CZM Rewind: Part Two: Gay Resistance to the Nazis

In this second rewind episode, Margaret continues to tell the story of gay artists and street gangs that fought the Nazis.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that sometimes we run rewinds. You
probably didn't know that, but I'm recording an introduction for
both of the old episodes, and this is the introduction
for the second one. Because I do episodes mostly in
pairs because they come out twice a week. You've probably

(00:27):
figured that out. Anyway, Here's an episode that I care
a lot about about gay resistance to fascism. Hello, and
welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and this week I'm talking with Shreen. How
you doing good?

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Actually, I know I said the first time you told me,
I just said I was like basically doing bad. But
after the recording the first part. I don't know if
people know that record them back to back, but I
feel much better than I did earlier. So I feel
good after hearing about all these cool fucking people. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Cool. And our producer Sophie is on the line as well. Sophie,
how are you?

Speaker 1 (01:06):
I'm great? Drinking a cream? So does Zva live in
my best life?

Speaker 4 (01:11):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:12):
So speaking of aftertastes and Nazis, And there's this I
actually don't know how to do this segway. But you
are listening to part two of our two part series
on gay resistance to Fascism, and so you're probably a
little bit confused if you haven't heard the episode that
came out Monday. So you should go back and listen
to it if you haven't.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Yeah, you really should. It's a really good episode, and yeah,
you will learn about a lot of really cool people.
And this is coming from a very big cynic, so
this is good.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
It's like, try to impress the cynic is like an
interesting not.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Even about impressing. It's like, will I still be miserable
by the end of this, you know what I mean?
Like it's like, yeah, you know what.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Okay, Well this one is going to be Oh I
don't want to spoil it, Okay. So where we last
left off, there was like a motley crew of queers,
artists and medical students in Amsterdam who just pulled off
a like heist movie level antics to blow up a
Nazi records storehouse. And today we're going to bring things
back to Germany. So Germany, there's a country called Germany.

(02:13):
Weymar Germany is the period from nineteen nineteen after Germany
got its fucking ass handed to it in the First
World War to nineteen thirty three, when Hitler came to
power and did the whole Hitler thing that I presume
most people are familiar with on some level. And Weymar
Germany had a lot going for it, right. It was
a republic, for one thing, which is a step up
from dictatorships and such. People could like vote and shit,

(02:35):
and there was free speech, there was free assembly, There
was no state religion, some of the gay laws weren't
being enforced, although they were still there. And the government
was based out of a city called Weimar, which is
how they got the name Weymar Germany. But Germany was
completely fucked economically. World War One left their economy in shambles.
Hyperinflation took over. Everyone was hungry and you know, fucked,

(02:58):
and then they had the fucking worldwide depres after all
of that on top of it.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
I mean, I think that's the reason why the Nazis worked,
you know what I mean. They had to like kind
of get the desperate, do you know what I mean?
Like they had to really and like then Hitler quotes like,
oh he can save us, kind of thing. I think
they had to have the previous shitty part in order
to even do that totally part, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Totally because people are so fucked they're like, I'll try anything.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
Yeah, exactly, exactly yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
And then so most of the stuff I'd been exposed
to about by Our Germany, which focused on really cool stuff,
because by Our Germany it was this very interesting artistic
time period, and mostly I'd heard about the cabaret scene,
all the sort of decading queer artists who try to
live fancy, free lives while they're basically starving, and all
of that is like true and interesting and beautiful, but
it's only one part of Germany's culture at the time,

(03:49):
and actually only one part of it. It's queerness and
it's queer culture. You've also got this really messy assortment
of different organizations that have different names but get called
like the Vondervogel or the German youth movement or the
hiking clubs, and these go back decades. They go back
to the eighteen nineties, and there's this movement that it
kind of looks like boy Scouts if Boy Scouts was

(04:09):
like a fuck off huge thing that involved millions of
boys and girls, both through various levels of formal and
informal organization, with weird paganism, vegetarianism, nudism and queerness running
out through the entire thing. So not actually very much
like boy scouts.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
I would like to be that kind of boy scout.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Oh okay, well then you're going to love our characters today.
So millions of German kids formed these hiking clubs and
spent their days like camping and getting in touch with nature.
It was an anti modernist movement at a lot of
parts of it. And whenever people are like, oh, it
was this, it's like, it's all kinds of different things
all happening at the same time. But it was kind

(04:49):
of a lot of it was about leaving civilization behind.
A lot of it was German nationalists, although it didn't
have a necessarily an anti Semitic character as far as
I can tell, at least on any systemic level. Some
of it was really middle class and some of it
was really working class, and a lot of it was
just fucking outright criminal in kind of the best and
worst ways. There's a French gay anarchist named Daniel Geeren

(05:13):
who wrote about the movement in the nineteen thirties because
he would go visit nineteen thirties Germany because it was
a fucking awesome place to be a gay anarchist.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
But he found it.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
He found this movement increasingly politically polarized between the communists
and the fascists. And as the whole worldwide depression is hitting,
more and more youth are finding themselves homeless. They choose
itinerant lifestyles overstaying still in one place. So the movement
keeps growing, and it keeps polarizing and doing all kinds
of weird shit. In nineteen thirty three, huge chunks of

(05:42):
has come to an abrupt end when Hitler bans all
alternative youth organizations that aren't the Hitler Youth. A lot
of the more mainstreams of these groups just basically become
the Hitler Youth, and in nineteen thirty nine he makes
participation in the Hitler Youth compulsory. But the youth movement
went a lot lot of different directions. Not all of
it went into Hitler Youth, as we'll get into, but

(06:03):
some of it did. And so we're going to talk
about gay Nazis now. These are not the cool people
who did cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
Well, got to balance it out, I suppose, But also, yeah,
I'm fascinated where this will go.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
My own experience with boy Scouts. I was a boy
Scout and my best friend and who is a boy Scout,
came out as trans like years before I did. And
so I love that, you know, me and my best friend,
because people are like, oh, they're letting girls into boy
Scouts now, and like me and a lot of other
trans women are like, oh no, they always did. That's

(06:37):
a that's but so gay Nazis, that's the thing. Yeah.
So before Hitler took over completely and the National Socialists
were just like one of the parties in Germany. They
were actually the only political party in Wymar, Germany with
unknown high ranking gay member. Ernst Rohm was the leader

(06:57):
of Hitler's essay, which are usually called the brown Shirts,
which are basically the parties like street thugs who operate
outside the law, like you know when Trump told his
brown Shirts proud Boys to stand by and stand back,
a similar sort of organization. And aernstram was really into
this hyper masculinity thing. He's so anti you know, you're

(07:18):
so anti feminine that you don't fuck women, right, yeah,
and he's really into authority and discipline and obedience. Those
are good manly things, unlike democracy, socialism, anarchism, fucking girls,
all that weird soft yeah. And this is not to
say that the Nazis were pro gay. They were just
kind of pro hypocrisy. I think even before they came

(07:40):
to the power, they were the most adamantly anti gay
party in politics. But even the Social Democrats, who were
the ones who weren't enforcing paragraph on seventy five and
were part of trying to fight to get paragraph on
seventy five appealed when they used they used homophobic language
to try and talk shit on the Nazis. Basically they

(08:00):
were like, oh, Rom's gay and so, and they like
published his private letters in order to basically be like,
if you support the Nazis, you support pedophilia and gayness,
and the Nazis will corrupt our children, and so no
one's fucking good at this point, no political party is
looking good. The Nazis are clearly looking the worst. But
it's just kind of interesting to me. And this causes

(08:23):
us split in the gay rights scene. Right, some groups
like the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which is as magnus Hirschfeld,
the guy I was talking about a lot. Last episode,
he warns the gay Nazis. He's like, you know, the
fucking Nazis are going to come after you too, right.
But then the other big organization at the time, this
is really not something to be proud of. They're like,

(08:45):
what nah, They're not coming after all the gay people,
just those Jewish gay people buckers. Yeah, but but spoiler alert,
the Nazis are coming after all the Cays. On June thirtieth,
nineteen thirty four, on what gets called the Night of
Long Knives, Hitler has Rom and a whole bunch of

(09:06):
the other Brown Shirt leaders just murdered and in public.
Hitler was like, oh, I definitely did this because Rom
was going to betray me. But it was really transparently.
Hitler was tired of being made fun of for putting
up with gay people in the ranks. His pal Mussolini
like to make fun of him, and they were like, oh,
you're harboring gays, you know whatever, you.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
Know his pal Mussolini, Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
That's like the very first no homo with consequences or something.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
I don't know, Yeah, totally. And then what's kind of
interesting is that Hitler probably didn't personally have a problem
with Rome's homosexuality. He just he was a fucking people
pleaser and he wanted people to like him, which has
definitely never happened. Again, there's never been a populist right
wing leader any time in history, certainly not in the
past ten years in the United States who has clearly
not had any problem personally with gay people.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
And no, yeah, yeah, but greatest country in the world.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Wow, we're the ones who beat these Nazis.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Okay, so we're the heroes of this story.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yeah, and then fire the conductor for being gay. So
in private, Hitler would either defend or attack Ro's homosexuality
depending on the audience, right, Like, sometimes he was like, oh,
that was in his misspent youth and he's learned better now.
And other times he's like, ah, us, worldly men, we
understand that such thing has happened, and are fine. That's
my Hitler accent. I don't do accents, you should.

Speaker 4 (10:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
Yeah, I also don't do accents, but I think I
when I tried, I've learned my lesson.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
So yeah, I'm reasonably certain that if someone put a
gun to my head and said that I had to
speak like a British person for two minutes or I
would die. I would die because I genuinely believe that
with a gun to my head, I would not be
able to talk with a British accent.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
No, no, no, no no. I did a live reading
of Twilight once with Bechdel Class another amazing podcast. Yeah,
and I had to voice one of the characters who
was French for and like in the thing, he has
an accent, and so I tried before we recorded, I
was like, can I do this? And I tried to
have a French accent and I sounded like Jamaican every time.

(11:12):
It was so I was that was like cemented, like
Sharin accents are not for you. This is not so yeah,
but no accents are hard. So I understand, and I
don't want to do that to the audience.

Speaker 2 (11:24):
Okay. So another one of the people that another one
of the gay brown Shirts that Hitler has killed, was
a guy named Edmund Hines who was actually Hitler's cell
mate after the failed couve nineteen twenty three the Beer
Hall putsch and he was one of the fucking original Nazis.
Like literally, he was number seventy eight in the enlisting
in the National Socialists, and he was gay as hell,

(11:46):
and when they came for him during the Night of
Long Knives, he was in bed with a lover.

Speaker 4 (11:49):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
By nineteen forty one, Hitler starts suggesting the death penalty
for gay kids in the Hitler Youth and then they
pass the death penalty for GAYSS members. But what they
do instead, I mean a lot of them they kill, right,
some of those sentences get commuted to go be cannon
fodder in the war against Russia, which I think they
actually did to a lot of Yeah, a lot of
people end up dying that way, get taken out of

(12:13):
prison and sent to go die on the Eastern Front,
or they're sent to serve. And it's like all criminal
dearly Vonger brigade of the SS, which is basically a
brigade within the SS, that's like all of the worst
people and the criminals. And I put worst people in quotes,
but like you know where they like go give criminals

(12:34):
a chance to go die. I bring all this stuff up. Okay,
do you know that meme? The I never thought leopards
would eat my face, said the person who voted for
the leopards eating people's faces party.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
No, I don't know, this is what I just said.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Okay, okay, okay, okay, no, no, no, I mean it's
just basically this. It's like someone's like, but I never
thought the leopards would eat my face, right, the person
who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party. And
that's how I feel about the gay Nazis.

Speaker 3 (12:59):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
And the reasons to bring this up in this like
otherwise conversation about good gay people is that I feel like, Okay,
when we talk about the bad people in history who
are gay, we're usually playing into this trope that like
all of them were closeted, right, h But these gays
Nazis weren't. They were not closeted. They were open about
their interests. It was part of their like storied tradition
of right wing homosexuality that ran concurrently with left wing

(13:24):
in a political homosexuality.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
And is it just like internalized homophobia or like hatred
that's I tried to wrap my head around stuff like that,
like what they tell themselves to legitimize their existence or
like what they're doing. So it's like, I don't.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Know, you're just fucking racists, you know, and they're like,
I like the racist Party, and then they're like, but
the racist Party hates you for being gay, and you're like, well,
I don't care. I'm so racist that that's you know.
It's like we see that a lot.

Speaker 4 (13:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, And like the modern far right in the United States,
there are like, you know, gay members of it, and
you're just like, what are you fucking doing? They hate
you and we'll laugh at you and kill you at
the first opportunity, and you're like, no, they like me,
you know.

Speaker 3 (14:07):
You know, I just thought of it's probably power that
changes it, you know what I mean, Like, if you
feel like you're a little bit not untouchable, but like protected,
you feel more able to be a hypocrite.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
I feel like, right, yeah, no, that that actually makes sense.
And honestly, like almost everything comes down to power at
the end.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
Yeah, okay, ready, okay.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
And so the other reason to bring all this up
is that I think that we forget that a lot
of this shit has like really high stakes, the way
that we talk about sex and sexuality and gender, and
I would argue that we should be on the lookout
for when some segment of oh I don't know feminism
or gay politics starts making common cause with the right wing,
which obviously would never happen. Now, No feminists would just

(14:55):
start making common cause with the right wing at all.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
No, no, oh, no white feminism here, yeah, exactly. Oh god,
I just thought I was I wanted to make like
a really subtle Harry Potter reference, but I went fast enough,
and so I just went with that the most. But
you should know a listener that I was trying to

(15:18):
talk about Jake k.

Speaker 5 (15:19):
Rowling anyway, me too, That's what I was thinking of too. Yeah. Okay,
so so you've got the gay Nazis. They don't last
very long, fuck them whatever. But now I want to
talk about gay pirates.

Speaker 3 (15:33):
Hell yeah, let's do this.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, I want to talk about the Edelwise pirates, who
are so much fucking cooler, and they're on the opposite
side of all this. So all the youth from the
what I was saying, when they're all itinerant doing all
this crazy shit. They're running around in these like it
gets a million names buns or bands or clubs or
clicks or whatever, and they're coming out of the vonder
Vogel and all these related movements and the whitewashed version

(15:57):
of history that I'd run across primarily before doing the
research honestly has them like wandering around the pristine German countryside,
like singing camp songs and thinking about like marrying their
heterosexual sweethearts monogamously and popping out pure Ariyan babies and
all that shit. Right, But like this could not be
further from the truth, this growing culture of vagabondism and

(16:18):
has a desire for change because they're all fucking broken, hungry,
and mainstream societies completely failed them, and more and more
of them were living in camps and again totally unfamiliar
to people today, as you know, whatever. A lot of
the clubs were just gangs. They were the wild gangs,
and they were in a war against civilization and everything boring.

(16:39):
Every winter they would like disband in every Easter, they
would celebrate their click or their gang's rebirth. Their camp
songs were parodies of the Hitler youth songs. They told
dirty jokes, They got into fistfights with the Hitler youth. Basically,
with all the men off to war, the Hitler youth
were acting like the police, and a lot of German
cities and so they and they lived criminal lives and

(17:02):
they fucked and oh my god, did they fuck. And
it was anything but straight, anything but monogamous. Like it's
it's like queer enough to like maybe even get me
a little bit like, oh my, maybe that's not the
right way to go about these.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
Things, you know.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
So these are not the assimilationist gays. These are street fighting,
forest fucking, sex working, Nazi robbing, criminal queers.

Speaker 4 (17:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:23):
It's like the anarchy of gay Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
And and they're called the they have a lot of
different names, but the one I'm going to use now
is the wild Fry, which means the wild free, which
was one of their mottos. And they would have like
things emblazoned while I'll get to that, and they live
up to the name. History mostly remembers like a subsect
of them called the Edelwy's Pirates. And and I've got flies.

(17:49):
Yeah it's a flower. Oh interesting, Okay, I think I know, right. Yeah.
So so I've got information kind of about two generations
of wild Fry, and one chunk comes from about nineteen
thirty and one chunk comes from the early forties. And
so I'm kind of doing my best to give an
honest like the way that these two connect, but there

(18:11):
isn't a lot of information about that because all of
the shit is so hetero washed. But so it's an
important I'm going to do an imperfect job, but I'm
going to do the best I can and quote original
sources and all that shit. And because people when they
mentioned Edelway's Pirates, they present the sort of like generic
working class youth subculture who ruled and were brave as
fuck and they like fought Nazis. There's a movie about

(18:32):
them called, I think it's called Edewais Pirates.

Speaker 3 (18:36):
But again it gets taken out, yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Totally, and it doesn't talk about their origins and it
definitely doesn't talk about gay fucking. And so Daniel Gearen,
who's the French anarchist who wants to go hang out
gay folks in Germany, so does. He describes a run
in with them in his book called the Brown Plague,
which is a doesn't translate well now, but means that
it's critical of the rising tide of fashion them. Okay,

(19:02):
one Sunday on the outskirts of Berlin, we met, by
chance a strange troop on the road. Needless to say,
Neither of their short pants, their bere calves, which disappeared
under their long wolf vests, the bulky and sundry loads
swaying on their backs, nor their enormous hiking boots distinguished
them from ordinary vagabonds. But they were very much tuffs.
They had the depraved and troubled faces of hoodlums, and

(19:23):
the most bizarre coverings on their heads. Black or gray
chaplain esque bowlers, old women's hats with the brims turned
up in amazon fashion, adorned with ostrich plumes and metals.
Proletarian navigator caps decorated with enormous edelwise above the visor. Handkerchiefs.
Are scarves and streaming colors tied any which way around
the neck. Bare chests bursting out of open skin, vests

(19:46):
with broad stripes, arms scored with fantastic or lewde tattoos,
ears hung with pendants or enormous rings. Leather shorts surmounted
by immense triangular belts, also of leather, yeah both daubed
with all the colors of the rainbow, esoteric numbers, human profiles,
and inscriptions such as wild fry or rudber bandits around

(20:11):
their wrists. They wore enormous leather bracelets. In short, they
were a bizarre mixture of virility and feminasy.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
Wow, that's a sentence. That is amazing, I know.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
And you too can buy all of their costumes from
our sponsor, the Pirates Store, which is a nonprofit again
because we're going full pure wholesome with the ads here. Yeah,
it's a nonprofit store.

Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah, yeah, no, what you said in blazon. The first
thing I was like, they have merch, you know, like
you know this is that's a good way to spread
the word.

Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah, totally, and we too. I actually don't think we
have merch at the time of this recording, but we
do have advertisers, and some of them are hopefully the
Pirate Store.

Speaker 3 (20:53):
Yes, we're manifesting.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yeah, here's some ads.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
So the Wild Fry they're self organized, right, They don't
have this like overarching structure, but they do sometimes form
into these larger coalitions, sometimes not. There's thousands of these
bands and they all have fucking weird, fantastic names. Some
of them are Black Love, Red Oath, Fear Not Death,
Bloody Bones, Dirty Guys, Forest and Field Sleepers, Tortoises, Brandy Frush,

(21:29):
Black Flag, Forest pirates or the Northern Lights.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
Wow. I love that. It's like the Legends of the
Hidden Temple, like the team names.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, it's like, I'll get to why. It sounds like
fantasy at a second. That's one of the things I
love about it. Okay. They also they all had their
own distinct styles of dress, which and they basically the
basic idea was take some idea from fantasy literature and
just fucking run with it. Just basically like, try to
live like you're in a fantasy novel.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
Wow. They're like, what's the what's it called? Uh, what's
the thing? When you're role playing? It's like LARPing thing, LARPing, LARPing.
It's like LARPing. It's like LARPing, yeah, but very creative.

Speaker 5 (22:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
And so they and unlike a lot of the rest
of the Vandervogel movement, which was fairly middle class, almost
all of these are working class kids, and basically they're like, well,
a fantasy life that sounds better than starving, right, And
so some of them would dress up as like American frontiersmen,
others would dress up like pirates. Some were in stereotypical
German garb and like leader hosen and shit. Others were
like crusader knights, some were caricatures of indigenous Americans. All

(22:40):
of them wore edelwise flowers, the single symbol that like
united all of them and gave them the eventual name
the Edewis Pirates, and they were into tattoos, including on
their genitals. Girls and boys both wore earrings and when
the various gang this is one of my favorite details
I ran Chris when the various gangs would meet up together.
Instead of all wearing they're like different colors from their

(23:03):
different clicks, they all wore like top hats and tailcoats
and like the finest, like fancy clothes that I'm sure
they stole.

Speaker 3 (23:10):
Wait, I want to look up what an eda wise
flower looks like. I want, I want to visualize their merch.
Oh wow, that's really it's like a starfish.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
Oh yeah, huh yeah, they're like for anyone's listening, they're
they're pretty white flowers with like yellow I don't know
anything about biology botany.

Speaker 3 (23:35):
I've definitely never seen one before. It's very unique looking,
but okay.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Cool, I have a visual Okay, the most influential fantasy
author for them, which is kind of funny is this
guy named Karl May, who is this nineteenth century adventure
novel author who's yeah, so he knows where I'm going
with this.

Speaker 3 (23:52):
Oh no, oh, no ah.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah, this is Hitler's favorite author.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Favorite author con man, Karl May. Yeah, yeah, I did.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
Not know that.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
There's a whole behind the Bastard's episode about about Hitler
and about how he loves uh Carl May.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
Wow, Cal, I wonder how Carl felt.

Speaker 4 (24:15):
Yeah, this is like I mean, you know, Robert describes
Karl May as the JK.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
Rowling of the day.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (24:23):
Interesting, That's all I need to know. That's all I
need to know.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
But I want to know because I think of like,
I'm in a metal band that takes a lot of
inspiration from Tolkien, and so are a lot of Nazi
metal bands, right, and so I think of it like that,
you know, But I haven't read any Karl May. But anyway, May,
so these Carl May, Larper's who like rob people in

(24:47):
these sex work.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
Hey.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
A few years ago a modern queer sex worker focused
radical publishing project called Underbelly translated some of their songs
from German. And so I'm not going to sing it
unfortun I'm sorry everyone, ah darn, but my my favorite
is just making fun of the Hitler youth for being
too masculine and normy. And it's called short hair, big ears.

(25:11):
Such short hair, such big ears. That means the Hitler
youth must be here, grow long hair, tango nights. There's
no Hitler youth in sight. Oh ho oh ho. And
one hears the words on every street there's no Hitler
youth I'd like to meet? O ho o ho.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
Ain't there fucking poets? Come on? That's amazing, amazing.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
And most of we're like fourteen to eighteen. I'll get
into that more, but.

Speaker 3 (25:36):
That's the age where you kind of feel like invincible, right,
Like that's the damn I would have been all over that.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Yeah. They made their living as delivery drivers in various
unskilled positions, petty crime, non petty crime, sex work, especially
at various gay bars throughout the city. Honestly, one of
the reasons I love them so much as they just
sound like my friends. That's just like a description of
what my friends do, and especially when we were younger,

(26:03):
and then they would pull all their money and then
use it to pay off all their criminal fines that
they incur or to support their arrested friends, and they
go to juvenile attention and jail and shit constantly, and
they break out of juvenile detention constantly. Like the study
I read of fifty wild fry who had been held
in detention, almost all of them had broken out at

(26:24):
least once, and six of them had broken out of
detention centers more than twenty times. Individuals only.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
That is incredible. Well, yeah, I don't, I know.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
And the more they face repression, the more they just
resent mainstream society. This is even before the rise of
the Nazis. A lot of this stuff. They just resent
mainstream society, and they retreat further and further into their
fantasy worlds. In the city Colm, where the movement is strongest,
they coordinated all their gangs, which they called guilds into.

Speaker 3 (26:56):
Of course, they're called guilds, yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
Right, yeah. They coordinate them into rings, which are coalitions
of each guilt of guilds by district.

Speaker 3 (27:05):
And then each.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Guild had had a leader called a gang bowl, and
the bowls of each guild would together elect the ring bull.
And to be a bull, you had to prove that
you were strong brave, good at crime, and down to
fuck down to.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
Fuck like good a cribing down to fuck.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yes, all kinds of weird ways, and at least one gang,
the Eagles of the Mountains. Everyone in it was a
bowl because they were like no leaders, I guess, and
each bowl had a queen, which I think might have
been of either sex, but I'm not entirely sure. All
male gangs had a beloved who is expected to be
sexually available to everyone in the gang. Since some gangs

(27:47):
didn't let girls in, girls formed their own all girl gangs.
And then some boys wanted to join the all girl gangs,
and so the girls let them in. And I appreciate
that because that would have been me. I would have
been the boy being like, can I join the girl gang? Though?

Speaker 3 (28:02):
Yeah, I mean girls are nicer than yeah, yeah, than men.
But I also was thinking, like just guilds and all
these little factions and stuff. This is like irl world
of warcraft, you know what I mean, This is just
like factions and battle and like whatever, like wow, yeah,
that's art is life and life.

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Are I suspect these kids weren't bored very often, you know.
And Okay, so each new member when they would join
was initiated through bizarre and ceremonial baptisms, which were elaborate
rituals of violence and sex. They would start off with
fist fights and knife fights and then turn into public sexuality,

(28:47):
like fucking everyone in the gang, or masturbating in front
of everyone, or getting off during sex fast enough, like
literally someone's standing there with a stop watch and you're like, wow,
get off fast enough.

Speaker 3 (28:57):
So it's like hazing, but.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
For badass yeah, yeah, totally, it's like way more like
the hat.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
You're cool enough to be cool.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, And it's hard for me to imagine the frat
where the hazing iss. Now you've got to fuck all
of us, but you know whatever, also a mixed gender
frat m hm. And they would all descend into drunken
orgies every time someone knew was baptized, of course, And
there's actually there's I should have saved them in a

(29:32):
file to make them easily available, but there's actually photos
of some of these. Some of the like weird like
and it's like people dressed like pirates with knives and
all kinds of weird shit. And they would They lived
in the forests and in squats in the cities. They
would like each each crew would have it. Each each
guild would have its own squat basically addicts or cellars
or un used storage rooms, and they would put a

(29:53):
single bed in the middle and they called it the
fucking sofa, and that was like the only sleeping space.
I mean, I'm sure they slept on floor and they
would just like this.

Speaker 3 (30:03):
I would not if I wasn't on this podcast, I
wouldn't think this was true.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
No, I know and like and so so I'll say
that my main source of this is Daniel Gern's account
of talking to of the more like crime sex stuff
is talking to a sociologist a social worker sorry at
the time, who did a study on these people, and
that study is replicated in a book, The Brown Plague.
But yeah, because a lot of the later stuff that

(30:28):
we hear about edawisepirates just doesn't talk about their drunken
orgies at all, but.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
Stuff gets erased all the time, right, like as we've
learned from this podcast and just life.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Yeah, yeah, totally, okay. So they would like, like one
account I was reading, they like they would steal and
sell cars and then they would like in their stolen
car they would like drive around and like I don't
remember exactly, was like the guy who steals the car.
He's like known, is like a car guy that's like
his name or whatever, you know. And then they like
go around and rip off payphones. I didn't even know

(30:59):
they had payphones back then, but they would like go
and like rip off payphones and then try and get
all the money out and that they couldn't throw them
in the river or whatever. And they would fence all
their stolen goods through bartenders in exchange for alcohol. And
this gets and this leads a lot of them, a
lot of them end up like in debt to these bartenders.
And then like when they age out of the wild fry,
they just enter like a more mainstream life of crime

(31:22):
for better or worse.

Speaker 3 (31:22):
Oh, I didn't even consider that they would age out. Actually,
now that you say that out loud, I know. It's like,
you can't stay a wild fry if you're not a
small fry. You have to be by yourself committing crime
all of a sudden. I don't know. Yeah, that's not fair.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
I know, I know. And it's like because one of
the things that this reminds me so much of when
I was like a teenage squatter, but I did most
of that. One was like nineteen and twenty, and so
I'm a little bit like, oh, I would have been
too old to be you know.

Speaker 3 (31:51):
Yeah, and that's fucked up, that's not fair. Yeah, it's
like very Peter Panny Lost Boys about them, you know what.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
I mean, totally Yeah, it is just Peter Pan's army. Yeah, yeah, Okay.
So the Nazis come to power and they refuse to disband,
and in a lot of cities they're powerful enough that
they completely just challenge the hegemony of the Hitler youth,
and in some cities they outnumber the Hitler youth. And
one of the slogans that they had at the time
was eternal war against the Hitler Youth. Yes, yes, And

(32:23):
so they did resistance in a lot of ways, right
like just by existing they and continuing to like hiking
camp and wander their resisting Nazi era travel restrictions. But
they they weren't content with only doing that, and so
it wasn't long before they go from like street fights
with the Nazi the Hitler youth to distributing propaganda, like
when the Allies would drop leaflets on the city. The

(32:45):
wild fry would run around and like stick the leaflets
through people's doors and shit. They help people desert from
the Nazi army. They would rob Nazi warehouses and you know,
eventually started like killing Nazis who needed a good killing. Actually,
what you're talking about, like aging out. I think that
I think that the war like fucks up. The best
I can tell, the war like fucks up there, you know,

(33:08):
sort of like their specific organizational structure, it becomes a
lot looser. And so some of the people that you
know who get hanged and stuff for this activity are
like formal at a wise pirates and shit like that, right,
And so they're still hanging out with like sixteen year
olds doing all these crimes together, and a lot of
them get caught and get sent to concentration camps. On

(33:30):
November tenth, nineteen forty four, thirteen of them or thirteen people,
six of them who are teenagers and some of them
are formal otawise pirates get executed without trial and coal
and I believe for theft, murder and planning to blow
up at Gestapo headquarters. This is the like most known
thing that they that they were doing.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
I forgive me if you've mentioned this. Yeah, like demographically,
what are most of them? Are they like mixed like
ethnicity wise?

Speaker 2 (33:59):
Oh okay, they do so they are both Aryan and Jewish, okay,
or at least they specifically refuse to disallow Jews. I
could not tell you what percent of the movement was Jewish. Probably,
I don't know. I know that historically they allowed in uh.
And that was like a thing that distinguished them from
a lot of it is that they were like what
fuck all.

Speaker 3 (34:19):
That It was like kind of started I would assume
by like Aryan people.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
But that were good probably, But I couldn't tell you.
I couldn't tell you about Jewish participation in the beginning.

Speaker 3 (34:30):
I was just trying to imagine them forever. Reason, when
I imagine something badass and doing stuff, they're not white,
so I have to rearrange.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, well, considering like the overwhelming majority
of Germans at this point are not like really doing
their best, you know. Yeah, so like I.

Speaker 3 (34:49):
See that my prejudice now, I'm just gonna.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
I think that's fair. Yeah yeah, and so so plenty
of histories. So they run into this problem where they're
not seen as political, which in a sense, it's true right,
because they were not friends with polite society, any polite society.
There were criminals under the Weimar Republic, there were criminals
under the Nazis, and they continued to be criminals when
the Allies liberated the country. The wild fry and Soviet

(35:17):
controlled areas were treated really harshly, and many of them
were sentenced to twenty five years in prison. And because
they're working class criminals, they were never acknowledged their anti
fascist work until twenty eleven when and the families of
the Edewis pirates who were killed never received like reparations
from the German state, unlike other partisans. And the last

(35:39):
known surviving Edelwise pirate was a woman named Gertrude Koch Coach.
I don't know who died in twenty sixteen at the
age of ninety two.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Well it's a long life.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah, you know who else survives? The people who drank
tap water and eat potatoes. The sponsors of this show
you will live forever. And this is especially funny because
now I've been learning about the more about potatoes because
I listened to buying the bastards, which I feel terrible to.

Speaker 3 (36:06):
Admit on this show not how could you?

Speaker 2 (36:10):
I know? And I'm learning cool people.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
Only what a hack podcast?

Speaker 3 (36:16):
I wonder who produces that show?

Speaker 1 (36:19):
Yeah, loser.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
But anyway, here's some ads for tap water potatoes and
whatever else gets mixed in there. And we are back
and we are talking about pirates.

Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yes, when you first started with the Pirates, I don't
I've never heard of the Edays Pirates, but I was
curious what definition of pirate you were going to use,
like the actual like people that were pirates on you
know what I mean, because yeah, yeah, exactly or like
just but it's just really funny that there's like dressed
like pirates. Yeah, they do pyrany thing. Yeah, it's all

(36:59):
like they're I don't know, it's just kind of funny
to see it all come together totally imagination.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah yeah, I mean they lived really similar lives to
like Golden Age pirates, but they like were doing it
yeah in costume, you know, yeah, fucking rules honestly, Like.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
It's it's it's yeah, it's like especially at the time,
it's like if the world is going to shit, just
you live once, you know, like that's the Yeah, I
don't know, it's it's I like the uninhibited nature of
their life.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah I do too, jesus. Yeah. And then one of
the things I like about them is like it doesn't
seem like it was like a gay culture as in,
like some of them are gay, and some of them
are heterosexual, and some of them are by it was
just fucking weird. Like I don't think any of them
knew their sexuality. Some of them probably cared and some

(37:49):
of them probably didn't.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
And like, yeah, they definitely weirdos unite, right, sorry, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no,
I mean it's like weirdos all unite. Right. So it's
like when you're in high school, the outcast are altogether,
whether they're like people of color or gay or whatever.
Like that's what happened to in my experience anyway. Yeah,
we're like when you're yeah, if you're what's the word marginalized,

(38:13):
marginalized exactly, if you're marginalized and you're fucking weird, you
will unite because you want a weird community and weird, honestly,
I think is a great thing. You should be weird
being a normy boring you know, so stay weird.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
Hell yeah totally. And then okay, so these aren't the
only queers fighting the Nazis within Germany. Far from it.
I'm going to tell you about some more of them.
There's a gad Beck who is a gay, part Jewish
Berliner who in nineteen forty two he borrows a Hitler
youth uniform and he marches into the pre deportation camp

(38:49):
where his lover Manfred is being detained. So he shows
up in his uniform and he goes to the commanding
officer and he's like, oh, I need to borrow this
guy from on a construction project. And so the request
is granted and the you know, and he starts out
the camp with with his lover Manfred. But then Manfred
stops and he says, I can't leave my family basically,

(39:11):
and he goes back into the back into the camp.
He dies, him and his family die, but he basically said,
you know, if I will never be free if I'm
not free with my family. But so then gad Beck
spends the next three years helping Jews escape before he
gets betrayed by a fucking a Jewish spy for the

(39:31):
Gestapo and he gets arrested, but he survives the war.
So this is gonna be another one of those like
who lives, who dies?

Speaker 3 (39:42):
Yeah, little list of me, just listening intently until the
very end. It's like, okay, well not the next one.
Maybe the next one will be better.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
Yeah, well then, you know, So this guy survives the
war and he spends his lover doesn't but he does.

Speaker 3 (39:57):
Well, it's nice that, like, even after his lover doesn't
go with him, he's actually a true like you know
what I mean, he keeps doing fighting the good fight totally.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
He doesn't just fuck off, which would be exactly perfectly fair.
I am not judging anyone who fucks off out of
a place is trying to murder them, you know, yeah, exactly.
And he lives to be eighty eight and he spends
the last thirty five years of his life with his partner.
So I like when it's.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
A good ending, Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Now on to others. Yeah, okay. So then there's a
Count Albrecht von Bernstaff who's a gay aristocrat and he's
this he's a short, balding man. He's always impeccably dressed,
and he wastes most of the war years sitting around
cafes hitting on waiters, or that's what he wants people
to think right, I mean he does. He is these things.

(40:42):
He's a short, balding, well dressed man who hits on
a lot of waiters. But he's actually he's he's playing
up the like foppish aristocrat gay man stereotype to draw
attention from his actual work, which is he's running an
underground railroad helping Jews and other dissidents get themselves out
of Germany.

Speaker 3 (41:00):
That's genius, I know. And like that does take like
front and center, you know, like put the gay out
front and then let me do my secret good job. Yeah, totally,
this one could keep him distracted.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Yeah, he's like, oh, I'm just a creepy, harmless old
gay guy, you know, like uh yeah. And he's so
aristocratic and I kind of love him for this. He's
so aristocratic that he figures like, all right, I'm doing
something that is obviously illegal, being being gay, but I'm
so rich that everyone puts up with it.

Speaker 3 (41:30):
Yeah, exactly. Power. I think it was the last episode.
Maybe it was this, Yeah it was last, but like Power,
you can you can get away with more.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah, totally. And yeah, because because.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
Money, power and money. Sorry, I'm like I have a
lot of insight thoughts that are just I think, and
they say it out loud, even if it's like not
even my right timing.

Speaker 2 (41:48):
But I think that's the point of a podcast.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
Why am my podcast?

Speaker 2 (41:51):
Because otherwise it would be me talking to myself and
that would be half as interesting as fair but.

Speaker 3 (41:57):
No money and power. So that's how you hack life, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
I know.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
And it's like all across history. If you're poor and gay,
you're fucked, and if you're rich and gay, you're just eccentric,
you know.

Speaker 3 (42:08):
Yes, yeah, very true, Oscar Wild.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
Yeah totally, although it only sort of works out for
him different points.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, yeah, but still but that was a bad example whatever.

Speaker 2 (42:17):
No, no, no, no, it is a It is a
good example because like he's able to exist in that
way at all because of that kind.

Speaker 3 (42:23):
Of exactly yeah, who's accepted as what he was, yeah
versus yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
Anyway, So the so Count Albrecht he he coordinates with
gay resistance groups in the Netherlands, and to quote an
anonymously written article that's coming from an upcoming issue of
a magazine called Baden that the author let me read before, also,
Count Albrecht had warned his contacts in Holland about the
Nazi invasion before it began, so they could prepare themselves.

(42:50):
In one instance, members of a gay society took measures
ahead of the German invasion. In preparation for the catastrophe.
The editor of their paper, Levin Strecht, burned the organization
mailing list another comrade Aren't. Then Saundhorst committed the entire
list to memory so that they could find one another afterwards.
And I really like that because I like, yeah, because

(43:11):
when I first started doing this, like everyone's like keeping
these records, and he keeps getting them all in trouble, right,
and so I'm like, what do you what do you
fucking doing? Burn your fucking records?

Speaker 3 (43:19):
Right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
But then the guy who memorizes it all makes reminds
me that I'm like, well, it was so hard for
them to find each other in the first place, that
like losing that is losing something really important.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
Yeah, you know, yeah, memorizing is that's what. That's a
great solution if you're able to.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
Do that, you know, totally.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
Also Mohammed, of the prophet of Islam, he memorized the Kuran,
you know, how to read and write, so it works.
Look at him now you know he's done. Well, yeah,
I've heard of him, you know. Crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
So eventually Count Albrett gets gets found out, and he
gets arrested, and he gets into a series of concentration
camps and he gets really horrendously tortured. But his fellow inmates,
they remember him based on how he kept everyone's spirits up,
like he would he'd be sitting around in the concentration
camp and he'd be like, we're all going to have
the most fabulous party at my house when this is

(44:14):
all done. You are all invited. Everyone's coming over, like,
you know, break out all the finest stuff, best party ever.
And and he didn't survive the camps. He died in
the camps. But I don't know, hundreds of people, at
least Jews and gays and gay Jews and at least
two different countries survived the war because of his efforts

(44:37):
and him disguising himself himself as a fop, you know,
and playing into the like being like, oh, yes, homosexuals
are cowards, we would never do anything bad, you know.

Speaker 3 (44:47):
Use the stereotype to your benefit, just like you know
what I mean. It's or like not benefit, but like
your advantage. Yeah, yeah, wow, what a guy.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
I know, I like him, okay. And one of the
things that it's kind of arc that I ran across
in a lot of this research, a lot of the
gay men who survived the concentration camps get immediately re
arrested because they're gay, right, because you're not allowed to
be gay, whether it's Nazi Germany or Soviet Union. Well
East Germany, at least the Soviet Union had more complicated

(45:16):
Oh yeah, right, I think Hitler had re I know that,
like Lenin made homosexuality legal, and then Stalin was like, JK,
fuck all you. But anyway, one guy, for example, that
I was reading about, I don't have his name in
front of me. He wasn't as much of a resistance fighter,
although just existing is resistance. I'm not trying to like
knock him. He retold his experience where he was taken

(45:38):
back literally in front of the same judge that had
sentenced him to a concentration camp previously, because they didn't
actually get rid of the fucking Nazis, they just like
cut off the head of it. Yeah, so he gets
sent back to the same judge who's like you again
and then sentences him right back to fucking person.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
That makes me so mad.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
People empower, staying power, yeah ultimately.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
Yeah, yeah, Okay. I want to end with with one
last short story about a queer poet named Robert Desnos
and he was poet. Yeah, he was heavily involved in
the French surrealist scene and he joins the resistance to
Germany once you know, francis under occupation and like our
Dutch heroes from last episode or last Monday whatever on hoseay,

(46:22):
is this a new episode? Is this just a different
half of the same episode. I don't understand the taxonomy
of my own job.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
It's a two parter, okay.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
In the last part of this two part episode, perfect, thanks, thanks,
I'm good at my job. So he works as a
counterfeitter and he makes fake id's and he also does
a ton of other stuff. He actually works for a
collaborationist newspaper as a spy, and he passes along all
the information he learns by working for a shitty pro

(46:51):
German newspaper. He passes it along to the Resistance. He
also wrote for underground papers under a ton of different names,
and in nineteen forty four he gets caught and he
gets sent to a series of concentration camps. But at heart, right,
this guy's a surrealist. So one day, according to a
Holocaust survivor named Odette, and it's relayed. This story is

(47:13):
relaid through a writer named Susan Griffin. So Robert's waiting
in line for the fucking gas chamber, and he just
jumps up and runs up to a man who's ahead
of him in line, and he just gets really excited
and he starts reading the man's palm and he's like,
look here, look at your lifeline. You're gonna live a
long life, and you're gonna have three children. And his absurdism, right,

(47:35):
because they all know what's fucking happening. I think his
absurdism is so contagious that everyone's just just like breaking
out laughing, and it confuses the guards so completely that
the guards send them back to their barracks. Wow, because
they don't know how to handle these people who are
supposed to just be like totally given up, who are

(47:56):
like right riotlessly, rioteously, who are laughing very hard, uncontrollably, and.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
Wow, that's so fascinating.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
And he he doesn't die in a gas chamber.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
He used used the phrase unexecuted in your script.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
Everyone gets sent back to the barracks unexecuted is the
way I read it. Yeah, and he technically survives the war,
but he caught typhoid, I believe, in the concentration camp,
and he dies within a month of liberation. But again,
that doesn't see him right. I know, I know, are fair?

Speaker 3 (48:35):
What is nothing like?

Speaker 2 (48:39):
Okay? But the reason I want to end on that
note is because I think people look at some of
this history wrong, at least like queer history, because they're like, oh,
did they succeed, Like a lot of the stuff I
would read being like, oh, they didn't succeed because they died,
or they didn't succeed because they only blew up eight
hundred thousand records instead of three million records or whatever. Right,

(49:00):
but they it to me, it feels like they succeeded, right.
They they chose resistance and a lot of them, most
of them didn't survive the war. But they say fucking
thousands of people and I don't know.

Speaker 3 (49:12):
They died fighting, you know what I mean, Like if
they did die in a way that they shouldn't have, Like,
it's just a testament to like I don't know, caring
more about the world and yourself, and like I don't know,
I don't know where I'm going, I don't know when
end when.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
I start them.

Speaker 3 (49:29):
But I think it's pretty bad ass.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
Yeah, I think that they like they they basically they
proved a fucking lot and they certainly proved like our
man Willem said at the beginning that homosexual is not
a fucking synonym for a week, which is what people
used to treat it as. And no one can fucking
say that they were cowards, you know.

Speaker 3 (49:49):
No one. Yeah, definitely not, that's the last thing, yeah
would be. I was thinking though not to like yes
and but no, yes, And it uh like the vast
majority of these people that we learned about are our men, correct,
So it is interesting just to think, like how many
more people there were that maybe didn't get like attention

(50:12):
or history and about them, or that were who were
I mean, there was a there's a spattering of women.
I'm there for sure. But it does make me wonder
if again it goes back to power. As a man,
you have more power, right, and maybe that's why you're
able to accomplish more, especially I mean back then and
now what am I saying, But it's interesting to think
about who gets written about, even in like alt history

(50:36):
totally because as I'm a filmmaker, I want to say
in quotes, but come on, I should like whatever imposters
in drome one on one, but filmmaker imposter syndrome is
real and it But I was reading about like writing
like scripts and movies and stuff, and how we're so

(50:58):
used to just pretending that Western story structure is like
the default way to tell stories and we forget that,
like so many cultures have different ways of telling stories
and like, yeah, it's like Bollywood films are structures so
differently than ours, and we assume ours is the right
default way. And I think that's the same with just everything.
It's all you didn't mention that this is the westernized

(51:21):
version of it. And it just makes me wonder what
else is out there, because I know there are more
amazing people out there. Maybe we don't have to know
about them, just to know they existed is enough.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
I don't know if that made any sense.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
No, No, I think that that actually gets it something
really important. One of the things that I kept running
across with this is like I think I feel certain
that there was as many you know, lesbians fighting against
the Nazis right as there were gay men. And most
of the people with names that I'm coming up with
are gay men, and I think partly that's because they
get written about for being gay in a way that

(51:54):
a lot of the women aren't being written about. And
then like it's actually telling that the Oedawis pirates who
were a mixture of boys and girls, right, they that's
not a story full of names. You know, there are
some names we have for that, but mostly you have
these like anonymous masses of like mixed group of queer

(52:18):
kids who are like, all right, let's suck up these Nazis.
And they don't get fucking remembered except kind of collectively.
And you know, I don't know whether that's better or
worse or different or whatever, but it does it. You're right,
It leads to this, like you know, the which stories
get told absolutely.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
Exactly, Yeah, oh yeah, think about the stuff all the time, yeah,
because I mean I don't know even like, yeah, the
history stories or whatever, like what we've even gotten as
a civilizations about like what we've learned from our past
centuries of existence, Like even that is curated, you know
what I mean. It's like it just we just live

(52:56):
in a matrix is real. But but no, I'm really
happy to have learned all of this stuff from you
today and on Monday two days ago because we're not
recorded at the same time. But but no, I hope

(53:17):
it makes other people think about this kind of stuff too,
because it doesn't have to be like this default way
of thinking of like, oh, this is just the way
things are because this is the way they are. This
is the way they are because this is how they
always have been because certain people make it this way,
if that makes sense. So it's I don't know, just
using your brain to philosophize, I think is sometimes a
good thing. And it's like do some shrooms or something.

(53:40):
Every other podcast about IM like, do some shrooms. But
if you're able to, it's I think it's a cure
for things or just seeing the world a different way.
Can I shut up moment? God, Okay, I'm shutting up now.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
Yeah. When I when I saw streams, I saw the
void and it was really bad and dark for months.

Speaker 3 (54:08):
But okay, I stay correct.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
But my experience is not the I'm certainly not anti
people messing around with this kind of stuff. You know,
I gave it multiple shots.

Speaker 3 (54:19):
I should have made a blanket. You're right. No, No,
I mean, but people should.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
I don't know. There's all kinds of blankets that are dangerous.
You know.

Speaker 3 (54:27):
All I meant to say was like expand your mind
and like I like that. I'm leaving this recording being like,
you know what, maybe we're not so bad?

Speaker 2 (54:37):
Hell yeah, would you say that there's cool people who
did cool stuff?

Speaker 3 (54:44):
You know, I did cool stuff, but you mentioned it.
But thank you for having me and letting me ramble
to no end. Uh, this was really fun.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
Oh thanks so much for being on.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
I'm back again.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
Please, yeah, please, I would love.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
To come back and learn more good things about good people,
cool cool things about cool What am I doing? I
must to get all love cool things about cool people
who happen to be good doing good. I'm doing it again.
I'm gonna stop talking. This is the end of my sentence.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
Now, Saren, before we send you off, is there anything
you would like to plug?

Speaker 4 (55:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (55:25):
I'm Sreen. You can follow me on the internet if
you want. Twitter is Shiro Hero six sixty six and
Instagram is just Shiro Hero. I make films. I write poetry.
I have a couple of poetry books out that I
self published.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
What's the newest one called.

Speaker 3 (55:42):
Archives?

Speaker 2 (55:42):
Cool?

Speaker 3 (55:43):
Yeah, it's basically just emo diaries I've decided to publish.
It's very personal, but yeah, that's just my I'm honest
to a fault. And if you want to follow along, great.
If you don't like me rambling, good because I'm going to.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
Stop now Margaret plugs anything.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
You can also follow me on Twitter at Magpie Killjoy,
where I try to be clever because Twitter is just
this awful competition. It's like an arena of people trying
to acquire enough clout to not starve by being clever
and having all the right takes. And I always.

Speaker 3 (56:21):
Around takes always. But were you were you? Were you
on Twitter when it was just like a place to
like say your thoughts out loud. I look at the
dumbest ship. It's like Facebook statuses or like whatever, where
it's just like I'm hungry, like I'm gonna feel my
test and now it's just instead of being like a
random thought catalog, it's definitely this one upping the arena

(56:45):
of death.

Speaker 4 (56:45):
Yeah, yeah, speaking speaking of death, can I can I
plug Jimmie Loftus's Ghost Church that's on cool.

Speaker 1 (56:53):
Zone Media as well. That will be will be out
by the time this this episode drops, so check that out.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
By Jamie Loftus, Queen future guest of this podcast.

Speaker 4 (57:06):
Your guest future guests of this podcast, Jamie Loftus. I
also produce that one, so check it out.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Sophie produces all podcasts. I think you've already heard me say, yeah.

Speaker 4 (57:16):
Yeah, legally all podcasts are mine, yeah, except except for
once again.

Speaker 1 (57:20):
The jo Rogod podcast is actually a YouTube show.

Speaker 3 (57:23):
Yes, legally distinct.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Yes, yes, thank you, and we'll be back Monday, right.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
Right, Margaret, Yay, next Monday, forever until the heat death
of the universe.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
Cool Cool Bye, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 4 (57:43):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.