Explanation: While we associate fascism with homophobia in the modern day, and it has always had some of that tinge, people are, uh, strange, and especially when fascism was ‘new’ and its exact positions uncertain (due in part to being ideologically incoherent dreck), some LGBT folk embraced the repugnant cause.

Fascism is always a brutal, anti-intellectual, ultranationalistic, conformist ideology, but in its ascent to power, was noted as having strong revolutionary tendencies as well. Not good revolutionary tendencies, but revolutionary in the sense of ‘seeking something other than conservatism’ - as seen with figures like the Brothers Strasser and Ernst Rohm in the Nazi Party, who considered themselves enemies of liberals and socialists as well as conservatives and aristocrats, favoring instead a more raw, direct bootlicking than conservatives or aristocrats could offer them. But as fascism succeeded, it tended to seek consolidation of its power - which was most compatible with conservatives and aristocrats, in terms of ideological ‘allies’, which generally resulted in such figures ending up marginalized or purged.

For that matter, though we would recognize these folk as LGBT, they distinctly would not have been aligned with the LGBT movement - Ernst Rohm, for example, despised the nascent LGBT movement in Weimar Germany, decrying it as ‘effeminate’, unlike his ‘warrior’ vision of guys being guys manly men forming manly bonds.

Pictured are, clockwise, starting from the top left:

Ernst Rohm, the Nazi leader of the ‘SA’, a street-fighting unit that referred to themselves as ‘Stormtroopers’, after the assault troops of WW1 Germany, despite most of them being too young to be veterans of that war. Rohm himself, to be fair, was a WW1 combat veteran, but not one of the assault troops. He was pretty openly gay, and encouraged a culture of (MANLY ONLY) male-male love in the SA. He was close to Hitler, but purged after Hitler’s continued grasp on power was endangered by Rohm and other ‘revolution’ oriented Nazis, who pissed off the industrialist capitalists and agrarian-military aristocracy enough to give Hitler a ‘us-or-them’ ultimatum. At that point, he (and many others) were executed in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.

Yukio Mishima was a writer, male model (yes, really), actor, and singer, who… fell into some pretty gruesome far-right political leanings. As male-male relations are not explicitly denigrated in traditional Japanese warrior-culture, he apparently found no contradiction with his politics and his sexuality. He wrote a play wherein Hitler et co were major figures, and served as mouthpieces for his mixed views on fascism. Arguably, Yukio Mishima was not quite a fascist, but not for any love of liberty - he was an ardent anti-revolutionary and anti-modernist who revered the Japanese Emperor, and whose primary bone-to-pick with the contemporary Japanese Communist Party was that they didn’t revere the Emperor. He was a far-right ultranationalist and militarist, though, which would qualify him as a fascist to many - certainly in common parlance. Core to his thought were anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-materialist ideals. He committed suicide after attempting to inspired the Japanese military to perform a coup to restore the Emperor’s rule (they were utterly uninterested, and mocked him). Apparently his writing is quite good.

Jutta Rüdiger was head of the Nazi “League of German Girls”; a position for which one had to be unmarried.

… she was unmarried because she was living with another woman in a lesbian relationship, which would last another ~50 years.

Even as late as the 2000s, she remained an unreformed Nazi, speaking highly of Nazi values, and dodging the issue of the horrors it created, not just in genocide, but in the entire brutal, totalitarian apparatus.

Rotha Lintorn-Orman was an ambulance driver in WW1, an aristocrat, and the founder of the British Fascist Party. She was a hard-drinking, hard-partying, gender-norm-defying bisexual woman who nonetheless aligned with the Tories, despite… everything. Yet she regarded the Tories as too ‘meek’ on the issue of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, and admired the brutality and violence of Mussolini’s then-new Fascist regime, and its position on ‘class collaboration’ instead of ‘class conflict’. Her original Fascist organization would later wither to irrelevance over conflicts with another major figure of British Fascism, Oswald Mosley, whom she considered a ‘near-Communist’ and abhorred for being a former member of the Labour Party. She would die of natural (alcohol-induced) causes several years before WW2.

… human beings are fucking weird.

A marginalized minority embracing fascism isn’t unheard of at all.

Every single one who does so embraces fascism because they have an absurd sense of narcissistic self importance that makes them think they are the exception to the fascists’ wrath and they’re “one of the good ones”.

Every single one has an abusive personality and is deeply insecure.

Peter Thiel and Alice Weidel say “Hallo”.

TIL Mishima was gay. Such a shame about him. I really loved his writing until I discovered the whole, well, everything about him.

From a psychological stand point I don’t find it surprising. Fascism embodies hyper-masculinity; power trough military might. And so you can trace the appeal among homosexual males and FtM trans (think the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae).

Violence is always the ultimate tool of Fascism and Might being the ultimate expression of masculinity.