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Speaking of Paragraph 175

Jim Burroway

May 14th, 2007

Last night as I was putting the finishing touches on my exposé of Paul Cameron’s “Gays in Nazi Germany,” Michael Petrelis emailed me to remind me that today is a profoundly important date in LGBT history.

Magnus HirschfeldOn this day in history, exactly 110 years ago on May 14, 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld, the modern world’s first “homosexual activist” organized the Scientific Humanitarian Committee for the expressed purpose of advocating for the repeal of Paragraph 175, the German statute which criminalized sodomy. Paragraph 175 was the law that the Nazi’s would later use to send upwards of 15,000 gay men to concentration camps. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee is the first documented formal group to advocate for the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

Actually, Michael Petrelis emailed me to say that today is Magnus Hirschfeld’s 139th birthday. Born in Kolber, Germany (now Kolbrzeg, Poland), he became a prominent physician, sexologist and the pioneering gay-rights advocate. He recognized early on the importance of gays and lesbians to come out of the closet, believing that the nascent movement wouldn’t make much headway otherwise:

…(I)n the last analysis, you must carry on the fight yourselves….(T)he liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals themselves.

The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee managed to gather over 5000 signatures from prominent Germans from all walks of society for a petition to overturn Paragraph 175. But none of the signatories were openly gay.

The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’s work continued when he founded the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin in 1919. But the Institute’s work came to an abrupt end with the rise of the Nazi party in 1933. On May 6 of that year, the Nazi’s attacked and destroyed the institute and burned its valuable library. Dr. Hirschfeld was away on a speaking tour at the time, and so that act was the start of his permanent exile.

Dr. Hirschfeld died two years later — again on this date — of a heart attack in Nice, France on May 14, 1935. He was 67 years old.

Paul Cameron’s Nazi revisionism reminds us that Dr. Hirschfeld’s work is just as relevant today as it was a century ago.

Hat tip: Michael Petrelis

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