A single murdered man became both a gay-rights icon and a Haredi saint

Evidence

His immediate legacy was contradictory, to say the least. In his native Dutch language, De Haan was famous as a poet of mystical and homoerotic themes36 and as a proponent of homosexual rights. In years to come De Haan became emblematic as a victim of Zionist paranoia and political intrigue in Israeli popular culture, who haunts the conscience of those who believe that the pre-state “defense” apparatus may have overstepped its bounds in having him killed. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 462

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The contradiction is a ready-made narrative engine: a homoerotic poet and gay-rights advocate canonized by the strictest anti-Zionist Haredi faction, plus reinterpreted decades later as a sacrifice to security-state paranoia. A novel could hold these irreconcilable afterlives of one body together.
• FICTION: The image of competing commemorations of a single murder — saint, martyr of paranoia, Gay pioneer — is a strong scaffolding for fiction about how the dead get claimed by rival factions.