The gay rights movement can trace its origins to World War I. This war was a massive chain reaction of conflicts that exploded in Europe following the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian extremist group in the capital city of Bosnia. The killing activated a number of treaties and alliances that sent almost every European country into military conflict. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire emerged as the Central Powers. Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and Japan formed the Allied Powers. Russia would leave the alliance following the communist uprising in 1917, the same year the United States joined the Allies.
The United States entered the war in 1917 after Britain intercepted a coded telegram from Germany asking Mexico to go to war against the United States on Germany’s behalf. When the telegram was presented to American authorities, the previously neutral and isolationist country was thrust into the war during its final years. The United States chose to fight alongside France and Britain against Germany and the other Central Powers.
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German scientist who pioneered the movement to research homosexuality objectively and scientifically.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, an immigrant named Henry Gerber was given a choice: join the American military forces fighting against his homeland of Germany or be incarcerated as an enemy alien. He chose to join the war effort.
WELCOME STRANGER, HAPPY TO SEE YOU
Little is known about the early life of Henry Gerber. Born in Bavaria in 1892 as Josef Heinrich Dittmar, he immigrated to Chicago at age twenty-one and changed his name to Henry Gerber to sound more American. He was one of many Europeans who immigrated to Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Prior to the outbreak of World War I, he had enlisted in the US Army but declared himself a conscientious objector when the United States declared war on Germany four months later. As an enemy alien, he was sent to an internment camp. According to some sources, he spent some time institutionalized for his homosexuality. After the war, he reenlisted and was stationed in Coblenz, Germany, as part of the American occupying forces. Gerber’s work there involved writing and editing newspapers for the Army.
HE WHO DARED...
The event that pushed Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld to prioritize the study and support of homosexuals was the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde. A famous writer of plays, poems, and stories, Wilde was also well known as a flamboyant personality on the London social scene.
In early 1895, the Marquess of Queensbury outed Wilde as a homosexual. Until then, Wilde had been in the closet as far as the general public was concerned. Against the advice of friends, Wilde sued the marquess for libel, which was punishable by up to two years in prison.
However, the marquess had a strategy for defense. Because of the ways in which the laws were written, the libel case could be thrown out if the offending statement was proven to be true. The marquess’s attorney hired detectives to expose Wilde’s private life, and during the trial they threatened to bring forth personal letters and testimonies from male prostitutes with whom Wilde had been involved. Wilde dropped the suit and was forced to repay the defendant’s legal expenses.
Wilde was now not only bankrupt but was also charged with gross indecency in an extremely public and political trial. Even the marquess’s attorney from the previous trial asked of the solicitor general, “Can we not let up on the poor fellow now?” Despite his attempts on the stand to defend not only himself but “the love that dare not speak its name,” he was found guilty and sentenced to hard labor.
This 1878 photo shows Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) before he was outed and convicted of gross indecency.
Postwar Berlin was ground zero for ideas about sex and sexuality that had been developing in Germany over the previous fifty years. The man at the forefront of this revolution was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Of all the medical experts who attempted to explain homosexuality in the nineteenth century, Hirschfeld would end up having the most influence and, by comparison, the most positive and supportive approach.
Born in 1868, he originally studied philosophy before switching his focus to medicine. In the late nineteenth century, he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, a group that fought to repeal the criminalization of homosexuality and study it scientifically. Hirschfeld was part of the growing field of sexology, the study of human sexuality.
The permissive culture of Berlin in the 1920s and Hirschfeld’s work were huge influences on Gerber. The economic collapse of the country after the war had a destabilizing effect on German culture. The previous conservative and militaristic aspects of society began to fall out of favor with the younger generation. Art movements such as Dadaism and expressionist cinema began to thrive, and foreign influences such as American jazz became popular.
In Berlin, Gerber found a gay culture that was unlike anything he had seen in America. There were gay bars and a thriving scene for cruising, where gay men and lesbians would go looking in public for sexual encounters with others of the same sex. Most important was Hirschfeld’s institute and work, which treated homosexuality and gender nonconformity not as illnesses, but as legitimate identities.
FIRST ITEM ON THE GAY AGENDA
When he finally returned to Chicago, Gerber was inspired by what he had seen. He convinced a few friends to form the Society for Human Rights (SHR) in 1924. This type of group would come to be known as a homophile organization. Although he conceived of the group, Gerber served only as its secretary. John T. Graves, an African American minister, was the society’s president.
After electing their officers, the eight founding members wrote up an agenda for actions to take. First, they intended to ask other gay men to become members. Typical of early gay rights organizations, the society was strictly for men. Gay men and lesbians at the time were very culturally divided, and it would not be until later in the twentieth century that they began join together as a unified movement. The group excluded bisexuals, so only strictly homosexual men could be members. They also planned a series of lectures and a newsletter that would be called Friendship and Freedom. The group struggled, though. Without any real experience, they lacked the organizational skills and connections to get financial support from wealthy gay men.
In spite of financial struggles, excluding people who weren’t gay men would prove to be the organization’s downfall. The group’s vice president, Al Meineger, was bisexual and married to a woman.
WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?
During the times when gay men and lesbians had to keep their identities secret, it became important to know who else was gay and where to find safe spaces for socializing. Here are some of the secret signs and signals people came up with:
• The Hanky Code dates back to the California gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century. It began among men looking to dance in the all-male taverns that sprang up to serve the prospectors who had come looking for gold. Men would wear a handkerchief in their back left pocket if they were looking to dance with another man as the lead and one in their back right pocket if they meant to follow. A good number of these men were queer.
• In Chicago, State Street was a major thoroughfare where the many classes and cultures of the Windy City intersected. One of the signs in that neighborhood to signal that someone was gay was a red necktie. A more flamboyant color signal in early modern New York was a green suit, but the look was so flamboyant it was difficult to be discrete.
• Lesbians had their own signs and signals, too. Giving violets to another woman, inspired by a verse from the ancient Greek poet Sappho’s work, was a way of admitting an attraction. In the 1940s, some gay women would get a nautical star tattooed on their inner wrists. The trick to this was that such tattoos could be covered up with a wristwatch during the day and exposed at night.
This 1953 portrait shows James Baldwin (1924-1987). He contributed to the canon of African American literature and to the growing body of LGBTQ+ writing.
• Books also acted as a way to find out if someone was gay. People would ask whether someone had read books such as Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin or Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker or what they thought of gay writers such as Walt Whitman or Gertrude Stein.
Not wanting to be left out, he kept his heterosexual relationship secret. In 1925, Meineger’s wife found SHR materials he had brought home. Like the members of SHR, she was completely unaware of her husband’s bisexuality. She reported the evidence to police, and Graves and Gerber were both arrested. When writing about the incident later on, Gerber would mention he was showed a Chicago Examiner article titled “Strange Sex Cult Exposed,” but that particular headline was not preserved in the paper’s archives and perhaps never existed. It is more likely that the newspaper was the Chicago American, and the headline was “Girl Reveals Strange Cult Run by Dad.”
The Gerber/Hart Library in Chicago holds these Gay Olympic Games medals and poster in its archives. The Gay Games started in 1982 in San Francisco.
Though the charges against Gerber were dropped after several trials and appeals, the legal expenses bankrupted him, and the scandal cost him his job with the post office. Despite this loss, and the failure of America’s first homophile organization, he continued to write articles in support of gay rights. He took a chance and published them under his own name, rather than a pseudonym. Although his efforts with the SHR were not successful, he has been recognized and honored by the Chicago LGBTQ+ community. In 2015, his house, where the SHR held its meetings, was made a historic landmark, and the city’s LGBTQ+ library, the Gerber/Hart Library, is named after him and lesbian social justice activist Pearl M. Hart.