One hundred years ago, on December 10, 1924, the United States’ first legally recognized gay rights organization, the Human Rights Association, was founded in Chicago.
Its founder was Henry Gerber, a German immigrant and postal worker. According to his biography, he was expelled from school and lost several jobs for being gay in his home country. Angel of Sodom: Henry Garber and the Birth of the Gay Rights Movement Written by Jim Elledge, published in 2022.
In 1913, at the age of 21, he came to the United States with his family and joined the Army. After completing his tour of duty, he became involved in Chicago’s gay scene, which led to further problems – institutionalization, arrest, and internment as an enemy alien. The authorities gave him the choice of going to prison or returning to the army.
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He chose the latter and returned to Germany in 1920 for a mission. There, he noticed a large gay rights movement emerging. “He subscribed to a German gay magazine and was in touch with Magnus Hirschfeld’s scientific and humanitarian community in Berlin,” the magazine’s biography says. Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame website. When he returned to the United States and worked at the post office, he was inspired and decided to start a movement in his home country. He and his friends founded a non-profit organization, the Human Rights Association. The group published a newsletter, Friendship and Freedom.
Unfortunately, society did not last long. In July 1925, the family of one of Gerber’s associates reported the group to the police, who raided the association’s meetings, arrested Gerber and others, searched Gerber’s apartment, and removed materials related to the organization. It was confiscated. Gerber spent his life’s savings on his defense, and after three trials, the charges were dismissed on the grounds that he had been arrested without a warrant. He was fired from the post office, moved to New York City and re-enlisted in the Army, where he served for another 17 years. The military at the time was apparently more tolerant of homosexuality than many civilian employers.
Gerber’s later activities were low profile. He formed a pen pal club for homosexuals and wrote articles and letters to the editor under a pen name. After World War II, he moved to a veterans home in Washington, D.C., and eventually joined the Washington chapter of the Mattachine Society, a new gay rights organization. Inspired by Gerber, Harry Hay founded Mattachine in California in 1950. However, Garber’s subsequent involvement in the gay rights movement was limited by his “deep-seated capriciousness,” which “left him dissatisfied with what a new generation of advocates were doing.” Patrick T. Reardon writes. review of Angel of Sodom.
Gerber wrote several books, all unpublished, and one of them, the novella “The Angel of Sodom”, became the title of Elledge’s biography. Gerber also wrote a eulogy for the Human Rights Association. one magazine The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive at the University of Southern California Libraries in Los Angeles has a collection of Gerber’s letters, which proved to Elledge valuable for his writing.
gerber/heart LGBTQ+ Founded in 1981, the Chicago Library and Archives is named in honor of Gerber and Pearl Hart, activist lawyers who defended homosexuals and immigrants. Gerber/Hart has a free lending library of books, e-books, and audiovisual materials, as well as an archive of documents.
Mr. Gerber died in 1972 at the age of 80. He was posthumously inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 1992, and in 2015, Garber’s Chicago apartment was designated a National Historic Landmark by Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell. It is the second LGBTQ+ site to receive this title, the first being New York City’s Stonewall Inn, site of the famous 1969 riots over police harassment.
Source: Advocate.com – www.advocate.com
