Pierre Seel - Speaking Out

Speaking Out

In 1981, the testimony collected by Jean-Pierre Joecker (director and founder of the gay magazine Masques) was published anonymously in a special edition of the French translation of the play Bent by Martin Sherman. In April 1982, in response to anti-gay declarations and actions by Léon Elchinger, the Bishop of Strasbourg, Seel spoke publicly and wrote an open letter to the Bishop on 18 November. He simultaneously circulated the text to his family. The letter was published in Gai Pied Hebdo No 47 on 11 December. At the same time, he started the official process of getting compensation from the state.

From the time he came forward publicly until the end of his life, Seel was active as an advocate for the recognition of homosexual victims of the Nazis—and notably of the forgotten homosexual victims from the French territories of Alsace and Moselle, which had been annexed by Nazi Germany. Seel came to be known as the most outspoken activist among the men who had survived internment as homosexuals during the Third Reich. He was an active supporter of the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French national association founded in 1989 to honor the memory of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazi regime and to advocate formal recognition of these victims in the ceremonies held annually to commemorate citizens and residents of France deported to the concentration camps.

In 1994, Seel published the book Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel (I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual), written with the assistance of journalist and activist Jean Le Bitoux, founder of the long-running French gay periodical Gai Pied; the book subsequently appeared in translation in English, German and Spanish. Seel appeared on national television and in the national press in France. His story also was featured in a 2000 documentary film on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, Paragraph 175, directed by San Francisco filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Returning to Germany for the first time since the war, Seel received a five-minute standing ovation at the documentary's premiere at the Berlin film festival.

Seel also found himself under attack in the 1980s and 1990s, even receiving death threats. After he appeared on French television, he was attacked and beaten by young men shouting homophobic epithets. Catherine Trautmann, then the Mayor of Strasbourg and later a Socialist Party culture minister, once refused to shake his hand during a commemorative ceremony.

In 2003, Seel received official recognition as a victim of the Holocaust by the International Organization for Migration's program for aiding Nazi victims. In April 2005, President Jacques Chirac, during the "Journée nationale du souvenir des victimes et des héros de la déportation" (the French equivalent to the Holocaust Memorial Day), said: "In Germany, but also on French territory, men and women whose personal lives were set aside, I am thinking of homosexuals, were hunted, arrested and deported." On 23 February 2008, the municipality of Toulouse renamed a street in the city in honour of Seel. The name plaque reads "Rue Pierre Seel - Déporté français pour homosexualité - 1923-2005".