There has been a sudden explosion of Nazis in the West End: first Bent, then Cabaret and with The Sound of Music soon to come. From my perspective, the Bent reviews, some ecstatic, some dismissive, seem, in addition to the critical judgments of the play, to have brought forth something I had hoped gone for ever: homophobia. Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph approvingly quotes Peter Hall’s entry in his Diaries for 1979: “Bent is a Manhattan fag’s fantasy . . . black leather and swastikas, sex in concentration camps . . . salacious and sentimental.”

The phrase “Manhattan fag” — the playwright Martin Sherman is American — whether in 1979 or in 2006, is offensive by any standards: replace it with “Manhattan kike” or “Manhattan nigger” and see how it sounds. As for the uniforms and swastikas, it is not gays who are excited by them, but the people who wore them.

Oddly, certain reviewers seem to feel that the Nazis get a rather bad deal in the play: they were, says Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times, quite ordinary men who committed atrocious evil. Bent presents them as sociopathic children, an interpretation with which anyone who has seen the footage from Abu Ghraib will find it hard to quarrel.

What is offensive is that these reviewers seem to twist the facts depicted in the play, and suggest that Sherman is perverting the truth of the Holocaust for purposes of gay propaganda. But everything in the play — whether or not you like the way it’s handled — is based on documentary evidence. Homosexuals were the lowest of the low; they were despised by their fellow inmates; they were given the most demeaning tasks.

No one is saying that numerically the Jews did not suffer vastly more than any other group, but a substantial number of gay men were meted out particularly harsh punishments. Is that not worth saying? They did survive on humour, which in their case, naturally, was queer humour. And they did manage to create some sort of sexual contact. The famous sex scene in which the two men talk themselves off is dismissed as masturbatory: if it were between a man and a woman, I’m sure critics would be delightedly throwing their hats in the air at their clandestine orgasm as a triumph of the human spirit — precisely Sherman’s point. But apparently not for homosexuals. In fact, Sherman is making the very same point that Tom Stoppard so eloquently makes in Rock’n’Roll: the only real defiance of totalitarianism is by refusing the terms of the tyrant, by creating a reality beyond the reality of politics.

Anyway, The Sunday Times suggests that the hedonistic queers of Weimar Berlin had it coming to them: “There is no recognition that the individualistic anarchy of these solipsistic bores often leads to a tyrannical backlash.”

Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail seems to insinuate that the suffering of a gay person is of less significance than that of a heterosexual because homosexuals don’t have children. “Max and Horst . . . are lone adults with the option of choice” — a highly debatable proposition — whereas “Jewish parents had to see their children sent to their deaths”. Homosexuals don’t have parents? I always knew we were different, but I hadn’t realised that we were self-generating.

Spencer and Hart profess to be appalled by the cheers that resounded round the auditorium on the first night. Spencer half-expected Max, he says, to chant “I’m out and I’m proud” as he kills himself. But the overwhelming final statement of the play is that maybe there is something more important than simply surviving, and that is to die with love and dignity in one’s heart. Why should that not be as true for gays as it is for anyone else? It is our history too.