
There are moments in your life that are so supremely comical that you could almost believe someone is scripting them.
Picture this: a small group of Neo-Black Panthers are staging a demonstration complete with a crate podium and megaphone on a busy metropolitan street before a crowd of looky-loos. I’m happily on my way. At the exact moment the men invoke the sobriquet “White Nazi Devils”, I — blond, blue-eyed, 6’2” — happen past, the entire assemblage turning to look at me like I just sauntered in out of central casting, prompting me to simply shrug in mortification as if to imply “Sorry?…”
Utterly embarrassing, but even I have to admit it was hilarious.
Even if you don’t have your ear to the political ground, you have to have noticed that Nazis are everywhere lately, to the extent that I’d actually bet that they’re invoked more often in political discourse than even Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Health care, civil rights, financial reform, secularism — the fuckers are behind it all. They’re such over-used go-to villains that they’re practically on par with vampires. As gays, you find yourself becoming so inured to being equated with Nazis (I can understand how tough it is for Middle Easterners and the terrorist anchor around their necks) that it starts to roll off your back. Middle America just loves casting us as encroaching shock troops out to stage a Christian Holocaust. Still, it’s easy to overlook how interwoven — in some ways imposed upon us, in other ways not so much — the Nazi aesthetic is embedded in gay culture. That image of buff, swaggering, Teutonic-looking guys with shaved pates and copious tats is pretty ubiquitous, meaning somewhere along the line we adopted and reinterpreted the brand upon us. Villainy can be such a perverse turn-on in its way, and the antagonism of oppression is such that its friction inspires a certain erotic hostility.
In the end, Nazis — be they authentic or subliminal, accurate or campy, implied or inferred — are pretty rod-inspiring despite the, y’know, genocide and forced labor, so while we’re not exactly proud to present you with some of our guilty, guilty pleasures, here are our favorite Inglorious Bastards in no particular order: (read the full article)

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