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Event Details: 

Join Professor Andrew Lear, founder of  Oscar Wilde Tours, the LGBTQ history and culture tour company, on Sunday, March 26 from 2 to 3:30pm EST for an online Zoom tour about the LGBTQ resistance heroes of Nazi Europe. This program honors the memory of such queer greats as Gad Beck (see article below), a gay Jewish teenager who led the largest resistance organization in Nazi Berlin and Willem Arondeus, a Dutch artist and resistance fighter who wanted people after the war to know that "homosexuals are not cowards."

Registrants will have access to the recording for 14 days after the live event. 

ANY DEFINITION of a “hero” has to be expansive enough to accommodate everyone from Achilles to Harriet Tubman, among many other well-known examples both fictional and historical. One person in history who isn’t well known, but who certainly fits almost any definition of a hero, is Gad Beck, who resisted the Nazis inside Germany during World War II and saved several dozen lives.

Beck started life as a gay Jewish boy (also short, slight, and nonviolent) and ended up leading the most successful resistance cell in Nazi Berlin—and he even survived the war. In fact, he lived until 2012, which means that if I had started my research on him just a few years before I did, I might have been able to meet him in person. During World War II, he won many small victories against the Nazis in the best of all possible ways—through bravery, a capacity to make (and defend) friends, and wit. In many ways, he was reminiscent of the mythical archetype of the trickster, which could embrace everyone from Homer’s Odysseus to the Norse god Loki. ... Continue Reading