‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany's Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War

Abstract

This article analyses the impact of the First World War on Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. I argue that the war was a turning point for the nation's gay movement, as it provided a central ideal – comradeship – which altered the ways in which homosexual rights organisations defined homosexuality and masculinity. A militarised rhetoric permeated the language of gay rights groups in the 1920s, providing a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimise ‘friendship’ and secure civil rights. The article relies on the publications of three major homosexual rights organisations recently collected at the Schwules Archiv und Museum in Berlin.

Introduction: Masculinity and the Third Reich

“…Jason Crouthamel, known for his research on masculinity and the sexuality of German soldiers during World War I and its aftermath, shows how homosexual veterans of that war and active soldiers in the Third Reich deployed hegemonic masculinity as a resource that allowed for agency and defense. 39 As is generally known, the Nazis considered homosexuality-unlike racial inferiority-as a curable, or at least suppressible, disease. Most homosexual men in Nazi Germany had only one option to escape persecution: by hiding or suppressing their identity.…”

“… Reeser, Masculinities in Theory,[38][39] 45. 24 Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 15.…”