and emotional walls and admits that he loved Rudy. It is likely that Max did not even know himself that he loved Rudy when he was making all those sacrifices for him. The phony front that he put up was so convincing that he had fooled even himself. If Max had not had a real love for Rudy, why then would he have blocked out Rudy’s name after being forced to participate in Rudy’s murder? Most likely, the memory loss was a traumatic amnesia.

Since Max was so open about his lifestyle among his friends and had endured the condemnation of his family for being gay, it is hard to understand why he was so determined to pass himself off as Jewish to the Gestapo. Perhaps the bottom line with Max was his own survival. He was gay while it was easy to be gay. Although he suffered an estrangement from his family and was continuously broke, it allowed him to hurt the father who had hurt him by sending his lover away. His lifestyle also allowed him to be irresponsible and decadent, even if it did not really make him happy, and he had to resort to alcohol and drugs for solace. It was fine to throw his homosexuality in his father’s face, but not in the face of the Gestapo. As Greta said, ‘‘You don’t play games with the SS.’’ It was fun to live scandalously as long as his lifestyle was defiantly shocking to those he wanted to hurt, but the fun was over when his life was at stake. Then it was strictly a matter of survival, and Max was spoiled enough to want to avoid what he heard was the lowest level of prisoners.

Even though Max refuses to accept the lowest status in the concentration camp, in his own mind he has sunk to the very lowest level of humanity. Already at the beginning of the play, his selfdestructive use of drugs and alcohol indicated a low self-esteem. Throughout the play he refers to himself as rotten and unlovable. Max tells Horst not to love him because he killed Rudy and will kill Horst, too, in his inevitably destructive way. His involvement in Rudy’s death and his sexual act with the dead girl have convinced him that he is totally contemptible and worthless. Robert Skloot, author of the Holocaust book The Darkness We Carry, concludes that Max’s success at getting a yellow star ‘‘comes at the price of denying his homosexuality, [and] is, according to Sherman, meant to be understood by us and, eventually by Max, as nothing less than self-annihilation.’’ This self-loathing is, in effect, an admission of guilt about his selfdestruction, just as his painful, halting confession to Horst is an admission of guilt. He has to tell someone what he did so that others will be as disgusted with him as he is with himself. They have to know that he is ‘‘a rotten person.’’

Needless to say, Max has trouble dealing with the tragic turn his life has taken. Anyone would. Sherman uses a repetition technique to illustrate Max’s feeble coping mechanisms, but it does not seem to work effectively in the story. Max’s tendency to count when he can’t face what’s happening does not come across well, perhaps because most people associate counting with an attempt to calm anger, not with avoiding reality. The repetition of ‘‘This isn’t happening’’ in various forms is probably more annoying to the audience than effective in portraying denial.

It is ironic that Max does not want a pink triangle because of what Horst told him, and then it is Horst who tries to get Max to wear the pink triangle. Another irony is that Horst is the one who tells Max how to survive on the train, but later it is Max who tries to teach Horst how survive the physical torments of their imprisonments (e.g. through exercise), and tries to keep Horst from turning into one of the walking dead. Otherwise, Horst becomes Max’s teacher in many ways. He teaches Max about love, about being gentle, about being honest with one’s self, and about dignity in death. Before Horst, being gay to Max was simply a means of seeking pleasure. After getting to know Horst, Max learns that being gay can include loving someone, and that there is value in love.

Max’s suicide at the end of the story may seem contradictory to his previous determination to survive. However, in his efforts to survive, Max had given up his identity as a gay person and had participated in acts that violated his sense of humanity. It is paradoxical that Max wanted to live when he thought himself not worth saving, then purposely went to his death when he finally found value in himself. As Eric Sterling speculates in a 2002 Journal of European Studies article analyzing Max’s self-destruction, Max apparently realized that the Nazis, not him, destroyed the bodies of Rudy and Horst. What he destroyed was his own soul. ‘‘Max cannot negate the damage he has inflicted upon others or even himself, but he may die with dignity, as the person he actually is—not as a fraud.’’ Sterling concludes that in suicide Max finally takes control over his own destiny. He will no longer allow his father, or social codes, or the Nazis to control him.

The character of Max provokes many questions. How can someone so openly gay deny his sexuality? How can someone who says he does not believe in love sacrifice his safety for the sake of his lover? How does someone so selfish evolve into a caring partner for Horst? How can someone so shallow carry such deep pain? The answer is that Max wore many masks. His childish attempts to avoid facing the reality of crisis were nothing compared to the avoidance of reality he had practiced for years. Max used a persona that was too cool to care about anything or anyone while all the time his soul was burning with shame, pain, and confusion. Some people have to learn the hard way, and for Max that meant reclaiming his humanity in the concentration camp, the most dehumanizing place on earth.

Source: Lois Kerschen, Critical Essay on Bent, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

In Bent, Max, who is the main character and supposed hero of the drama, is not heroic but rather is soft and weak. Max is generally selfish, uncaring, and mean. Even the moments where he seems kind often serve his own agenda. While Max makes deals to survive, he also ensures that he will not have to be on his own. When he finally comes to terms with himself in a deeper sense, it is only in one aspect: his homosexuality.

In contrast, two of the men Max is involved with are much more likable, honest, real, and heroic. Rudy and Horst are open about their homosexuality and about their lives in general. Both are nurturers who take care of Max in his own way. Both are loyal and caring and have strong characters. Rudy and Horst do not make deals and try to get out of uncomfortable situations like Max does; they want to confront them. They try to make the best of what they have, while dealing with Max and the problems that he brings. The pair patiently educate Max, who was raised in wealth but disowned by his family for his open—though somewhat superficial—embracing of a homosexual lifestyle.

That Max lives openly as a gay man is one of his strongest points. Max has not married a woman and had affairs with men on the side, which is what Max’s uncle (Freddie) has done in order to remain in good standing with the family. Though Max’s uncle supports Max by getting him a ticket and papers out of the country and sending him money in the camp, Max’s uncle is a fraud who lives a dishonest life. Although Max is honest in the beginning about his sexuality, this character point is tempered because Max does not admit he loves the men he is involved with and later denies his homosexuality when faced with harsher treatment at the work camp. Max would rather wear a yellow star, which indicates that he is Jewish, than a pink triangle, which indicates he is homosexual.

It is also telling that Max cannot stand to be alone and not have some sort of homosexual relationship. Max has been living with Rudy for some time, perhaps years, but later on cannot remember his name. When Greta tells Max not to leave Rudy after the Nazis storm their apartment, it is somewhat for Rudy’s benefit. Greta believes that Rudy would not survive on his own and tells Max to take care of him. Though Max is compelled to stay with Rudy, Max also benefits from the situation. Max does not have to face the world alone. Max tries to deny that he needs a relationship with Rudy or any man for that matter. In act 1, scene 3, Max will not take the single ticket and papers that will take him out of Germany and to Amsterdam. Instead, Max asks Freddie to obtain another ticket and papers for Rudy. Max will not admit the importance of his relationship with Rudy. Max tells his uncle ‘‘I just feel responsible.’’ Max’s issue seems to be more about being alone, for if he was traveling alone within Germany or out of the country, it would increase his chances of survival.

After Rudy dies, Max immediately begins a relationship with Horst. Max takes risks to get Horst assigned to his work detail by using the money his uncle sent him to bribe the guard so that Max can interact with him. To keep Horst alive when he becomes ill, Max performs a sexual act on a captain to obtain medicine for him. This inadvertently leads to Horst’s death as the captain assumed Max was a heterosexual Jew and to perform such an act would humiliate him. When the Nazi figures out that Max is probably gay and did it for Horst’s benefit, the captain kills Horst. Finally, alone with no potential relationships in sight, Max kills himself. While he does don Horst’s jacket with the pink triangle on it before his suicide, a symbolic acceptance of his homosexuality, he also admits he does not even want to try to survive on his own as a gay man. Max is not willing to take any punishment from the Nazis for his homosexuality. He instead inflicts harm on himself by walking into the electric fence and ending his life.

Max readily admits his faults. He tells Horst in act 1, scene 6 ‘‘I’m a rotten person.’’ Max makes his living doing shady deals, including selling drugs. Though he lives with Rudy and is in a relationship with him, Max brings home a man, Wolf, whom he met at Rudy’s place of employment. This incident is after Max got so drunk that he does not remember what he did or how Wolf got there. Max and Rudy are forced to go on the run because of Wolf. Wolf was involved with a Nazi German official who was on the outs with Nazi leader Adolph Hitler and Wolf was arrested by the SS. If Max had not been so selfish in his actions the night before the play begins, Max and Rudy might have survived and continued in their normal lives.

Despite Max’s many flaws, Rudy remains loyal. Rudy tells Max ‘‘I love you’’ in act 1, scene 1, even though Max embarrassed him at work and had sex with another man in their home. Rudy does not even want to tell Max what he did the previous night. He only does it when Max threatens Rudy’s precious plants, a symbol of his ability to nurture like Horst’s nursing. Max’s reliance on Rudy is underscored by Max expecting Rudy to make decisions for him like stopping him from acting as he did the night before. Rudy will not do that, but he also does not threaten back. Rudy accepts his actions. Rudy takes care of Max through his hangover, offering him food and drink, and though it is very awkward, takes care of Wolf by offering him a robe and coffee.

After Max and Rudy are forced to go on the run, it is Rudy who again takes care of Max. In act 1, scene 4, in the tent city outside of Cologne, when Max says he has a temperature, Rudy feels his forehead and confirms it. At the end of that scene, he touches Max’s face several times in a loving manner. Max pushes him away. Max then holds hands with Rudy, but only where no one can see. In the same scene, Rudy tells Max that he got a job digging a ditch so that he could buy them food, which Max refuses to eat. For Rudy, a dancer by training, this was a difficult job. It does not seem that Max has ever done an honest day’s work. Rudy has also worked on ways of getting out of the country, discovering spots where one can walk over the border, but Max dismisses them.

Also in act 1, scene 4, Rudy describes an opportunity to get out of the tent city and to possibly start a better life. Rudy caught a ride with a man who was attracted to him. Rudy believes that the old man might have allowed Rudy to stay with him and perhaps gotten him out of Germany. But Rudy, being loyal to Max, returned to the tent city and Max. Although at this point in the play, Rudy is somewhat resentful of Max and what Max has done to his life, he remains loyal. Max, while even more angry in some ways, is still afraid to leave him. Max makes meaningless promises about their life in Amsterdam, after telling his uncle in act 1, scene 3 that he would do whatever the family wanted—even marrying a woman to help with their business—if Freddie was able to get them both out of the country.

All of Rudy’s loyalty to Max proves meaningless when in act 1, scene 5, Max contributes to Rudy’s death on the train to the work camp. When Rudy is targeted by the officers, Max denies that he knows him. As Rudy is beaten by them, Max stands there, concerned only with saving his own life by not admitting he knows Rudy, has been with Rudy, and is homosexual himself. When the officers order him to, Max pummels the already dying Rudy. Rudy whispers his name, but Max ignores him. Max does not need Rudy anymore. He has found a new man to have a relationship with: Horst. It was Horst who had advised him to ignore Rudy to ensure his own survival on the train. Rudy gave Max some idea of how to care for someone. Rudy showed love for Max until the end.

In Max and Horst’s first full scene together, Max tries to give Horst some of the vegetables from his soup because Horst was not given any by the Kapo because Horst is identified as homosexual. This is the kind of act that Rudy would have done for Max. Here, this act on Max’s part is manipulative because he wants another relationship to sustain him. When Horst tries to leave a short time later, Max whines ‘‘I don’t have anyone to talk to.’’ While Max is still dishonest, Horst somewhat appreciates the connection Max is trying to make. Horst does not like the means (lying and manipulating) with which Max is trying to make the connection, but Max needs Horst to survive, much more than Horst needs Max.

Like Rudy, Horst still acts as Max’s nurturer and confidant despite Max’s faults. Though Horst knows Max is gay, he does not tell anyone else at the camp. As previously mentioned, it is Horst who advises Max on how to act on the train so that he can survive. After Max tells his story about how he obtained his Jewish star, Horst tries to touch his face. In act 2, scene 3, Horst admits that he loves Max and that their relationship, such that it is, is helping him survive the camp. Horst even devises a signal that tells Max that he loves him. As with Rudy, Max wants the relationship but will not accept the love that is part of it for the other man.

Over the course of act 2, Horst becomes Max’s role model. Though Horst resents the fact that Max bribed a guard to get him assigned to his job at the work camp so that Max could have someone to talk to, Horst eventually breaks down and converses with him. After Horst apologizes for his behavior in act 2, scene 2, Max is able to say he is sorry later in act 2 because Horst has shown him how to express regret. Later, Horst initiates a sexual act with Max using only words in act 2, scene 2. When Max tries the same kind of sex act with Horst in act 2, scene 4, Max uses language that makes the act rougher, a fact that upsets Horst.

Horst has also repeatedly tried to get Max to admit he is really homosexual and should be wearing the pink triangle. Horst shows Max that Horst tolerates abuse but has some dignity. When the SS captain tries to make Horst electrify himself on the fence, Horst refuses to die that way. He attacks the captain and is shot in the back. Max finally breaks down and admits he loved Rudy, Horst, and another man. Max then dons Horst’s jacket with the pink triangle but, instead of taking the lessons he learned from Rudy and Horst and trying to fight his way out of camp, he decides to die. As with many other decisions he made in Bent, Max takes the easy way out and kills himself on the electrified fence. Though finally willing to admit his homosexuality in a deeper sense, Max will not let himself have a reason to live.

Source: A. Petruso, Critical Essay on Bent, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Bent begins on an infamous night in gay history: June 29, 1934, also known as ‘‘The Night of the Long Knives.’’ On this night, the Nazis purged Germany’s old leadership and with it all of Hitler’s political opponents. The purge resulted from political quarrellings between Nazi leaders subordinate to Hitler. Most notable to Sherman’s play is the struggle between Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Röhm. Röhm was the head of the powerful Sturmabteilung leadership (SA) and, as it was, he was the leader of the only viable threat to Hitler’s power. The SA was an enormous armed assault division that functioned as the key paramilitary organization of the German Nazi Party. Himmler was aware of Hitler’s suspicion of Röhm and the SA and, thus, he fabricated evidence to defame Röhm and presented it to Hitler. This evidence fueled Hitler’s mistrust that Röhm intended to use his powerful position in the SA to challenge Hitler’s rise to power.

Although it is reported that Hitler was fond of Röhm, he was still under pressure to reduce the SA’s power. Hitler’s Nazi supporters were concerned with Röhm and the SA’s socialist inclinations. In addition, Röhm’s control of the 2.5 million strong SA division left many of Hitler’s subordinates alarmed, if not completely fearful. Members of the Nazi party viewed Röhm and other leaders of the SA with great distaste because they frequently practiced homosexual behavior. On ‘‘The Night of the Long Knives,’’ Röhm was arrested on the grounds of his homosexuality—behavior deemed incompatible with the Nazi party because homosexuals did not reproduce and perpetuate the master race. Röhm then declined the opportunity to commit suicide and was executed. This example, which demonstrates how Nazis felt about homosexuals, informs the reading of Bent.

The first half of Sherman’s play is focused on a homosexual couple, Rudy and Max, as they attempt to flee Germany after Hitler’s purge of homosexuals in the government. Knowing that if government officials are arrested and executed based on their sexuality, the two understand that their only chance is to escape Nazi Germany and find refuge outside of Hitler’s grasp. However, the lovers are captured in Cologne and sent to Dachau. On the train, Rudy is dragged away and murdered by the Nazis. Here, in the first five scenes, Sherman dramatizes an important and often overlooked point—that homosexuals were also victimized by Nazis. Although countless books have been published about the persecution of Jews, there is only a limited number of works written on the suffering of homosexuals during the Holocaust.

Soon after Rudy is dragged away by the Nazi officer, Max meets Horst, a homosexual also bound for Dachau. Horst bears a mark of identification—a pink triangle—registering that he is homosexual. Sherman writes

HORST: I’ve been through transport before. They took me to Cologne for a propaganda film. Pink triangle in good health. Now it’s back to Dachau.

MAX: Pink triangle? What’s that?

HORST: Queer. If you’re queer, that’s what you wear. If you’re a Jew, a yellow star. Political—a red triangle. Criminal—green. Pink’s the lowest.

Now, indubitably informed that as a homosexual he is the lowest and the most worthless of all prisoners, Max begins his attempt to erase his identity. His hope is for survival at all costs, to efface himself from his identity as a homosexual and become someone else. Max takes this desire for survival to the darkest levels of despair. To convince the guards that he is not a homosexual, Max is instructed to rape the corpse of a young girl. Max tells Horst of his experience

And I said, I’m not queer. And they laughed. And I said, give me a yellow star. And they said, sure, make him a Jew. He’s not bent. And they laughed. They were having fun. But . . . I . . . got . . . my . . . star.’’

With this abandonment of self, Max wins himself a step up in the prison class system. He no longer wears the pink triangle. He is no longer viewed as queer. With this act, Max becomes a staunch survivalist. A survivalist is an individual who views survival, at all costs, as the primary object, especially in the breakdown of society. His postmortem violation of the teenage girl earns him the yellow star and solidifies his position on survival at all costs, but with it Max completely destroys his identity and his conscience. Eric Sterling states in his article ‘‘Bent Straight’’ in European Studies

The difficulty Max experiences in confessing [to the rape of the young, dead girl] to Horst, with his many pauses, demonstrates to the audience that he feels shame and recognizes that he has preserved his life at an exorbitant cost—his identity and his dignity.

In this moment of irony, Max’s actions increase his chance of physical survival, but he has selfexecuted that which is most important, i.e., his conscience and his identity.

The second half of Sherman’s play is restricted to the wasteland confinements of a prison camp. Here, Max carries rocks from one pile to the next, then back again, in an exercise of complete futility. His task of moving rocks back and forth represents the crisis of his identity. Max, through his survivalist blinders, is left without any purpose. He is not a Jew, even though he may wear the yellow star and, thus, he lacks the identity of Judaism. Although he is queer, he must constantly deny his identity in order to survive. Thus, just as he passes the rocks from one pile to the next in an endless cycle of futility, Max continues to lie about his beliefs and deny his true identity in an empty, repetitious pacing between his appearance and his true identity.

Yet, regardless of this mind-numbing monotony, it is the safest work in the prison camp and, eventually, Max is able to bribe a guard to allow Horst to do the same. With this, Max again presents himself as a staunch survivalist. However, it also plays out as a crucial turning point in Max’s development as he shows a desire to help Horst. This is unlike any of Max’s other actions. For example, when Max is speaking with his Uncle Freddie about tickets and papers to get Rudy and himself to Amsterdam, it is apparent Max is acting out of guilt, not love. When Freddie asks if he loves Rudy, Max responds ‘‘Don’t be stupid. . . . I’m a grown-up now. I just feel responsible.’’

Although Max uses the last of his monies to have Horst moved to the rock pile, Horst is still critical of Max’s denial of his true identity. Horst disapproves of Max’s masquerading as a Jew. Not because he is anti-Semitic, but because Max is denying his identity as a homosexual. As the two grow closer and closer over the time they spend moving rocks, Horst begins to chip away at Max’s survivalist unwillingness to wear the pink triangle, to admit to the world and to himself what and who he is. Oddly enough, it is at the rock piles (the representation of Max’s anonymous futility) that Horst forces Max to confront his true identity. He tells Max, ‘‘I’m the only one who knows your secret . . . That you’re a pink triangle.’’ In Sherman’s language of the play, Max’s denial of his homosexuality is not only an attempt to survive but is also an act of a man afraid to surrender to love. Max’s opinion on love is made clear in his discussion with Uncle Freddie. It is apparent that for Max, love is ‘‘[b——sh——t]’’ and with that, it seems, almost antithetical to survival.

Nonetheless, Horst’s persistence eventually pounds home the message that love is, in fact, essential to survival. In a scene that is incongruous, emotional, and courageous, Max and Horst make love to one another with only words. Under the baneful stares of the Nazi guards, Horst and Max have an exhilarating exchange:

HORST: We can feel . . .

MAX: Feel what?

HORST: Each other. Without looking. Without touching. I can feel you right now. Next to me. Can you feel me?

Their exchange continues, and the two men are left inspired by their love for each other. Here, in the most unlikely of settings, Max discovers through his verbal lovemaking with Horst that he is capable of expressing his true feelings. Max, for the first time, feels love. Although he does not understand love, the discovery that he can express himself, even under such brutal conditions and stay alive, is a crucial breakthrough for Max.

Still, though, Max’s true awakening to his identity and his understanding of love comes at another unlikely moment. In the closing scenes of the play, Horst becomes ill. He has a terrible cough. Without medicine, Horst will be incapable of continuing his work and will surely be executed. Again, Max shows his dedication to his survivalist nature. This time, however, his focus is not on his personal survival; it is wholly centered on Horst. Max suspects that a certain guard is homosexual and, with hopes of receiving special favors, Max offers to sexually please the guard for an exchange. Lucky for Max and Horst, the guard is indeed receptive to the sexual advance, and Max is able to acquire medicine for Horst. Max’s sexual act with a Nazi guard is indicative of his devotion to Horst because Horst benefits from Max’s risk and sacrifice. Max, on the other hand, gains nothing and, in fact, places himself and his survival in harms way.

Until the end, both Max and Horst stick to their pragmatics. Max’s survivalist nature is embodied in his early selfishness but is also evident in his later actions at the rock pile and his acquisition of medicine for Horst. Even near the end of the play, Max says ‘‘My yellow star got your medicine.’’ However, it is not until the final moments after Horst’s death that Max realizes it was not the yellow star that got them the medicine—it was their love for each other. Max realizes that it is more important to live truthfully, as Horst did all of his days, and have a shorter life, than to exist dishonestly and survive longer.

Upon Horst’s death, Max puts on his lover’s coat bearing the pink triangle. At this moment, standing proud in front of the Nazi guards, Max completely regains his identity and his conscience. Paradoxically, the act of self-affirmation also simultaneously results in a loss of status. In the eyes of the Nazis, Max has demoted himself to the most worthless class of individuals at the prison camp. For Max, he has restored his dignity. Finally, in these last moments, Max becomes a character of admiration, an individual who has loved, restored his conscience, and righted his identity. Although Max’s final act is one of suicide, it is a statement to his liberation and final empowerment. Of his own volition, free of both his pragmatic survivalist nature and the demands of the Nazis, Max walks into the electric fence ending his life with a clear understanding of his love for Horst and for himself.

Source: Anthony Martinelli, Critical Essay on Bent, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Bent is a play about a pile of rocks, and it will hit you like a ton of bricks.

Twenty-four years after Richard Gere brought Martin Sherman’s revolutionary piece of playwriting to Broadway, the devastating story of how Nazis killed both time and gays in the Dachau camp retains a timeless ability to deliver a jolt as lethal as one from an electric fence.

Perhaps that’s because in America, of all the groups singled out for extinction by the Nazis 60 years ago, only homosexuals remain subjected to the societal ambivalence that still allows for condoned acts of violence and discrimination against them.

Evidence of the modern-day persecution of gays is only as hard to find as a newspaper. There was Matthew Shepard in Laramie, as well as Kyle Skyock, the Rifle teen brutally beaten for being gay. And there are an estimated 1,500 new hate-crimes victims every year, according to the FBI.

Sherman estimated that up to a half million gays were killed by the Nazis in World War II, most by methods that raised the bar for cruelty and degradation.

But just last month, a Minnesota House representative looked a Holocaust survivor in the eye and questioned her eyewitness account of the slaughter of gays. Apparently some stories need to be told until they are heard.

Ironically at the end of the Hunger Artists’ guteviscerating new production of Bent, all that can be heard is silence, followed by a groundswell of weeping, from the right and left.

The production has its minor flaws. The secondary actors playing Nazis are about as menacing as Dennis; perhaps one of the condemned prisoners is played with too sunny of a disposition; and not all of the script’s verbal hammers hit their nails on the head. But when a play ends with weeping in stereo, you have to give it up to those involved and say, ‘‘Bravo.’’ Nothing I’ve seen of late has so affected its audience, and for my money, that makes Bent the best play of the year.

That this blindside comes from the Hunger Artists, who have been largely dormant the past year, only magnifies the feat. And that blindside is delivered courtesy of an impeccable actor named William Hahn.

Bent opens in the living room of an ordinary gay couple in 1934 Berlin. ‘‘In the Mood’’ is playing, but how could anyone be in a fine mood with the foreboding visual of an already omnipresent barbed-wire fence draping the back wall, a Nazi soldier pacing back and forth? Homosexuality was illegal but tolerated in Germany until Hitler executed Karl Ernst, the openly gay and tolerant director of his storm troopers forces.

Hahn plays Max, a drunken, directionless trustfund playboy cared for by devoted dancer Rudy (the terrifically natural newcomer Dennis Crowder). But the playwright takes a devastating and daring right turn that leaves its unprepared audience wrecked even before intermission. Suffice it to say, Crowder makes an unforgettable entry to—and exit from— the Denver stage.

Among Sherman’s many potentially lethal risks is the introduction of a second protagonist in the second act. But the result is simple, existential genius. The remaining action consists only of Max and Horst (the winning Joseph Norton) pacing the yard, moving a pile of rocks from one end to the other. It is a cruel Nazi mind game intended to drive the men insane. If they are ever caught talking to one another, or touching one another, they will be shot.

This confined new premise simply should not work, dramatically. But it does, emphatically. Over months, these two men learn ways of communicating, of falling in love and of even making love to one another—without laying a finger on one another. Max and Horst move only 20 feet back and forth in a straight line, yet they embark on epic character arcs. How they come to grips with their humanity, their identities and their destinies is heartbreaking enough, but even as a simple piece of theater business, it is a thrill to watch.

Whether Norton should open with such a glib demeanor is debatable. His Horst seems oblivious to the fact he is trapped in an inescapable courtyard of death. But it’s not so much where you begin as where you end, and Norton brings Horst home with a demise that is agonizing and raw.

There is less room for debate about a performance from Hahn that is so razor-sharp, it could easily be remembered one day as legendary. Max is a man incapable of love who is brought to a place where his survival depends on denial and deals, where even the slightest act of love can get him killed. Survival is possible here, but all it will cost you is your soul. And Hahn seems to have actually changed bodies at intermission. His vapid player with the sculpted physique is replaced in totality with a mature, realized hero who springs to life from within the decayed shell of a gaunt sack of bones.

Bent director Jeremy Cole has remarkable control over the tone of his piece (and ditching the accents was brilliant). Lighting designer Anna R. Kaltenbach accentuates every poignant moment with harrowing profundity, and Mike Herron’s simple but telling set design will make him a wanted man. But this Bent will be remembered most not for its hero’s ultimate act of courage, but for the courage summoned by the actor inhabiting him.

Source: John Moore, ‘‘Hunger’s Bent Best of the Year,’’ in Denver Post, April 22, 2003, pp. 1–2.

There is an historical irony to the adoption of the pink triangle as one of the symbols of the gay and lesbian rights movement. We have actually known very little about what happened to gays and lesbians under the Nazis in the years 1933 to 1945. Our memory is in fact ‘‘empty memory,’’ in the words of Klaus Muller, a gay consulting historian to Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. Muller uses that term because we are not ‘‘haunted by concrete memories of those who were forced to wear [pink triangles] in the camps.’’

In his introduction to the new edition of The Men with the Pink Triangle, Muller notes that gays and lesbians have been among the ‘‘forgotten victims’’ of the Holocaust, rarely spoken of or studied. Likewise, homophobia has not been sufficiently examined ‘‘as an important part of Nazi propaganda, racism, and population politics.’’

Until this past year, Richard Plant’s meticulously researched The Pink Triangle (1986) had been the major work in English helping to fill the historical void (Frank Rector’s 1981 The Nazi Extermination of Homosexuals is full of blatant inaccuracies). Plant’s short study is valuable on many levels, not least for the clarity and strength of his writing.

Plant fled Nazi Germany for Switzerland in 1933, and ultimately fled to New York. His book opens with a moving prologue in which he describes both his fear at the time, as the son of a Jewish socialist, and the ways in which he and so many other Germans that Hitler had declared enemies were unable to take Hitler seriously. One of Plant’s friends was gay and was smuggled into Switzerland after brutal treatment in jail, but others were not so lucky. The book is thus in part fueled by a personal wish to bear witness to the suffering of his friends, though it never becomes polemical. Plant also clearly demonstrates the widespread taboo among noted historians and biographers on reporting gay experiences in the Holocaust.

Plant takes us from debates about the nature of homosexuality in 19th-century Germany through the Nazi persecution before the war and into the concentration camps. He starts the book with a crisp overview of German thinking about homosexuality and the ways this dialectic played itself out socially and politically. One of Plant’s most distressing observations is that charges of homosexuality emerged in Germany as potent political weapons used by many different parties, not just the Nazis. Plant describes the gay movement’s repeated attempts to repeal Germany’s anti-gay law, focusing on the major protagonist, Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was a walking composite of Nazi scapegoats: a liberal, Jewish, gay sexologist. His internationally renowned Institute for Sexual Research was one of the Nazis’ early targets, and its ransacking, followed by a bonfire of its books and files, came a year before the well-known Ernest Roehm Affair, or the ‘‘Night of the Long Knives.’’

It’s easy to misread the Affair as mainly a brutal expression of Nazi anti-gay sentiment, but Plant disabuses us of that notion. In the summer of 1934, Hitler ordered the purge of the Brown Shirts, the Nazi party’s long-time private army. While its leader, Ernest Roehm, Hitler’s friend and secondin- command, was openly gay, Plant says that his gayness was ‘‘a sideshow . . . never really the cause of his downfall.’’ Homosexuality was used as a propaganda excuse to explain the purge—along with the far more serious (but bogus) charge of plotting against Hitler. The Nazis would likewise later use false charges of homosexuality in an attempt to weaken the Catholic Church, to eliminate youth groups that rivaled the Hitler Youth, and to police the armed forces.

The Roehm purge served Hitler politically in a number of ways. Roehm wanted his SA to absorb the German army, a goal that made its generals his bitter enemies. Hitler wanted the army to swear allegiance to him personally, rather than to the German state. A deal was struck and Hitler got his loyalty oaths. Murdering Roehm and eliminating the SA also eased party conflicts between paramilitary and political factions. And the purge burnished Hitler’s ‘‘image as a tough leader capable of imposing discipline and high moral standards on his own party.’’ Far more insidiously, it established ‘‘the legalization of crime in the name of the state,’’ setting a precedent for the murder of any German group conceived of as a state enemy, whether Jews, gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses or anyone else.

Plant devotes a bizarrely fascinating chapter to explicating SS leader Heinrich Himmler’s background and the development of his ‘‘curious blend of cold political rationalism, German romanticism, and racial fanaticism.’’ Plant admits that despite all the details, as with other Nazi officials, the biographical facts explain only so much; one is still left puzzled by the cold ferocity of hatred translated into murderous policies. Himmler was in charge of the Final Solution, and his youth seems to have been filled with constant humiliation over his physical weaknesses and his family’s low status and financial decline. Lots of adolescents harbor wild dreams of revenge against their perceived tormentors or as recompense for unbearable shame, but few get the power to enact them as Himmler did. His inner world eventually became a slumgullion of anti- Semitism, superstition, homophobia, and paranoia about a Germany facing defeat by a low birthrate, and lunatic fantasies for turning the SS into Europe’s new nobility, with blond and blue-eyed Germans spreading across Europe.

Among the groups Himmler loathed, homosexuals were stereotyped as effeminate, pacifist criminals, bearers of a dangerously contagious disease found only in the degenerate bourgeois and upper classes. This profile was not exactly sui generis: it was composed of various views popularly held by a wide range of Germans. Some of them sound a very contemporary note, calling to mind anti-gay rhetoric in the U.S.

Plant shows those policies being enacted into laws even crueler in practical effect than on paper, as judges in Germany were increasingly given the latitude to punish any act at all ‘‘if the inborn healthy instincts of the German people demand it.’’ In other words, they could completely overturn a basic principle of Western law, that only acts explicitly listed as criminal can be punished. Plant’s chronology at the end of the book usefully lists Nazi legislation and activity against gays, Jews, and other targets, year by year. More powerfully than the narrative from which it is drawn, this schedule shows growing Nazi lawlessness masked as law.

Life in the Camps

Though gays could elude the Gestapo far more easily than Jews, once they wound up in concentration camps, they fared very badly, and were almost always among the numerically smallest of the various groups of prisoners. All prisoners were supposed to be brutalized, terrorized, and constantly reminded they were enemies of the State. But gays suffered in different ways. Homophobia existed in the camps just as much as elsewhere, here taking many forms like suspicion. Attempting to join an anti-fascist underground, you might be suspected of only being after sex, or of spying because you might trade sex and information to guards. Being classed as a State enemy didn’t automatically make other ‘‘enemies’’ feel any kind of bond, and gays were ‘‘blamed’’ for sadomasochistic acts of guards or kapos (the prisoners appointed by camp officials to keep order).

Plant estimates that as many as 15,000 gays were murdered by the Nazis. Because they came from such widely divergent backgrounds, gays never united with any sense of group solidarity as did other groups. Few gays became kapos (who were mostly criminals or anti-fascists) and thus they couldn’t intervene with camp officials or guards to help other gays. Gay prisoners also rarely received mail or packages from families or friends, who were ashamed of their incarceration, or afraid of being caught in the net of Nazi terror themselves. Finally, homophobic officials assigned gays to work details with the highest mortality rates, like quarries and cement factories. Some gays were also the victim of bizarre medical experiments attempting to alter their sexuality.

Plant relays these horrors dispassionately, which is no easy achievement. But he warns that the persecution of homosexuals has a long history in Europe, and that the Nazi ‘‘hurricane of hatred’’ can be heard whistling in the rhetoric of Fundamentalists calling for a ‘‘holy war’’ against their society’s ‘‘most vulnerable and vilified minorities.’’

The Pink Triangle is probably less well-known than the play, Bent, Martin Sherman’s 1979 opus about gays in the Holocaust. That’s unfortunate. While Bent is at times powerful art based on gay suffering in the Holocaust, it’s skewed in some notso- obvious ways, creating a distorted image of the Holocaust in general and the role of gays in particular.

Bent is the story of Max, a shallow, cokedealing, S&M-loving Berlin homosexual who winds up in Dachau after a 1934 round-up of homosexuals. In the course of two acts, he helps murder his roommate by finishing the beating an SS guard began, commits necrophilia to prove to the SS that he’s straight and thus deserves a yellow star rather than the pink triangle, has ‘‘verbal sex with a fellow prisoner he comes to love,’’ sees that man killed, and kills himself—after donning the pink triangle.

Max is a frivolous charmer, impossible to care about, a man whose deepest insight into himself is that he’s ‘‘a rotten person.’’ If the play is an attempt to show that even men like him can learn to respect themselves and to love, it seems extremely cruel. Does it take Dachau to make someone deepen as a human being? If so much suffering is necessary, he must be hopelessly unfeeling—which Max doesn’t seem to be—so the play fails as the portrayal of a man’s development into a mensch.

Before Bent opened on Broadway in 1979, New York papers were filled with articles about the play’s success in London and interviews the author. The common theme was the controversy the play had caused by asserting that Jews had it better off in concentration camps than homosexuals. Sherman was reported again and again to have done ‘‘years’’ of research in the British Museum, and so the play was supposedly based on accurate information. One negative review said the only research you needed to write Bent was screenings of Cabaret and The Night Porter. I’d add: being tuned into urban gay life of the late 70’s, American style.

I saw the original Broadway production and have read the play several times since. I still think it’s less the story of survival of human dignity under the most atrocious circumstances, or even of gay pride, than it is a sexual fantasy. The heavy sexual atmosphere is created in the opening scene with references to leather, chains, and cocaine, making the play feel at that point like a transposition of the late-70’s Village to Berlin in the 1930’s. The atmosphere is heightened when Max’s big blond pick-up of the night before struts out of the bedroom nude.

In Dachau, Max’s new friend Horst is openly gay and pressures Max to admit the truth about himself. Remember—he’s not suggesting that Max come out to his parents at a family dinner—he’s telling Max to wear his pink triangle proudly in a concentration camp! It’s grotesque. So is the fact that despite lifting and carrying rocks 12 hours a day, they manage to chat and flirt like they’re at a bar:

Horst: Your body’s beautiful.
Max: I take care of it. I exercise.
Horst: What?
Max: At night I do push-ups and deep knee-bends in the barracks.

Horst doesn’t believe it, but Max says he does it to stay strong, to survive. This ludicrous exchange is heightened on-stage by the actors’ undeniably healthy and attractive shirtless bodies that nothing can disguise. Even when it was Richard Gere, his beauty could not blind me to the fact that his line was ridiculous. The play titillates the audience here by offering beefcake and saying ‘‘Okay, pretend you’re in a concentration camp and there’s this really hot guy—!’’

Max says that everyone in the camp talks about sex and misses it: ‘‘They go crazy missing it.’’ This is nonsense. Richard Plant points out, as many other writers about the camps have done, that in a brutal and unpredictable atmosphere of terror, torture, starvation, filth, with no medical care, most men’s sexual desires faded away. Prisoners were obsessed with food, not sex. While sex may have occurred, food was far more important, and in memoir after memoir about the camps, you encounter tales of dreaming about food, fantasizing post-liberation feasts, or memories of pre-war meals.

Given the play’s sexual emphasis, it’s not surprising that its real highlight is an act of fantasy sex achieved through talking. This act ostensibly proves that Max and Horst are still alive, still human. If anything proved that during the war, judging by Holocaust victims’ stories, it was kindnesses like sharing food or helping the weak stand during a role call. Such acts challenged the barbarity of the camps and ‘‘salvaged the highest values’’ of Western civilization, in the words of Anna Pawelczynska, the Polish sociologist who was in Auschwitz and wrote Values and Violence in Auschwitz thirty years later. Max does perform such an act when he gets medicine for Horst’s cold, but once again sex is central in Sherman’s vision. To get the medicine, Max has to blow an SS captain.

Bent’s greatest strength is shining a light on an unexplored region of the Holocaust Kingdom, but it is often one-dimensional, poorly written, dramatically unconvincing and even absurd. It’s believable and historically accurate when a guard throws a prisoner’s hat onto an electrified fence so that, when forced to retrieve it, he’ll electrocute himself. But that’s undercut when a guard is unbelievably explicit and almost solicitous in his instructions to Max and Horst; he’d be more likely to shout some orders and beat the two men. The SS actually knock on Max’s door when they come to murder the man he picked up. The Nazis in this play can seem like figures out of a melodrama, but then the cardboard nature of the characters is well-suited to a sexual fantasy. Bent reveals the poverty of Sherman’s imagination: he could not conceive of gays in a concentration camp without sex being central. Ironically, he confirms straight stereotypes about gay men, that even in that hellish environment, sex is still more important than anything else.

Source: Lev Raphael, ‘‘Deciphering the Gay Holocaust,’’ in Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Vol. 2, No. 3, July 31, 1995, p. 16.