Röhm is an exception that proves the rule. Despite everything he had going for him in the Nazi party, they still came for him, and then targeted all other homosexuals.
Fascism is reactionary and has to uphold the heterosexual nuclear family. Homofascism is not really tenable.
Fascism is always at its core an anti-communist ideology. It was literally invented by liberals to crush communist movements spreading across Europe in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Jews and gay people were targeted because it was easiest to associate the Others (who have always been hated across Europe) with “Leninism” to tarnish the reputation of communism. Fascism was always about protecting the liberal capitalist order. The arch-liberal Churchill admitted this himself.
This was also what elevated centuries-old anti-Semitism to industrial scale genocide in Nazi Germany - the only way to crush communism is to exterminate the seeds that could sow the ideas of communism (Cultural Bolshevism) and corrupt the mind of the people in the first place.
As far as I can remember there were millions of SA men, they all knew Rohm was gay, and they were his devoted followers. Rohm wasn't purged because he was gay. Rohm was purged because he had millions more potential fighters than every other group of fighters the Nazis controlled combined. His homosexuality was the justification for an overtly politically power grab. It's the propaganda campaign they used to explain to the people why Hitler was turning on his best friend and closest ally. Rohm's street level SA was a threat to the other organs of the Nazi Party, especially Himmler, and represented a massive concentration of power that Hitler did not have absolute control over. And even then, Hitlers other lieutenants apparently had to bully him in to turning on Rohm because apparently they were genuinely friends who like and respected each other.
I could be wrong about all this, but that's the history as I understand it. Much like the designation of Jews is arbitrary, and fascists can turn on any outsider group, the enmity against homosexuality is also arbitrary. Hypermasculine states have had normalized homosexual behaviors since time out of mind without any internal contradictions. If the circumstances of industrial capitalism had arisen under a society with different sexual attitudes than late imperialist Europe they probably would have picked something else as their rallying point to define themselves against.
Röhm is an exception that proves the rule. Despite everything he had going for him in the Nazi party, they still came for him, and then targeted all other homosexuals.
Fascism is reactionary and has to uphold the heterosexual nuclear family. Homofascism is not really tenable.
Fascism is always at its core an anti-communist ideology. It was literally invented by liberals to crush communist movements spreading across Europe in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Jews and gay people were targeted because it was easiest to associate the Others (who have always been hated across Europe) with “Leninism” to tarnish the reputation of communism. Fascism was always about protecting the liberal capitalist order. The arch-liberal Churchill admitted this himself.
This was also what elevated centuries-old anti-Semitism to industrial scale genocide in Nazi Germany - the only way to crush communism is to exterminate the seeds that could sow the ideas of communism (Cultural Bolshevism) and corrupt the mind of the people in the first place.
As far as I can remember there were millions of SA men, they all knew Rohm was gay, and they were his devoted followers. Rohm wasn't purged because he was gay. Rohm was purged because he had millions more potential fighters than every other group of fighters the Nazis controlled combined. His homosexuality was the justification for an overtly politically power grab. It's the propaganda campaign they used to explain to the people why Hitler was turning on his best friend and closest ally. Rohm's street level SA was a threat to the other organs of the Nazi Party, especially Himmler, and represented a massive concentration of power that Hitler did not have absolute control over. And even then, Hitlers other lieutenants apparently had to bully him in to turning on Rohm because apparently they were genuinely friends who like and respected each other.
I could be wrong about all this, but that's the history as I understand it. Much like the designation of Jews is arbitrary, and fascists can turn on any outsider group, the enmity against homosexuality is also arbitrary. Hypermasculine states have had normalized homosexual behaviors since time out of mind without any internal contradictions. If the circumstances of industrial capitalism had arisen under a society with different sexual attitudes than late imperialist Europe they probably would have picked something else as their rallying point to define themselves against.