I just want to say that I really enjoy and appreciate your blog. Thank you for doing these excellent posts about Lively and The Pink Swastika. It is a ponderous work, full of lies and absurdities. But because (i) it deals with historical matter in Germany from 60, 70, or 80 years ago, (ii) makes a great number of false claims, and (iii) cites little known or hard-to-find “sources”, it is a chore to refute these false claims. And given that the thesis – that Nazism is a gay conspiracy – when it was perpetrated by heterosexual men leading an overwhelmingly heterosexual nation, that few have really made the effort to deal with it. And others who might be inclined to do so are loath to give respectability to the claims that might (perversely) result from an extensive rebuttal. In that sense, it has a lot in common with traditional Holocaust denial or revisionism. Citizens Allied for Civic Action is one of the few groups who have risen to the task. Their very extensive, blow-by-blow rebuttal of The Pink Swastika, which is called “The Annotated Pink Swastika”, can be found here:

http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Barracks/8706/index.htm#TOC

In fact, The Pink Swastika is really nothing more than a compilation of examples of 2 types of argument. The first is simply to to take unproven assertion of homosexuality as a given. The book cites extensively to a man named Samuel Igra, who makes all sorts of scandalous allegations of homosexuality, without any evidence or personal knowledge. Lively seems to think that rumor-mongering is scholarship as long as you cite to the rumor-monger. The second type of argument was illustrated in the video clip you embedded a few months ago, wherein Lively seeks to blame gays for the Columbine shooting. He argues that one of the shooters was influenced by Nietzsche and that Nietzsche was gay. It therefore follows that homosexuality is responsible for the Columbine shooting and by extension the gays of today. The problem with this argument is that both premises are likely false and at best wholly unproven and that, even if they were true, they would not support the conclusions he reaches. Lively makes the same type of argument (false premise added onto false premise, yielding invalid conclusions) over and over in the Pink Swastika.

Thanks again for your excellent posts. I will keep reading with interest.