The homophile movements also represented a new beginning. Cory-whose pseudonym was a reference to André Gide’s 1924 defence of homosexuality Corydon- had himself been influenced by Hirschfeld’s book, The Homosexuality of Men and Women. One influential book in America was Donald Webster Cory’s (pseudonym of Edward Sagarin) The Homosexual in America. But there were some links to a European past. Subsequently publishing also smaller English and French language sections, Der Kreis was between 19 the only homosexual periodical in the world, and the best known in Europe for many years after 1945 ( Kennedy 1999 Steinle 1999).Ĭontinuities were less evident in America when the first American homophile movement, the Mattachine Society, was founded in San Francisco in 1951 ( D’Emilio 1983). Its editor from 1943, Karl Meier (“Rolf”), had worked as an actor in Germany between 19.
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Another thread of continuity between the years before and after 1945 was the Zurich based Swiss periodical Der Kreis which had started in 1932. In 1946, however, one of the editors of this publication, Nico Engelschman (pseudonym: “Bob Angelo”) revived it under the name Vriendschap and set up what became COC in 1949. It survived until the Nazi invasion of 1940 when it disbanded and ended its recently founded newspaper Levensrecht.
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A Dutch chapter of his Scientific and Humanitarian Committee had existed since 1911 (Hekma this volume). Forced into exile, Hirschfeld died in 1935, but his legacy survived. The most visible manifestation of interwar homosexual activism had literally gone up in flames when in May 1933 the Nazis publically burnt the archives of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. This “homophile moment” represented both continuity and a new beginning. In Germany there was no one organized movement, but groups in Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt and Berlin publishing a plethora of more or less ephemeral magazines: Der Weg, Die Gefährten, Die Freunde, Hellas, Der Ring. By this time, self-proclaimed “homophile” movements existed in the United States, France, Belgium, Britain and Scandinavia. It appeared in the first issue of the Danish publication Vennen in 1950, and needed no explanation when used in the first issue of the American homophile publication ONE Magazine in 1953. By the early 1950s, homosexual reform movements throughout the Western world had adopted it. It achieved currency when adopted in 1946 by the Dutch organization Cultuur-en-Ontspanningscentrum known as COC. The word “homophile” was coined in 1924 by a German physician and homosexual activist in a work entitled Hetero und Homophilie ( Legg 1994: 23–7). This re-evaluation is partly due to the pendulum of historical revisionism but also to our contemporary preoccupations: stripped of the label, the “homophile” world view seems closer to us in some respects than that of the gay liberationists who consigned them to the dustbin of history.
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Thompson in another context called the “enormous condescension of posterity” ( Churchill 2008 Jackson 2009 Loftin 2012 Meeker 2006 Rupp 2011). Only recently have historians begun rescuing “homophiles” from what E.P. The homophiles never recovered from their dismissal by 1970s gay liberationists who were revolting as much against their precursors as against heterosexual society. The very term “homophile” has disappeared from use while “homosexual,” “gay” and “queer,” whose usage and popularity has fluctuated, are all employed today.
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Many leaders of these movements hid behind pseudonyms, and this further demonstrated their closeted timidity to later generations. They seem irremediably associated with a certain view of the conservative 1950s as opposed to the “radical” 1960s-although in fact most homophile organizations continued into, and after, the 1960s. The “homophiles” have neither the transgressive glamour of the fin de siècle nor the heady excitement of the revolutionary activism of the 1970s. Or it calls to mind discreet homosexual publications with none of the sexually explicit photographs that became widespread from the mid-1970s. If the word “homophile” is remembered at all today, except by historians, it conjures up fusty (black and white) images of respectable (white) men in suits earnestly debating at committees and congresses.