So The Germans Invented Homosexuality And Gay Rights...Who Knew?

[MsGuy]

Here's an article/book review from the New Yorker about the development of a Gay rights movement in late 19th century Germany that came oh so close to success only to be squashed by the Nazi's at the last moment.

Interesting how so many of the different elements of the modern Gay Movement were prefigured over a hundred years earlier.

But kind of sad too given what happened in the 1930's.

An excerpt from the review:

"On August 29, 1867, a forty-two-year-old lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs went before the Sixth Congress of German Jurists, in Munich, to urge the repeal of laws forbidding sex between men. He faced an audience of more than five hundred distinguished legal figures, and as he walked to the lectern he felt a pang of fear. “There is still time to keep silent,” he later remembered telling himself. “Then there will be an end to all your heart-pounding.” But Ulrichs, who had earlier disclosed his same-sex desires in letters to relatives, did not stop. He told the assembly that people with a “sexual nature opposed to common custom” were being persecuted for impulses that “nature, mysteriously governing and creating, had implanted in them.” Pandemonium erupted, and Ulrichs was forced to cut short his remarks. Still, he had an effect: a few liberal-minded colleagues accepted his notion of an innate gay identity, and a Bavarian official privately confessed to similar yearnings. In a pamphlet titled “Gladius furens,” or “Raging Sword,” Ulrichs wrote, “I am proud that I found the strength to thrust the first lance into the flank of the hydra of public contempt.”

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I guess I should have noted the book reviewed is Robert Beachy’s “Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity” (Knopf).

[Ojibear]

Here we are nearly 150 years later and the Supreme Court of India just made homosexuality illegal again. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr.