Gay Implications, Dirty Jokes Newly Discovered In Anne Frank’s Diary
Researchers recently discovered the suggestion of a gay relative in Holocaust victim Anne Frank’s famous diary, The Diary of a Young Girl.
The Anne Frank House announced this week that writing on two pages of Frank's original notebook, which the young author had obscured with "brown gummed paper," had finally been deciphered using image processing technology, the Times of Israel reports.
Frank wrote these recovered entries on September 28, 1942, when she and her family had been hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam for three months. They include four dirty jokes and several sentences on what she called “sexual matters.”
Describing intercourse, Frank wrote that “a man considers this cohabitation to be a pleasure and also has a craving for it. A woman has too, but less.”
The teen also seems to insinuate that her maternal uncle, Uncle Walter, was gay.
“All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together,” Frank wrote. “In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there. Uncle Walter is not normal. Girls sell this.”
"Anne Frank writes about sexuality in a disarming way," says Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House. “Like every adolescent she is curious about this subject."
Among the off-color jokes, Frank wrote, “Do you know why the German Wehrmacht girls are in Holland? As mattresses for the soldiers.”
“A man had a very ugly wife and he didn’t want to have relations with her,” she also joked. “One evening he came home and then he saw his friend in bed with his wife, then the man said: He gets to and I have to!!!!!”
“Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile,” adds Frank van Vree, director of the National Institute for War Documentation. “The ‘dirty’ jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl.”
Frank, who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, would have been 89 next month. Her diary was first published in 1947 and has since been published in more than 60 languages.
