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While visiting George Segal's Holocaust sculpture at San Francisco's Lincoln Park, Naomi Seidman recently asked a man why he was posing for a snapshot behind the barbed wire.

His answer consisted of three words.

"Because I'm gay."

Said Seidman, the daughter of Holocaust survivors who has often worked with the gay community: "I think there is a bizarreness to this culture that allows people who didn't actually go through the Holocaust to put themselves in it –which I find disturbing."

Seidman, associate professor of Jewish culture at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, relayed the anecdote Sunday after participating in "Hidden Legacies: Lesbians and Gay Men in Nazi Germany." The panel discussion was held at San Francisco's Main Library.

"The language of claims really differs when it's spoken by people who survived the Holocaust — and when it's spoken by people who have no first-hand experience with it, regardless if they're Jewish, gay or otherwise," Seidman said.

Close to 100 people attended the afternoon event, which featured five panelists, most of them Jewish as well as gay or lesbian. It was sponsored by San Francisco's Reform Congregation Sha'ar Zahav and the Holocaust Society of Northern California in partnership with several other groups.

Ali Cannon, the moderator and former program director of the Holocaust Center, said identity politics frequently enters discussions on the Holocaust's legacies.

"I would certainly hope today that any queer youth identifying with the Holocaust would make an effort to understand its history," Cannon said. "And part of that is knowing that the bottom line of the Holocaust was the elimination of the Jewish people."

That point was reiterated by David Shneer, the director of children's education at Sha'ar Zahav, who said that it was important to understand the different levels of persecution endured during the Nazi regime.

"Homosexuality was a movement to purge the Aryan race from the inside, as opposed to the Jewish question, which was a movement to purge the Aryan race from the outside," he said. "The reality is that gay men were sent off to concentration camps, not to extermination camps, and that's a big difference."

Shneer added that discussions of the Holocaust shouldn't turn into a "numbers game," because that would be a game many non-Jewish groups, including gays and lesbians, would lose.

Nonetheless, he mentioned that the estimated — though not verified — 5,000 to 15,000 gay men sent to concentration camps is far from insignificant.

"It's understandable that gays and lesbians are going to find common history where they were singled out for persecution," Shneer said. "Similar to many groups, the history of victimization is used for community-building."

The sole Holocaust survivor on the panel offered another perspective.

"In Auschwitz, there were no pink triangles," said Jerry Rosenstein, referring to the symbol worn by gay prisoners of the Nazis. "I was in Auschwitz solely because I was Jewish, not because I was gay."

Rosenstein, who was rescued from a death march by the Russian army, said that the Holocaust should be viewed as Jewish history, within the context of world history.

"Globally, the Holocaust affects everybody," Rosenstein said, "because there's a lesson for everyone — all you have to do is look at the situations in Africa and in the Balkans," Rosenstein said.

"Having said that," Rosenstein continued, " the politically correct perspective of today doesn't work when considering the Holocaust. A lot of groups can lay claim to suffering during the Holocaust, but not nearly to the extent [that] the Jews did.

"To operate from any other perspective is unrealistic."

That point wasn't disputed by Jaime Balboa, the last speaker at the event. Balboa, S.F.-based public education director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, said what was missing from the dialogue was awareness.

"This is not about the politics of victimization — or about a competition," said Balboa, the only non-Jew on the panel. "No one can deny that the Jews were the biggest victims of the Holocaust. But in a very broad sense, the Holocaust was about the denial of human rights — and in that capacity the persecution of gay men and lesbians has been largely forgotten"

Mentioning that acts of "indecency" — including intercourse between men — were prohibited by the German government in 1871 and not repealed until 1969, Balboa said that homophobia existed long before and after the Third Reich.

"I see definite public education value in wearing the pink triangle for queer youth," said Balboa, adding that he hoped whoever donned the triangle as a symbol should do some historical research.

"I don't see it as a commodification of someone else's suffering," Balboa said, "as much as I see it as the knowledge of what happens when hate goes unchecked."