Painting the body politic
Remembering Montreal artist, former Hitler Youth and gentle flirt Peter Flinsch, 1920-2010

by MATTHEW HAYS

http://www.montrealmirror.com/2010/041510/news2.html

On March 30, Montreal artist Peter Flinsch died of natural causes. With his passing, the international queer community lost one of its most crucial figures.

FROM KISS TO WORK CAMP TO CANADA: Flinsch at 16 (l) and 85

Peter Flinsch leaves behind a body of work that is staggering. In his nine decades—he was about to celebrate his 90th birthday on April 22—he created thousands of sculptures, paintings, drawings and etchings, the vast majority of which were powerfully homoerotic.

But every bit as astonishing as his work is his life story. In 1942, the German-born Flinsch was drafted into the Nazi military service. A member of the Hitler Youth, Flinsch actually attended some of the Nuremberg rallies and met Hitler twice. But while the 22-year-old was on a Christmas break, he attended a party where he planted a boozy kiss on a subordinate. “It was friendly,” he told me during a 2008 interview. “But it was at the wrong time, in the wrong place. My whole life was changed by that.”

[INDENT]An early outing[/INDENT]

Indeed, another officer witnessed the kiss and ratted out Flinsch, who was soon being interrogated by Nazi officers. The charge of homosexuality was a serious crime under the Third Reich, who argued that it defied the virtues of a German master race and was punishable by imprisonment. Flinsch was urged to confess, which he did. “Then they had me.”

Flinsch was sent to a Nazi work camp. While he did not wear a pink triangle (the mark for detained homosexuals in Hitler’s Germany), in a strange ritual, he was forced to announce that [he] was gay to his fellow prisoners every morning. After serving his time, Flinsch was sent back into active duty, but developed malaria, recovering just as the war ended.

After the war, Flinsch, stuck in East Germany, married a bisexual actress who was West German, which allowed him to go to West Berlin. By 1953, he immigrated to Canada to be with his boyfriend, Heino Heiden, who was then artistic director of the Vancouver Ballet Company.

But after a few months, they moved to Montreal, where Flinsch would work as a set designer for Radio-Canada. The job “was very creative,” he recalled. “And it allowed me the time to pursue my creative artistic work. I was lucky—I didn’t have to sell vacuums or paint cheap landscapes to get by.” He won a 1981 Anik Award for Best Television Design.

[INDENT]From fascism to freedom[/INDENT]

Flinsch’s art is very eclectic, with some sketches recalling the line drawings of Jean Cocteau, others evoking the hypermasculinity of the stereotypes of Tom of Finland. His work is striking for many reasons, not least of which is its very existence. At a time when most gay artists were masking their own sexual orientation, Flinsch was defiantly and brazenly queer in his treatment of the male form. And he attributed a big part of the reason for this sensibility to his time in the Nazi work camp.

“Basically, I was outed at age 22. But from then on, I felt free about my sexual orientation. It turned me into a strong person who knows who I am and what I stand for. Yes, it traumatized me, but it did so in a way that didn’t break me—it made me.”

Flinsch’s life and work were feted beautifully in a 2008 book by Montreal historian Ross Higgins, a co-founder of the Quebec Gay Archives. In Peter Flinsch: The Body in Question (Arsenal Pulp), Higgins recounted Flinsch’s story and included over 100 pages of Flinsch’s artwork.

Flinsch was also a warm and endearing man, and very generous. And he had a gently flirtatious streak, even into his late 80s. When I sat down to interview him about the book for the American gay magazine The Advocate, he said, “You’re always wearing a blue shirt when I see you. You do that just to bring out those bright blue eyes of yours, don’t you?” He had me.

It could be argued that the narrative arc of Flinsch’s life and career reflects the evolution of the contemporary queer liberation movement itself: from imprisonment under a fascist regime to freedom and artistic expression in a country that guarantees gays full equality under the law.

“I think it’s very difficult for people to understand what it was like back then. It was so entirely different. If I think back to being in that prison in the ’40s, I could never have foreseen that I would be sitting here now telling it to you as a little story. Now it’s become a very queer situation.”