First homosexual movement
These organizations emphasized human rights and respectability politics, and they excluded prostitutes and effeminate homosexual men, who were considered harmful to the movement's public image.
It effectively ended within a few months of the Nazi takeover in early 1933, and the relative tolerance of the Weimar era was followed by the most severe persecution of homosexual men in history.
The Weimar Republic has held enduring interest as a brief interlude in which gay men, lesbians, and transvestites took advantage of unprecedented freedoms, leaving a strong influence on later LGBTQ movements.
In an 1893 pamphlet, he argued that sexuality could "neither be acquired through environmental factors or suggestions, nor extinguished through medical treatment or psychological conditioning", which in his view made criminalizing it legally and morally untenable.
[33] In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the world's first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (WhK), with Max Spohr, Eduard Oberg [de], and Franz Joseph von Bülow.
By 1914, the petition had accumulated the signatures of more than 3,000 doctors, 750 university professors, and thousands of other Germans, including Krafft-Ebing, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and prominent Social Democratic (SPD) politicians.
[46] From the beginning of the movement, the majority of activists both inside and outside the WhK endorsed the idea that homosexual men belonged to a kind of third sex with male bodies and female souls.
[47] Dissent came from an opposing faction that took inspiration from pederasty in ancient Greece[48] in combination with modern ideas of Nietzscheanism, anti-modernization, misogyny, illiberalism, and in many cases antisemitism.
[51][52] In 1896, 21-year-old Adolf Brand launched Der Eigene ("The Special One"), initially an anarchist-leaning literary journal that was refounded two years later as the first periodical in the world oriented to a homosexual readership.
August Bebel, the leader of the SPD and one of the first supporters of the WhK's petition, brought up Paragraph 175 in parliament, possibly to show the hypocrisy of the proposed law.
A 1909 draft version of the penal code argued that homosexuality was a "danger to the state, since it is suited to damage men most severely in their character and in their civil existence, to wreck family life, and to corrupt male youth".
[102] Other German cities, including Hamburg, Hannover, Düsseldorf, and Cologne also enjoyed thriving gay scenes during the Weimar era,[103] although Catholic Southern Germany was much less hospitable.
[119] Despite its grassroots origins, the BfM relied on Radszuweit's media empire for growth, but unity was difficult to achieve because regional groups wanted to run their own affairs according to local conditions.
To keep better-educated homosexuals who might have been turned off by his more lowbrow publications, in 1925 Radszuweit purged Blätter für Menschenrecht of advertisements and sent it without an additional cost to all members of the BfM.
[122][119] Hahm's Damenklub Violetta in Berlin offered theater performances, dances, auto tours, fashion shows, and a moonlight cruise for its members; it also had a reading room and discussion groups.
[136] It aspired to be a "world parliament" for homosexual men and women, but its editors lacked the business acumen to make this possible and its personal ads led to a ban in 1923 and 1924.
[116] His awareness of different content preferences among German homosexuals and exploitation of market segmentation with multiple publications enabled Radszuweit to increase circulation.
[149] Censorship advocates, who ranged from pro-democracy moderates to the far right, believed that exposure to the wrong media would turn young people to promiscuity or homosexuality instead of heterosexual family relationships.
[154] For homosexuals who were afraid to come out, lived in less tolerant parts of Germany, or could not afford to participate in other aspects of the subculture, the magazines provided their only connection to like-minded people and fostered a sense of community and identity.
[163][164] Faced with a listing, editors of homosexual publications had a difficult decision to make: publish under a different name, wait out the ban, or keep selling to subscribers only despite losing advertising revenue.
[168] Both the DFV and BfM "were oriented toward integration rather than sexual liberation for its own sake", according to historian Marti Lybeck, and defined themselves in opposition to the libertine nightclub culture.
[169] Their publications, in both political and literary writings, promoted monogamous relationships in conformity with bourgeois norms and a form of masculinity outwardly indistinguishable from broader society's.
[174] In the context of political organizing, neither Hirschfeld's model of homosexuality—which assumed that homosexual men have some characteristics of women—nor that of the masculinists was satisfactory, because both effeminacy and pederasty were socially reviled.
This coalition was opposed by the Center Party, the conservative women's movement, Protestant morality campaigners, and right-wing conservatives from the German National People's Party (DVNP)—backing the exclusive role of heterosexual marriage against "immorality", which included not just homosexual emancipation but also gender equality, female prostitution, extramarital sex, sexualized media, birth control, and abortion.
[45][193][194] Hirschfeld called the institute "a child of the revolution",[192] hoping that through scientific research and public education, he would be able to persuade Weimar politicians to change their stance on homosexuality.
[246][247] Hirschfeld received the most criticism because his approach had not proven successful, but Radszuweit was equally ineffective at persuading stakeholders or German society at large that homosexuals were not a threat to youth.
Many homosexual organizations attempted to destroy membership lists and other information that the Nazis could use to target dissidents, and activists made agreements to keep quiet about their activities to protect their former members.
[269] The Weimar Republic has held enduring interest for many LGBT people as a brief interlude in which gay men, lesbians, and transvestites took advantage of unprecedented freedoms.
[271][272] Marhoefer argues that the achievements of the first homosexual movement "were more in keeping with a relatively narrow tradition of activism that shied away from radical claims to public space and, in addition, rejected a broader form of sexual freedom that would have included more people".
[273] As Germany became more accepting of LGBT people in the twenty-first century, the number of Germans taking pride in their country's role in the first homosexual movement increased.
