Those Who Are Left From the directors of The Celluloid Closet, Paragraph 175 feelingly portrays the gay holocaust, creating a moving portrait of memory, pride, aging, and living by John W. Stiles

If I were to tell you of a documentary film showing at the Museum of Fine Arts this month about the Nazi treatment of gay men in World War II, your first reaction might be to recoil. The horrors visited on any victims of the Nazis do not make for a pleasant moviegoing experience. When the victims are selected because they’re gay, the terror may strike too close to home. If, though, I were to tell you that the film was the product of Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein, the same team that delivered The Times of Harvey Milk, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and The Celluloid Closet, you might be inclined to rethink your initial reluctance.

Paragraph 175 of the 1871 German Penal Code states, "An unnatural sex act committed between persons of the male sex...is punishable by imprisonment." The Nazis, in a homophobic frenzy to protect the "master race" from corruption by gays, expanded Paragraph 175 to cover kissing, hugging, and even fantasizing. More than 100,000 men were arrested by the Nazis under its provisions and somewhere upwards of 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. Most died there. Less than 10 of these men are known to be alive today. Six were interviewed for the Friedman/Epstein documentary. Two declined outright.

One of the six, Karl Gorath, shows us a photo album. As he turns the black construction paper pages of the album we see more and more place holders with no pictures. Klaus Muller, a young German historian employed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, serves as the interviewer for the film. He asks Karl about the blank spaces. "Bad memories, I don’t want to talk about them," he answers in German. He looks up and into the camera lens and waves his hand back and forth as if to say, "cut." The interview ends before it has begun.

Most documentary filmmakers leave uncooperative interview subjects on the editing room floor. In a testament both to their wisdom and courage, Epstein and Friedman leave the non-interview intact. Karl’s silence speaks loudly to the depth of the suffering these men endured. I asked Rob Epstein recently about the inclusion of that particular scene. He replied, "I’m glad you got it. We struggled with that scene, with how [not] to have it read by the viewer as a deficiency of the film. He’s the person that just won’t go back."

I asked Epstein how making Paragraph 175 had affected him personally. He took a deep breath before answering, "In unexpected ways. It made me think about aging and how would I like to imagine myself as an old gay man."

Paragraph 175 is not nearly so much about life in the Nazi concentration camps as it is about getting on with life in the aftermath. These men found ways to cope with what happened–some through denial, some through action. Take the example of the two youngest victims, one a German Jew, Gad Beck, the other a French gentile, Pierre Seel. Gad immigrated to Israel after the war, helping found the state of Israel. He returned to Germany in 1979 at age 56 to work with fellow survivors. Pierre Seel married after the war only to divorce when he broke his silence about his experience. He has a particularly poignant comment for interviewer Klaus Muller, who is a German. "I swore I’d never shake the hand of another German," he says. Pierre warns Klaus, "I am trying hard not to hurt you while you’re trying hard to understand me." Watching Pierre try not to hurt the young German while Klaus tries to avoid inflicting any more pain on the traumatized Pierre is one of many compelling and mesmerizing interchanges in this powerful film.

The film opens with Rupert Everett narrating the story of Berlin in the 1920s and ’30s, when the German capital was a haven for the avant-garde in the last days of the Weimar Republic. The sexual revolution of the late 20th century saw its precursor in Berlin. For example, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in 1919, with the intent of elevating the study of sex to a science. The institute housed the offices of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which was very possibly the first homosexual organization in modern times. Gay and lesbian nightlife flourished.

Ernst Roehm–the head of Hitler’s Brownshirts (the precursor of the Nazi SS) and one of the original founders of the Nazi Party–was gay and made little effort to conceal it. In part due to Roehm’s well-known gay status, the gay population in Germany felt it had little to fear from the Nazis. Tragically, Berlin’s fall from gay mecca to gay hell took less than one year. As the Nazi power base shifted and the homophobe Heinrich Himmler gained ascendancy over the elite Stormtrooper wing of the German General Army, Roehm’s fate changed from favored son to hunted criminal. On June 30, 1934, Roehm was dragged from his bed and executed. The fate of Germany’s gay and lesbian community was soon sealed. Near the first anniversary of Roehm’s execution, Paragraph 175 was modified to allow wholesale arrests of German males suspected of thwarting the propagation of the master race.

The Nazis largely ignored lesbians. Seen as little more than breeding factories, women were spared the persecution visited upon their male counterparts. Gay German men were subjected to bizarre experiments to "cure" them of their homosexuality, including testosterone implants and forced visits to brothels. Recalcitrant Germans and their non-Aryan brothers were targeted for slave labor and execution.

The six men who are the subjects of Paragraph 175 survived and talk of their lives before and after the war. When asked whom he could have talked to about his experience in the camp, Heinz F., stoic, reserved, sophisticated, talks of his mother’s unwillingness to listen. Klaus (the interviewer) probes, "Was there no one you might have shared your experience with?" Heinz F. replies, "My father," and breaks down for the first and only time in the interview. Gad Beck talks of making love on the train en route to the camp. When Klaus asks for clarification, Gad replies, "You are so slow, darling, so slow." From Heinz’s aloof stoicism to Gad’s carefree glibness, we see with startling clarity the epic battle to maintain pride and dignity in the face of overwhelming oppression and degradation.

Paragraph 175 has already earned multiple awards at festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe. I asked Epstein, the owner of two Oscars, four Emmys, three Peabody awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, what the awards mean to him. "In your everyday life you don’t live with the fact that you’ve won awards, you’re going about what’s right in front of you, the project you’re working on, you know, the tasks of life. In terms of my career, they do mean something. They validate a body of work and I’m very proud of that."

The body of work Epstein refers to includes some off-the-beaten-path films. Where Are We? is the result of a cross-country road trip in a mini-van in which Epstein and Friedman interviewed anyone and everyone they encountered about their joys, disappointments, lives, and loves. Epstein tells the story of gaining the assignment for their most unusual documentary so far, Xtreme: Sports to Die For: "The head of documentaries at HBO was watching an extreme sports event and thought, ‘My God, these people could kill themselves,’ and gave us the project as an assignment. We went to the second year of the X-games in San Diego and hung out there for awhile just as research and found a real interesting sub-culture." The result is a film not as much about so-called Xtreme Sports as it is about the culture it spawns and supports. Epstein and Friedman’s willingness to look below the surface lies at the heart of their success as filmmakers.

Theirs is an unusual partnership. Few films list "co-directors." I asked Epstein: How exactly do they go about co-directing?

"There’s no set formula, we’re both present on the set most of the time and, if for some reason, something takes us away, we trust the other to steer the ship. If we’re doing an interview, [only] one of us is doing the interview and confers with the other during reel changes. We go into an interview very well-prepped. We spend a lot of time working out what we expect the direction of the interview to be so we’re like-minded going in. And we trust each other’s instincts. In the editing process, we’re both very involved. We both have very strong editing backgrounds"–Friedman worked with William Friedkin on The Exorcist and Martin Scorcese on Raging Bull–"and so we’re directorial in the editing process. That allows for a lot more arguing and disagreement. We have similar sensibilities so when we argue it’s usually because something is not working and we have to find another way."

I asked Epstein how he and Friedman met.

"I was living in San Francisco in 1975 and working on the film Word Is Out, a very early landmark gay documentary. Friedman saw the show in New York and wanted to meet the filmmakers and came out to San Francisco. One of the filmmakers hosted my 24th birthday party and Friedman was at that party. We’ve been partners in film for 14 years; we were partners in life for 10 and we’ve remained family as our relationship changed."

I had read that Epstein had answered an ad for volunteers for Word Is Out in pre-production and ended up as a co-director on the project–I asked him how in the world that happened.

Epstein laughed. "A very brave move on the part of Peter Adair [a pioneer in gay and lesbian cinema who died of complications from AIDS in 1997] to bring in a neophyte. I guess he saw the possibility that as a young person, a young gay man, I would bring all of that into the film, which I did. He encouraged and nurtured and allowed me to grow in that process with a watchful eye but with a free rein. It was Peter’s brilliance and generosity that allowed that to happen."

From Word Is Out, his very first work, to his latest effort, Paragraph 175, Rob Epstein has repeatedly demonstrated the sensitivity toward his subjects and open-mindedness crucial to documentary filmmaking. Epstein talked about his approach to the subject and subjects of Paragraph 175.

"Going into it, I think we expected to have a much closer sense of camaraderie with these men. Their experience was so different from anything that we’ve experienced that it really wasn’t the case. [We were] outsiders from every respect. These were German men, Christian men, and subjected to abuses we cannot even fathom." Instead of drawing back, though, Epstein finds common ground with these men. "I’m not yet an old gay man, but I might be someday. I think about that in looking at these men and how they’re dealing with the last years and months of their lives and looking back at the lives they’ve lived."

Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein’s Paragraph 175 makes its Houston debut at the Museum of Fine Arts, Saturday & Sunday, May 19 & 20, 7:30 p.m. It will be screened again at the MFA Saturday—Monday, May 26-28, 5:30 p.m., as part of the Houston Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

When John isn’t writing for OutSmart, he keeps himself busy writing film reviews and essays for his website, www.johnwstiles.com.