Guest Post: Forgotten origins of the modern gay rights movement in World War I

Laurie Marhoefer, University of Washington

One of the World War I’s most enduring legacies is largely forgotten: It sparked the modern gay rights movement.

Gay soldiers who survived the bloodletting returned home convinced their governments owed them something – full citizenship. Especially in Germany, where gay rights already had a tenuous footing, they formed new organizations to advocate in public for their rights.

Though the movement that called itself “homosexual emancipation” began in the 19th century, my research and that of historian Jason Crouthamel shows that the war turned the 19th-century movement into gay rights as we know it today.

A death in Russia

In the winter of 1915, a German soldier died in a field hospital in Russia. The soldier, whose name is missing from the historical record, had been hit in the lower body by shrapnel when his trench came under bombardment. Four of his comrades risked their lives to carry him to the rear. There, he lay for weeks, wracked by pain in the mangled leg and desperately thirsty. But what troubled him most was loneliness. He sent letters to his boyfriend whenever he could manage it.

“I crave a decent mouthful of fresh water, of which there isn’t any here,” he wrote in his final letter. “There is absolutely nothing to read; please, do send newspapers. But above all, write very soon.”

German infantrymen aim machine guns from a trench near the Vistula River in 1916.
AP-Photo

This soldier, who had to keep his relationship hidden from those around him, was just one of the approximately two million German men killed in World War I. His suffering is not unlike what many others experienced. What his loved ones made of that suffering, however, was different, and had enormous consequences.

His boyfriend, identified in surviving documents only as “S.,” watched the man he loved go off to serve in a war that he did not fully endorse, only to die alone and in pain as S. sat helplessly by hundreds of miles away. S. told their story in a letter to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which published it in April 1916.

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was then the world’s leading homosexual emancipation group, boasting a membership of about 100 people. The soldier’s story took a cruel twist at its very end: S.‘s loving replies were lost in the chaos of the war and never reached the soldier.

“He died without any contact from me,” S. wrote.

Demanding the rights of citizens

After the war, many believed the slaughter had been for nothing. But S. saw a lesson in his partner’s suffering and death.

“He has lost his bright life … for the Fatherland,” wrote S. That Fatherland had a law on the books that banned sex between men. But the sodomy law was just the tip of the iceberg: S. and men like him generally could not reveal their love relationships in public, or even to family members. Homosexuality meant the loss of one’s job, social ostracism, the risk of blackmail and perhaps criminal prosecution.

S. called it “deplorable” that “good citizens,” soldiers willing to die for their country, had to endure the status of “pariahs.” “People who are by nature orientated toward the same sex … do their duty,” he wrote. “It is finally time that the state treated them like they treat the state.”

A new phase of gay rights

A magazine put out by the League for Human Rights in 1930.
Author provided

Many veterans agreed with S. When the war ended, they took action. They formed new, larger groups, including one called the League for Human Rights that drew 100,000 members.

In addition, as I argue in my book, the rhetoric of gay rights changed. The prewar movement had focused on using science to prove that homosexuality was natural. But people like S., people who had made tremendous sacrifices in the name of citizenship, now insisted that their government had an obligation to them regardless of what biology might say about their sexuality.

They left science behind. They went directly to a set of demands that characterizes gay rights to this day – that gay people are upstanding citizens and deserve to have their rights respected. “The state must recognize the full citizenship rights of inverts,” or homosexuals, an activist wrote in the year after the war. He demanded not just the repeal of the sodomy law, but the opening of government jobs to known homosexuals – a radical idea at the time, and one that would remain far out of reach for many decades.

Respectable citizens

Ideas of citizenship led activists to emphasize what historians call “respectability.” Respectability consisted of one’s prestige as a correctly behaving, middle-class person, in contrast to supposedly disreputable people such as prostitutes. Throughout the 20th century, gay rights groups struggled for the right to serve openly in the military, a hallmark of respectability. With some exceptions, they shied away from radical calls to utterly remake society’s rules about sex and gender. They instead emphasized what good citizens they were.

In 1929, a speaker for the League for Human Rights told an audience at a dance hall, “we do not ask for equal rights, we demand equal rights!” It was, ironically, the ghastly violence and horrible human toll of the World War I that first inspired such assertive calls, calls that characterized gay rights movements around the world in the 20th century.

It would take nearly a century for these activists to achieve one of their central goals – the repeal of sodomy laws. Germany enjoyed a 14-year period of democracy after World War I, but the Nazis came to power in 1933 and used the sodomy law to murder thousands of men. A version of the law remained in force until the 1990s. The United States struck down its sodomy laws only in 2003.

Laurie Marhoefer, Assistant Professor of History, University of Washington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Titanic's Enduring Legacy

When Millvina Dean died on May 31, the final chapter of one of the iconic events of the early 20th century was closed.

Miss Dean, 97 years old, was the last survivor of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. She was an infant aboard the White Star liner, traveling with her parents and brother, who hoped to settle in Wichita, Kansas, to create a new future for themselves. That plan never materialized, as her father was killed and her mother decided to return to England.

Twelve years ago, keyed to the 85th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, I wrote a review of a book called Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth, by Paul Heyer. It appeared in The Metro Herald in April 1997. (Note that this was published before the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed.)

The Titanic's Enduring Legacy
Richard Sincere
Exclusive to The Metro Herald

This week marks the 85th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Last Sunday, cable's Discovery Channel debuted a documentary about the event, putting forth the theory that the famous ship had not been slit open by an iceberg, but rather buckled upon collision, creating small holes placed evenly along the hull that allowed water to flow into the ship. Two days earlier on MSNBC, Time & Again dug into NBC News archives to commemorate the anniversary with a 30-minute look at previous reports on various Titanic remembrances and efforts to find her wreckage.

The Discovery Channel's report, which focuses on how extremely cold water weakened the Titanic's "impenetrable" hull, reminds us of how cold air was a factor in the 1986 Challenger disaster, another gripping tragedy. Remarkably, the Challenger explosion parallels -- in sometimes eerie detail -- the sinking of the Titanic.

What are some parallels? Both voyages were preceded by enormous public attention, the Titanic because it was the world's largest cruise ship, embarking on its maiden voyage, while the space shuttle Challenger would carry the first average citizen into space, schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Both ships sank into the North Atlantic. Both accidents involved ice -- the Titanic sideswiping an iceberg, the Challenger breaking up because ice weakened its "O"-rings. Both disasters were quickly followed by official -- and controversial -- government inquiries, which were in turn followed by legislation and regulations meant to address the cause of the tragedy. And, since the Titanic went down, no passenger's life has been lost at sea due to icebergs; since the Challenger, no lives have been lost in space travel.

Both disasters had something else in common: both caught the imagination of the American people (and people across the globe) in an unprecedented fashion.

In the case of the Titanic, however, there was a new element -- the emerging technology of radio communications. Radio imparted news of the disaster much faster than any previous, similar event. (When the liner Pacific vanished without a trace in 1856, it was many months before a message in a bottle landed in Scotland, declaring that the ship had gone down in an icefield. By that time, of course, no rescue or salvage was possible.)

Paul Heyer, professor of communications at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, demonstrates, in a new book-length examination of media treatments of the Titanic disaster, that "everything old is new again" (Titanic Legacy: Disaster as Media Event and Myth, by Paul Heyer. Praeger Publishers, 200 pages, $39.95). Many of the news media's practices that are currently under attack -- for instance, paying witnesses for exclusive first-hand accounts of events -- were similarly criticized in the aftermath of the Titanic's sinking. Sensationalism, luridness, manufactured stories designed to sell newspapers -- these were worries in 1912 as much as in 1997. Who needs A Current Affair or Jenny Jones when you have the New York World and the New York Herald?

In Titanic Legacy, Heyer traces how the New York Times, in particular, emerged from the pack of more than a dozen New York dailies, and how its coverage of the Titanic sparked its ascendancy as the country's premiere newspaper. He goes on to look at how both news and entertainment media treated the disaster in subsequent decades, with special emphasis on the 1953 film Titanic (starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck) and the 1958 British docudrama based on Walter Lord's non-fiction book, A Night to Remember. He also traces more obscure works, such as Thomas Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain," which he composed for a fundraising event for Titanic survivors, and blues singer Leadbelly's ballad, "De Titanic." He pays particular attention to "Titanic Toast," described as part of the African-American oral tradition and performed in the 1910s and ‘20s much as a rap number is today.

Several dynamic characters emerge from the story. Time has faded our memories, and most of us have forgotten that Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless communications, was scheduled to be a passenger on the Titanic, but pressing business in New York forced him to depart Britain several days earlier. Few people remember, too, that the ultimate owner of the Titanic was tycoon J.P. Morgan, whose international shipping trust included White Star Lines. In addition, several famous people went down with the ship, including millionaire John Jacob Astor and Isidor and Ida Straus (owners of Macy's), who insisted on remaining together, hand-in-hand, as the Titanic descended into its watery grave.

In many ways, the story of the Titanic is as much a story of modern communications as it is about shipbuilding or sailing or weather conditions. The U.S. Senate investigation into the disaster led shortly thereafter to the first comprehensive regulation of (what later became known as) broadcasting. Marconi's corporate policies came under particular attack for being monopolistic. Heyer seems to accept this charge at face value, although he acknowledges that Marconi's company had several competitors both in Europe and America. Heyer is also insistent that regulation of the wireless industry was necessary and proper, though he fails to back up these assertions with hard evidence.

Titanic Legacy is a fascinating book. Professor Heyer is sure to find a ready audience for his book among the many amateur Titanic historians. For anyone interested in the history of the news and entertainment media, however, Titanic Legacy is recommended reading.

As a side note, I also highly recommend another book on the Titanic, which I have not had the pleasure of reviewing: The Titanic Story: Hard Choices, Dangerous Decisions by Stephen D. Cox, who is now editor of Liberty magazine.

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