Bent by Martin Sherman

So, I just finished reading a play called Bent for my theatre of diversity class. It was a very touching and sad story about the Nazi concentration camps and homosexuals in these camps. Generally people associate Jewish people with concentration camps and you forget that there were so many minorities in these camps including homosexuals. The story was about a man named Max who gets taken to this concentration camp and meets another man there. Max tells the guards he is Jewish so gets sent there not because hes a homosexual but because he is "Jewish." He does this because he has learned that people in these camps for homosexuality get treated the worst. He meets this guy who is in there for being a homosexual and thus has to wear a pink triangle. They develop this friendship and eventually the man gets shot and killed by a guard, and Max is deeply upsetted about this and feels this guilt for not being who he truly was and in a way I saw that he felt like he abandoned his community (homosexuals) by not telling the guards who he truly is, so he feels like he must die just like his friend in order to make amends. He kills himself at the end while wearing his friends jacket which has the pink triangle on it. This shows Max finally being who he is and telling everybody that he is proud to be gay by doing what he realizes is happening to his community. Very powerful last moment because it shows him reuniting with himself and his community.

This story was a very touching and sad story. I myself am gay, so just reading this made me cringe and almost cry. I mean I could not imagine being taken somewhere like that just because I am gay. But what is very scary is how that was a reality at one point. People were taken away from their home just because they were different then another group of people. This play is supposed to shed light on the fact that not only was this happening to Jewish people during WWII but that this also was happening with gays. It tells the audience what it means to be part of a community and the importance of sticking by your community no matter what the hardships. It sheds light on discrimination and shows just how inhuman our world was at one point and its also trying to prevent this from ever happening in the future, and in a subtle way is telling us that the discrimination that we face in our country now could cause this horrible event to happen again. Doesn't want anything like this to happen again and does this by telling a story about two gay peoples experience in the concentration camps during WWII and what they had to endure and the relationship and community they had to build in order to survive.