On This Day In Gay History... Rest In Peace, Gad Beck

Gad Beck was a pioneering gay activist & educator in a severely anti-homosexual, repressive post-WW2 German society.

The diminutive Beck was famous for his witty, lively style of speaking. On a German talk show, he said, “The Americans in NYC called me a great hero. I said no... I’m really a little hero.”

Beck's wartime effort to rescue his boyfriend is film worthy. Beck donned a Hitler Youth uniform & entered a deportation center to free his Jewish teenage lover- Manfred Lewin. 17 year old Beck succeeded in freeing Lewin, from the holding camp in Berlin. But Lewin decided he couldn't abandon his family, & voluntarily went back. The Nazis would later deport the entire Lewin family to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.

As a “half-breed” by Nazi-standards Gad Beck was interned at Rosenstrabe-camp in Berlin in 1943, but set free again after unique street-protests by non-Jewish relatives & friends. Soon after, he joined the “Chug Chaluzi”, an underground Zionist youth group. When he learned of the mass exterminations at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he began helping many people hide &/or escape to Switzerland. He became responsible for vast sums of money necessary for bribes & payola. His life sounds like a spy film with many incidents of cat & mouse & undercover dealings in order to save those under threat of death by the Nazis. He was constantly on the move, continuing his sex life where & when he could. As the leader of this illegal group, Gad Beck helped to organize the survival of many Jews in Berlin during the last two years of WW 2. He was 18 years old at the time.

Beck was born to a Jewish father & a Protestant mother who converted. With his twin sister- Margot, Beck spent his formative years with his family in Berlin. His childhood was one of tolerance & love. With his own brand of honesty & openness he told his parents that he was homosexual & they unsurprised & quite accepting of it. As a young teenager he had his first experience of anti-Semitism when his schoolmates made cruel comments to him.

After the war, Beck would move to Israel, but return to Germany in 1979, where he became active in gay & Jewish life. His fascinating story was immortalized in the film The Story of Gad Beck & the HBO documentary Paragraph 175.

Beck passed away today in a German assisted living home, just 6 days from his 89^th birthday. He is considered to be the last gay survivor of the Holocaust. He leaves behind- Julius Laufer, his partner of 35 years.

Speaking about his life as a gay Jew, Beck stated: “God doesn’t punish for a life of love.”

Born On This Day- June 23rd... Alan Turing

I have to be honest.  Because his contribution lies outside of the arts & literature, I would not have known of his life but for the play & film in the late 1990s- Breaking The Code starring openly gay Derek Jacobi.

He saved the world from the Nazis & the importance to the modern world of the mathematical, philosophical, & cryptographic work of Alan Mathison Turing cannot be overestimated.

A gifted mathematician, Turing is remembered today as one of the founders of computer science. The Turing Machine is an abstract device that "consists" of an infinite paper tape & a reader that can move forwards & backwards altering what is on the tape. However, despite its' simplicity, it remains a model for all aspects of computing today. It may prove to be a model for all actions that can be performed by a computer, but that problem is as yet unsolved. It is amazing that he invented it before computers as we know them really existed.

However, his most significant accomplishment was the person responsible for breaking the "unbreakable" German codes during WW2. Given the limited resources the British had, the precise knowledge of German intentions allowed the British to concentrate those resources so that they could achieve superiority in battle. Turing's contribution to victory in that war ranks as high as that of anyone else other than Winston Churchill.

Despite the fact that he may have been the most brilliant scientist of his generation, someone whose work in deciphering the German codes during World War II played a major role in achieving Allied victory, Turing was discarded & deemed a security risk because of his homosexuality.

Turing is remembered not only for his work on computers & the cracking of the Enigma machine codes during WW II, but also because of his needless, horrific death. He committed suicide at the age of 41, 2 years after his arrest, conviction, & forced chemical castration for his homosexuality.

In about 1948 when he decided to have a more positive gay life it was just the point when there was a change from silence to active persecution of homos in Britain. After pioneering work in computers, software design, & artificial intelligence, Turing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at an unusually young age; in 1948 Turing's life took a turn for the worse.

Turing had moved to Manchester after accepting a position as Deputy Director of the Royal Society Computing Laboratory at the University of Manchester, where he soon became involved with a young working class man- Murray Arnold, who would later break into his home.

After reporting the burglary, Turing was arrested & prosecuted for what was then known under British law as Gross Indecency, under which Oscar Wilde had also been charged in 1895. Even through this ordeal, he remained open & unapologetic about his sexuality. Turing was offered a stark choice: go to prison or submit to the administration of the hormone oestrogen. Intended to suppress his libido, it was a kind of chemical castration.

This treatment left Turing impotent. He also developed breasts. He found his security clearances revoked & he was unable to continue his pioneering work. 2 years after his arrest, & 1 year after the barbaric 'therapy', Turing killed himself.

He left no note, & the circumstances of his death were inadequately investigated and perhaps left deliberately murky. It is believed that he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.Turing probably drank the cyanide but left an apple by his bed. It was a grim joke against his reputation for impracticality kindly allowing those who wanted to believe that he had ingested the poison by mistake. Turing knew the apple was an icon of death in the Snow White story.

His story is tragic, but the twist to his story is part of the comedy of life which, despite everything, he did his best to enjoy.

The city of Manchester has done something to celebrate Turing's life & achievements & make amends for the cruel treatment he received.  There is now a major road called Alan Turing Way, & a statue of Turing in a park in Manchester's Gay Village.

In September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

There is also a statue at the University of Surrey, close to Turing's childhood home. In June 2007 a new statue of Turing was unveiled at Bletchley Park Research Center, where he carried out his work during the war.

As I rechecked dated & facts for this post, today’s Google Doodle is a tribute to Turing on his 100^th birthday. I doubt that is a coincidence that Steve Jobs named his company- Apple.

Memorial Day 2011

My husband is named for his uncle, his father's brother, who was killed in WW2. There is a beautiful & stark memorial to the citizens of Washington State that gave their lives while defending our country. The Garden of Remembrance is a half-acre, L-shaped garden along the sides of Benaroya Hall (home of the Seattle Symphony). Memorial walls of granite, lined by slender reflecting pools, are oriented so that the names face the western sun. In addition to the walls, a poem honors veterans who died in World War I; a reflecting pool honors those missing in action; & a fountain honors those who died in peacetime service. The memorial was designed by Robert Murase, a noted landscape architect. The Garden was dedicated on July 4, 1998.

Not long after the memorial was completed, the Husband was walking in front Benaroya Hall & glanced up & immediately (not knowing that it even existed) saw his own name engraved with the date of his death in England in 1944. He claims that his eyes went directly to it, although the memorial had thousands of names. The Husband said it was a Twilight Zone Moment.

The Husband served in the US Army during the Vietnam War Era (1971-77). I feel blessed that he is with me today & not a name on a War Memorial.

The Husband learned at his father's funeral, summer 2010, his uncle was mostly likely gay. He was a theatre & dance major before going to war & he wrote home to his brother about how cute the other service men were. The letters were destroyed, but the Husband believes it to be true & his namesake messy personal life explains many things about his family dynamics.