LGBTQ Breaking News Service

Voices of Eswatini, a new project from Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities (ESGM) and All Out, amplifies the voices of the small but strong LGBT community in a tiny kingdom in southern Africa where same-sex relations are illegal.

Same-sex sexual activity is criminalized in Eswatini under the colonial-era Roman-Dutch common law that is still applied in the country, which officially changed its name from Swaziland in 2018. The Voices of Eswatini campaign by ESGM and the online advocacy group All Out seeks to convince the government to repeal the prohibitions against sodomy.

The project presents stories from LGBT people in video, audio, and print format to help other people in Eswatini understand their experiences, and how discrimination, persecution, and social stigma harm them.

S’Thembile, a 27-year-old lesbian, says she was gang raped by a group of the police who declared that, because she was a lesbian, her “body is going to waste.”

“I was angry but then I didn’t want to let my mind stay in all those things. I went through a lot of counselling,” S’Thembile says in Voices of Eswatini. “For me, being an LGBTI person, it hasn’t been the easiest and the smoothest journey of my life but if I have to live and had a chance of choosing, I would still choose to be a lesbian. It’s who I am. It’s a life that God has given me.”

Many of the queer Swazis featured in the project say that they routinely face harassment and violence in their communities, and that the police will give them no help.

“After I reported an assault to the cops with no success, all they asked me was, ‘Am I gay?’ Ignoring the fact that I had been violated and fought for my life,” says Thando, a gay 27-year-old man.

“I have had suicidal thoughts that flood my mind and I tried so much or so many times to take my life but somehow I could not go through with it,” Thando says. “I have so much to do with my life, and the friends I have now have made me strong. They’ve kept me strong and sometimes I wonder what and where would I be without them.”

Many queer Swazis flee to neighboring South Africa, where LGBT people have more legal rights and protections, as Thobile Shiba did when her parents forced her to drop out of school when she came out as a lesbian.

“I went to Nelspruit, South Africa, where I felt at home and found other lesbians. When I’d would come back home, I’d find that the news of me being a lesbian were still doing the rounds and it really didn’t sit well with me,” Shiba says.

Shiba says she wants to see the Eswatini government promote tolerance of LGBT people so that families can stay together.

“To change the situation in Swaziland [which remains a common name for Eswatini] for people like me would be to put educative measures into place so the parents could learn about such issues,” Shiba says. “We as children suffer when we being forced out of our homes because in the rural areas people like me are branded as demons.”

A young gay man named Mpolweni shares a story of an abusive relationship that illustrates how the lack of legal rights for queer people increases danger even from intimate partners.

“He took advantage of me knowing that our same-sex relationships are not legal in our country. Every time I had an argument, he’d beat me up,” Mpolweni says. “I ended up telling myself, ‘This is not how I should be living my life.’ But then it was like jumping from the frying pan to the fire because at home they neglected me, disowned me actually.”

Still, Mpolweni has hope that tolerance can improve in Eswatini.

“Maybe if they can treat us as normal people because we are normal,” he says. “There is nothing that is abnormal about us except our sexual preferences and to be recognized legally like everything we want to do, there shouldn’t be any hiccups along the way.”

Related articles:

Voices of Eswatini, a new project from Eswatini Sexual and Gender Minorities (ESGM) and All Out, amplifies the voices of the small but strong LGBT community in a tiny kingdom in southern Africa where same-sex relations are illegal.

Same-sex sexual activity is criminalized in Eswatini under the colonial-era Roman-Dutch common law that is still applied in the country, which officially changed its name from Swaziland in 2018. The Voices of Eswatini campaign by ESGM and the online advocacy group All Out seeks to convince the government to repeal the prohibitions against sodomy.

The project presents stories from LGBT people in video, audio, and print format to help other people in Eswatini understand their experiences, and how discrimination, persecution, and social stigma harm them.

S’Thembile, a 27-year-old lesbian, says she was gang raped by a group of the police who declared that, because she was a lesbian, her “body is going to waste.”

“I was angry but then I didn’t want to let my mind stay in all those things. I went through a lot of counselling,” S’Thembile says in Voices of Eswatini. “For me, being an LGBTI person, it hasn’t been the easiest and the smoothest journey of my life but if I have to live and had a chance of choosing, I would still choose to be a lesbian. It’s who I am. It’s a life that God has given me.”

Many of the queer Swazis featured in the project say that they routinely face harassment and violence in their communities, and that the police will give them no help.

“After I reported an assault to the cops with no success, all they asked me was, ‘Am I gay?’ Ignoring the fact that I had been violated and fought for my life,” says Thando, a gay 27-year-old man.

“I have had suicidal thoughts that flood my mind and I tried so much or so many times to take my life but somehow I could not go through with it,” Thando says. “I have so much to do with my life, and the friends I have now have made me strong. They’ve kept me strong and sometimes I wonder what and where would I be without them.”

Many queer Swazis flee to neighboring South Africa, where LGBT people have more legal rights and protections, as Thobile Shiba did when her parents forced her to drop out of school when she came out as a lesbian.

“I went to Nelspruit, South Africa, where I felt at home and found other lesbians. When I’d would come back home, I’d find that the news of me being a lesbian were still doing the rounds and it really didn’t sit well with me,” Shiba says.

Shiba says she wants to see the Eswatini government promote tolerance of LGBT people so that families can stay together.

“To change the situation in Swaziland [which remains a common name for Eswatini] for people like me would be to put educative measures into place so the parents could learn about such issues,” Shiba says. “We as children suffer when we being forced out of our homes because in the rural areas people like me are branded as demons.”

A young gay man named Mpolweni shares a story of an abusive relationship that illustrates how the lack of legal rights for queer people increases danger even from intimate partners.

“He took advantage of me knowing that our same-sex relationships are not legal in our country. Every time I had an argument, he’d beat me up,” Mpolweni says. “I ended up telling myself, ‘This is not how I should be living my life.’ But then it was like jumping from the frying pan to the fire because at home they neglected me, disowned me actually.”

Still, Mpolweni has hope that tolerance can improve in Eswatini.

“Maybe if they can treat us as normal people because we are normal,” he says. “There is nothing that is abnormal about us except our sexual preferences and to be recognized legally like everything we want to do, there shouldn’t be any hiccups along the way.”

Related articles:

A volcano in a remote location in Iceland began “quietly” erupting earlier this month, giving the area around it a consistent flow of lava for the first time in about 800 years.

For Sumarliði and Jónsi, that sounded like the perfect wedding venue.

Related: Cruel videographer walks out in middle of wedding to protest same-sex marriage

The Fagradalsfjall volcano is on the Southern peninsula of Iceland, and volcanic activity has gone on for past several weeks fissures. It is possible to safely visit the eruption area, but only at certain times and in a certain manner. There are no amenities near the location, no clear paths, and the wind has to blow in a certain direction or else visitors will be hit with gases from the eruption.

Sumarliði and Jónsi had scheduled their wedding for last year, but it got postponed due to the pandemic. This year, they saw the volcano as an opportunity to make their wedding more special.

“The whole idea was very last-minute as we then had four days to find suits, polish our rings, get Sumarliði’s hair cut, and meet with Árni, the wedding officiant,” they told Queerty.

They got in contact with wedding planners Pink Iceland, who helped them research the location.

“So we were well aware we were not in charge. Mother Nature is in charge,” said Birna Hrönn Björnsdóttir of Pink Iceland. “So one of the security measures was to have a gas measurement type of thing with us at all times.”

Then there was making the journey from where they live in downtown Reykjavik to the mountainous, most southwestern part of the island nation.

“The volcanic eruption site lies in a valley about 90 minutes from where we parked. So we hiked together in full hiking gear with trekking poles and the whole nine yards,” they explained. “The hike was fun but we had to walk through a snowstorm most of the way which stressed Sumarliði out as he was terrified of freezing to death once he’d changed into his wedding suit.”

When the small group made their way to an optimal site, they set up a small area, changed, and hoped for the conditions to improve.

And they did.

Birna shared, “We had the luxury of picking from three craters that were erupting when we got there. And almost immediately, as we chose the spot, after we had hiked for three or four hours, the sky kind of cleared and we got a blue sky.”

“Something magical happened: the wind died down, it stopped snowing, and the sun came out,” they recalled. The pair came together, and “as we were about to start the ceremony, a wall in the crater burst and a slow river of neon-orange lava flowed past us as we said our vows, exchanged our rings and got married.”

“It was a beautiful, awe-inspiring, and yet terrifying experience to get married in front of this majestic wonder of mother nature.”

It’s a lovely conclusion to the couple’s journey, after meeting on Tinder in 2015. They are no stranger to scenic moments — Jónsi proposed to Sumarliði at the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Bastille Day in 2017, right in front of an exuberant fireworks display.

This time, their joyous moment was not only beautifully documented, but was featured on the BBC in reporting of the ongoing volcanic activity.

See more of the photos as shared with LGBTQ Nation‘s sibling site Queerty.

by Christopher Rudolph
7h ago

Is your blood sugar low? If so, then Symone has just the thing to satisfy your Sweet Toof.

The Arkansas-born, Los Angeles-based queen was never afraid to make a statement when sashaying down the RuPaul’s Drag Race runway. A frontrunner from the beginning, Symone won the first two maxi-challenges back-to-back. She would go onto win four maxi-challenges but land in the bottom two twice, for the Rusical and Nice Girl Roast episodes.

Symone turned it up to 11 during the acting challenges, but she also brought it with her fashion. Her outfits highlighted Black culture and mixed couture with political commentary, including her du-rag train look and her Fascinating Fascinators look with bloody bullet holes on her back and “Say Their Names” etched on the back of her headdress.

Symone spoke with NewNowNext about making it to the final four of Drag Race Season 13, if her good friend Gigi Goode had any advice for her going into the finale, and how seeing RuPaul on Sabrina the Teenage Witch inspired her drag journey.
 

Hi, Symone! First off, your runway looks were so beautiful, and they were also political. Why was it important to you to celebrate Black culture on the runway?

Well, it was important because there have been other queens before me and they’ve paved the way for me, for sure. I wanted to celebrate it in a way that I’d never seen before, and I think it was a way for me to send the love out to all of the kids who felt like I did growing up, who felt bad about being Black and gay. There’s kind of a connotation with it, especially in our own community — I’m just going to be real. So it was really important for me to show people, specifically queer Black people, that you can be Black and gay and love yourself and have fun, and be gorgeous, and stunning, and also say something with how you present yourself. I had three points I wanted to hit on the runway. I wanted to have fun; I wanted people to be like, “That’s a Symone look,” I didn’t want to ever look like anyone else; and I also wanted to say something. People need a little hope, a little love, and a little encouragement everything’s going to be okay, especially in the times we’re in right now. So I kind of just wanted to blend all of that together.

Were your runway looks always going to be political, or did last summer’s protests influence that?

Oh no, it would have always been that way. I’ve always been that type of person. I don’t want to just be a pretty thing. I think if anything, it made it more important to me to do it because how you look and how you express yourself is very important. It’s drag; it’s a visual art form. As much as it is comedy and things, it is also a visual thing, and it’s important to be yourself. I’ve always been that way, and I just think that’s the purpose of art, to challenge the times and reflect on it.

When you said queens that paved the way, are there one or two queens that come to mind who really inspire you?

Shea [Couleé]. I think her being on the show. And imagine, I auditioned for her season and I wish I could show you the audition tape — you would have been like, “No. Send her home first, now.” [Laughs] I think for me, she was very pinnacle because she very much opened the door for me. And Naomi [Smalls], being able to infuse fashion and drag in the way that she did, she’s very big up there for me, too.

Seeing RuPaul getting choked up talking about how proud he is of you…we don’t see that very often as viewers. What was that moment like for you?

It was amazing because if anything, it’s just like, oh my God, thank you so much. I love you. You were a huge influence in my life. Seeing you on Sabrina the Teenage Witch — it’s insane, just snapping your fingers and becoming this gorgeous Glamazonian woman, I was just like, oh, my God! And now, for you to give that love back to me for showing myself on the show, you cannot buy that. It was beautiful for me and I think, in a way, beautiful for everyone to see. I could probably cry now thinking about it.

You’re standing up on stage, and the most famous drag queen in the world is saying that they’re proud of you.

It was what you strive for … I mean, of course, you strive for the [Drag Race] crown, but it’s kind of what you want when you go on the show. You want to impress RuPaul and to get that kind of love and adoration. You can say whatever you want, but that’s what you want when you go on the show. And I got that, so yay for me. Yay for Symone!

So what was it like preparing for the finale?

Preparing for the finale was fun and very stressful, as you can probably imagine, because I wanted to … as much as I’d shown of myself, I felt like, okay, I can give them more, I can give them another side of me. So that was really important to me and kind of nerve-racking in the sense that you never know what’s going to happen. But then when we actually started filming and we were getting ready and whatnot, there was a certain sense of calm that washed over me because it was like, you’ve made it to the top four, so now just show who you are and just further prove to them why you deserve to be crowned. I know I did what I needed to do, and I know that I have an impact. Those are all the things I wanted, regardless of what happened. But don’t get it twisted — I came there to win, I said it. But I know I did what I needed to do and I’m very proud of everything. It was all a lot of fun, a lot of nerves, but overall just a beautiful experience.

And you four, the final four, you all seem so close.

Yeah. I’m literally getting messages now from them. We talk every day. We have a group chat. Before we got busy, busy, we would call each other every day on FaceTime. We’re really, really close. We root for each other. We’re all so different but it’s love, and we were even filming the finale being like, “You all bitches, we made it here.” It was really lovely.
 

I know Gigi’s finale was a little different, but did Gigi have any advice for you going into the finale?

It was kind of the same advice that she had going into the competition, which was, “Have fun with it and really bask in it because it’s almost over, so just enjoy it.” I had a tendency to be a little crazy person when I was filming, so they were just like, “Bitch, you made it to the top four, so just literally enjoy yourself. These looks are stunning. You’re going to be great. It’s fine.”

What was your favorite look that you wore this season?

People ask me this and I’m like, it is so hard. They’re just all so beautiful.

I know.

They’re like my babies. Well, the one that is the closest to my heart is my du-rag look because that came from seeing my cousins, my uncles, and my brothers. When I look at that look, I think of them, and it’s such a sweet place in my heart. It just warms me every time I see it, and I think it’s so important. And it was a strong look at the beginning. We don’t know the runway until we know, so I did that one for me.

When you think back to filming Drag Race, do you have a favorite moment or a moment that just encapsulates your time there?

Not a specific moment. I think of it all as one big journey. I think the runways and seeing RuPaul light up and the judges light up and everyone just getting it immediately. All the runways and the times with Mother Ru and the judges with them giving advice, those are my favorite moments. There are so many things I enjoyed about filming. I learned so much about myself and what I’m capable of, and it was just all so great. I don’t really have a specific moment, although I will say getting to talk with Ru and Michelle [during the Tic-Tac lunch], that was pretty major.

Well, I mean, Ru was right. You walked out on that stage, and we knew instantly, “Oh, she’s a star.”

There she is! Oop!

The U.S. State Department has authorized embassies worldwide to display the rainbow pride flag on embassy flagpoles along with the American flag, which reverses the Trump-era policy. 

In a State Department cable reviewed by news outlets, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the diplomatic outposts are not required to fly the LGBT pride flag but can decide if it is appropriate to display on the flagpole “in light of local conditions.”

The rainbow pride flag can be displayed before May 17, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, through the end of June, according to the cable and a State Department official who spoke with the New York Times.

June is officially recognized as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, which are viewed by many as the beginning of the gay rights movement. 

In the cable reported originally by Foreign Policy, State Department officials were told to follow the “do no harm” policy to prevent backlash against the local LGBT population.

“Posts should support efforts to repeal [criminalization] legislation, while ensuring that ‘do no harm’ remains our overarching principle so U.S. efforts do not inadvertently result in backlash or further marginalization of the LGBTQI+ community,” the cable was quoted as stating. 

Though the flag would be relatively non-controversial in some countries, in many Middle Eastern or North African countries where same-sex relationships are banned, the pride flag could stir up contention. 

Franklin Graham, a prominent conservative evangelical leader and president of Samaritan’s Purse, criticized the decision on Facebook. He said just because something is “authorized” does not make it right. 

“Why should a flag representing one group of people and a specific agenda be literally raised up above all others and allowed to fly at our embassies and consulates?” Graham, the son of legendary evangelist Billy Graham, wrote.

“The embassies represent the United States of America on foreign soil—only the U.S. flag should be flown. Not the gay pride flag, not the Christian flag, not any other flag.”

“The previous administration had a one-flag rule that the Biden administration has rescinded,” he continued. “Our U.S. flag represents the sacrifice, the honor, the unity, the patriotism—and the blood—that made America great. Pray for our nation and our leaders.”

The Trump administration denied requests from U.S. embassies to display the rainbow flag on the embassy flagpole to celebrate LGBT Pride Month and only allowed the American flag to be flown on the flagpole. 

In defense of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s one-flag rule, former Vice President Mike Pence told NBC News in June 2019 that he and the president believe only the U.S. flag should be displayed on the embassy flagpole. 

“We both feel that way very passionately, but when it comes to the American flagpole, and American embassies, and capitals around the world, one American flag flies,” Pence proclaimed. 

The Trump administration’s State Department reportedly denied requests from U.S. embassies in Brazil, Germany, Israel and Latvia to fly the rainbow pride flag for LGBT Pride Month. 

Embassies were still allowed to display the pride flag outside of the embassy under Trump, and some embassies displayed the flag elsewhere. 

South Korea, for example, displayed the pride flag on the building instead of the flagpole until embassy officials removed it and a Black Lives Matter banner, the New York Times reported. 

During the Obama administration, embassies were allowed to fly the rainbow flag under the American flag on the embassy flagpole. 

Blinken pledged to support the LGBT agenda by flying the pride flag at U.S. embassies and reinstating the special envoy for the human rights of LGBTI persons upon being sworn in this January.

The State Department is yet to make a formal announcement regarding this decision.

Video of a Nashville executive harassing a gay couple at a prom has gone viral, and even comedian Kathy Griffin has called out the arrogant CEO.

“You look like an idiot,” Sam Johnson, 46, CEO of the telemedicine platform VisuWell, can be heard telling student Dalton Stevens, who showed up at Franklin High School’s prom in a red dress.

Related: Kathy Griffin gets ultimate revenge on MAGA harasser by turning her in to FBI for rioting at Capitol

“We went to this hotel close to where we live and we got a lot of good photos and we were there for about an hour and right as we were about to leave we standing outside in this little middle area with a bunch of buildings surrounding us,” said Jacob Geittmann, Stevens’s boyfriend who recorded the video and posted it to TikTok.

“This man comes up and he’s about an inch away from my boyfriend and he says, ‘What are you wearing?’ And he’s like, ‘A dress, why?’ And he’s like, ‘Why are you wearing that? You shouldn’t be wearing that.’”

Geittmann said that Johnson started “going on and on” with “homophobic banter” like “You look disgusting, you look ridiculous, you look like an idiot. Men shouldn’t be wearing this.”

His video starts with the confrontation already in progress. Stevens is telling Johnson to get away from him. The teen walks to go into the hotel, and Johnson follows him.

An adult can be heard telling Johnson to stop because it’s “a special night” for the teens, and he shrugs in his short-sleeve collared shirt and grins.

“I’m sorry, I’m gorgeous,” the teen says.

“Are you?” Johnson responds.

At one point, Johnson swings at Geittmann’s phone and tells him to stop recording. He also appears to hit Stevens in the arm.

In another video, Geittman said that Johnson succeeded in knocking the phone out of his hand and it hit the ground, which is not shown. He said Johnson was “pretty obviously drunk.”

After being posted to TikTok this past Saturday, the video went viral and was shared on Reddit and Twitter.

“It seems like he’s dying to be online famous,” Kathy Griffin wrote when sharing it on Twitter.

Johnson told NewsWeek that the allegations against him are “entirely false.” He said that the gay teens were “obnoxious” and “loud” and that he wanted them to “tone down the vulgarities around the families and children who were present.”

He said he was at the restaurant at the hotel when he “was presented with their loud cursing.”

“Making it about the dress was their idea and they edited out most of the exchange. I have no ill will towards anyone or their personal choices, so long as it does not harm me or my family.”

After the encounter, Geittman said that his boyfriend “looked gorgeous, everybody loved it, and nobody had a problem with it.”

Intimate partner violence is a serious problem in Canada and around the world.

This form of gender-based cruelty causes a lot of pain and suffering.

Intimate partner violence or IPV can be categorized into three types: psychological, sexual, and physical.

 Women are more likely than men to experience abuse from their romantic partners.

A new report by Statistics Canada indicated that 44 percent of women in the country reported in 2018 that they have experienced some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime.

“By comparison, this was the case for just over one-third (36%) of men,” the federal agency stated Monday (April 26).

In the same report, Statistics Canada noted that people from other population groups indicated “higher-than-average rates of IPV”.

Foremost of these are members of the LGBT community.

“Sexual minority people—those whose sexual orientation is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or another sexual orientation that is not heterosexual—are much more likely to experience all forms of intimate partner violence than heterosexual people,” Statistics Canada stated.

For instance, in 2018, two-thirds or 67 percent of sexual minority women said that they had experienced at least one type of IPV since the age of 15.

This rate was “significantly higher” than the 44 percent of heterosexual women who reported similar experiences.

“When broken down by sexual orientation, relatively similar proportions of bisexual (68%) and lesbian (61%) women said that they had experienced some form of IPV in their lifetime, though both were significantly more likely to experience IPV than heterosexual women,” Statistics Canada reported.

Moreover, more than one-quarter or 27 percent of sexual minority women reported being sexually assaulted by an intimate partner at some point since age 15, compared with 11 percent of heterosexual women.

“As was the case among sexual minority women, sexual minority men were much more likely than heterosexual men to experience both physical and sexual assault by an intimate partner over their lifetime,” Statistics Canada reported.

To illustrate, about one-third or 31 percent of sexual minority men indicated that they had been either physically or sexually assaulted by an intimate partner since age 15, compared with 17 percent of heterosexual men.

People with disabilities also experience a high rate of intimate partner violence.

More than half or 55 percent of women with disabilities experienced some form of IPV in their lifetime, compared with 37 percent of women without disabilities, Statistics Canada reported.

The agency noted that the most commonly reported form of IPV among women with disabilities was psychological abuse (53 percent), physical abuse (32 percent), and sexual assault (18 percent).

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The German biochemist Otto Warburg made few friends — not among his fellow scientists, despite his Nobel Prize for unlocking one of the secrets of cancer, and not among the Nazi leadership, who nevertheless let this scion of a famed Jewish family run one of the Reich’s most important biology research centers.

How the brilliant and imperious Warburg (1883-1970) stood up to the Nazis and continued his sometimes lonely pursuit of a cure for cancer is the subject of Sam Apple’s forthcoming biography, “Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection” (Liveright). It’s a deep dive into the history of cancer research, the anti-Jewish madness and medical quackery that consumed Hitler, and the recent rediscovery of the “Warburg effect” and how it might just explain the West’s cancer epidemic.

Apple is the author of two previous books, “Schlepping Through the Alps” and “American Parent,” and teaches journalism and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. He spoke to The Jewish Week from his home in Wynnewood, Pa. This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

I hate asking the “why this book” question to start any interview, but when I remember your first book — about an eccentric Austrian shepherd who happens to sing Yiddish folk songs — I wondered why you would want to spend so much time with a person as unpleasant as Otto Warburg.

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I came to the topic of cancer metabolism before I came to Warburg. I was interested in the science, but it really wasn’t until I came across Warburg that I decided to write a magazine article, and then a book. He was an awful guy in many respects, but he was a genius, and he was an eccentric and I, you know, I’ve always been attracted to those kinds of characters. 

Place Warburg in his time, which is the first part of the 20th century. Germany is a scientific powerhouse and he’s studying plant cells and that eventually morphs into cancer research.

His father Emil was a really prominent physics professor at the University of Berlin, at a time when it was still very unusual for Jews to reach a central position. Einstein really loved Emil. Otto grows up in a household surrounded by some of the greatest minds in the history of science. Somebody described him as having even a religious devotion to science. 

The question for him is, what can he do to be a great scientist in his own right and reach the fame of his heroes — Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, the great German scientist who won the Nobel Prize for his studies of infectious diseases? He decides, I think very consciously, that he’s going to defeat the great disease of his time and era, and that was increasingly becoming cancer.

We know the Warburgs from his American cousins, the famous Jewish banking family, but by the time you get to Otto it’s two generations removed from his Jewish grandparents.

He’s not particularly close with that branch of the family, but his father grew up Jewish, although, like many German Jews of that generation, assimilated. Although there’s no evidence that Emil rejected his Judaism, Otto grew up with no real Jewish upbringing, and didn’t think of himself as Jewish.

Otto won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1931 for his contributions to cellular metabolism and cellular respiration. What should we know about him in terms of science, especially now, as you write in the second half of your book, his ideas are making a comeback? 

Sam Apple (Liveright)

Because his father’s a physicist and Einstein is one of his heroes, he views everything through the lens of energy. In 1923 he makes this fairly remarkable discovery that cancer cells are overeating — eating in a way very different from other cells. That leads to a lot of scientific interest about the connection between metabolism and cancer, but after World War II, his ideas largely began to disappear.

Because of his record during the war? Otto chose to stay in Germany as the head of his fiefdom, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Dahlem, when so many other scientists, Jews and non-Jews, were leaving either out of self-preservation or to protest the Nazi regime.

There are a number of reasons. One is that people detest Warburg. He wasn’t a likable guy, in many respects, and he did himself no favors by making sort of extreme statements saying his own work was all you needed to know about cancer and the rest is garbage. 

He was a tremendous narcissist. One example: He didn’t want to be photographed with other scientists out there, including Nobel Prize winners. He was brilliant and he thought of himself as above everybody else. He had an aristocratic personality.

A bigger factor was the genetics revolution that took hold in the late 20th century. As they began to understand DNA and cancer mutations, Warburg’s study of the energy reactions began to seem very unimportant.

He was a patriotic German and served in a famed Prussian cavalry during the First World War. Was he a Nazi sympathizer? 

He hated the Nazis but for not entirely the right reasons. He stood up to the Nazis when they came to his institute, and basically screamed at them, saying, “I’ll burn down this institute before I let you interrupt my work.” He wasn’t particularly worried, however, about what they were doing to everybody else. He was happy to just sort of be alone in his institute.

You write that 2,600 scientists had left the country, especially but not only Jews and half Jews and quarter Jews like Warburg (as the Nazis saw him). And yet despite his Jewish ancestry he manages to survive, and the Nazis let him stay on. How does he pull that off?

When I grew up I learned in Jewish day school that the Nazis defined a Jew as someone having one Jewish grandparent. Warburg had two Jewish grandparents. But it’s more complicated than that. In the initial racial regulations of 1933, there were exceptions — for example, if you had served in World War I. And restrictions only applied to people in the civil service and government positions. It really came to a head in 1935 when a lot of Nazi officials were frustrated that so many people were sort of skirting the regulations and that the definition hadn’t been fully worked out. In 1935, they passed the Nuremberg laws, which were meant to crack down on Jews and also provide some clarity as to who’s a Jew and who’s not. 

It’s eerie and macabre how, in a country known for its science, Hitler tried to bring fake scientific precision to deciding who was and wasn’t racially a Jew. 

There are different regulations according to your parentage, so someone like Otto, who is considered a “first degree Mischling,” or mix-ling, was sort of in the middle. Mischlings were assimilated into German society, went to German churches and their relatives weren’t Jewish, and Hitler was savvy enough in the early days, when Germany still cared about its international reputation, to see that cracking down on them might not be so easy. But as things progressed and particularly after the start of World War II, there was no more political need to protect the Mischlinge people. Hitler hated them especially because they were the living embodiment of what he detested: the intermingling of Jews and Aryans. 

In January, 1942, after the second “final solution” conference, Warburg’s status became much more precarious. I believe the preponderance of evidence that it really was the cancer research that saved him. 

You write how cancer was both a personal fixation of Hitler’s but also a national fear. 

(Liveright)

There’s a tremendous amount of evidence that he was fixated on cancer more so than other diseases. And it makes sense because he lost his mother to breast cancer. There is this phenomenally strange story about a Jewish doctor coming in to care for his mother and young Hitler, by the doctor’s side, telling him to try whatever he can to help his mother. He ends up giving her these terrible, painful treatments and he later described Hitler as the most distraught person he’d ever seen.

But cancer was a very large part of Hitler’s hypochondria. He was constantly talking about the research, spouting off nonsensical theories about cancer and trying a lot of dietary therapies. I don’t have clear proof that Hitler was directly involved in Warburg’s case, but there’s a lot of things pointing to it. On June 21, 1941, when the Nazis would launch Operation Barbarossa, the biggest military operation in history, there’s a conversation between Hitler and Goebbels and they’re talking about cancer research. Warburg had applied for what they call a German “blood certificate” to have his status, you know, upgraded, so I think it’s very likely that Hitler personally intervened to [protect] Warburg.

Hitler also uses cancer as a metaphor for Jews, and the real and fake science gets mixed into his theories of how cancer itself is a symptom of a society that’s allowed itself to be degenerated.

Hitler used the metaphor all the time. You can find it in “Mein Kampf” and his various speeches. In Hitler’s case, the connection between Jews and cancer was more than a metaphor. It was much more a literal connection in his mind. He was worried about cancer and he was worried about Jews. The historian Robert Proctor calls Nazism a national hygiene experiment inflicted on the Jews.

Warburg, of course, wanted to literally conquer disease and Hitler, in his own mind, was attacking disease by lumping Jews into that same category. 

Amazingly, Hitler at one point described himself as the Robert Koch of politics. I was struck by the fact that both Hitler and Warburg saw themselves in the image of Robert Koch. Warburg, of course, wanted to literally conquer disease and Hitler, in his own mind, was attacking disease by lumping Jews into that same category. 

They were two narcissists born of the same generation, both trying to emulate this heroic German scientist, but one doing it in a rational way and the other doing it in the most monstrous way imaginable.

Warburg was a gay man and had a life-long male partner, which under the Nazis would have been another mark against him. But it wasn’t a deeply held secret exactly.

It’s kind of amazing that he survived, not only as a Jew or first-degree Mischling, but also somebody who’s very clearly homosexual. He and his partner lived in the same house, traveled together, they were inseparable. At one point it was clear that he had been turned in or someone had written a letter to Nazi authorities accusing them of homosexuality, among other crimes. In the same way that he refused to let the Nazis interfere with his science, he wasn’t going to let anybody interfere with his homosexual lifestyle.

You suggest Otto stood up to the Nazis only to the degree that they were going to affect him personally. What was his record in terms of protecting other Jewish scientists? Did he have any empathy for perhaps Jews in his lab, or did he have opportunities and punted?

It’s a little bit of both. He did try to protect a few people, particularly inviting Hans Krebs and other famous biochemists to come work at his laboratory as a way to protect them. There was a guy named Erwin Haas in his laboratory who he protected because he valued his science, but there was another young Jewish researcher who he let go in 1933, seemingly under pressure. He tried to find a position for him in the United States, he wasn’t totally unsympathetic, but he was no champion of the Jewish people. I got the impression that he was worried about himself. And in fairness, like many people he really believed that the Nazi insanity was going to die out after a year or two.

A cousin of Warburg’s said he wrestled every day with, you know, should I stay or should I go. And when I read the stories of all these people who had fled, it really struck me that so many of them were not happy in places where they felt like outcasts. They lost all the prestige they had in Germany. Warburg knew himself and knew that he would have been miserable had he left. He knew himself well enough to know that he needed his castle to feel like an emperor.

There is an ethical debate about Nazi science and whether society can derive a benefit from their inhumane experimentation. Is there any indication that Warburg’s science is tainted?

I don’t think there is. After the war, because he hadn’t left, some thought he was a Nazi sympathizer, but I don’t think that they thought he was actually working on behalf of the Nazis. It is true that after 1942 his institute was reclassified as a war institute, but that only allowed him additional protections to continue his cancer research. 

What is Warburg’s legacy in Germany?

In the immediate post-war period I think the new government actually wanted to sort of highlight his career and say look, there’s a Jew who survived. As it became clear that his science was falling out of fashion, he was sort of disregarded in Germany as well. But there is still an Otto Warburg medal that goes to German scientists and the institute is now known as the Otto Warburg House.

Why is it important for people to understand who he was and what he was part of?

There are a few different models of how cancer progresses, and you can focus on the genetic impact on mutations in the DNA, or you can focus on the metabolic angle. Both are clearly relevant, but what Warburg said until the end of its life was: It’s metabolism, metabolism, metabolism, and everybody forgot about that in the late 20th century. And in the last 20 years or so there’s been a huge rediscovery of cancer metabolism and the way that a cancer cell produces energy. It’s absolutely fundamental to cancer. I think he has been redeemed really.

One example you give is that “the path from the refined sugar added to our diets to insulin resistance, and from insulin resistance to cancer, is now well understood and based on widely accepted science.”

My larger goal in this book was to try to investigate a mystery, which is why cancer has become so much more common since the middle of the 19th century, and my ultimate answer is that it’s connected with the sugars in our diet and how they leave us with higher levels of the hormone insulin, which helps cancers grow and overeat in the way that Warburg discovered. Warburg didn’t get the whole story right, but insofar as he focuses the picture of cancer on metabolism he is very much at the center of this 200-year mystery.

Google News alerts me any time any celebrity says anything that’s even leaning up against the idea of being gay — or when websites lie about it. Starting two weeks ago I kept hearing that Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” was about Jessica Chastain, but I also kept hearing that Kristen Stewart was going to make another Twilight movie if Bella Swan could be bisexual. Just a lot of bananapants rumors out here, you know? Okay, but then! Today! My Sara Ramirez Google News alert mentioned this Vanessa Carlton/Jessica Chastain thing, so I finally clicked on it — and lo! A gay from the TikTok The Baldridges has done a special investigation about Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” and decided it’s either about Jessica Chastain, Sara Ramirez, or Rutina Wesley, which means this thing now has my full attention.

@thebaldridges

The truth is out there! #athousandmiles #lgbt #vanessacarlton

♬ original sound – The Baldridges

Okay so the theory goes like this: Vanessa Carlton is a known bisexual who one time said “A Thousand Miles” is about a crush she had on someone who went to Juilliard with her. And guess who went to Juilliard with her? Yuh: Other known queers Sara Ramirez and Rutina Wesley! @thebaldridges also points out that walking really fast with a blank stare on your face is queer culture, and I cannot disagree.

I would also point out, as we often do when we talk about Taylor Swift, that straight people simply do not pine with the same kind of intensity as queer people. Walking one hundred miles on a treadmill in an air conditioned room seems straight; walking one thousand miles through a mystical timeless void? That’s gay. Also, there’s at least three employees of Autostraddle dot com who would absolutely walk one thousand miles through the flames of literal hell for Sara Ramirez and Rutina Wesley, so, I mean, there’s a precedent.

Thank you for your investigatory work, The Baldridges! We look forward to your next gay deep dive about which soft butch Kacey Musgraves’ song “Space Cowboy” is about.

@thebaldridges

who wouldn’t walk a thousand miles for @jes_chastain ????

♬ A Thousand Miles – Vanessa Carlton

In his latest Q&A on Instagram, someone asked “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” rapper Lil Nas X if he’s a top or a bottom. 

At first, he answers with a joke. “I’ve never been a bunk bed kind of guy. I like queen-size beds, I like king-size beds, I like full.”

But then he gets a bit serious.

“All jokes aside, with this top and bottom shit in the gay community. Its become a huge form of misogyny,” he says. “How you n****s misogynists, you’re all gay, you’re f****ts. We’re all f****ts.”

He has a point. Some folks like to feminize or even shame men who like to bottom when that desire has nothing to do with how you present your gender or sexuality. At the end of the day, we’re all gay and shaming each other over positions is quite silly.

Thank you for speaking out X, we love a woke king!