‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and Militarisation in Germany's Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War

This article analyses the impact of the First World War on Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. I argue that the war was a turning point for the nation's gay movement, as it provided a central ideal – comradeship – which altered the ways in which homosexual rights organisations defined homosexuality and masculinity. A militarised rhetoric permeated the language of gay rights groups in the 1920s, providing a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimise ‘friendship’ and secure civil rights. The article relies on the publications of three major homosexual rights organisations recently collected at the Schwules Archiv und Museum in Berlin.