IF, as a comelec commissioner maintains, there is no need to accredit Ang Ladlad, which seeks to represent the LGBT community in Congress as part of the party-list system, because there are already quite a number of gays and lesbians in Congress, then the body might as well revoke the accreditation given to parties seeking representation of women.

After all, there is already a large number of women in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, and we already have had two women presidents.

But “women” are listed among the marginalized sectors which deserve automatic accreditation in the party-list system, based on the argument that while women are not marginalized in terms of numbers (being one-half of the population), they have by virtue of historical experience been marginalized in terms of representation in political and decision-making bodies.

So it is with “sexual minorities,” men and women who, by virtue of their sexual orientation and preferences, have been marginalized not just in terms of political power but even in terms of social standing and relationships with the rest of society.

The good Comelec commissioners may have thought they were defending religious orthodoxy and social conventions when they scoffed at Ang Ladlad’s application. But here’s an example of how homophobia can be taken to extremes, and explains why homosexuals are often the first to be persecuted by fascist regimes. The passages are taken from “The Poisoned Embrace: A Brief History of Sexual Pessimism” by British journalist Lawrence Osborne.

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BOTH totalitarian states set out with almost quaint naivete to engineer souls…In the Soviet Union, prostitutes were sent to camps called prophylactoria to have themselves readjusted, while in the Third Reich, state-run brothels collected semen from unwitting “donors” in the pursuit of a plasma substitute…The Nazis set up Lebensborn or Founts of Life, maternity homes for SS wives (the SS journalist Gunter d’Alcquen explained that they provided an opportunity for “pre- and extra-conjugal mothers of good stock to give birth under relaxing conditions”) in order to harness the illegitimate children of SS indiscretions. Indeed, the Nazi state actively encouraged illegitimate children and was probably the only European state aggressively to heap public honour upon single-parent families during the war. Illegitimate children were given automatic state maintenance and state-paid guardians. Christian shame was swept under the carpet in order to let biology have its way.

Thus, whereas the Catholic Church had branded homosexuality a sin for essentially Gnostic reasons, the Nazis condemned it simply because it wasted sperm... Homosexuals in the camps were rarely tortured as they had been at the behest of the theologians, for whereas the latter wanted to purify the homosexual’s soul, the former simply wanted his semen. The Reich Bureau of Statistics figures show that they were castrating two hundred rapists a year right up until 1945. And yet because a worship of nature and biology dehumanizes the citizen by rendering his personal passions null, a new kind of pessimism began to emerge, one that grafted itself on to the trunk of the old. The old monsters gave itself new teeth.

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WE can see this in one unpleasant example. The Soviet exile Armand Maloumian, a former camp inmate of the 1930s, has left a disturbing account of the sexual codes used informally in the Soviet Gulag as a means of maintaining order.

Forced breeding was practiced routinely in the Gulag, just as in Germany. But even worse than forced breeding was the hierarchy used to keep the male camps orderly. There, homosexual rape was used to destroy the stubborn, and in a strange and unique way.

The stubborn inmate was raped by certain homosexually active inmates and then, against his will, labeled a “pederast.” What this did was to destroy his social status. He became an untouchable. If another convict so much as sat next to him, he too would become an opustivshiesya, a “degraded.” His disease could be handed on even by the simple exchange of a cigarette.

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ON ONE occasion, Maloumian writes, at a camp near Kharkov, a delivery of anchovies caused a riot among the prisoners, because the untouchables, pushing and kicking their way to the front of the queue, succeeded in touching the fish before anyone else. Why was there a riot? Because no one else dared eat them.

Of course, homosexual coercion is an ancient tradition in prisons. But during the Stalinist period this coercion began to take the form of a codified violence which had for its intention the utter destruction of the individual’s centre of gravity—a centre of gravity which Christianity had created but which the cult of biology could never for a second recognize. The prisoner started out as a sexual being with the usual attachments, perhaps some sediment of bourgeois erotic sentiment, and was then gradually humiliated and emptied until he became either a sexual gangster himself or an untouchable. In other words, he became an asexual ghost. Yet over this vast area of degradation and suffering, the state wove its predictable disguise, denying not only the use of sex as an instrument of terror, but the very existence of the homosexual form that terror had taken. Wasn’t sexual love the glass of water you drank in order to increase the number of citizens? Wasn’t the self, with its seething pessimism, as much an illusion as the supposed existence of Sapphics? And even as late as the 1980s, the Soviet Medical Encyclopedia gave no definition of lesbian love; it merely gave the geographical location of the fabled isle of Lesbos.