a&e features
Gay Holocaust survivor shares life lessons
Alfred Munzer laments ongoing religious, racial hatred
Alfred Munzer in his Van Ness apartment. Now retired from his medical career, Munzer devotes much of his time to the Holocaust Museum. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
First Person 2015 Series: Al Munzer
Conversation with a Holocaust Survivor
Wednesday, July 29
11 a.m.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, S.W.
Free
No registration required
Although the odds were not favorable for Alfred Munzer in the circumstances surrounding his birth, in many ways, he ended up being the luckiest member of his family.
He’s the youngest of three children of Simcha and Gisele Munzer, a family of Jewish immigrants from what is now Poland. His parents were childhood sweethearts and were raising two daughters, Eva (born in July 1936) and Leah (born in November 1938) in the Hague, Netherlands. After World War I, anti-Semitism was rampant in their native land and opportunities were limited, so they moved to Holland where there was a substantial population of Jews, some of whom were from families that had been there since the 15th century. Simcha ran a men’s tailoring business.
When Gisele discovered she was expecting a third child — the pregnancy was unplanned — an abortion was advised and, as Munzer tells it today, his mother was told that, “it would be immoral to bring another Jewish life into the world.” Although not especially religious, she was inspired by the Old Testament story of Hannah, the childless woman who vows to God that if she is given a son, she will give him back to God. Her wish is granted with the birth of Samuel.
Munzer, now 73, was born on Nov. 23, 1941. Before he reached his first birthday, in July of 1942, Germans began mass deportations of nearly 100,000 Jews from the occupied Netherlands to the east, primarily Auschwitz, a network of Nazi concentration camps in German-annexed regions that had previously been part of Poland. It marked the beginning of a harrowing season for his family.
Munzer says growing up, he was often reminded of the circumstances around which he was born.
“Any time I was bad growing up, my mother would remind me of this, how she had prayed to God and requested a son,” Munzer says. “She indoctrinated me with this. It was made very clear that she had made the same pledge as Hannah and that I was here in service of God ultimately.”
It’s one of many biographical stories Munzer will share on Wednesday, July 29 when he does another installment of the Holocaust Museum’s First Person program in which survivors are interviewed about their life experiences. Since retiring from his career as an internist and pulmonologist last year, Munzer has become increasingly active as a volunteer at the museum. The program is free.
Having shared his life story many times over the years, first at an artistic event in Woodstock, N.Y., in the early 1980s, Munzer says it’s important that his story and those of other Holocaust survivors continue to be told.
“The angle I usually take is that even in a sea of evil, it is possible for people to do the right thing and stand up for what is right,” he says.
Unlike, for instance, the Anne Frank family, the Munzers thought they’d fare better if they went into hiding separately. Munzer’s two sisters went to live with a Catholic family. Simcha Munzer had received a notice to report for so-called labor duty, essentially a one-way ticket to a concentration camp, but was able to delay it by first having a hernia operation he’d been putting off and later faking a suicide attempt. Joined by Gisele at a Jewish psychiatric hospital where she was pretending to be a nurse’s aide, the two were eventually deported, in early 1943, to Vught Concentration Camp and then a year later to Auschwitz where they were separated.
Gisele had sold the family’s possessions. Neighbors kept some items such as a silver candelabra and fire dragon puppet that are now in Munzer’s Van Ness apartment where he’s lived for about 25 years with his husband, Joel Wind. Though only married for a year and a half, the two have been together since they met at Bet Mishpachah, a local LGBT-affirming synagogue where Munzer sometimes preaches, in 1980.
Things quickly turned dark for the family. The husband of the family raising Munzer’s two older sisters turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer. He denounced his wife and the two girls and all three were arrested and sent to the Westerbork transit camp. On Feb. 8, 1944, Eva, 8, and Leah, 6, were deported to Auschwitz where they were killed three days later.
Alfred was put in the care of a family friend named Annie Madna who placed him with her sister. After about a month, she became too nervous to keep him and placed little Alfred with her ex-husband Tole, a native of Indonesia. Munzer stayed there for the next three years and was looked after by their housekeeper, Mima Saina, who went to great lengths to care for him.
“She really became my mother,” Munzer says. “She was a woman who was completely illiterate, who spoke no Dutch, couldn’t read or write, she spoke only Indonesian, but she had a heart of gold. She would walk — I was in the house illegally, so there were no ration coupons for me — she had to scrounge up milk for me however she could, sometimes walking miles just to get it. I’m told I slept in her bed. She kept a knife under the pillow to kill off any Nazis who might try to get me or even kill me rather than having me fall in their hands. She was an amazing woman who raised me from the time I was about 9 months old till I was about 3 and a half.”
Simcha spent several months in Auschwitz and was then sent to three different camps in Austria. Although eventually freed from one in Ebensee in the Austrian Alps by the U.S. Army, he was so weakened by the ordeal that he died under the care of nuns at a convent just two months later, on July 25, 1945, 70 years ago this weekend. Munzer was told his father had contracted tuberculosis.
Gisele fared better and worked on electronics equipment in a series of camps before she was freed at the Danish border through the intervention of the Swedish Red Cross in early 1945. Although fussy from having been awoken from a nap, being reunited with her is one of Munzer’s earliest memories.
“I was cranky and crying so the whole Matna family was passing me around, like you do with a crying baby, and the only lap I wouldn’t sit on was my own mother’s,” Munzer says. “She was a stranger to me by that point.”
It was decided that his de facto surrogate mother Mima would continue to care for him while Gisele looked for work but Mima had a cerebral hemorrhage about two months later and died. Gisele eventually found work in the garment industry. Although deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, Munzer remembers her as a stoic, matter-of-fact woman. He had no sense growing up that his life was any different from anyone else’s.
“I was surrounded by kids who had lost their parents, who had lost siblings, there really was nothing unusual about that,” he says. “I did not understand as a very young kid what had happened to my sisters. All I knew was that there were these beautiful pictures on the wall of these beautiful girls. Everybody would tell me how wonderful they were. One of my mother’s neighbors would tell me that my older sister could write so perfectly when she was just 6. I was a little bit jealous of them in a sense. I had no comprehension of the fact that they had been killed. I just did not understand why they were missing or just didn’t really think about it.”
Neither, too, did the bombed-out landscape of the Hague, strike young Munzer as unusual.
“My mother had a very good friend who was in a concentration camp with her and she and her husband, well, there was very little housing available there. After my mother closed her store, she had acquired a little cosmetics store, we’d go to visit the Van Der Pols in these few little rooms they had in an attic and we’d walk across these huge fields of rubble to get there. I thought walking through rubble was just a normal thing. Or playing hide and seek in bunkers on the beach. It wasn’t until much later that I came to grips with the Holocaust as such.”
In July 1958, Gisele and then-16-year-old Alfred came to the United States where he became a bit of an overachiever. Located in Brooklyn, he finished high school, college, medical school and advance training at Johns Hopkins. He first came to Washington in 1972 during a two-year tour of duty with the Air Force and an assignment at Andrews Air Force Base.
He has many happy memories of his later years with his mother and says the two enjoyed many trips, including a few to visit his father’s grave, in her later years. A pivotal turning point in his understanding of the Holocaust came in 1978 when the miniseries “The Holocaust” aired on CBS.
“Before, I would hear her in conversations with friends and it was always, ‘so-and-so came back’ or ‘so-and-so did not come back.’ They never used the term survived. She had told me little bits and pieces here and there, actually humorous things mostly. She told me once very late in the game, she was actually cast as Adolf Hitler in a play, that type of thing. But she always had an incredibly positive attitude, which I think is really what kept her alive. She even spoke of being in one of those cattle cars and being able to look out and see the beautiful countryside. She said, ‘After the war, we may not have much money, but at least that was not a bad way to travel around and see nature. … After the ‘Holocaust’ miniseries, I took out a map and had her trace the 12 concentration camps she had been through and she told me the approximate dates and things that had happened at each place.”
Munzer says she was “very matter of fact about it.”
She eventually embraced Wind and on later trips introduced he and Alfred as “her two sons.” She settled in Rockville and enjoyed painting and was “not especially anti-German,” Munzer says. “She judged people individually and felt that was important.” Several of her landscapes hang above Munzer’s sofa now. She died at age 95 about 12 years ago.
Munzer started volunteering at the museum about eight years ago. He conducts tours, helps with Dutch-to-English translation work, gives talks to student groups and more. He says he’s delighted that the museum has remained popular and, although a challenge, is often overwhelmed by the number of people who visit, crowds having far surpassed estimates since its 1993 opening.
Museum staff say the stories from survivors are hugely important and valuable.
“One of the most powerful ways people (understand history) is to engage with someone who witnessed it,” says Diane Saltzman, director of survivor affairs. “Holocaust survivors who volunteer at the museum provide that personal connection for our visitors and bring an incomprehensible past alive and add a unique and powerful dimension to the visitors’ experience.”
Munzer is thrilled the staff — he’s the only LGBT survivor volunteer he knows of — has not raised the slightest issue with him being gay. He also says being out during his medical career was also pleasantly uneventful in that regard.
Last week’s conviction of 94-year-old SS sergeant Oskar Groening, an Auschwitz bookkeeper sentenced to four years imprisonment for his role as an accessory to murder in 300,000 deaths, is “awfully late” in Munzer’s opinion.
“Although I do think it’s important for people to be brought to justice.”
Equally important, Munzer says, is that the Holocaust is not forgotten.
“To me one of the greatest tragedies of the Holocaust is not even what happened but the fact that violence continues and especially genocide continues. The world really did not learn its lesson and the slogan ‘never again’ has really not been upheld. The fact that there is still religious hatred and racial hatred is just really, really sad. The re-emergence of anti-Semitism but even more in general, just not recognizing people as part of the common human race.”
Joel Wind (standing) and Alfred Munzer married in 2013 after more than 30 years together. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
a&e features
Queery: Meet artist, performer John Levengood
Modern creative talks nightlife, coming out, and his personal queer heroes
John Levengood (he/him) describes himself as a modern creative with a wide‑ranging toolkit. He blends music, technology, civic duty, and a sharp sense of wit into a cohesive artistic identity. Known primarily as a recording artist and performer, he’s also a self‑taught music producer and software engineer who embodies a generation of creators who build their own lanes rather than wait for one to appear.
Levengood, 32, who is single and identifies as gay and queer, is best known as a recording artist who has performed at Pride festivals across the country, including the main stages of World Pride DC, Central Arkansas Pride, and Charlotte Pride.
“Locally in the DMV, I’m known for turning heads at nightlife venues with my eye-catching sense of style. When I go out, I don’t try to blend in. I hope I inspire people to be themselves and have the courage to stand out,” he says.
He’s also known for hosting karaoke at Freddie’s Beach Bar in Arlington, Va., on Thursday nights. “I like to create a space where people feel comfortable expressing themselves, building community, and showcasing their talents.”
He also creates social media content from my performances and do interviews at LGBTQ+ bars and theatres in the DMV. Follow the Arlington resident @johnlevengood.
How long have you been out and who was the hardest person to tell?
I have been fully out of the closet since 2019. My parents were the hardest people to tell because my family has always been my rock and at the time I couldn’t imagine a world without them. Their reactions were extremely positive and supportive so I had nothing to fear all along.
I remember sitting on the couch with my mom, dad, and sister in our hotel room in New Orleans during our winter vacation and being so nervous to tell them. After I finally mustered up the nerve and made the proclamation, I realized my dad had already fallen asleep on the couch. My mom promised to tell him when he woke up.
Who’s your LGBTQ hero?
My LGBTQ heroes are Harvey Milk for paving the way for gays in politics and Elton John for being a pioneer for the fabulous and authentic. My local heroes in the DMV are Howard Hicks, manager of Green Lantern, and Tony Rivenbark, manager of Freddie’s Beach Bar. Both of them are essential to creating spaces where I’ve felt welcome and safe since moving to the DMV.
What’s Washington’s best nightspot, past or present?
Trade tops the list for me because of the dance floor and outdoor space. It’s so nice to get a break from the music every once and a while to be able to have a conversation.
We live in challenging times. How do you cope?
I’m still figuring this out. What is working right now is writing music and spending time with family and friends. I’ve also been spending less time on social media going to the gym at least three times a week.
What streaming show are you binging?
After “Traitors” Season 4 ended, I was in a bit of a show hole, but “Stumble” has me in a laughing loop right now. The writing is so witty.
What do you wish you’d known at 18?
At 18, I wish I would have known how liberating it is to come out of the closet. It would have been nice to know some winning lottery numbers as well.
What are your friends messaging about in your most recent group chat?
We are planning our next trip to New York City. If you can believe it, I visited NYC for the first time in 2025 for Pride and I’ve been back every quarter since. Growing up in the country, I was subconsciously primed to be scared of the city. But my mind has been blown. I can’t wait to go back.
Why Washington?
It’s the closest metropolitan area to my family, but not too close. I love the museums, the diversity, the history, and the proximity to the beach and mountains. It’s also nice to live in a city with public transportation.
Aging RFK Stadium has come down, but the RFK grounds are still getting lit up. Welcome back to the stage Project GLOW, D.C.’s homegrown electronic festival, on May 30-31. Back for its fifth year on these musically inclined acres, Project GLOW returns with an even more diverse lineup, and one that continues to celebrate LGBTQ antecedents, attendees, and acts.
Project GLOW 2026 headliners include house and techno star Mau P, progressive house legend Eric Prydz, hard-techno favorite Sara Landry, and bass acts Excision b2b Sullivan King, among the lineup of trance, bass, house, techno, dubstep, and others for the fifth anniversary year.
President & CEO Pete Kalamoutsos — born and raised in D.C. — founded Club GLOW in 1999. In 2020, GLOW entered into a partnership with global entertainment company Insomniac Events to produce live events like Project GLOW, which kicked off in 2022.
As in past years, Project GLOW not only makes space, but is intentionally inclusive of the LGBTQ community, one of its most dedicated fan bases. The festival’s LGBTQ-focused Secret Garden stage blooms again — a more intimate dance area that stands on the strength of DJs and musicians who draw from the LGBTQ community. D.C.’s LGBTQ nightlife mastermind Ed Bailey is the creative mind behind Secret Garden again. He joined Project GLOW in 2023.
“Kalamoustos says that “he’s proud of his partnership with Ed Bailey, along with Capital Pride and [nightlife producer] Jake Resnikow. It’s amazing to collaborate with Bailey at the Secret Garden stage, especially after the curated lineup we worked on at Pride last year.”
The Secret Garden will be a bit different from other stages: Eternal (“At the Eternal stage, time stands still. Lose yourself in the dance of past, present, and future, surrendering to the eternal rhythm of the universe”) and Pulse (“Feel the rhythm of the beat pulse through your veins as the heartbeat of the crowd synchronizes into one. Here, every moment vibrates with life as it guides you through a new dimension of euphoria”). The Secret Garden stage is in the round, surrounded by 16 shipping containers. The containers play canvas to muralists from around the world, who are coming in to paint them in a vibrant garden-style vibe. “We gave this stage some extra love with this layout,” K says, “ we finally cracked the code.”
K says that this will be the biggest lineup yet for the Secret Garden, featuring Nicole Moudaber b2b Chasewest, Riordan b2b Bullet Tooth, Ranger Trucco, Cassian, Eli & Fur, Cosmic Gate and Hayla. The stage is also the largest yet, featuring an expanded dance floor and 360-degree viewing.
Across all stages, K says that his goal for the fifth anniversary is “More art and fan interactive experience, more like a festival, strive to be like a Tomorrowland, as budget grows to add more experience.” Last year’s Project GLOW alone drew 40,000 attendees over two days.
K, however, was not satisfied with one festival this spring. GLOW recently announced a “pop-up” one-day event. Teaming up with Black Book Records, GLOW is set to throw a first-of-its-kind dance-music takeover of Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., headlined by electronic music star Chris Lake. Set for April 18, this euphoric block party will feature bass and vibes blocks from the White House. Organizers expect as many as 10,000 fans to attend. Beyond music, there will be food, activations, and plenty of other activities taking place around 6th St and Pennsylvania Ave NW – a location familiar to many in the LGBTQ community, as this sits squarely inside the blocks of the Capital Pride party that takes place in DC every June.
Over the past two decades, Club GLOW has produced thousands of events, from club nights to large-scale festivals including Project GLOW, Moonrise Festival, and more. Club GLOW also operates Echostage.
a&e features
New book celebrates 1970s dance music icons
‘A Night at the Disco’ features interviews with Donna Summer, Debbie Harry, more
If you’re a fan of 1970s-era dance music, don’t miss the irresistible new book by Christian John Wikane and Alice Harris, “A Night at the Disco,” which revisits more than 90 interviews conducted with some of the biggest names in pop culture.
“A Night at the Disco” (ACC Art Books) was published on March 24, and distributed by Simon & Schuster. It celebrates more than 100 artists who sparked a phenomenon in dance music from 1970-1979 and features excerpts from interviews with everyone from Donna Summer to Debbie Harry.
Lost City Books (2467 18th St., N.W.) will welcome author Christian John Wikane for a book signing and conversation about “A Night at the Disco” on Thursday, April 16 at 6 p.m. Details at lostcitybookstore.com. Bird in Hand Coffee & Books in Baltimore (11 E. 33rd St.) )will also host a Q&A with the author on Wednesday, April 15 at 6 p.m. Details at theivybookshop.com.
Below is an excerpt from “A Night at the Disco.”
“I’ll let in anyone who looks like they’ll make things fun.” Steve Rubell is guiding a New York Times reporter through Studio 54 as resident DJ Richie Kaczor dazzles the crowd with records by CHIC, Odyssey, and T-Connection. “Disco, that’s where the happy people go,” The Trammps sing as dancers spin and twirl underneath tubes of flashing lights. Seven months since Rubell and co-owner Ian Schrager opened Studio 54 in April 1977, it’s welcomed untold numbers of “happy people” … at least those lucky enough to pass through the doors.
“We were part of the chosen few,” says André De Shields, who immortalized the title role in The Wiz on Broadway at the time. “We could show up at Studio 54 and the doorman at the velvet stanchion would look over everyone and point to us from The Wiz to come in, that kind of thing.” As the lead vocalist in the GRAMMY-nominated Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, whose debut modernized big band sophistication for the discothèques, Cory Daye had carte blanche in the club. “The energy was like a New Year’s Eve party every night,” she says. “I would go up to the mezzanine and watch the mechanical light pillars go up and down, metallic confetti falling from the ceiling, the spoon and the moon. I was so fascinated and enamored by it.
“When a certain song came on, the people would just rush to the dance floor. There was no contact dancing — the hustle was pretty much on its way out — but it was just an amazing experience to see all the cultures together. It was a fusion of cultures, which described my life and my band, so I was right at home there.”
“Studio 54 was the place,” adds Linda Clifford. “Crazy parties. If you could think it, you would see it. It was like a circus. Just an amazing place to be. I worked 54 so many times. It was like a second home to me. The people there treated me so well. The crowd always seemed to enjoy my show. I always had a good time with them. That was the most important thing: making sure that they had fun.”
Well before Studio 54 opened, disco had become a business juggernaut. “A four billion dollar market and still growing,” Billboard announced in February 1977, with dance music offering more variety than ever. “There is no longer a single, readily identifiable disco beat, but a kaleidoscope of sounds that are melodic and danceable,” Tom Moulton told the magazine. In the clubs, records by veteran artists like Stevie Wonder and the Bee Gees were mixed in with a range of new acts like Grace Jones, Boney M., and The Ritchie Family, while everyone from ABBA to Marvin Gaye scored number one pop hits with songs that had club-centric storylines.
Beyond the charts, disco itself remained as idiosyncratic as ever, especially on several productions by Laurin Rinder and W. Michael Lewis, whose studio creations, El Coco (“Let’s Get It Together,” “Cocomotion”) and Le Pamplemousse (“Le Spank”), joined their own “Lust” from Seven Deadly Sins (1977) among the most tantalizing releases on AVI Records. Rinder & Lewis also produced acts for the newly hatched Butterfly Records in Los Angeles, where Saint Tropez (“On a Rien à Perdre”) and Tuxedo Junction (“Moonlight Serenade”) reflected the duo’s high gloss sound, spanning everything from European sophistication to a more literal translation of the ’40s sensibilities popularized by Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band.
12-inch singles had also grown as the preferred format to approximate the club music experience at home. Nearly a year after Atlantic Records introduced its series of promotional 12-inch singles for DJs, New York-based Salsoul Records released the industry’s first commercially available 12-inch single, “Ten Percent” by Double Exposure, in May 1976. A year later, T.K. Records was the first label to certify a gold record for a 12-inch single when Peter Brown’s “Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me” tallied one million sales.— Christian John Wikane
(From “A Night at the Disco” by Alice Harris & Christian John Wikane. Published by ACC Art Books.)
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