Paragraph 175
Richard Burnett
rburnett@hour.ca
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De Waele (c) and Bent cast: "It's important to be out"
photo: Litratista.com
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The reason why rumours Richard Gere enjoys gerbils up his ass keep dogging the actor after all these years is because Gere not only worked at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1971, but posed for Playgirl (made for girls but "read" by boys) in 1983. Mostly, though, it's because Gere starred as a gay man interned by the Nazis during World War II in playwright Martin Sherman's internationally acclaimed play Bent.Is it any surprise, then, that real, honest-to-God gay matinée idols still refuse to publicly come out?
Bent was then adapted for the silver screen in a stark film starring Clive Owen and Montreal actor Lothaire Bluteau (Black Robe, Jesus of Montreal, 24) who, at 52, is still so damn hot I'd have no problem worshipping him on my knees. In fact, Bluteau won the award for Best Actor at the 1997 Gijón International Film Festival for his work on Bent.
Hundreds of revivals later, Bent finally makes its Montreal debut next week with a mixed gay-straight cast in an Altera Vitae production at Espace 4001.
"I saw the original Broadway production with Richard Gere and I've also seen the movie with Lothaire Bluteau, and because I'm a visible minority, it [especially] hurt," says Filipino-Canadian director Carolyn Fe. "[But] I've changed the production a bit. Back in 1979, Martin Sherman wanted it to be an act of coming out. Today, with the advancement of gay rights, the cry is slightly different."
Since Bent debuted on Broadway with Gere
and in London's West End with Sir Ian McKellen, historians - notably Richard Plant's great 1986 book The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals - mostly claim just 15,000 homos were sentenced to Nazi death camps.So it bears repeating that after Hitler - a self-loathing homosexual - was crowned chancellor in 1933, paragraph 175 of the German penal code enabled authorities to crush Germany's burgeoning gay movement embraced by the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic. Over 100 gay bars and political organizations were wiped out in Berlin alone and SS chief Himmler himself later boasted the Nazis had slaughtered a million gay men between 1938 and 1944.
One million.
Worse, after the war, homos sentenced to Nazi death camps under paragraph 175 were still treated as criminals by the Europeans and their allies for another 50 years.
"Why is there no reckoning after the Second World War with the persecution of homosexuals during the Nazi regime?" Frédéric Mégret - Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights, director of the McGill Clinic for the Sierra Leone Special Court and a member of the French delegation at the Rome conference that created the International Criminal Court - once asked me rhetorically. "Because gays simply were not on the agenda. Not one word was mentioned about homosexuals during the Nuremberg trials. Unlike all other victims of Nazi persecution, homosexuals continued to be persecuted."
Mégret says the United Nations Genocide Convention should be amended to protect sexual minorities. "If ever there was a gay community, it was in Berlin during the Weimar Republic," Mégret says.
In Bent, Max, a gay politician in 1930s Berlin, and his boyfriend Rudy are rounded up by the Gestapo after gay members of the Sturmabteilung - the Third Reich's S.A. storm troopers, run by gay Nazi Ernst Röhm, Himmler's rival - are murdered in their apartment by the SS.
On the train ride to Dachau, Rudy calls out for Max when he is brutally beaten by the guards. But Max denies he is gay and, upon the guards' orders, beats Rudy to death. Max does so because he believes he can survive Dachau if he is not assigned the pink triangle, the symbol for convicted homosexuals. But at Dachau Max meets the openly gay Horst, and the play follows their love story to the bitter end.
"There were some tears onstage during rehearsals," says Carolyn Fe.
Openly gay 24-year-old Montreal actor Vance de Waele, who realized he could be an openly gay actor after working for out Montreal theatre director Greg Kramer ("He's successful and respected and if he can do it, so can I"), plays Horst in Bent.
"There are a lot of similarities between Horst and I," Vance says. "I only came out three years ago and it's important to be out. Horst is not ashamed to be gay and is not going to change, and neither am I. That pink triangle means something."
As McGill's Frédéric Mégret told me, "We must never forget that the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany had as much to do with regular, everyday ordinary homophobia as it did with Nazi policy. The Nazis deliberately drew on widespread general homophobia."
And if you don't believe me, just ask Richard Gere.
Bent plays at 8 p.m. nightly, Tuesday to Sunday, at Espace 4001 (formerly Geordie Space, at 4001 Berri, corner of Duluth), Nov. 5-15. Additional Saturday and Sunday matinées at 2 p.m. Surf to www.alteravitae.com.
