The first “gay rights” organization in the United States was an American chapter of the German-based Society for Human Rights (SHR). The German SHR, formed in 1919 by Thule Society member Hans Kahnert, was a militant organization led by “Butch” homosexuals. Many of the early Nazis, including SA leader Ernst Roehm, were also SHR members.
The American SHR was formed on December 10, 1924, in Chicago, by a German-American named Henry Gerber (J. Katz:388). Gerber had served with the U.S. occupation forces in Germany from 1920 to 1923 and had been involved with the German organization. Together with a small group of fellow “revolutionaries,” Gerber legally chartered the group without revealing its purpose and began publishing a pro-homosexual journal called
Friendship and Freedom (ibid.:389), patterned after the German chapter’s publication of the same name (ibid.:632n.).
In 1925, however, **the organization collapsed when Gerber, Vice President Al **
Menninger and another member were arrested on charges of sexual abuse of a boy, all three having been turned in by Menninger’s wife. The Chicago
Examiner ran a story titled “Strange Sex Cult Exposed,” and spoke of “strange doings” in Menninger’s apartment. Menninger confessed, but Gerber claimed the incident was a set-up, saying that their arrests were “shades of the Holy Inquisition.” Rather than take his chances in court, however, Gerber hired a lawyer who “knew how to fix the State Attorney and judges” and the case was dismissed (ibid.:392). After going underground for a time, writing under the pen-name “Parisex,” Gerber reemerged in 1934 on the staff of a pro-homosexual literary magazine called
Chanticleer (ibid.:394). He also retained his ties to the German SHR and published several articles in their publications (ibid.:633n.).
In
Chanticleer, Gerber revealed himself as a militant socialist who regarded capitalism and Christianity as the twin pillars of ignorance and repression of “sexual freedom” (ibid.:394). In response to the news of the Roehm Purge in the American press, he admitted that the Nazis were led by homosexuals and praised “Roehm and his valiant men” (ibid.:396). Gerber is quoted at length in
Katz’s
Gay American History regarding the Nazi regime. He writes,
A short time ago an American journalist pointed out in the liberal “Nation” that the whole Hitler movement was based on the homosexual Greek attachments of men for each other, and the same Jewish author stated that it was another of the Hitler contradictions that the “Leader” should have acquiesced in the burning of the books of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld…Thus we get a glimpse of the insanity of the whole movement: A Jewish doctor working for the interests of homosexuals is persecuted by a heterosexual mob, led by homosexuals (Gerber in
J. Katz:395).
It is interesting to note that the homosexual inclinations of the Nazis were a matter of at least limited public knowledge in the United States at this time, as well as their Greek origins. We can also infer from this passage that Gerber himself was not an overt fascist, though he clearly identified with the Brownshirts in Germany. Open fascism in the homosexual movement would come later, but Gerber and his pederastic friends had established its foundation. By 1972, when he died at the age of 80, Gerber had witnessed the emergence of homo-fascism as a permanent theme in the movement
**