"I'm not queer, I'm married to a woman!" Alice Weidel said this in 2023 in the ARD summer interview. Now you might think: "Huh? But then she's queer!" After all, queer is often used as a collective term for all people who are not heterosexual, cisgender or endosexual.

However, Alice Weidel is not concerned with queer as a collective term, but with queer as a term that is charged with progressive, supposedly "woke" symbolism, human rights and a supposed "gender ideology". And she rejects that.

Queer rights

In an article for Geschichte der Gegenwart, cultural anthropologist Patrick Wielowiejski, who ethnographically accompanied gay members of the AfD for two years, writes the following:

"In fact, the AfD primarily integrates homosexuals (...) into its ranks (...). As long as they recognise the "reality of bisexuality" and thus reject queer views of gender and sexuality, LGBT people are tolerated by the AfD."

And further:

"As a result, we are not primarily dealing with homophobia or trans-hostility (even if these have by no means disappeared completely), but above all with queer hostility. This means that some parts of the so-called community can be integrated into the historical bloc of the right - namely those who affirm the phantasm of a natural, stable, unambiguous identity. Or, in short, the least queer of them."

Alice Weidel and other right-wing LGBT people in the AfD are not alone in this. In the same year as Alice Weidel, just a few months later, Jens Spahn said in the Interview with the right-wing populist Fox News knock-off "Nius": "I'm not queer, I'm gay."

Of course, it is up to each person to decide how they want to define themselves. Nobody has to use the term "queer" for themselves if they don't want to. However, this is not about rejecting a self-definition. It is about combating everything that the term "queer" stands for in their imagination: so-called "gender ideology", woke efforts for equality, the supposed "early sexualisation" of children (i.e. age-appropriate sexual education), the dismantling of rigid, binary, essentialist ideas of gender and sexuality, or the supposed "endangerment" of cisgender women through trans rights. In short, the term "queer" is seen as a threat to the binary two-gender system, which is a cornerstone of the patriarchal world order.

The term "queer" is therefore used here as a cipher, as a code for "left" and for the dismantling of clear gender boundaries. A look at German history in particular shows: This phenomenon is not new!

Sexual intermediate stages

Ernst Röhm was head of the National Socialist paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and a close friend of Hitler. And: his homosexuality was an open secret. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Ernst Röhm significantly helped Hitler with the rise of the Nazis - at a time when there was a movement in Berlin that is now known as the world's first queer emancipation movement. However, the term queer as we use it today did not exist back then.

However, there was another term that partly fulfilled a similar function: sexual intermediate. The term was coined by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish doctor, sexologist and founder of the world's first movement for the rights of queer people. Hirschfeld developed a scientific theory on gender: he understood gender not as binary, but as a continuum with male and female as extreme poles. According to Hirschfeld, all people have a mixture of both male and female sexual characteristics. Most people would cluster at the two ends of this continuum. However, some people tend to be in the middle of this continuum. And he called these people sexual intermediates. For example, he included not only trans and inter people, but also lesbians, gays and bisexuals.

The concept of sexual intermediates was central to Hirschfeld's theory of gender and sexual diversity and was seen as a kind of collective term for people who were outside the heterosexual, cisgender and endosexual norm - similar to the term "queer" today.

However, there was resistance to Hirschfeld's theories among queer people - and particularly among politically right-wing gay and bi+ men. As a counterpoint to Hirschfeld's progressive, non-binary theories on gender and sexuality, the activist Adolf Brand founded the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen in 1903. Brand and many other gay and bi+ men on the political right to far right believed that Hirschfeld was "feminising" gay and bi+ men and attempted to portray male homosexuality not only as binary, but above all as the "most masculine form of masculinity": According to them, nothing is a sign of a "real man" than sex between men. These gay men are therefore so masculine that they neither want to look at women nor touch them. And that doesn't make them "effeminate", but hypermasculine.

These ideas were often linked not only to sexism and misogyny, but also to racism and anti-Semitism. And were also found in large numbers among gay and bi+ Nazis around Hitler's friend Ernst Röhm, as well as in his SA.

Threat to right-wing ideologies

Then as now, the dissolution of the gender binary is perceived by the right as a threat. Because this binary gender dichotomy is an essential building block of their white-patriarchal world order, in which the "white race" is taking over by maximising the number of children from heterosexual marriages between "unambiguous men" and "unambiguous women" - whereby women are of course degraded to childbearing machines.

The theory of sexual intermediates is just as much a threat to this worldview as woke queer theory. Then as now, there were and are gay, lesbian and bi+ people who try to pander to the right by demonstratively distancing themselves from the threat to the patriarchal worldview of white supremacy. Back then they said: I am not a sexual interstitial. Today they say: I am not queer.

What they are also saying: "Look! I may be a lesbian, but I'm not like those crazy left-wing ideologues. I may be gay, but I'm actually on your side and want the same things as you! I'm not dangerous for you. Please accept me and I will fight with you against the others."

The rejection of the term "queer" by right-wing populist and far-right, queer (meaning: non-heterosexual, non-cisgender and endosexual) people is similar to the rejection of the term "sexual intermediates" by right-wing populist and far-right people around 100 years ago, which were considered sexual intermediates at the time. History does not repeat itself. But it often rhymes.

As was the case around 100 years ago, however, this cannot end well. Right-wing extremists and right-wing populists will not suddenly stop after the fight against trans and non-binary people. Once they have finished with trans and non-binary people, it will be the next group's turn: lesbians, gays and bi+ people. In 1934, Hitler had his former friend Ernst Röhm killed in the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazis then tightened §175, which criminalised male homosexuality. Thousands of queer people were sent to concentration camps and murdered there. It is therefore important that we stand together as a community and show solidarity - regardless of how we personally define ourselves.