Society for Human Rights
Society founder Henry Gerber was inspired to create it by the work of German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and by the organisation Bund für Menschenrecht by Friedrich Radszuweit and Karl Schulz in Berlin.
[7] During his time in Germany, Gerber learned about Magnus Hirschfeld and the work he and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee were doing to reform anti-homosexual German law, especially Paragraph 175, which criminalized sex between men.
[6] Gerber marveled at the development of the gay community in Berlin and later wrote "I had always bitterly felt the injustice with which my own American society accused the homosexual of 'immoral acts.'
"[10] He was particularly impressed with the work of Friedrich Radszuweit and Karl Schulz's group called Bund für Menschenrecht 'Association for Human Rights' and absorbed a number of Hirschfeld's ideas, including the notion that homosexual men were naturally effeminate.
Inspired by Officer Koester work with the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the Bund für Menschenrecht in Berlin, Gerber resolved to found a similar organization in the United States.
The application outlined the goals and purposes of the Society: [T]o promote and protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence and to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of factors according to modern science among intellectuals of mature age.
However, few Society members were willing to receive mailings of the newsletter, fearing that postal inspectors would deem the publication obscene under the Comstock Act.
Gerber sought out the support of people in the medical professions and sex education advocates and was frustrated when he was unable to secure it, because of their fear of ruining their reputations through the association with homosexuality.
[17] Gerber shouldered all of the labor and financial obligations for the Society and for production of Friendship and Freedom,[6] something he was willing to do in service of the cause, believing it possible he would be remembered as the gay Abraham Lincoln for his effort.
[20] Weininger's wife reported the Society to a social worker in the summer of 1925,[21] calling them "degenerates"[20] and making claims of "strange doings" in front of her children.
[15] The police broke in on Gerber in the middle of the night with a reporter from the Chicago Examiner in tow, interrogated him, seized his personal papers and arrested him.
[16] Although Gerber avoided prosecution for obscenity under the Comstock Act, he lost his post office job for "conduct unbecoming a postal worker".
[15] Henry Gerber and the Society for Human Rights serve as direct links between the LGBT-related activism of the Weimar Republic and the American homophile movement of the 1950s.
In 1950 Hay's idea reached fruition when he and several other men founded the Mattachine Society, the first enduring LGBT rights organization in the United States.
