LGBT Rights Opposition - History

History

The first organized gay rights movement arose in the late nineteenth century in Germany.

In the 1920s and into the early 1930s, there were gay communities in cities like Berlin; sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was one of the most notable spokespeople for gay rights at this time. When the Nazi party came to power in 1933, one of the party's first acts was to burn down Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, where many prominent Nazis had been treated for sexual problems. Initially tolerant to the homosexuality of Ernst Rohm and his followers, homosexuals were purged from the Nazi Party following the Night of the Long Knives and the Section 175 Laws began to be enforced again, with homosexuals interned in concentration camps by 1938 (see Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust).

Under National Socialism in Germany, the dismantling of homosexual rights was approached in two ways. By strengthening and re-enforcing existing laws that had fallen into disuse, it was effectively re-criminalised; homosexuality was treated as a medical disorder, but at a social level rather than individual level intended to reduce the incidence of homosexuality. The treatment was a program of negative eugenics, starting with sterilisation, then a system of working people to death in forced labour camps, and eventually refined by medical scientists to include euthanasia. The driving force was the elimination of degeneracy at various levels – genetic, social, identity and practice, and the elimination of such genetic material in society. Lifton wrote about this in his book The Nazi Doctors:

sexology and defense of homosexuality were aspects of “sexual degeneration, a breakdown of the family and loss of all that is decent,” and ultimately the destruction of the German Volk. medicine was to join in the great national healing mission, and the advance image of what Nazi doctors were actually to become: the healer turned killer. Sterilization policies were always associated with the therapeutic and regenerative principles of the biomedical vision: with the “purification of the national body” and the "eradication of morbid hereditary dispositions.” Sterilization was considered part of “negative eugenics”

It is argued that the numbers of homosexuals eliminated was quite low, and confined to Germany itself, based on estimates that of 50,000 homosexuals who came before the courts, between 5,000 and 15,000 ended up in concentration camps. However, many of those who came before the courts were directed (or volunteered) to undergo sterilisation/castration; they would be included with others who, in line with the historic shift in German society (that started with Westphal, and developed through Krafft-Ebing to Magnus Hirschfeld, of homosexuality being seen as having a neurological, endocrinological and/or genetic basis), were treated for homosexuality as a medical rather than criminal matter. Those treated by psychiatrists and thereby included in the T4 project to eliminate people with medical disorders would not be reflected in the rates of those dealt with as criminals.

After the Second World War, campaigns for gay rights began to develop, initially in the UK, Europe and North America. Towards the end of the 1960s homosexuality began to be decriminalised and demedicalised in countries such as the UK, New Zealand, Australia, North America and Western Europe, in the context of the sexual revolution and anti-psychiatry movements. Organized opposition to gay and lesbian rights began in the 1970s,, primarily amongst Christian groups, following the liberalization of attitudes and laws relating to homosexuality in many English-speaking countries and Western Europe.