The authors claim that only "femme" homosexuals were persecuted, and even they did not fare as badly as other Nazi victims, while "butch" homosexuals—including Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Rudolf Hess—formed the core leadership of the Nazi regime. They claim that leaders of the Wandervogel scouting movement "recruited countless young men into the homosexual lifestyle" and that the Sturmabteilung—the Nazi party's original paramilitary wing—also engaged in homosexual recruitment. Chapters of the book address issues such as Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Adolf Brand, the Freikorps, Baldur von Schirach and the Hitler Youth, and Ernst Röhm. Reception In his book Stormtrooper Families about homosexuality in the Sturmabteilung, American historian Andrew Wackerfuss described the authors as "a pair of anti-gay political activists" who "tried to rebrand the brown shirt as a pink swastika". He situates the book within 1990's culture wars in the United States and noted that Lively's allegations of "gay fascism" have gained "wide popularity on the American right" as well as in Russia and Uganda. Wackerfuss considers that there are "numerous and persuasive criticisms of [Lively and Abrams'] misuse of the historical method". He criticized The Pink Swastika "outright homophobic charges" and recommended The Annotated Pink Swastika (an internet publication of the Citizens Allied for Civic Action) as "a useful guide to the errors and inaccuracies... the text is deconstructed page by page to reveal its many flaws". German historian Martin Göllnitz called the book's argument "completely untenable" because it relies on fabrications like the claim that Röhm's SA was the product of the Weimar homosexual movement. Sociologist Arlene Stein states that The Pink Swastika "is a carefully constructed piece of political rhetoric, mixing serious scholarship with lies and outright distortions, truths with half-truths and falsehoods". According to Stein, the book is part of an effort to strip gays of their "victim" status in order to decrease support for LGBT rights. Writing in Journal of the History of Sexuality, historian Erik Jensen regards the authors' linkage of homosexuality and Nazism as the recurrence of a "pernicious myth", originating in 1930s attacks on Nazism by socialists and communists and which has been "long since dispelled" by "serious scholarship". An article in Boston Magazine, written by journalist Spencer Buell, contended that the book contained "ludicrous theories" and has been "thoroughly debunked". According to Fordham University's Internet History Sourcebook on the Holocaust, "no serious historian takes