January 8, 2018: Gay Rights Histories: The Society for Human Rights (1924)

[On January 9^th, 1978 Harvey Milk was inaugurated to a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, making him one of America’s first openly gay elected officials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Milk and other historical moments and events in the early history of the Gay Rights Movement, leading up to a weekend post on an impressive visual exhibit on the movement at Fitchburg State University.]

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 history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?

January 6-7, 2018: Crowd-sourced Books for the New Year

[Whatever else 2018 brings for us all, I hope it brings lots more great writing and voices to read and engage with and learn from and share. To that end, this week I highlighted five recent or upcoming books that I’m excited to read. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the nominees of fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]

Andrew DaSilva writes, “For nonfiction, The Romanovs: 1613-1918, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I am looking forward to reading it, but I got like 4 other books I wanna plow through before I get to anything new such as this.”

Nicole Sterbinsky shares, “I'm hoping to read Planet for Rent by Yoss very soon. It's a translated version of a Cuban science fiction novel. Judging from what the back of the book said it also has some satirical elements about life in Cuba under Castro. So, I'm very interested to see what the author has to say.”

Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel is reading Lisa Brooks’ Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War.

Derek McGrath writes, “In the immediate future, I need to read more #MyHeroAcademia to get weekly reviews going again. And I need to re-read some classic literature related to a particular animated show. (Ever wanted to see F. Scott Fitzgerald as an anime supervillain?)”

Ellak Roach Tweets, “Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer reads like it could have been written yesterday, and I think is just as relevant now as it has ever been.” He adds, “Another book I just finished reading in my Political Theory class is How Propaganda Works by Jason Stanley. It’s a pretty brisk read, but I really enjoyed my time with it (covered the first 5 chapters or so in class, read the rest myself).”

Dan Sheppard shares, “Homesick for Another World by Otessa Moshfegh. A collection of short stories that are simultaneously mundane and jarring.”

Since they were kind enough to Retweet my request for nominations for this post, I wanted to share the website of Is a Rose Press.

And Jeff Renye, like so many of us, is just waiting for The Winds of Winter.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Books you’d add to the list?

January 1-5, 2018: New Books for the New Year

[Whatever else 2018 brings for us all, I hope it brings lots more great writing and voices to read and engage with and learn from and share. To that end, here are five recent or upcoming books that I’m excited to read—please share your own nominees or suggestions in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend reading list!]

1)      Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy: Coates has been in the news quite a bit recently for (to me) a particularly frustrating reason: Cornel West’s attacks on him for focusing too narrowly on white supremacy as the fundamental American ill. But whatever one’s stance on that particular contest (and I’ll say that I’m thoroughly Team Coates and leave it at that), we cannot in any case lose sight of the vital role that Coates plays as one of our best public writers and scholars. His latest book on both the Obama presidency/era and the transition into the Trump one extends and deepens that role, and I’m excited to delve into more fully in the new year.

2)      Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird: The post hyperlinked under her name reflects how long and how fully I’ve enjoyed Locke’s mystery novels, which (as Matthew Teutsch has argued) consistently link race, community, and history to genre conventions in unique and deeply compelling ways. Her newest novel, which has already been picked up as a potential FX series, is #1 on my list of fiction I need to read as soon as possible in 2018.

3)      Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing: Ditto what I said above about Locke when it comes to Ward’s books, both her fiction (as referenced in the post hyperlinked under her name) and her family and cultural memoir. With Sing Ward has returned to fiction, and by all accounts written another great American novel, one both located in longstanding traditions such as the road novel and passionately engaged with our contemporary moment and society. What else is there to say?

4)      Francisco Cantu, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border: I know significantly less about the last two (both forthcoming in early 2018) books I’ll highlight here (and again would love to hear about more new or upcoming titles in comments!), and won’t pretend otherwise. What makes this book so interesting to me is that it’s written by a former Border Patrol agent but seems willing and able to consider with nuance and empathy the circumstances and identities of those individuals, families, and communities seeking to cross the US-Mexico border in both documented and undocumented ways. We need voices and texts like that much, much more than we need big, beautiful walls.

5)      Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: We also need great writing about writing—about how to do it, the overt subject of novelist Chee’s collection of essays; but also and especially about why we do it, about the individual and collective stakes of writing and reading and books and literature. I look forward to seeing how Chee presents those broader topics alongside his more specific literary and writing subjects.

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. You know what to do!