Why Did Gay Rights Take So Long?
On a sweltering July night in 1925, Henry Gerber—a German-born post-office worker living in Chicago—heard a pounding at his door. Several uniformed police officers shoved their way inside, confiscated his diaries and personal files, and arrested him. Only at the police station, when Gerber saw two of his gay and bisexual friends sitting for mugshots, did he start to realize what was going on: He was being persecuted for launching what was likely America’s first gay-rights organization.
In an article he wrote for a gay magazine in 1962, Gerber likened the next few days to an “Unholy Inquisition.” After police discovered the existence of his group—the innocuously named Society for Human Rights—Gerber spent five days in jail before being released on bail. Although he was never charged, he was fired from the post office. Many of his gay acquaintances refused to be seen with him, fearing undue attention.
If we visualize the history of the gay-rights movement in the U.S. as a scatterplot, Gerber’s Society for Human Rights unleashed the movement’s more radical, liberationist phase. The Society for Human Rights, which existed for less than a year,from 1924 to 1925, and which aimed to create a political constituency around gay rights, is often reduced to a footnote. But the existence of Gerber’s organization complicates things: If queer people were organizing themselves in the 1920s, what happened to the movement in the 30 years or so in between?
