The need to assert pride in our identities in going public to fight for our civil rights as LGBTQIA+ people has been an idea that has been there from the very beginning.
Different people in different times and places have struck upon this and we look back on some of these.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895)
Described by some as the “first gay man in world history”, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs became the first LGBTQIA+ person to advocate for their rights and the first to identify sexual and gender minorities as a class of people who had a shared civil rights struggle.
Ulrichs lived in a period where homosexuality had been legalised in parts of Germany under the Napoleonic Code of laws that came out of the French Revolution and this afforded him a window of freedom in which he could speak his mind.
In 1862 he came out to his family and began publishing a series of pamphlets under the pseudonym of “Numa Numantius” on the “Riddle of Male-Male-Love.”
On 29 August 1867, Ulrichs became the first homosexual to speak out publicly in defence of his rights in front of the Association of German Jurists in Munich and from then on he abandoned the pseudonym.
During his own lifetime his activism made him so famous that even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote to each other about him and his pamphlets were read from one end of Europe to the other.
But when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1970 the smaller German states fell into line behind Prussia to form a united Germany under Prussia’s Paragraph 175 sodomy law and that window of freedom closed and Ulrichs quit to move to Italy.
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935)
Although the pair would never meet, Ulrichs’ decade of activism directly inspired another in Germany to take the fight to the next level.
Magnus Hirschfeld was born in Kolberg in Poland and emigrated to Germany in 1888 to complete his medical studies, earning his degree in 1982.
Two years after Ulrichs’ death, the pioneering sexologist founded the world’s first LGBTQIA+ rights organisation, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.
Dubbed the “Einstein of Sex” by the American press, in 1919 Hirschfeld opened his Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin which for over a decade functioned as a virtual embassy for a pan-European movement to decriminalise homosexuality.
The same year Hirschfeld co-wrote and acted in the 1919 film Different From the Others, in which he argued that the “persecution of homosexuals belongs to the same sad chapter of history in which the persecutions of witches and heretics is inscribed.”
In 1921 the group held its First Congress for Sexual Reform, leading to the formation of a World League for Sexual Reform and by 1932, congresses had been held in England, Denmark, Czechoslovakia and Austria.
However when the Nazi Party took control of Germany in 1933, Hirschfeld, who was both Jewish and gay, fled to France where he died in exile two years later.
Frank Kameny (1925-2011)
Frank Kameny founded the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1961 to fight Cold War era persecution of LGBTQIA+ Americans by the US Government.
Kameny was a WWII veteran who had served in Germany and became an astronomer with the US Army Map Service in 1957.
But he failed to disclose a 1956 arrest in San Francisco after police observed him with another man.
Anti-Communists like Senator Joe McCarthy argued that gay men and lesbians were a danger to America because they could be blackmailed into spying.
So when the government found out about his arrest he began a legal battle to keep his job, arguing that he was immune to blackmail because he was proud of his homosexuality.
“Homosexuality… is not only not immoral, but … such acts are moral … and are good, right, and desirable, socially and personally,” he told the court.
He lost the case but in doing so he had invented the idea of gay pride!
Kameny would go on to organise the first public protests by LGBTQIA+ Americans, picketing the White House in 1965.
In the year before Stonewall he coined the slogan “Gay is Good” as an assertion of pride in gay identity after being inspired by the African American civil rights slogan “Black is Beautiful.”
In 2009 the Obama Administration formally apologised to him for his firing from the US Army and the following year he was present in the room when Barack Obama signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010.
-For all the events taking place during Sydney Pride Month go to www.sydneypride.com
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