Robert Beachy: The Earliest Gay Rights Movement Started in 19th Century Germany

By: The Seattle Lesbian

Historian Robert Beachy is challenging our modern understanding of what it means to be homosexual. According to the Goucher College scholar, the earliest gay rights movement started in nineteenth-century Germany.

When the German empire was unified in 1871, the Imperial Criminal Code included a law prohibiting sexual penetration of one man by another. Questions about what types of activity should fall under the law spurred a sustained public inquiry into the nature of same-sex eroticism and sexuality in general.

Read more here

..

Brought to you by The Seattle Lesbian

Photo: The Diary of Miss Anne Lister