Anne Frank is one of the most widely read voices of the Holocaust—a teenage girl whose words survived even when she didn’t. Her diary is a monument to both human resilience and the brutality of genocide. But not all of Anne’s words made it into the editions most of us grew up reading. Among the redacted lines are deeply personal passages about her body, her desires, and her attraction to girls. These weren’t just edited for length. They were erased to preserve a version of Anne that fit the world’s comfort zone.
Anne Frank’s Redacted Pages: Attraction, Identity, and Erasure
Anne Frank was just fourteen when she began to write about herself—not just her fears and dreams, but her body and her sexuality. In a passage once censored, she describes lying in bed, longing to touch her own breasts. In another, she writes of kissing a female friend and wanting to explore her body. She goes on to say:
“If only I had a girlfriend!”
These words aren’t shocking because they’re sexual. They’re shocking because they’re Anne’s. Because for decades, we’ve only been given one version of Anne Frank: innocent, tragic, heterosexual. The version that could be taught in classrooms without making anyone uncomfortable.
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What We Lose When We Straightwash History
Anne never labeled herself. She was a teenager discovering her identity in hiding, under threat of death. But her attraction to girls—recorded in her own hand—has long been ignored, downplayed, or dismissed.
Why? Because admitting Anne Frank may have had same-sex desires disrupts the tidy narrative of who she was “supposed” to be. And because the world has always been more willing to mourn victims than to confront the complexity of who they really were.
This isn’t about labeling Anne posthumously. It’s about acknowledging what she felt, what she wrote, and what that means for how we preserve queer memory in historical narratives.
The Politics of Remembering
There’s a reason these pages were hidden. Otto Frank, her father and the first editor of her diary, removed them before publication. Later editions restored some of the material, but it remains largely unknown to the public.
This selective remembering isn’t unique. From Shakespeare to Sappho, queer longing has been tucked behind euphemism or edited out entirely. Anne’s case is more sensitive, more painful—but no less political. When we choose what to forget, we also choose who gets to be fully human in history.
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A Queer Reading Is Not a Stretch—It’s a Lens
Acknowledging Anne Frank’s attraction to girls isn’t salacious or disrespectful. It’s necessary. Queer youth, especially those facing persecution, deserve to see themselves in history—not just as outliers, but as part of the human story.
To read Anne’s diary with queer eyes is to honor what she actually wrote. Not to define her, but to widen the frame. Because the more honestly we tell her story, the more powerfully it speaks to those who still feel hidden.
Let the Page Stay Turned
Anne Frank was a refugee, a diarist, a girl who loved and feared and dreamed in extraordinary circumstances. She was also a teenager who found beauty in women’s bodies and longed for connection with other girls.
These truths coexist. And they matter. Because if we can’t hold space for the full complexity of someone like Anne, what does that say about the rest of us?
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