LGBT History Part-1

We all know the LGBT community has had a long and difficult road, but not many of us know the details of how they have struggled. In school, we learn history over wars, slave times, the Black Plague, and The Holocaust. However, our teachers have never taught us about LGBT History and how they have gotten the rights they have today. A lot of the history they have taught us involves the LGBT community, our teachers, and history books always left that part out.

The Early Gay Rights Movement:

Henry Gerber, a German immigrant, founded the first documented gay rights organization in the United States. In 1924, while Gerber served in the U.S. Army during World War 1 he was inspired to create his organization by the scientific-humanitarian committee, a “Homosexual Emancipation” group in Germany. The small group published a few issues of “Friendship and Freedom”, The first gay-interest newsletter. The group separated because of police raids. The U.S. Government designed Gerber’s Chicago house a national historic landmark, 90 years after the group separated.

The Pink Triangle:

For the next few decades the gay rights movement did not advance, However, a few times some individuals around the world did come into the spotlight. In 1928 English poet and author Radclyffe Hall stirred up a dispute when she published The Well of Loneliness, a lesbian-themed novel.

During World War 2 the Nazis held homosexual men in concentration camps and sewn a downward pointing pink triangle onto there shirts to identify them and further dehumanize them. Nazis also gave sexual predators the pink triangle badge.

In 1871 homosexuality had been made illegal in Germany, but was rarely enforced until the Nazi party took power in 1933. It is estimated in the United States Holocaust memorial museum that 100,000 gay men were arrested and between 5,000 and 15,000 were placed in concentration camps. Just as Jews were forced to identify themselves with yellow stars, gay men had to wear a large pink triangle and lesbians had to wear large black triangles.

“There was no solidarity for homosexual prisoners; they belonged to the lowest caste.” Pierre Seel, a gay Holocaust survivor wrote. An estimated 65% of gay men died in concentration camps between 1933 and 1945. The 1970s was when the gay rights movement began to emerge in Germany. The first autobiography of a gay concentration camp survivor, The Men with the Pink Triangle, was published.

In 1973, Germany’s first gay rights organization reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of liberation. “At its core, the pink triangle represented a piece of history that still needs to be dealt with.” Peter Hedenstrom said in 2014. Afterward, it began cropping up in other LGBT circles around the world. In 1986, six New York activists created a poster with the upside down pink triangle and said Silence = Death, Meant to call attention to the Aids Crisis that was removing the population of gay men across the country. The poster was adopted by the ACT UP organization and became the lasting symbol of the aids advocacy movement.

The Homophile Years:

Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Foundation, in 1950, it was one of the nation’s first gay rights group. The Los Angels Organization came up with the term “Homophile” which was considered less clinical and focused on sexual activity than “homosexual.” After Dale Jennings was arrested in 1952 for solicitation, the small group expanded sought to improve the lives of gay men. At the end of the year, Jennings formed a group called “One, Inc.” which welcomed women and published the country’s first pro-gay magazine/ In 1953, Jennings was ousted for being a communist. He and Harry were also kicked out of the Mattachine foundation for their communism, but the magazine continued. In 1954 the U.S Post Office refused to deliver the magazine. The declared One.Inc. obscene. In 1958 One, Inc. Won the lawsuit against the U.S. Post Office.

The Mattachine Society

Mattachine Foundation members restructured the organization to form the Mattachine Society, which had local chapters in other parts of the country and in 1955 began publishing the country’s second gay publication, The Mattachine Review. That same year four lesbian couples in San Fransico founded an organization called the Daughters of Bilitis, which soon began publishing a newsletter called The Ladder, the first lesbian publication of any kind. The early years of the movement had some setbacks. The American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a form of mental disorder that banned gay people- sexual perversion- from federal jobs, this remained effective for around 20 years.