Homosexual Exclusions: Homonormativity, Elite Distinction, and Failed Assimilation in Pre-Nazi Germany

Despite the Third Reich's efforts to rewrite German history, post-WWII scholars and activists have worked valiantly to unearth the inspiring legacies of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific Humanitarian Committee (WhK) before Nazi takeover. But by lionizing Hirschfeld, these same scholars/activists have too often erased (1) WhK’s limitations, (2) other, less savory competitor groups like the masculinist Community of the Self-Possessed (GdE) and collaborationist Human Rights League (BfM), and (3) surprisingly generative critiques put forth by these latter groups. In a comparative-historical analysis of WhK, GdE, and BfM organizers, I suggest that fin-de-siècle German capitalism inculcated an illusory proximity to power that limited organizers' insights into bourgeois heteronormative German society and their precarious place within it. Despite criticizing some particulars, all of these activists nonetheless identified with and demonstrated adherence to classist models of normative Germanness by excluding other gender- and sexually-nonconforming people. WhK medicalists constructed themselves as upright, learned "homosexual" professionals against criminalized "pseudohomosexual" sex workers; GdE masculinists constructed their Hellenistic literary circle of enlightened "homoerotic" against crude, hypersexual, effeminate decadents. BfM homonormatives constructed themselves as respectable, everyday middle-class citizen-subjects against perverse, pathological, in-your-face activists. These attempts to gain inclusion at one another’s expense undermined their ability to work together and with other oppressed groups. Apart from a brief rapprochement, these competing groups constantly distinguished themselves from and denigrated one another. Hidden beneath this impulse is, to borrow from current discourse about Trump supporters, a sense of being “temporarily embarrassed elites" that obscured friend from foe and obscured their extreme vulnerability to the coming storm of fascist reaction. I conclude by bringing the strengths and limitations of these three groups to bear on the current fascist, genocidal moment, suggesting that learning from their mistakes and capitalizing on their strengths is essential for bringing about a non-fascist movement, society, and world.