Henry Gerber and Chicago's Society for Human Rights

In the 1920s, the Society for Human Rights was founded in Chicago with the intent to decriminalize homosexuality. The society's founder was inspired by Germany's homosexual emancipation movement.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm trac Even Wilson. And Uh. We recently
talked about the Compton's Cafeteria riots. Uh, and this is

(00:22):
kind of a little bit of a dovetail on that,
but we're time traveling backwards. We talked about in that episode,
how you know a lot of people point the Stonewall
riots as the beginning of the LGBT rights movement in
the US, but of course there were things going on
before that, as that episode on the Cafeteria Riot pointed out,
and even before that, and they were certainly gay people

(00:45):
here long before that. Uh. And there were, in fact
LGBT rights organizations trying to pop up, probably much earlier
than you suspect. And today we're going to talk about
the man who started, ever so briefly, the first such
organization in the US, at least the first that we
know of, and that took place more than four decades
before Stonewall. So just a heads up on this one,

(01:07):
particularly if you're listening with younger listeners. Uh. We are
going to talk a little bit about some legal issues
that came up involving specific sex acts. So just keep
that in mind as you listen to this one. Maybe
preview it if you think your your younger listeners might
not be ready for that. But right out of the gate,
I feel like we have to mention that today's subject,

(01:27):
who is Henry Gerber, can be a little bit of
a difficult character in LGBT history. While he definitely wanted
to push back against anti gay legislation, he was not
so open to bisexuals. He was not particularly accepting of
lesbians or basically any of the people we would put
under the LGBT umbrella today that we're not gay men. Um.

(01:49):
He was an introvert. He was very serious man. Some
people describe him as curmudgeon le or cantankerous, uh, not
really a charmer, and he would often down his nose
even at other gay men, uh, saying that they were
too frivolous and that they were not forward thinking enough
about the place of the gay man in society. But

(02:10):
at the same time, he really spearheaded this important that
often overlooked effort to improve the rights of gay citizens
and secure some sort of safety for them. So we're
talking about Henry Gilbert today, keep in mind he's a
little bit tricky in some ways. He was born as

(02:31):
If Henry Dittmar. On j eighteen. He and his family
left their home in Bavaria to set out for the
United States, and they arrived at Ellis Island in nine thirteen.
At that point, Henry was twenty one, and once they
had been processed by immigration officials, the family moved to Chicago,
where they were hoping to join the significant German population there.

(02:53):
Henry got a job pretty quickly working at Montgomery Ward
in the mail order department. As it's probably obvious at
this point, Gerber was gay, and a lot of the
articles about him indicate that being homosexual got him institutionalized briefly,
although the accounts aren't entirely clear about exactly when this happened. Yeah,

(03:15):
he's one that, um we mentioned this a lot in
our are very in some of our episodes that there
are some portions of history and usually it's the further
back you go that it becomes the harder to actually
find substantiated information. And he's very tricky in this regard.
Outside of military records, a lot of what we have

(03:36):
is kind of word of mouth and his retailing and
some other retellings that have happened along the way, So
some of the details get a little mushy meshy um.
But what we do know is that Henry enlisted in
the U. S. Army on January nineteen fourteen, and it's
believed that just after this is when he changed his
name from uh Joseph Henry Dittmar to Henry Gerber, although

(03:59):
this is an other part where there's some haziness around
the historical record and when he stopped using his birth
name and switched to Gerber. Ditmar actually still appears on
a nineteen seventeen draft card, although at that point Henry
claimed exemption on that card as a conscientious objector, and
it's possible that he purposely uh shifted the name back

(04:20):
to his original Bavarian name in an effort to create
some paperwork confusion over his status. That's purely speculation. I
don't know based on what I've seen, and I haven't
seen the actual card, if that was a pre printed
card or if it's something he wrote in um. But
eventually we do know that his military records cross referenced
both names, both Ditmar and Gerber, during the early part

(04:43):
of World War One, he was labeled as an enemy
alien and he was taken to an interment camp. Really,
sensationalist stories in the press and in gossip circles about
German spies in the United States caused a lot of
German immigrants to be looked upon with suspicion, and he
was no exception. After the war was over, Gerber re
enlisted at the end of nineteen nineteen and he worked

(05:06):
for the military as a printer and a proof reader.
And he was shipped to Coblin's Germany as part of
the U. S. Army of Occupation in nineteen twenty and
there he worked on the Amarock News, which is a
daily paper that was published to keep American soldiers that
were stationed abroad, particularly in Germany, informed and entertained, and
it published everything from poems and short stories to the

(05:26):
latest sports scores. While he was in Germany serving as
a United States soldier, Garber was exposed to back country's
homosexual emancipation movement and as also to the Scientific Humanitarian
Committee that was a critical part of that movement. Uh
and I'll give a little background on the German homosexual
emancipation movements, and we're also going to talk a little

(05:49):
bit about Magnus Hirschfield, who was also mentioned in the
Compton's Cafeteria episode. So the criminal Code in Germany was
amended in eighteen seventy one with the inclusion of what
is called paragraph one seventy five, and that piece of
legislation made it illegal for men to engage in sexual
acts with one another. Twenty six years after paragraph one

(06:11):
seventy five was adopted into law, the Scientific Humanitarian Community
was founded in Berlin by Magnus Hirshfield. One of the
huge achievements of Hirshfield's life was the deconstruction of homosexuality
from a biological perspective, sort of moving it away from
being defined as a pathology and with a scientific approach

(06:32):
to the issue of homosexuality, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee was
making some progress towards LGBT rights, and they were making
that progress right up until Hitler's rise and the Nazi
Party's persecution of any perceived sexual deviance. Yeah, the Nazi
Party actually burned down Magnus Hirshfield's Institute for for Research

(06:53):
into Sexuality. Like that's that's sort of been alluded to
in a couple of episodes that we have talked about
that have been the subject, and we've never gone into
a lot of detail, but yeah, the Nazi Party destroyed
his facility and all the research. That wasn't it. And
uh that we're just giving you kind of the brief
and quick on that to kind of contextualize what happens

(07:14):
next when Gerber returns to the US. We're going to
talk about that influence after his time in Germany and
his exposure to the homosexual emancipation movement, But first we're
going to have a quick word from a sponsor. By
the time Gerber returned to the US, he was well
acquainted with the homosexual emancipation movement. He had spent his

(07:34):
time in Germany reading magazines and other literature about the
movement and also getting to know its leaders. He would
kind of travel around Germany and go to lectures and
and really immerse himself in this whole ideology to learn
about it. And he thought, if Germany could have this
growing and and thriving for the time homosexual culture that
was willing to speak out for rights, why couldn't we

(07:55):
have that in the US. So one of the things
about the United States was that there was just a
lack of uniformity in legislation across the country regarding sex.
It had created a really tangled mess, and that was
facing anyone who wanted to work towards the cause of rights.
Being labeled as immoral in his home country for being
homosexual just really seemed to be an incredible injustice to

(08:19):
gerber Yeah, and I have to wonder about sort of
the duality of it in terms of his home country.
I put that word in the notes, and he considered
the US his home country, even though he had come
from Bavaria. And so it's kind of interesting that he
then went back to Germany and saw them kind of
working towards this progressive idea of rights, and then he

(08:40):
went to his chosen home where he just did not
have that same kind of um social movement going on.
This is kind of fascinating from that perspective. Uh. And
when he returned to Chicago in nine after his three
years in Germany, he started working as an employee at
the US Postal Service, and he saw that Chicago had
this growing gay subculture, which was secret in most areas

(09:03):
of the city but fairly open in the Bohemian neighborhood
of Tower Town, which is in the Near North Side area,
and as he saw the gay and lesbian community growing,
he wanted to create a way to protect these people's rights.
Inspired by what he had seen in Germany, he launched
his own plan to create an organization that would mimic

(09:24):
the ones that were involved in Germany's emancipation movement. He
knew that he could not do it alone, but it
was really difficult to find other people who were willing
to take the risks that were inherent and participating in
this kind of mission. He tried to network with other activists,
including birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, but he never managed
to forge any alliances. His efforts to reach out to

(09:47):
the game and he knew of in business UH in
Chicago were met pretty coldly at best. Prominent business people
were just not willing to risk their jobs and families
to fight for what they thought was definitely a losing cause. Yes,
it's if it's not completely clear. At this point, pretty
much all these people were closeteds um outside of Tower Town,

(10:09):
like nobody knew that any of these people were gay.
UH and after a year of searching for allies, Gerber
and six other men that he had managed to round
up founded Chicago's Society for Human Rights in nine four,
applying for a charter to incorporate the group on December
tenth of that year, and it was the first gay

(10:29):
rights organization in the United States. The Society of Human
Rights published a newsletter called Friendship and Freedom, which circulated
to all of its members. It was a pretty small
group and not many people wanted literature that might out
them to show up in their mailboxes. Postal inspectors cooperated
with law enforcement and would report suspicious materials. At this point,

(10:53):
pretty much all of this would have been considered a scene. Yes,
all pretty much illegal. Uh. Nonetheless, Gerbert continued his work,
and the mission of the society was to educate the
heterosexual community about homosexuality and to reform the laws that
made homosexuality criminal. But they had to be very very
careful about this. The charter for the group relaid this

(11:15):
purpose this way quote to promote and protect the interests
of people who, by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities,
are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness,
which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence. And
to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of factors.
According to modern science, among intellectuals of mature age, the

(11:37):
society stands only for law and order. It is in
harmony with any and all general laws in so far
as they protect the rights of others, and does in
no manner recommend any acts and violation of present laws,
nor advocate in any manner inimical to public welfare. Uh.
You probably noticed that there is no mention there of

(11:58):
homosexuality or gay Remember this was still a time when
it was absolutely illegal to be gay thanks to sodomy laws. Uh.
In Illinois, there were precedent cases that established oral sex
as sodomy under the letter of the law, including one
which judicially categorized fellatio as a crime against nature. Uh.
This was not a time that it would have been

(12:19):
safe for an organization intended to decriminalize homosexuality to be
out and proud about it. They had to be very
very careful and kind of work in incremental, very slow steps. Unfortunately,
their work did not last very long at all. Just
eight months after it was founded and with only two
issues of Friendship and Freedom having been published, everything came

(12:39):
to a crashing halt. In July, the wife of one
of the co founders reported her husband to a social
worker after the couple's daughter said she had seen her
father and other men performing seances and other strange behavior.
The social workers she spoke with contacted police, and soon
thereafter the Society for Human Rights, which was headquartered in
Gerber's home, was rated. Gerber was arrested for deviant behavior.

(13:06):
His typewriter, his diaries, and other papers were seized, and
at this point in time, Illinois sodomy law stipulated a
minimum one year prison term for anyone found guilty, with
a maximum sentence of ten years, so this was quite
a serious situation. Gerber always insisted that the story of
his colleagues' behavior, as reported by his life and related

(13:27):
the papers, was fabricated, But because the accused husband, al manager,
was confessed to being bisexual during police screening, no one
cared that the facts of the news weren't entirely accurate. Yeah,
and this also came as a surprise to Gerber. He
had not even known, according to what I read that
the members of his group, that any of them were married.

(13:50):
So when this turned up and there was a wife
that had reported one of them. Remember, he wasn't really
that keen on bisexual, So this was a really kind
of weird and awkward situation in addition to being dangerous
and kind of a powder keg uh. Gerber was held
by the police for several days. He was allowed a
phone call the morning after his arrest, which he used

(14:10):
to call work and explain his absence, and his supervisor
kind of tried to help him out. He wrote up
the situation as absent on leave in an effort to
cover for Gerber. Henry endured three trials with his colleagues.
The only evidence against him that was supposed to prove
that he was homosexual was a powder puff that was
allegedly found in his room. He yeah, that's widely believed

(14:33):
to have been planted. Remember, he was not, by any
accounts I have read, a cross dresser. He wasn't. He
didn't dabble in jen any sort of alternate gender expression.
So this powder puff, it's very jarring. In the record,
it seems very weird and out of place. However, the

(14:54):
charges against him were eventually dropped, and that happened when
a judge realized this was during this third trial that
Gerber had been arrested without a warrant, but unfortunately, he
had spent his entire savings up to this point, particularly
on this third trial, hiring an attorney so that he
could try to sort of save himself from this miss

(15:16):
The raid and the trials had been reported by the news,
with the Chicago Examiner running a story about it under
the headline strange sex cult exposed. So even though he
had been released and the charges were dropped, he was
still fired from his postal job in the wake of
the of the incident for a quote conduct unbecoming a
postal worker. Additionally, all records of the Society for Human

(15:40):
Rights and their Friendship and Freedom newsletter that had been
seized in the raid were destroyed, and for decades this
important aspect of LGBT history was basically erased. There are
no surviving copies of the Friendship and Freedom newsletter. A
review of it was reprinted in the book Paris Gay,
which came out in one and the review describes the

(16:02):
newsletter as moral and says that it included a poem
by Walt Whitman and as an essay about Oscar Wilde's
practice of wearing a green carnation in his lapel. It's
long been rumored, but not ever confirmed, that Wild in
his social circle would wear green carnations as a secret
symbol of homosexuality. Yes, so that's how that essay would

(16:23):
have appeared in the newsletter. UM And in just a moment,
we're going to talk about Henry's life after the raid
and subsequent trials and how that put an end to
the Society for Human Rights. But first we're gonna take
a brief word from a sponsor. After all of these
things that we've talked about, Henry Garber was in need
of a fresh start, and he chose to move to
New York City. In nine seven, he re enlisted with

(16:47):
the U. S. Army, and then he would serve for
seventeen years. He's also said to have been frustrated at
this point with the lack of activism within what he
called the Dorian crowd. He was also really exasperated at
his precip said that other gay men were too willing
to accept the commonly held belief that homosexuality was a
mental illness, and people were seemingly willing to accept a

(17:09):
life of clandestine meetings in a state of fearfulness. Yeah,
So he basically kind of kept on the download after this,
but he did continue to write. So throughout the thirties,
Gerber wrote articles for gay magazines. He used a pen name,
and he also managed a correspondence club which was called Contacts,
which would eventually become a communications network for gay men

(17:31):
in the US. And he also wrote an essay called
in Defense of Homosexuality which was published in The Modern Thinker,
and he wrote that under the pseudonym paras Ex. In
thirty four, he even wrote an anti Hitler paper openly
criticizing Hitler's treatment of homosexuals, Yeah, which was kind of

(17:51):
bold and a little bit dangerous, even written under a
pen name. Um. Then a few years down the road,
there was a man named man who Old Boy Frank,
and he was a gay activist in California, and he
reached out to Henry Gerber in nineteen forties. He was
hoping to get some assistance in creating a new movement
to fight the oppression of homosexuals. And while Gerber was

(18:13):
glad to help out through his writing, he did not
want to attach his real name to the effort and
take a real pivotal role. He just did not want
to risk losing everything again. Throughout his military career, he
dealt with harassment. He was blackmailed and beaten. His quarters
at Governor's Island were searched by Army investigators in February

(18:34):
nineteen forty two. They found no illegal materials or evidence
of illegal behavior, but just the same he was held
in the guard house for several weeks after the search.
He was honorably discharged in nineteen forty five. In nineteen
fifty a new gay rights organization formed called the Matachine Society.
We referenced that in the earlier episode about the Comptence

(18:57):
Cafeteria riot. UH. In nineteen fifty two, this group began
publishing the first gay and lesbian national newsletter, which was
called One, and when Gerber found out about One, he
actually wrote to the magazine with an account of his
efforts to start the Society for Human Rights and his
you know, attempts to get a previous newsletter out called

(19:19):
Friendship and Freedom. In nineteen fifty eight, One was part
of a First Amendment case heard by the U. S.
Supreme Court. This case was incredibly important because it eventually
led to the ruling that publishing homosexual content did not
mean a publication was inherently obscene. Yeah. Prior to that,
if you even said, or you know, suggested that two

(19:41):
men might care for one another romantically, it was pretty
much obscenity. Whereas this drew that boundary of like, no,
that's not automatically obscene, you guys. Uh. Years later, in
nineteen sixty three one, the magazine actually ran a full
story about Gerber's efforts, uh, and the work that he
was doing in the nineteenth twenties, and it kind of
reintroduced his part in the LGBT rights movement into record.

(20:06):
In his retirement years, Henry Gerber moved to the U. S.
Soldiers and Airmen's Home in Washington, d C. He died
there on December thirty one, nineteen seventy two, from pneumonia.
He was eighty years old. In posthumously, of course, Henry
was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame,

(20:26):
and in February of the house at seventeen ten North
Crily Court in Chicago, which is where Gerber lived when
he founded the Society for Human Rights, was nominated as
a National Historic Landmark. The National Historic Landmarks Committee unanimously
approved the nomination. The next step in the process was
for it to go to the National Park Service Advisory
Board in May. We have not yet been able to

(20:49):
find any information about how that went. Since they we
are recording this literally immediately after the conclusion of May,
they have not published their notes yet. Today we're June second,
I think that we're recording. So if it's approved by
the Advisory Board, the nomination would then move to the
Secretary of the Interior for final approval. So yeah, his

(21:14):
home may become a National Historic Landmark. It looks like
it's on track for that to happen, but you never
know what will happen in the process, so that's something
to look forward to. We may have an update soon,
which would be exciting. So yeah, that's the story of
Henry Gerber. He is tricky. He's one of those people
that he comes up for a long time. He was
written about and sort of like, here's the the lgbtwo

(21:37):
rights activists you have never heard of. But even so,
as we mentioned in the episode, there are some blank
spots in there that are not always entirely clear, and
and because he's maybe not the most sort of charming character,
I think he gets overlooked anyway. Yeah. Well, and some
of his uh, prejudices like continue to exist today, Like

(22:02):
there is still a lot of anti bisexual sentiment um,
and like a general trend of kind of assuming anyone
who has a relationship with a person of the same
sex is gay or lesbian and that bisexuality is not
a thing. Like there's a lot of those ideas continued
to crop up today years and years later after his death.

(22:24):
So it's that's not a I didn't go away, right, Yeah.
I mean, you know, within any community, there is always fracturing,
and he was you know, kind of one of the
first people that that exemplifies some of that going on.
And it's not it's easy to go, oh, well, that's
how it was in the twenties, which again I always
just feel like we have to pause and go this
was something he was working on in the nineteen so

(22:47):
much earlier than we really think about this movement um.
But a lot of those those issues still echo today.
So it's kind of an interesting touchstone and and we
can kind of see the mirror of that continue you
But do you also have listener mail, I do. It's
on a completely different topic. Uh, this is from our listener, Adam,

(23:07):
and he says, Holly and Tracy, much like the rest
of your listeners, I have started listening to your podcast
to and from work each day. I have downloaded onto
my phone a whole bunch of podcasts to listen to,
for which I am very entertained and enlightened. My wife
calls you guys my girlfriends jokingly. Of course, Oh, Adam,
you wouldn't want that anyway, He goes on. Almost two
years ago, I bought a nineteen sixteen Ford Model T

(23:29):
and have since restored the car. Enclosed as a photo
of the car. Holy smokes, it is gorgeous. That is
my commentary. Uh. Since restoring the car, my wife and
I have enjoyed the car immensely, and we try to
go to as many Model T tours as we can
fit into our busy lives. While on the tours, they
usually have a banquet and encourage you to wear period attire.
We have not a clue what men and women wore

(23:51):
in that period in time. All I know is that
short sleeves were not in fashion yet. I just listened
to a podcast of Holly and Sarah on underwear and
learned that Holly is very much into fashion, so this
question is geared more towards Holly. What did the average
person we're in nineteen sixteen? We have seen photos of
men in suits and women in extravagant gowns. But for
the most part, the person who bought a model t

(24:13):
was not a very well off person. I personally, personally
believe they were just average working individuals. Where can we
see some of these fashion photos with your experience, Holly?
Are there places you can find these clothes and our
clothing patterns that can be purchased as my mother in
law is very good with a sewing machine. Okay, Adam,
here's my first piece of advice. Google do an image

(24:35):
search on Google for nineteen sixteen. Don't specify nineteen sixteen
clothing because that often does turn up your fashion stuff.
If you just google nineteen sixteen, the images that will
come up, you'll get a lot more general, real life
working individuals. I will say overall, Um, the club, some
of the clothing is going to look formal. That isn't

(24:56):
that's sort of casual clothing, just because I think we're
so used to a level of informality that period close
Even the more middle and even lower class just looks
fancier to us. But uh, that's my first piece of advice,
And I would kind of go through the images that
you like the most and find the things you like
and notice sort of what's going on with the suits
for men and and what you do and do not like,

(25:17):
and uh, ditto for your wife kind of to figure
out what she doesn't doesn't like. And then I will
give you three places that you can go for patterns
that I really like. They're more than these, These are
just the ones that I think might hit the time
period you're looking for the best. Um. The first is
Reconstructing History dot com. They have a section that is

(25:37):
labeled as Downton Abbey because it kind of spans that.
A lot of the Victorian clothing pattern sites that I
like kind of stopped at nine or a little bit
after that, so they're not going to quite get into there,
but this one does. Another good one is past Patterns
dot Com. And uh, the third one is Sensibility dot Com.
The company has actually sense and sensibility patterns and they

(25:58):
all have some pretty interesting stuff that you can look at.
So what I would do is I would get your
inspiration pictures from online and then kind of look through
these patterns and see which one is line up most
closely with that, and then work with your mother in
law to kind of put together something that resembles it.
That's how I would go about it. And I'm a
little bit jealous of your awesome car. So you would

(26:19):
like to write to us and uh show off your
pictures of your awesome car. You can do that at
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(26:40):
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(27:00):
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