Anne Frank and the American culture war: the sexual politics of Holocaust memory

The occasion of an Anne Frank exhibition in Oregon in the early 1990s is the focus for a discussion of the term "Holocaust" in the US media and of attempts by the Christian Right and the Gay Liberation movement to exploit it for their respective agendas.While the Christian Right objects to the inclusion of homosexuals among Nazi victims on a par with Jews, attempting to demonstrate a direct link between Nazi ideology and homosexuality, gays and lesbians have in their turn tried to equate themselves with Jewish Holocaust victims. In the process the Holocaust has become trivialised, commercialised and glamorised.