LGBT history did not begin at Stonewall.
Europe experienced a golden age of activism and publishing from 1836 to 1933, preceded by decisive intellectual foundations early in the 19th century, before systematic destruction.
The mechanisms that enabled this erasure are reappearing today on a global scale.
It is often repeated, even in progressive circles, that LGBT history is recent, marginal, or born in the 1960s in the United States.
This claim is historically false — and politically dangerous.
Between the mid-19th century and 1933, Europe experienced:
This history did not vanish by chance. It was destroyed, then buried, then made unreadable. And today, some of the political mechanisms that enabled this erasure are at work again — this time on a global scale.
The history of homosexual emancipation in Europe does not begin with the major scientific institutions of the late 19th century, nor with the first structured militant organizations. It starts earlier, in a discreet but decisive moment, when homosexuality was formulated for the first time not as a scandal, a pathology or a moral fault, but as a question of rights.
In 1836, the Swiss thinker Heinrich Hössli published in German a text now considered one of the earliest modern European essays explicitly demanding recognition of the rights of men who love men. Hössli speaks of “male loves” without evasion or protective metaphor. He neither excuses nor conceals. He asserts.
What he defends is not condescending tolerance, but full dignity — legal, social, human.
The gesture is all the more remarkable because it occurs in a context where homosexuality is criminalized by law, suspected by emerging medicine, and condemned by dominant morality. Hössli does not take the oblique paths of literature or symbolic allusion. He writes head-on, in an argumentative register, to make a clear claim: the end of persecution and the recognition of rights for a minority defined by its affective and sexual orientation.
This is not yet activism in the modern sense. Hössli founds neither association nor movement. His text does not trigger immediate collective mobilization. But it accomplishes something more fundamental: it shifts the framework of debate. Homosexuality ceases, in his reasoning, to be a matter of private morality or medical diagnosis; it becomes a question of public justice.
This intellectual shift forms a foundation. It precedes and makes possible the later politicization of the homosexual question. In this European genealogy of emancipation, individual speech comes before collective action.
Contrary to popular belief, public homosexual speech did not begin in 1890.
As early as the 1860s, the German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published, under his own name, a series of texts in which he defended love between men as a natural reality and not a crime. Between 1864 and 1879, he released twelve volumes of Forschungen über das Rätsel der mann-männlichen Liebe (Researches on the Enigma of Male-Male Love), where he developed a theory of homosexuality as anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa — a female soul enclosed in a male body — and coined new vocabulary, notably the term Urning.
He addressed explicitly:
In 1867, Ulrichs went further: he spoke before the Congress of German Jurists in Munich, calling for the repeal of laws punishing homosexuality; this speech is often regarded as the first public defense of homosexual rights.
He was not an isolated marginal figure. Ulrichs is now recognized as a pioneer of sexology and one of the first documented modern homosexual activists.
In France, at the same period, speech was more indirect but very real:
It was not yet newspapers explicitly identified as “homosexual,” but a public space in formation where homosexuality was discussed, theorized, represented — often obliquely, but not inaudibly.
From the 1890s onward, Germany became the global center of printed LGBT culture. Historiography speaks of a “first homosexual movement” that flourished in Germany from the late 19th century until 1933, carried by organizations, magazines, bars, and associations.
Historians estimate that during the Weimar Republic alone, more than twenty publications for gay, lesbian, and “transvestite” audiences were published in Germany; over the longer period 1890–1933, including association bulletins, ephemeral titles, and literary reviews, the number reaches several dozen to over a hundred depending on criteria.
These publications were not clandestine. They were:
Among the major titles:
In Berlin, between 1919 and February 1933, between twenty-five and thirty German-language homosexual periodicals were published, some weekly or monthly — an unparalleled media density in the world at the time.
Europe did not merely “tolerate” an LGBT existence: it printed it, sold it, debated it in public space.
The central figure of this period is Magnus Hirschfeld.
Physician, sexologist, and activist, he founded:
The Institute was:
The founding of the Institute in 1919 marked an unprecedented moment: for the first time in modern history, homosexuality and transidentity were defended scientifically, legally, and politically within a recognized institution with resources, consulted by researchers worldwide.
For the first time, a modern state — even a fragile one — tolerated an institution whose explicit goal was to reform the law and change public perception of homosexuality.
France did not have the same mass activism as Germany. Yet it had:
In 1909, Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen founded Akademos in Paris.
The magazine is described as “the first in France to address homosexuality openly and positively”; syntheses indicate it was the first such magazine in French, after some earlier legal publications like the “Annales de l’unisexualité.”
Akademos is a material object: copies can be found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, digitized on Gallica. It published poetry, essays, philosophy, arts; it explicitly presented itself as a magazine defending what Fersen called “the Other Love.” Its existence is not a retrospective interpretation: it is an editorial fact.
In the 1920s appeared:
Inversions was created on November 15, 1924 by three young men — Gustave-Léon Beyria, Gaston-Ernest Lestrade, and Adolphe Zahnd — and defined itself from the first issue as a magazine “for homosexuality,” “entirely devoted to the defense of homosexuals.” An academic study confirms that, along with Akademos, these were the first two homosexual magazines in French, explicitly referencing the German model of Der Eigene.
These magazines were not just literary leaflets: they sold classified ads, offered platforms, claimed political defense. Inversions was prosecuted; to escape judicial repression, it changed its title to L’Amitié in 1925.
Around these magazines gravitated intellectuals today often disconnected from their homosexual context:
France spoke. It spoke differently from Germany, less in terms of mass movement than in terms of literary networks and public scandals — but it spoke.
In 1933, the Nazis’ rise to power marked a radical break.
This was not gradual forgetting. It was a deliberate political destruction of memory: ban, seizure, destruction, then erasure of the narrative.
After 1945, this destruction was worsened by:
For decades, the history of this first European homosexual movement remained confined to narrow circles of specialized historians. The general public, including activists, inherited a narrative in which everything seemed to begin at Stonewall in 1969.
We are not in 1933. But we are witnessing, on a planetary scale, the reactivation of political mechanisms close to those that enabled the erasure of 1933.
The sequence is simple:
Increased visibility → Organized moral panic → Designated civilizational threat → Restrictive laws → Erasure of memories and institutions
This pattern is not poetic metaphor. It describes a sequence observed repeatedly — in Germany in the 1930s, but also in many contemporary contexts.
Since 2025, the Donald Trump administration has pursued an explicit policy of restricting recognition of LGBT people, especially transgender individuals.
Executive Order 14168, signed on January 20, 2025, establishes a federal policy recognizing only two “immutable” sexes and directs federal agencies to apply this doctrine in documents, regulations, procedures, and identification systems. It also requires the removal or revision of policies deemed linked to “gender ideology” and restricts the use of federal funds.
Analyses from reference organizations describe concrete effects: withdrawal or reduction of protections, funding pressures, pressure on healthcare services, and litigation over identity documents.
This type of measure does not target only individual rights. It aims to impose a state truth on sex and gender, and to administratively erase gender identity from the federal public space.
Unlike the interwar period, the current dynamic is global.
Africa
These laws are often justified by religious or cultural arguments, presented as a defense of the “traditional family” against an alleged Western import.
Yet, research recalls that the criminalization of homosexuality in Africa is largely a colonial legacy — later reappropriated as a symbol of cultural sovereignty.
Middle East
In many countries:
Several analyses also highlight the intertwining of colonial legal legacies, rigorist interpretations, and patriarchal social control policies.
Europe, Latin America, Asia…
The pattern recurs elsewhere:
Why are these policies emerging now?
Political science and studies on “anti-gender” movements identify several mechanisms:
Sexual minorities thus become a political lever, more than a moral issue.
Contemporary erasure does not always involve spectacular book burnings like in 1933.
It occurs through:
It is a soft but real destruction.
Between 1836 and 1933, Europe published, debated, and organized visible LGBT life. It believed visibility, science, and reason would suffice.
1933 showed that power can, very quickly:
Today, the lesson is clear:
Visibility without protected memory and without solid institutions is vulnerable.
Recalling this history is not an exercise in erudite nostalgia. It is a contemporary political alert.
Knowing that Berlin in the 1920s had more than twenty LGBT publications on its newsstands; that a sexology institute could welcome thousands of patients, conduct international research, and be destroyed in days; that magazines like Akademos or Inversions could exist in France, even briefly; that intellectuals like Raffalovich, Lorrain, Eekhoud, Gide viewed homosexuality as a legitimate component of the human condition — all this is not a dead heritage. It is an intellectual and political toolkit for today.
Against state truth, against moral panic, against administrative and symbolic erasure, the first resource is sharp memory: that of an LGBT Europe that already dared to speak — and tragically showed how fragile that speech is, and how much it deserves to be defended. Paris on 17/05/2026 by the Idaho France Committee
