LGBTQ Breaking News Service

German infantrymen aim machine guns from a trench near the Vistula River in 1916. AP-Photo

One of the World War I’s most enduring legacies is largely forgotten: It sparked the modern gay rights movement.

Gay soldiers who survived the bloodletting returned home convinced their governments owed them something – full citizenship. Especially in Germany, where gay rights already had a tenuous footing, they formed new organizations to advocate in public for their rights.

Though the movement that called itself “homosexual emancipation” began in the 19th century, my research and that of historian Jason Crouthamel shows that the war turned the 19th-century movement into gay rights as we know it today.

A death in Russia

In the winter of 1915, a German soldier died in a field hospital in Russia. The soldier, whose name is missing from the historical record, had been hit in the lower body by shrapnel when his trench came under bombardment. Four of his comrades risked their lives to carry him to the rear. There, he lay for weeks, wracked by pain in the mangled leg and desperately thirsty. But what troubled him most was loneliness. He sent letters to his boyfriend whenever he could manage it.

“I crave a decent mouthful of fresh water, of which there isn’t any here,” he wrote in his final letter. “There is absolutely nothing to read; please, do send newspapers. But above all, write very soon.”

This soldier, who had to keep his relationship hidden from those around him, was just one of the approximately two million German men killed in World War I. His suffering is not unlike what many others experienced. What his loved ones made of that suffering, however, was different, and had enormous consequences.

His boyfriend, identified in surviving documents only as “S.,” watched the man he loved go off to serve in a war that he did not fully endorse, only to die alone and in pain as S. sat helplessly by hundreds of miles away. S. told their story in a letter to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which published it in April 1916.

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was then the world’s leading homosexual emancipation group, boasting a membership of about 100 people. The soldier’s story took a cruel twist at its very end: S.‘s loving replies were lost in the chaos of the war and never reached the soldier.

Story continues

“He died without any contact from me,” S. wrote.

Demanding the rights of citizens

After the war, many believed the slaughter had been for nothing. But S. saw a lesson in his partner’s suffering and death.

“He has lost his bright life … for the Fatherland,” wrote S. That Fatherland had a law on the books that banned sex between men. But the sodomy law was just the tip of the iceberg: S. and men like him generally could not reveal their love relationships in public, or even to family members. Homosexuality meant the loss of one’s job, social ostracism, the risk of blackmail and perhaps criminal prosecution.

S. called it “deplorable” that “good citizens,” soldiers willing to die for their country, had to endure the status of “pariahs.” “People who are by nature orientated toward the same sex … do their duty,” he wrote. “It is finally time that the state treated them like they treat the state.”

A new phase of gay rights

Many veterans agreed with S. When the war ended, they took action. They formed new, larger groups, including one called the League for Human Rights that drew 100,000 members.

In addition, as I argue in my book, the rhetoric of gay rights changed. The prewar movement had focused on using science to prove that homosexuality was natural. But people like S., people who had made tremendous sacrifices in the name of citizenship, now insisted that their government had an obligation to them regardless of what biology might say about their sexuality.

They left science behind. They went directly to a set of demands that characterizes gay rights to this day – that gay people are upstanding citizens and deserve to have their rights respected. “The state must recognize the full citizenship rights of inverts,” or homosexuals, an activist wrote in the year after the war. He demanded not just the repeal of the sodomy law, but the opening of government jobs to known homosexuals – a radical idea at the time, and one that would remain far out of reach for many decades.

Respectable citizens

Ideas of citizenship led activists to emphasize what historians call “respectability.” Respectability consisted of one’s prestige as a correctly behaving, middle-class person, in contrast to supposedly disreputable people such as prostitutes. Throughout the 20th century, gay rights groups struggled for the right to serve openly in the military, a hallmark of respectability. With some exceptions, they shied away from radical calls to utterly remake society’s rules about sex and gender. They instead emphasized what good citizens they were.

In 1929, a speaker for the League for Human Rights told an audience at a dance hall, “we do not ask for equal rights, we demand equal rights!” It was, ironically, the ghastly violence and horrible human toll of the World War I that first inspired such assertive calls, calls that characterized gay rights movements around the world in the 20th century.

It would take nearly a century for these activists to achieve one of their central goals – the repeal of sodomy laws. Germany enjoyed a 14-year period of democracy after World War I, but the Nazis came to power in 1933 and used the sodomy law to murder thousands of men. A version of the law remained in force until the 1990s. The United States struck down its sodomy laws only in 2003.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:

Laurie Marhoefer receives funding from the University of Washington.

Star Brazilian footballer Neymar – who plies his club trade for PSG – has been accused of organising an armed attack against Agripino Magalhaes, an LGBT activist and assistant to a Brazilian MP, LO-Bianco reports.

Having filed a lawsuit with the Court of Justice of Sao Paulo, Magalhaes also accuses Neymar’s lawyer, Davi de Paiva Costa Tangerina, of making death threats against him. The activist suggests he’s been targeted because he reported on Neymar’s alleged homophobia.

Magalhaes says he keeps changing addresses, fearing for his life, and that he cannot work as normal due to concerns for his safety.

According to the media outlet, he is seeking about $190,000 in compensation.

The Swedish David Färdmar premieres his debut film, ‘Vivir sin nosotros’, in Spanish theaters from this May 14th. Starring Björn Elgerd and Jonathan Andersson, the film tells of the breakup of a couple in their thirties. Shown at the Gothenburg Festival, It is a debut with which the director and screenwriter is committed to breaking with the clichés of LGBT cinema. “We live in 2021, it is important for young people, for the new generation, to see other types of references, other approaches,” says the filmmaker.

Living without us tells how a couple in their twenties who are very close to thirty face their breakup. On the one hand, for Hampus (Andersson) it is a relief to leave a relationship that was being self-destructive. On the other, Adrian (Elgerd) is devastated and heartbroken. The two will go through the sentimental duel in different ways, with the audience witnessing the breakdown and subsequent effort to remake their personal lives.

The project is based on a 15-minute short film made in 2018, entitled ‘No More We’, which also featured the same leading actors. “Initially, I wrote the script thinking about a feature film. We started shooting it while we were looking for funding but it fell apart and we had to stop it. With the material I had recorded, I decided to create a short”, shares the director, who highlights that “after the good reception” of ‘No More We’, it was when he was able to make the film he had thought of. “I tried again and, with the help of Swedish and American investors, we were able to do it,” he adds.

“There are too many movies that show how difficult it is to be LGBT”

An element that draws the attention of ‘Living without us’ is that it shuns the usual situations of LGBT cinema related to self-acceptance, homophobia or the hostile environment of society. “I was fed up with these types of films. I’m not saying they are not important, I recognize their value, especially in what they have meant in history and that, in certain regions, they continue to be necessary. But, when I started producing the film, I imposed five rules to be able to do it “, explains Färdmar in an interview for eCartelera during the promotion of the film in Madrid.

“The five rules were: 1. There would be no coming out of the closet, 2. That no one was going to be beaten or victim of a hate crime, 3. That there would not be the omnipresence of homophobia and the weight it entails, 4. There would be no HIV-positive characters and 5. That in the end all the protagonists are alive“, details the filmmaker, who considers that there have been” too many proposals that show how difficult it is to be gay, lesbian or trans. “” It is important for the new generations that are LGBT to see new things. I wanted to tell the story of a break in which being LGBT is normative“, he adds.

Hence, the protagonists are young. “I wanted the couple to be made up of two boys between 25 and 35 years old, not older, precisely so that the new generation could identify with them,” he argues. However, Färdmar does not rule out addressing a relationship between more mature gay men in the future. “Gays between 40 and 50 years old have other types of life challenges. It would have been a different film and, perhaps, I will explore it for my next project,” he says.

“It is essential that there is more representation in front of and behind the cameras”

Another virtue of the film is the chemistry of its two main interpreters, Björn Elgerd and Jonathan Andersson. “Before I became a filmmaker, I was a casting director and, in one of my jobs, nine years ago, I met both of them. I really liked their ways of acting and I said to myself that if he ends up being a filmmaker, I would want to work with them. When I started to write the libretto, I did it thinking about them for the leading couple “, reveals Färdmar, who highlights how” a respect and admiration arose between them during the filming “. “There was a splendid atmosphere on set,” he says.

Openly gay, Färdmar is aware of the movement from the United States that demands that LGBT characters be played by LGBT actors. “I think it depends on what type of film you want to make and what is the subject you are dealing with. To choose the four gay characters in my film, I asked the actors to read the script and I asked them if they were able to identify with the emotions of a breakup, “says the director.

“It never crossed my mind to ask them about their sexuality. The essential issue, for me, was to find the actor who best fit the role. Whether the subject requires it or not is another question. I think the fundamental thing is that, in the collective, we have more representation, both in front of and behind the cameras. I do not consider that you have to be gay to play a gay character because, if we follow that logic, a homosexual actor or actress would not be eligible for heterosexual roles, “he says.

“The public really wants to go back to the cinema”

On the other hand, Färdmar points out that, in most of the characters, it is their personalities that define them beyond their sexuality. “I don’t think being gay has to be the description for a role. As with society itself, there are many ways to be gay. When I did the casting, I did not talk about the sexual orientation of the protagonists as the main element, but about their emotions, of what they felt and how they lived a sentimental break, that was the essential thing, “he details.

Spain has become one of the first countries in which ‘Living without us’ has had a commercial premiere in cinemas, because in other international markets its launch has been limited to platforms, due to the coronavirus pandemic. “Although in Sweden there have not been confinements nor have we experienced the harsh restrictions of other countries, for the cinema it has been devastating. The capacity control measures made it impossible for the theaters to be open, the culture was closed,” he declares . “Now, let’s hope that the limitations will relax. The public is eager to return to the cinema, also to the theater and live music“, keep going.

Directed and written by David Färdmar, ‘Living Without Us’ stars Björn Elgerd, Jonathan Andersson, Micki Stoltt, Nemanja Stojanovic, Víctor Iván, Melker Wernberg, Shirin Golchin, Michaela Thorsén and Lisbeth Johansson. Available in theaters from May 14, from Surtsey Films.

The announcement that “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will end in 2022, at the conclusion of 19 seasons and more than 3,000 shows, heralds the end of an era. Ellen’s legacy will be one largely emblematic of the particular culture that she both helped define and represented on her show — a culture of kindness not distinct from that of complicity. Inclusion through assimilation. And visibility earned through performative respectability.

Does culture breed character, or does character breed culture? Ellen reflects the tension of this question, as, arguably, do we all. The answer is not either/or but both/and. Scorned and — literally — canceled after coming out as a lesbian on her hit sitcom, “Ellen,” in April 1997, Ellen fought for years to rebuild her career. And 2003 proved to be transformative: She voiced the widely adored character of Dory in Disney’s “Finding Nemo,” released in May, and later that year, on Sept. 8, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” had its inaugural episode.

That Ellen’s coming out served as a watershed cultural moment cannot be overestimated. “It’s easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far,” President Barack Obama said as he awarded Ellen the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, “just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages … just how important it was, not just to the LGBT community but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister, challenge our own assumptions, to remind us that we have more in common than we realize.”

May 13, 202107:22

Before Ellen, LGBT representation in entertainment could best be described as the “celluloid closet,” to evoke both Vito Russo’s 1981 book and, later, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary of the same name. During the 1980s and ’90s, the LGBT community was synonymous with death and disease as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept the nation and the globe. The ’90s brought sweeping federal legislation like the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which both restricted civil rights and sent the message that discriminating against the LGBT community was legal and permissible.

The context for Ellen’s coming out is essential to comprehending its significance. The year before that episode aired, in 1996, Olympian Greg Louganis’ admission that he had HIV at the time of his diving board incident was met with media sensationalism and gay panic; the year after, 1998, Matthew Shepard was tortured and murdered in Colorado.

With network TV’s national audience, Ellen had the opportunity to change how people thought about and related to gay people. She endeavored — quite successfully — to humanize the gay community through the logic of equality and, specifically, the language of sameness. Ellen, like all gay people, was just like you. As Obama remarked, she “could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister.”

And it cannot be over emphasized how much sameness mattered in September 2003, as then-President George W. Bush declared Iraq to be the “central front” in the “war on terror.” It was a time of “us” versus “them.” And Ellen was intent on showing how gay people — gay, god-fearing Americans like her — were very much a part of the “us.”

Likeness fosters likability. Ellen cultivated this through her “Be Kind” motto and her character, which became the living embodiment of this motto. To be welcomed into the homes of millions of Americans — especially the key daytime demographic of straight women — Ellen had to look the part.

The right kind of lesbian is the innocuous one: not too femme and not too masculine. Like Rachel Maddow, the other lesbian welcomed into millions of homes in the evening, Ellen gave the mainstream nonthreatening androgyny — but with just the right touch of lipstick.

This relatability is something that Ellen addresses in her aptly titled Netflix special, “Relatable,” in 2018. But as BuzzFeed’s Shannon Keating so smartly observes, it is this push for relatability — clearly tied to ratings — that trapped “Ellen in a prison of her own making.”

The consequential irony of humanizing the gay community for Ellen is that she could not be human — fallible and flawed — herself. As she commented in her interview with “TODAY” show host Savannah Guthrie this week, sexism influences this likability bind, as it does for all women. There is no room for error. There are few, if any, second chances — especially considering that her show is her “second chance,” of sorts. And she has spoken variously, including in “Relatable,” about how the “Be Kind” motto has ultimately boxed her in: “I cannot do anything unkind now, ever. … I have bad days, but I can’t do the things you do because I’m the ‘Be Kind’ girl.”

But an entire generation has passed since “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” premiered. And visibility as a tactic for acceptance, for any marginalized community, is no longer enough. Responsibility for social problems is often placed onto “systems,” yet the fact is that systems are made and managed by privileged people like Ellen, whose actions empower those very systems.

The visibility that Ellen, among countless others, helped usher in is no longer the endgame. And neither is respectability, as Keating observes: “[W]holesome respectability, of universality, of ‘gay people are just like you’ — has fallen out of favor these days with certain more radical groups within the LGBT community.” Autostraddle’s Heather Hogan similarly writes that “calls for civility have most often been used to silence the oppressed … kindness is not justice,” and “being nice isn’t enough.”

Hogan elaborates that “what Ellen has continued to refuse to understand, however, is that … it is not enough to simply publicly wish we could all get along. We can’t. Not because we’re mean, but because we’re arguing about the literal humanity of oppressed people who have suffered — and continue to suffer — endless, compounded violence rooted in white supremacy.”

May 13, 202100:32

The culture has changed.

But Ellen hasn’t.

Entering the third decade of the 21st century, ours is a culture where a character based on kindness and likeness rings hollow like T.S. Eliot’s modern man, “stuffed,” corrupt and complicit.

Our culture has moved into an era of authenticity and accountability — a movement heavily resisted by those who cry “cancel culture.” Societal resistance to change is not surprising. But what is surprising is how Ellen has acted (behind the scenes) during this time of cultural change. The past year’s allegations and revelations (which, for industry insiders and queer people with any connection to the community have heard rumors about for years) suggest Ellen’s kindness was a fiction masquerading as authenticity all along.

For example, in her recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which she announced the end of her show, Ellen demonstrates her unwillingness to take responsibility for her behavior, which contributed to the show’s toxic environment. The criticism “was all so stupid,” she said, adding that she “didn’t want to address it” because she “had no platform.”

This is odd, considering that Ellen not only has a following in the millions across several social media channels, she also has own own digital publishing platform, EllenTube.

Instead of acknowledging the power and access she has to take responsibility for her own actions and the actions of her deputies, she doubled down on victimization: “[A]ll I cared about was spreading kindness and compassion, and everything I stand for was being attacked. So, it destroyed me, honestly. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. And it makes me really sad that there’s so much joy out there from negativity. It’s a culture now where there are just mean people, and it’s so foreign to me that people get joy out of that.”

Ellen may claim that she is ending her show after 19 seasons because “it’s just not a challenge anymore,” but she has the opportunity, throughout the final season, to take on the challenge of accountability by doing the work, by learning and growing — not by disavowing and denying. A symbol of courage, she is now associated as much with hypocrisy as bravery. But Ellen knows more than most that her story doesn’t have to be over. Her legacy can still be one of redemption.

The announcement that “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will end in 2022, at the conclusion of 19 seasons and more than 3,000 shows, heralds the end of an era. Ellen’s legacy will be one largely emblematic of the particular culture that she both helped define and represented on her show — a culture of kindness not distinct from that of complicity. Inclusion through assimilation. And visibility earned through performative respectability.

Does culture breed character, or does character breed culture? Ellen reflects the tension of this question, as, arguably, do we all. The answer is not either/or but both/and. Scorned and — literally — canceled after coming out as a lesbian on her hit sitcom, “Ellen,” in April 1997, Ellen fought for years to rebuild her career. And 2003 proved to be transformative: She voiced the widely adored character of Dory in Disney’s “Finding Nemo,” released in May, and later that year, on Sept. 8, “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” had its inaugural episode.

That Ellen’s coming out served as a watershed cultural moment cannot be overestimated. “It’s easy to forget now, when we’ve come so far,” President Barack Obama said as he awarded Ellen the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, “just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages … just how important it was, not just to the LGBT community but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much, somebody who could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister, challenge our own assumptions, to remind us that we have more in common than we realize.”

May 13, 202107:22

Before Ellen, LGBT representation in entertainment could best be described as the “celluloid closet,” to evoke both Vito Russo’s 1981 book and, later, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary of the same name. During the 1980s and ’90s, the LGBT community was synonymous with death and disease as the HIV/AIDS epidemic swept the nation and the globe. The ’90s brought sweeping federal legislation like the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which both restricted civil rights and sent the message that discriminating against the LGBT community was legal and permissible.

The context for Ellen’s coming out is essential to comprehending its significance. The year before that episode aired, in 1996, Olympian Greg Louganis’ admission that he had HIV at the time of his diving board incident was met with media sensationalism and gay panic; the year after, 1998, Matthew Shepard was tortured and murdered in Colorado.

With network TV’s national audience, Ellen had the opportunity to change how people thought about and related to gay people. She endeavored — quite successfully — to humanize the gay community through the logic of equality and, specifically, the language of sameness. Ellen, like all gay people, was just like you. As Obama remarked, she “could be our neighbor or our colleague or our sister.”

And it cannot be over emphasized how much sameness mattered in September 2003, as then-President George W. Bush declared Iraq to be the “central front” in the “war on terror.” It was a time of “us” versus “them.” And Ellen was intent on showing how gay people — gay, god-fearing Americans like her — were very much a part of the “us.”

Likeness fosters likability. Ellen cultivated this through her “Be Kind” motto and her character, which became the living embodiment of this motto. To be welcomed into the homes of millions of Americans — especially the key daytime demographic of straight women — Ellen had to look the part.

The right kind of lesbian is the innocuous one: not too femme and not too masculine. Like Rachel Maddow, the other lesbian welcomed into millions of homes in the evening, Ellen gave the mainstream nonthreatening androgyny — but with just the right touch of lipstick.

This relatability is something that Ellen addresses in her aptly titled Netflix special, “Relatable,” in 2018. But as BuzzFeed’s Shannon Keating so smartly observes, it is this push for relatability — clearly tied to ratings — that trapped “Ellen in a prison of her own making.”

The consequential irony of humanizing the gay community for Ellen is that she could not be human — fallible and flawed — herself. As she commented in her interview with “TODAY” show host Savannah Guthrie this week, sexism influences this likability bind, as it does for all women. There is no room for error. There are few, if any, second chances — especially considering that her show is her “second chance,” of sorts. And she has spoken variously, including in “Relatable,” about how the “Be Kind” motto has ultimately boxed her in: “I cannot do anything unkind now, ever. … I have bad days, but I can’t do the things you do because I’m the ‘Be Kind’ girl.”

But an entire generation has passed since “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” premiered. And visibility as a tactic for acceptance, for any marginalized community, is no longer enough. Responsibility for social problems is often placed onto “systems,” yet the fact is that systems are made and managed by privileged people like Ellen, whose actions empower those very systems.

The visibility that Ellen, among countless others, helped usher in is no longer the endgame. And neither is respectability, as Keating observes: “[W]holesome respectability, of universality, of ‘gay people are just like you’ — has fallen out of favor these days with certain more radical groups within the LGBT community.” Autostraddle’s Heather Hogan similarly writes that “calls for civility have most often been used to silence the oppressed … kindness is not justice,” and “being nice isn’t enough.”

Hogan elaborates that “what Ellen has continued to refuse to understand, however, is that … it is not enough to simply publicly wish we could all get along. We can’t. Not because we’re mean, but because we’re arguing about the literal humanity of oppressed people who have suffered — and continue to suffer — endless, compounded violence rooted in white supremacy.”

May 13, 202100:32

The culture has changed.

But Ellen hasn’t.

Entering the third decade of the 21st century, ours is a culture where a character based on kindness and likeness rings hollow like T.S. Eliot’s modern man, “stuffed,” corrupt and complicit.

Our culture has moved into an era of authenticity and accountability — a movement heavily resisted by those who cry “cancel culture.” Societal resistance to change is not surprising. But what is surprising is how Ellen has acted (behind the scenes) during this time of cultural change. The past year’s allegations and revelations (which, for industry insiders and queer people with any connection to the community have heard rumors about for years) suggest Ellen’s kindness was a fiction masquerading as authenticity all along.

For example, in her recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which she announced the end of her show, Ellen demonstrates her unwillingness to take responsibility for her behavior, which contributed to the show’s toxic environment. The criticism “was all so stupid,” she said, adding that she “didn’t want to address it” because she “had no platform.”

This is odd, considering that Ellen not only has a following in the millions across several social media channels, she also has own own digital publishing platform, EllenTube.

Instead of acknowledging the power and access she has to take responsibility for her own actions and the actions of her deputies, she doubled down on victimization: “[A]ll I cared about was spreading kindness and compassion, and everything I stand for was being attacked. So, it destroyed me, honestly. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. And it makes me really sad that there’s so much joy out there from negativity. It’s a culture now where there are just mean people, and it’s so foreign to me that people get joy out of that.”

Ellen may claim that she is ending her show after 19 seasons because “it’s just not a challenge anymore,” but she has the opportunity, throughout the final season, to take on the challenge of accountability by doing the work, by learning and growing — not by disavowing and denying. A symbol of courage, she is now associated as much with hypocrisy as bravery. But Ellen knows more than most that her story doesn’t have to be over. Her legacy can still be one of redemption.