GLR May-June 2026

newspapers and pundits of the day used Röhm’s homosexuality to argue that all Nazis were “sexual perverts.” But in Hitler’s 1934 purge of homosexuals from the party on the Night of the Long Knives, Röhm was executed. In America, Henry Gerber, a German-born journalist and founder of Chicago’s Society for Human Rights, wrote an essay in the Society’s newsletter Chan ticleer claiming (quite wrongly) that Röhm was an anti-fascist homosexual hero worthy of celebrating as a martyr. Dunn writes that despite Chanticleer ’s tiny circulation, Gerber’s essay marked a fledgling change in the way LGBT Americans began to see themselves as a group and fostered an identification with persecuted queer people in Germany. When the Allies won the war and assumed the administration of Germany, they invalidated the “Nazi laws” but retained and continued to enforce Paragraph 175, which had been on the books since before the Nazis took power. That the U.S. was officially anti-gay became even more clear during the 1940s and ’50s, with frequent raids on bars, movie houses, baths, and other queer spaces, resulting in the loss of employment, breakup of families, and even incarceration. Those attacks were reinforced by the Lavender Scare, a concentrated effort by the U.S. Congress to identify and root out homosexuals from the federal government. In one odd yet convincing chapter in Pink Scar , Dunn dis cusses how underground pulp novels of the 1950s and ’60s ex ploited the memory of Nazi atrocities to titillate and entertain a niche but large audience. These paperback novels featuring lurid covers often sexualized the Nazis (big, brutish, blond Nazi offi cers terrorizing and abusing sweet, young, non-Aryan gay men). Perhaps unintentionally, they reminded readers of the horrors perpetrated—imprisonment, castration, and medical “experi ments” that ruined many men. Dunn argues for the importance of these pulps’ effect: “The Nazi persecution of homosexuals was a powerful story [that helped] a growing male subculture of the late 1960s anticipate and navigate the highly anti-homosex ual America they would confront in the post-Stonewall era.” Dunn demonstrates that these rhetorical influences stirred memories of Nazi persecution and created a sense of commu nity and a deep, lasting sadness over those memories, a sense of comradeship with those who were persecuted. He claims, how ever—and I vehemently disagree—that Harvey Milk single handedly killed that sense of comradeship. In his 1978 Gay Freedom Day speech at City Hall in San Francisco, Milk said: “We are not going to sit back in silence as 300,000 of our gay brothers and sisters did in Nazi Germany. We are not going to allow our rights to be taken away and then march with bowed heads into the gas chambers.” Dunn states that this is Milk’s attempt to “impugn the mem ories of the Nazis’ homosexual victims.” What he fails to see is that at the time—we were facing the infamous Briggs Initiative in California and similar actions across the country—Milk’s rhetoric was appropriate and necessary: not a call to “our better angels” but a demand that we get out of the bars and into the streets for the fight of our lives. And now, in 2026, we’re fac ing fascist tendencies that make his call to action even more im portant. Although this one chapter diminishes the book for me, I’m sure historians of the struggle for LGBT rights will find Dunn’s work a valuable resource. _________________________________________________________________ Hank Trout is the former editor of A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine. May–June 2026

Song of My Self

D AVID B ERGMAN

THE BRONZE ARMS by Richie Hofmann Knopf. 85 pages, $29.

T

HE BRONZE ARMS is Richie Hofmann’s third book of poetry, his second with Knopf, and he’s not yet forty. He’s already won a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, but none of the major prizes. They will come. And he’s insistently gay, though I couldn’t testify to whether he has had A Hundred Lovers , as the title of his second book sug gests, and that’s because so many of the “you’s” and “he’s” blur together despite the fact they are spread across the globe from Mexico City to Munich. His youth and looks are continual themes in these books. He tells us he has “hairy legs and a classical phallus.” In the very first poem of his first book, he compares himself to Anti nous, Hadrian’s lover, who was elevated by the emperor to a di vinity upon Antinous’ death (he drowned in the Nile) and was

frequently chiseled in stone, pic tured in frescos, and cast on coins. Antinous adorns both sides of one majestic Alexandrian drachma: the obverse in a crown, and the re verse on horseback, in the guise of Hermes, holding a caduceus while his cloak billows behind him. “I am young,” Hofmann writes in Second Empire , “My hair is the color of antique coins,” and in The Bronze Arms , we learn that the an tique coins of Hofmann’s hair are really heroic statuary melted

Richie Hofmann. Ryan Hagerty photo.

down into money and weapons. Thus works of art, like memory, can survive if given enough force. In the poem “The Bronzes,” he tells how two such sculptures are hauled from the sea, “Like a father and son,” and that “I could be bronze,/ my blue eyes flecked with gold.” The figure of Antinous stands behind a recurring figure in Hofmann’s latest book. In it, Hofmann, unlike Antinous, is saved from drowning by his father. “Drowning on Crete,” the most lit eral of the accounts, presents the near-drowning as a kind of transformation. “I didn’t die./ But for one moment/ I was some one who would never be old.” In this poem, Hofmann is mo mentarily contained, like Schrödinger’s cat, in a space spared from both life and death. In the next poem, “Arms,” Hofmann admits that his death “would have been a catastrophe for my fa ther,/ But it wouldn’t have changed a thing in the world,” except that old woman couldn’t stop repeating the tale of a father who lifts his drowned boy from the water. The boy dies again in “Dol phin” and, although “it’s terrible what happens,” “I am a little fa mous/ I was loved by a dolphin/ They minted coins that showed us playing.” Hadrian made Antinous a constellation that lies be

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