CARNAL NATION

On the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of France in May, 2010, the city of Mulhouse in eastern France will install an official plaque on a municipal building honoring the men persecuted by the Nazis for their homosexuality. The plaque will name one individual in particular, Pierre Seel, who is the only gay French national to recount publicly his experiences in a concentration camp. Seel died in 2005 at the age of 82.

On May 3, 1941, a 17-year-old Seel was arrested by the Gestapo in Mulhouse for his homosexuality. While in the city jail, he was tortured and repeatedly raped with a piece of wood. On May 13, he was deported to the Schirmeck-Vorbrück concentration camp near Strasbourg. His prison uniform bore a blue bar (not the pink triangle used at other camps), signifying both his Catholicism and "asocial" tendencies. After six months of hard labor and nearly starving to death, Seel was forcibly naturalized as a German citizen and conscripted into the German Wehrmacht. He served in various capacities in the German army through 1945 before returning to France and decades of keeping the reason for his incarceration a secret.

Following homophobic statements by the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1981, Seel came out publicly about his homosexuality and his wartime experiences. He published a letter with details of his life in the weekly gay magazine Gay Pied, which led to harrassment and death threats. In 1994, Seel wrote a memoire I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror, in which he noted, "There was no solidarity for the homosexual prisoners; they belonged to the lowest caste. Other prisoners, even when between themselves, used to target them." Although he had returned home to Mulhouse unlike so many others, Seel said that he felt the need to keep silent about his experience: "I was already starting to censor my memories, and I became aware that, in spite of my expectations, in spite of all I had imagined, of the long-awaited joy of returning, the true Liberation, was for other people."

Seel went on to appear frequently on national and international television, talking about the Holocaust. His story became a part of the groundbreaking documentary film on the deportation of homosexuals, Paragraph 175, for which he received a five-minute standing ovation at its premiere in Berlin. Seel was recognized as a true victim of the Holocaust in 2003 by the International Organization for Migration and in 2005 by French President Jacques Chirac. In 2008, a street was named after Seel in the French city of Toulouse.

The plaque in Mulhouse will also commemorate the other unnamed gay victims of the Nazis. The organization Les Oublié(e)s de la Mémoire (the Forgotten of Memory), which works to recognize the gay victims of the Holocaust, spearheaded the public honor. In addition to the plaque in Mulhouse, the organization is also working on a memorial project at the concentration camp Natzweiler-Struthof, the only German-built camp in French territory (pictured left), for gay victims.