User:Mww113/Early LGBT Movement
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The Early LGBT Movement is the name given to the LGBT rights movement of the first three decades of the 20th century. It mainly took place in Germany, but also in other European countries and the United States.[1][2]
The movement was rooted in the mid-19th Century writings of Heinrich Hössli, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and Károly Mária Kertbeny, three of the most prominent German writers at the time. The creation of Magnus Hirschfeld's Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee in Berlin in 1879, is generally considered to have marked the beginning of the Early LGBT Movement.[3] Within the german movement, there were many other important literary works published by Adolf Brand and Friedrich Radszuweit. Not only did they publish innumerable articles and magazines about the theme of sexuality, they actively implied that homosexuality should be accepted by society, and that paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which made homosexuality illegal, should be eliminated.[3]
The german movement extended across Western Europe and the United States, founding the World League for Sexual Reform in 1928, an international organization that, among other goals, sought the acceptance of homosexuality. However, this was not possible until the mid-1930s due to the rise of fascism and the beginning of World War II. The league dissolved, sewing a seed in Switzerland that lead to the birth of the homophile movement after the war.