Equality Quote by Rainer W. Fassbinder

Fassbinder is reaching for a deliberately abrasive contrast: Jewish identity, forged under centuries of externally imposed scrutiny, versus gay identity, often forced into self-policing secrecy. The line is less a sociological claim than a provocation, built to shame the shame itself. Its engine is accusation: not against the oppressor, but against the oppressed for internalizing oppression. That rhetorical pivot is classic Fassbinder - impatient with liberal comfort, willing to weaponize discomfort to expose complicity, even self-complicity.

The subtext is about visibility as power. Jewishness, in Europe, has frequently been marked whether or not Jews wished it; it has also produced robust communal institutions and political solidarity under pressure. Homosexuality, especially in postwar Germany, was policed through invisibility: Paragraph 175 criminalized men’s same-sex desire, and the closet became a survival tactic that could harden into habit. Fassbinder’s jab - “stupid enough” - is cruel, but it’s aimed at what he sees as a strategic failure: a minority unable or unwilling to convert private suffering into collective leverage.

Still, the comparison is ethically risky and historically blunt. Jews have, of course, been compelled to assimilate, conceal, and negotiate identity under threat; “never been ashamed” is polemical overreach. That overreach is the point: it forces the listener to feel the cost of shame, then asks who benefits from it. Coming from a gay filmmaker working in the shadow of German fascism and a still-hostile mainstream, it reads as both self-laceration and rallying cry - anger trying to pass itself off as clarity.