The Pink Swastika authors, Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, would have us believe that homosexuality was the driving force behind the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. Near the beginning of chapter three of The Pink Swastika, “The Homosexual Roots of Fascism,” Lively and Abrams state this thesis:

In seeking the roots of fascism we once again find a high correlation between homosexuality and a mode of thinking which we identify with Nazism.

The chapter then traces the roots of German fascism from Plato, through Frederick the Great, and Friedrich Nietzsche - all gay by the author’s reckoning. My point is not to contest this even though one could. For instance, historians and philosophers are divided about Nietzsche’s sexuality, although few think he was a homosexual. However, my point here is to propose a problem for the thesis that homosexuality and fascism have a necessary causal link of some kind.

In chapter three, Lively and Abrams guess at the sexuality of many Nazi and related people but with the following figure - Thomas Mann - they are probably accurate in their assessment. About Mann, they write:

Thomas Mann’s identification with Nietzsche may also have had some thing to do with the latter’s homosexuality. Among other works, Mann is famous for a 1912 novella called Der Tod in Venedig (“Death in Venice”), in which “an aging writer risks life and reputation in his attempts to gaze on the Apollonian beauty of the 14-year-old Tadzio” (Reiter in Grolier). Homosexualist historian A.L. Rowse called this novella “the most publicized homosexual story of the century” (Rowse:212). A recently published biography, Thomas Mann: A Life, by Donald Prater, establishes the novelist’s homosexuality. A review of this book in The San Francisco Examiner (December 23, 1995) states that the book is based in part on Mann’s private diaries, which reveal a “secret homoerotic life.”

Mann was married and had six children for whom he was “a remote and some times terrifying figure.” The article reveals that two of these children, Klaus and Michael, committed suicide. Two of his children became homosexuals (Rowse:212). Mann confesses in his diary that the character Tadzio, the 14-year-old boy in “A Death in Venice,” was actually modeled after a boy on whom Mann “developed a crush while holidaying in Venice.”

Now just as the uninformed reader might think that Lively and Abrams are about to suggest Mann’s positive relationship with Hitler and fascism, the authors write: