When was the world's first gay journal published? Congratulations if you said 115 years ago, in 1896. That's when Adolf Brand, at 22, started Der Eigene in Berlin. Originally cloaked as a journal of "male culture," its content became exclusively gay culture within two years. In 1900, Brand published Elisar von Kupffer's landmark anthology of gay poems, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe In der Weltliteratur, including works from Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 19th century Germany, as well as Arab and Japanese texts. Brand and his colleagues were constantly harassed and frequently prosecuted for their articles and photography, but he never backed down. Indeed, the first of his three prison sentences was for having attacked a member of parliament with a dog whip. His second prison term, eighteen months, was for libel, after reporting the affair between the German chancellor Prince von Bülow and the Privy Councilor Max Scheefer. His third prison term was two months, after he was convicted of violating Paragraph 175 for printing "lewd writings" in Der Eigene. The journal lasted thirty-six years. (Compare that with ONE, nineteen years; The Ladder, sixteen years; or 10 Percent magazine, four years.) His life's work destroyed and left in financial ruin, Brand gave up his activism in the 1930s. He spent two years in the German army and married a nurse, Elise Behrendt, who knew he was gay. He and Elise were killed together on February 2, 1945 when an Allied bomb exploded their home.
Comments