A Nazi in the Gay Sauna
Artwork by Serap Işık
“Following several years of escalating persecution under the Nazi regime, more than six million Jewish people were murdered during the Holocaust.
“Alongside Romany Gypsies and people with disabilities, members of the LGBT community were also targeted by the Nazis in their efforts to eradicate entire communities who they portrayed as a threat to the ‘German people’.
“While Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s was home to a flourishing LGBT community, since immortalised in Goodbye to Berlin and Cabaret, the Nazi rise to power was followed by a swift and brutal crackdown.
“Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested in Nazi Germany as ‘homosexuals’, of whom 50,000 were sentenced, and between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. Lesbians, bi women and trans people, whose experiences remain under-researched, were also targeted. It is unclear how many LGBT people perished in these camps.”
The Excerpt above was taken from the Stonewall website
***
A few weeks ago, I saw a man with a huge nazi eagle tattooed on his back walk into a sauna in Barcelona, a place mostly frequented by cis-gays. The very same symbol known as the Parteiadler that was used by the nazi Party after they came to power in Germany. The one normally depicted as spreading its wings and holding a giant swastika with its feet. The one spotted on a Philadelphia cop in 2016 with the ominous inscription: “Fatherland”.
The sauna was crowded as usual on the first Saturday of every month, which is nudist night. But strangely, the tattoo on this gay man's back didn't catch anyone's eye. I, paralyzed by the ease and audacity of this nazi began to mention the tattoo to the people around me, asking for help in a sense. Very quickly, the following thoughts began to swirl in my head: “This person is a danger to gay people of colour. This is a safe space and the presence of this nazi makes it unsafe. A nazi should not be tolerated in this sauna or anywhere else.”
While these thoughts were raging in my head, I was trying to decide what exactly I should do at that moment. I was worried about myself. What if I accidentally bumped into this person in a darker place? what if this person harmed me in a booth or a room when I was alone?.) I have been living in Barcelona for 12 years and it was the first time I was sharing a space with a nazi. One of those nazis I only heard rumours about but never met in real life. One of those nazis I was assured were so few and far that they could not possibly pose a danger to my safety. That night, one of them walked into a place in Barcelona where I felt safe and didn't bother to cover the horrible nazi tattoo on his back. Instead, he acted as if he was doing the most natural thing in the world. Anger was added to my anxiety. I asked for help from the people I knew and the sauna workers to feel safe.
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I approached one man he was chatting with earlier and asked if he knew that his friend had a nazi symbol tattooed on his back. He laughed and said: "He used to be a nazi a long time ago. He is thinking of getting it removed." If he was a nazi such a long time ago, I didn't understand how he chose to live with the tattoo for all that time.
“That night, one of them walked into a place in Barcelona where I felt safe and didn’t bother to cover the horrible nazi tattoo on his back. Instead, he acted as if he was doing the most natural thing in the world. ”
I reminded one of the workers in the sauna that there was someone in there with a nazi symbol and they had to get him out. "I know who you mean, but he's not a Nazi. He just likes eagles," he said, laughing. He didn't care about why this man had chosen this specific eagle out of thousands that can be found in tattoo shops. In another context, I could have found the simplicity of his explanation cute or innocent. But the indifference got on my nerves even more.
I told a friend about the tattoo. But he was too high to listen. He laughed it off and asked me to not bring down his mood. A guy I was hanging out with about an hour ago, advised me to distract myself by looking elsewhere. He added, "If you worry too much about it, you'll get upset unnecessarily."
“Unnecessarily.”
But this advice bears a great responsibility in the rise of fascist ideologies both in the past and the present. There is a well-recorded history of how nazism infiltrated the skinhead scene in the 1980s and how it is infecting certain aspects of environmentalist and leftist movements. This success is owed in large part to their use of ambiguous iconography that offers plausible deniability, such as but not limited to Pepe the frog, the globally recognised OK hand gesture, the number 88 and yes, even milk.
After being ignored repetitively by fellow patrons, I went to the sauna bartender and informed him that there is a man in the sauna with a huge nazi symbol tattooed on his back. He was dumbfounded. He told the DJ who was standing next to him, who seemed equally surprised. I was glad that someone finally reacted to the issue the way I did. No lie, it felt good. He assured me he would have a word with him and left.
Five minutes later, the bartender pretended to go into the restroom behind the nazi and looked at the tattoo on his back. Then he returned behind the bar and started looking at his phone. When I went over to ask him what was going on, he showed me the Parteiadlerhe found on Wikipedia and said he wasn't sure if it was the same as the tattoo on the man’s back. When I asked him for clarification, he said: “The feathers of the eagle are different.”
The feathers.
Of the eagle.
Are different.
Even my six-year-old nephew could see that the two eagles were the same, but I couldn't convince a group of grown men that the tattoo was a nazi symbol. I was feverishly explaining to a friend how people are ready to make up ridiculous excuses to tolerate a nazi when my husband came along, oblivious to all this.. He listened to me and told me I was right. I knew I was right, but it was good to hear it from him. While I was expecting him to join my effort to get this nazi out of the sauna, instead he told me it would be better for me to go home. He stayed in the sauna, while I went back home by myself. I never felt so much in danger in the 12 years I lived in Barcelona. What’s worse, no one, including my friends and my husband, understood why I was so worried and scared. And these people, who were not bothered by the presence of a Nazi there, told me I was making a big deal, even implying that I was spoiling their mood. As a result, the nazi stayed in the sauna and I left.
The aftermath of that night was as stressful and troubling as the night itself. As someone who left Turkey with security concerns, I thought I had found a safe haven in Barcelona. That feeling took a big hit.
My husband, a white European raised in an upper-class family, insisted for some time on not understanding the problem with me leaving that sauna alone that night, while the nazi remained. He tried to rationalize people's reactions that night with countless theories and justifications, all of which acquitted them of emboldening a nazi.
Once I managed to convince him I was right to be upset, he tried to shift the blame on me for leaving because of some nazi. "You should have stayed, you should have fought," he advised me. Despite the fact that he had never raised a finger for a cause, never organized, never risked his life for anything, he gave me, someone who had fought politically on the streets all his life, a lesson in political struggle.
We didn't talk for a few days. He went out of town for a while. When he came back I wasn't happy with the way things were at home, so I asked him to give me some time. I was having difficulty digesting what had happened. He said okay. A few days later, I invited him for coffee somewhere in the neighbourhood and asked him not to talk and just listen to me.
I explained to him at length how what happened in the sauna was problematic. How neither he nor his friends knew what to do with someone who felt in danger. Why safe spaces are especially important for queers of color, and why nazis should not be tolerated, nor trivialised under any circumstance. During that conversation, when there were things he didn't understand, things that didn't make sense to him, he asked questions, and I answered them. I kept telling myself that I didn't love the people in the sauna, except for this person I had been with for 13 years. I wanted to not treat this conversation as a burden. But it was. Because emotional labor is labor. The person with whom I had been together all these years, with whom I agreed on many things, with whom I agreed politically, had unfortunately made a critical mistake, and the burden of turning that mistake into something useful had fallen on me again. Because I was the one who was an immigrant, who was not white, who was not part of Spain. Such things do happen in the relationship of two very different people who grew up in completely different places and experienced completely different things.
At the end of the conversation, which turned into a lecture, he apologized, this time genuinely and with a lot of sympathy. He promised to be more careful from now on and asked me to give him directions if were to fail again in the future. I said okay.
He told me that the nazi left the sauna right after me that night. I didn't know how to feel about this information. That night my perception of the city where I had felt safe for 12 years was turned upside down. I am now much more alarmed by the clamor of the far-right Vox party. I am frightened by the possibility that they could rise again, even though they seem to be losing power now.
I'm not sure if I'm safe with white western cis-gays since that night in the sauna. The camaraderie I was trying to build with them has taken a big hit. It is alarming to think that behind their tolerance and trivialization of nazis is the privilege of knowing that a nazi will never attack them. It's like we parted ways with white Western cis-gays a long time ago. They have been ignoring the problems of queers of color for a long time, relying on the comfort of being able to marry and adopt children. Western white cis-gays and even lesbians have already turned their backs on the rest of us at countless points. We are all very familiar with how these communities maintain their privileges by partaking in problematic ideologies like trans exclusionism, white supremacism, homonationalism, pinkwashing and rainbow capitalism. But tolerating a nazi in a gay sauna is a level that I find very difficult to understand. I still wonder how they would have reacted if someone with Arabic tattoos on his arm or a turban had walked in that night. The fact that not needing a safe space is itself a white and cis privilege stands like an elephant in the middle of the sauna.
The fact that not needing a safe space is itself a white and cis privilege stands like an elephant in the middle of the sauna.
***
It might be good to open a parenthesis here for the far-right Vox party.
Vox, which means "voice" in Latin, was founded in 2013. Since its inception, the party has been committed to protecting the family, the church and the Spanish nation and state. It has since then focused its hatred on abortion, marriage equality, migrant/refugee communities, LGBTIQA+ and especially trans individuals. Like many far-right parties, they deny their ties to nazism, but have attended rallies organized by neo-nazis, displayed nazi flags, they even had a parliamentary candidate in 2019, who is known for being a member of a paganist coven known as the Aryan Brotherhood.
Like right-wing extremist parties in many countries, Vox uses internet trolls to target vulnerable groups and spreads disinformation about them on social media.
Since the 2019 elections, which saw the party enter parliament and finish as Spain's third largest party, there has been a sharp increase in hate speech and attacks across the country. While many LGBTIQA+ people have been targeted by this hate, the most shocking attack was the murder of 24-year-old Brazilian immigrant Samuel Luiz in La Coruna. Rights advocates have said that this murder was motivated by Vox's anti-LGBTIQA+ propaganda.
***
Days followed days. After the night in the sauna, I didn't leave the house or met anyone for about two weeks. I needed to stay home and relieve my concerns about safety. Then slowly I started meeting friends, socializing and going out at night. It was also good to spend time with people who understood me and cared about what I was going through.
Then something happened exactly two months after the night in the sauna. I had left a party in Raval one morning before dawn at 6 am. I was walking to a friend's house in the Barceloneta neighborhood. I was drunk but conscious. I knew what I was doing and I knew the way.
As I was walking past the famous market in Barceloneta, I noticed a van-type vehicle coming the other way. It was crowded. I continued on my way. As the vehicle passed me I heard them shout: "Maricon!" (Faggot in Spanish) It was followed by a full beer bottle flying towards my head. Luckily, I pulled my head back just in time and avoided getting hurt. The people in the vehicle laughed and drove off. I have no idea how many of them there were, where they were from, where they had come from and where they were going. I froze. I didn't even think to take a photo of their license plate. All I remembered was the extremely bright eagle sticker on the back of the vehicle. I couldn't move for a while, and when I could, I rushed to my friend's house. All I could think about was that eagle sticker and the echo of my own voice in my head:
The feathers of the eagle were different.
The feathers of the eagle were different.
The feathers of the eagle were different.
The feathers of the eagle were different.
The feathers of the eagle were different.
The feathers of the eagle were different.