[October 11th
marks the 30th annual National Coming
Out Day, an important occasion in the unfolding story of gay rights in
America. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of figures and stories from
the history of gay rights, leading up to a special weekend post on gay identities
in American popular culture!]
Three contexts
for the brief and frustrating yet important and inspiring history of America’s first
gay rights organization.
1)
Germany: The Society’s founder, Henry Gerber,
immigrated to Chicago from Germany in 1913 at the age of 21; he enlisted in the
US army during WWI and ended up back in Germany, working as a printer for the Allied
Army of Occupation between 1920 and 1923. While there he connected to the
work of German physician
and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Bund
für Menschenrechte (Association for Human Rights), a pioneering
organization (linked to Hirschfeld’s work with a group known as the Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee) dedicated to both supporting gay communities and advocating for
sexuality as a shared aspect of human identity. When Gerber returned to the US
and became a postal worker in Chicago, he decided to create his own such
organization, filing an application for a charter for a non-profit Society
for Human Rights in December 1924. While the first world war is often
described as a moment of new international (even global) conflict, and of the
ruptures that contributed to the rise of Modernism (among other effects),
Gerber’s German influences (like his immigration story) illustrate the era’s
and America’s concurrent possibilities for international connections and
collaborations.
2)
Comstock: As you might expect, Gerber and the
Society met with immediate and innumerable challenges. One of the most
significant, and certainly the most ironic given Gerber’s day job as a postal
service worker, was the Comstock Act
(1873), which crimilinalized sending materials deemed “obscene” or “immoral”
through the mail. Given that all gay-oriented publications (even those with no
overt erotic elements) were deemed obscene until the Supreme Court’s decision
in One, Inc. v. Olesen (1958), the
Society was not able to communicate via mail at all without violating the law;
for example, while Gerber founded and edited two issues of a newsletter, Friendship and Freedom, he likely
did not mail it to any members, and no extant copies of it are known to have
survived. Such social and legal challenges proved insurmountable, as in 1925
Gerber and other founding members were arrested; Gerber
would be tried in court three times before the charges against him were
dismissed, and in the process he lost all his personal papers, all remaining
issues of Friendship and Freedom, and
all of his personal savings as well. While the Society served as an influence
and inspiration for later gay rights organizations, its own history was
tragically short-lived and circumscribed.
3)
John
T. Graves: That frustratingly quick end in no way minimizes the Society’s
significance, of course, nor the many layers to its community and histories.
One of the most compelling to this AmericanStudier is that of John T. Graves,
an African American preacher in Chicago who signed the Society’s inauguration
papers (along with his partner, a railroad
worker named Ralph Ellsworth Booher) and served as the Society’s first and
only President. That’s about all of the information that I’ve been able to
learn about Graves as of this writing, but even those few tidbits present so
many complicated and compelling layers: the intersection of race and religion
with this early gay rights organization and movement. As I detailed in this
post, Bayard
Rustin is often seen as one of the first figures to bring those different
American communities and histories together; but four decades earlier, John
Graves apparently did so as well. Just one more reason to better remember and
engage with the frustrating but fascinating history of the Society for Human
Rights.
Next story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Gay rights figures or stories you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment