made male homosexuality a criminal offense in the USSR, and the Russian writer Maxim Gorky went so far as to proclaim: “Eradicate the homosexual and fascism will disappear.” (Upset at the gay-baiting of his leftwing comrades, the German writer Klaus Mann, son of Thomas, bemoaned how “People are in the process of making a scapegoat out of ‘the homosexual,’ the anti-fascists’ equivalent of ‘the Jew.’”) [...]
The idea of a homosexual elite allied with an authoritarian politics was initially advanced in the form of the Männerbund (men’s associations) of late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. In his cultural history of that era, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, the historian Robert Beachy details the surprising political diversity of early homosexual activists, many of whom were far right nationalists. The aftermath of World War I “helped to catalyze strains of masculinist ideology,” he writes, as “demoralized German troops” returned home “to explore the homosocial friendship and same-sex eroticism they had discovered in the trenches.” While the most renowned figure from that period remains the sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, a cosmopolitan, Jewish Social Democrat (whose 150th birthday will be celebrated May 14 at a symposium in Berlin), he existed alongside a coterie of hyper-masculine, authoritarian-minded writers and thinkers who “helped to assimilate homoeroticism to a nationalist, anti-democratic politics.” [...]
Mishima’s attraction to fascist ideas was more than merely aesthetic. Langer’s analysis that, because “underneath they feel themselves to be different and ostracized from normal social contacts,” homosexuals make “easy converts to a new social philosophy” like fascism was obviously an egregious generalization. But the thesis that some gay men have been attracted to fascist ideology in pursuance of forming a reactionary homosexual vanguard is not necessarily wrong as applied to certain individuals, one of them being Mishima. Through his worship of the body, obsession with male beauty, misogyny, and contention that homosexuals formed an elite, Mishima developed something of an overarching theory as to why gay men belonged on the far right: as a despised and misunderstood minority, they should fear democracy and ally with the forces of reaction, ingratiating themselves with an authoritarian order.
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