GLR March-April 2026

Correspondence

Breitensträter, and entertainers Friedrich Holländer and Josef von Sternberg. His fiftieth Birthday Party in Berlin’s Kaiserhof hotel (later Hitler’s pre-Chancellor lodging) featured nine skits in drag. Flechtheim started publishing portfolios featuring his galleries, and expanded to a full magazine, Der Querschnitt (“Cross section”), projecting a “distinctly gay aes thetic,” covering art (naturally) as well as sports and “life.” It featured portraits (many nude), travel, gossip, and essays, including by Ernest Hemingway (who dubbed Flechtheim the “noble citizen, prominent Jewish bugger and great art dealer Alfred Flechtheim”), Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, André Gide (in French). It also carried ads for Berlin’s gay nightspots. These developments prompted several trips to Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, and successful restitutions that have enabled financial support to AIDS research, LGBT organizations, and Jewish charities. They also led to a personal book: Jewish, Gay & Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany: Uncle Al fred Flechtheim’s Unexpected Legacies in Art, AIDS, and Law . Michael Hulton, San Francisco, CA Encounters with Boyd McDonald To the Editor, Michael Quinn’s Art Memo, “Cruising with Boyd McDonald” (Jan.-Feb. 2026), brought back memories of my 1986 en counter with McDonald, when I interviewed himfor a Penthouse Forum profile. As I wrote in my article, McDonald “lives in quarters that would appall most upwardly

her parents to the Gestapo expulsion back to Poland and its inevitable conclusion. And I shared his comparison of the Shoah and our AIDS pandemic. By the 1980s I had emi grated to Canada, working as an anesthesi ologist in Toronto. Propelled by this similarity, I questioned local “experts,” eventually adding a parttime primary early HIV care practice. Drawing on my U.S. contacts (one year’s training at Stanford) I aimed to introduce U.S. advances (primary care AZT availability, aerosol pentamidine etc), becoming a local activist. Some eighteen years ago, now in San Francisco, I began to receive messages rekindling my early fascination with the Germany from which my parents (who met in London) had luckily fled. I was poten tially able to reclaim works left by my noto rious great uncle, art dealer Alfred Flechtheim. I only knew Dad disapproved of Flechtheim’s open homosexuality, and that father was sole heir after his passing in 1937, from leg infections, despite bilateral amputations. I later discovered he died in St. Pancras Hospital, scene of some of my medical training. I started research into his Francophilia, introducing early Picasso and Braque to a German public. He left his family’s grain business, opened a Dusseldorf art gallery in 1913, resumed post World War I, and ex panded to Berlin. He became the “cham pagne fizz” in heady Weimar society. Flamboyant parties in which he entertained artists George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Rudolf Levy, Max Pechstein, Renée Sintenis, boxers Max Schmeling and Hans

Notes on LeDic ti onnaire To the Editor:

Hugh Hagius’ review of Le Dictionnaire historique du lexique de l’homosexualité (Nov.-Dec. 2025 issue) offers a captivating sampling of Nicholas Lo Vecchio’s study of words in European languages that have been used to describe queer folk over the ages. One correction is needed, however. According to the American Heritage Dic tionary, Third Edition , the word “berdache” is indeed attested in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. It origins can be traced from Ara bic ( bardag , bardaj ) to Persian ( barda ), Middle Persian ( vartak ), Old Iranian ( *varta -), and ultimately, the root * uel or * wel ə - in Proto-Indo-European. Over the ages, its meaning has evolved. In Persian and Arabic, it might refer to young male slaves who might be used for sex; earlier it simply meant “seized, captive, prisoner.” In the Mediterranean word, it was likely intro duced by sailors from Middle Eastern ports. By the advent of printing, it had already en tered Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and English, typically in reference to young, non-masculine males who were receptive in sex with men. The French fur traders who used “berdache” (in various forms) to refer to Two-Spirits among the indigenous people of North America had no way of knowing these ancient meanings. “Berdache” was simply frontier jargon for the nonbinary in digenous people found in many tribes, mostly male-bodied but sometimes female bodied as well. Since it wasn’t part of the European terminology for prohibited sex ual practices, its use in this context was fairly neutral. Will Roscoe, San Francisco, CA To the Editor: Regarding your article on Nicholas Lo Vecchio’s Dictionnaire historique du lex ique de l’homosexualité , in my research on male and female impersonators in the Victo rian era, I repeatedly came across journal ists who used the word “queer” to describe them. Of course at the time they were using it in the sense of “unusual,” but over several decades “queer” slowly became attached to homosexuals in general. David Williams, Louisville, KY In Search of Uncle Alfred and HIs Lost Art To the Editor: I found particular parallels in Harlan Greene’s article on Herschel Grynszpan [in the Jan.-Feb. 2026 issue]. My mother (who escaped to England in January 1938) lost

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