“This is the most dangerous thing I have ever read. And, yes, I’m with you 100 percent.”
1924
The Girlfriend
Berlin gets the first lesbian magazine in the world
Die Freundin, May 14, 1928. The contents down the left include an article asking “What is trash and filth?” - the wording of the censorship law that would be used against the magazine later that year. Photo: Bund für Menschenrecht, Public domain. Source.
On August 8, 1924 a new kind of magazine came into existence. Die Freundin means The Girlfriend. The first issue went on sale in Berlin.
It was published by the Bund für Menschenrecht, the League for Human Rights, a homosexual rights organisation run by Friedrich Radszuweit that at its height had something like forty-eight thousand members. Die Freundin started as a monthly, then went weekly, and it sold across Germany and Austria. Ruth Margarete Roellig wrote for it, and so did Selli Engler and Lotte Hahm, who both ran clubs and organised in Berlin. They wrote about lesbian life for lesbian readers rather than explaining it to anybody else.
There was fiction in it, poetry, and a running debate about what lesbian life ought to look like. The two things that made it genuinely useful were at the back. There were personal advertisements, where women wrote in looking for other women, and there were listings for the clubs and the women’s bars. A reader could find the magazine and find that a whole new world opened up to them. A way to make connections with women like them.
In 1928 the government came after it under a law written to control pulp fiction, on the grounds that it was trashy and obscene. Radszuweit changed the title to Ledige Frauen, Single Women, and kept publishing.
It ran until March 1933, two months after the Nazis took power. Much of it has since been digitised by German archives, so the stories and the arguments and the small ads are all still there to read.
Rudi Gernreich is born, and grows up to bankroll the American gay rights movement
Founders of the Mattachine Society, photographed in 1951. Gernreich is the one in the suit and tie; Harry Hay is leaning in at the top right. Photo: Jim Gruber, Public domain. Source.
Rudi Gernreich was born in Vienna on August 8, 1922, to a Jewish family. He was sixteen when Germany annexed Austria, and he and his mother fled to Los Angeles as refugees.
He took the work he could get, selling pastries and preparing bodies in a hospital morgue, and studied art at Los Angeles City College. In 1942 he joined Lester Horton’s modern dance company, where he both danced and made the costumes, he said afterwards that dancing was what taught him what clothes do to a body. Eventually he moved into designing.
In 1950 he met Harry Hay, who was trying to start an organisation for homosexuals in America and had written down what he had in mind. Nobody had managed to build one that lasted. Hay showed him the papers, and Gernreich read them and said: “This is the most dangerous thing I have ever read. And, yes, I’m with you 100 percent.”
He was one of the five men who founded the Mattachine Society, and he was the money. In the records he is R. Being publicly known as a homosexual in Los Angeles in 1950 would have ended his fashion career, and his fashion career was what paid for the organisation, so the initial was a working arrangement rather than an embarrassment.
The clothes were their own argument. He did a swimsuit with no built-in bra in 1952, when swimwear was engineering. He did the No Bra, and unisex clothing, and in 1964 the monokini, which was a topless swimsuit and which got him onto the cover of Time. He won four Coty awards, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art now holds more than a hundred of his pieces.
He was with Oreste Pucciani, who chaired the French department at UCLA, for thirty-one years. He died in 1985.
Bobbi Campbell and his boyfriend on the cover of Newsweek
Bobbi Campbell grew up in Tacoma, took a nursing degree at the University of Washington in 1974, and moved to San Francisco the year after to work near the Castro. In September 1981 he came back from a hiking trip with lesions on his feet, and that October a dermatologist called Marcus Conant diagnosed him with Kaposi’s sarcoma. Campbell was the first AIDS patient Conant ever had, and for the rest of his life he brought Conant a rose on the anniversary.
He did not wait for anyone to tell him what to do about it. That same October he put photographs of his own lesions in the window of the Star Pharmacy at 498 Castro Street, with a note telling people what to look for and to go and see a doctor. It was the first AIDS poster in San Francisco, and he made it himself out of his own body.
In December he started writing a column in the San Francisco Sentinel and gave himself a title. “The purpose of the poster boy is to raise interest and money in a particular cause,” he wrote, and called himself the KS Poster Boy. The column was picked up by gay papers across the country. He joined the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as Sister Florence Nightmare RN, and co-wrote Play Fair!, the first safer sex manual in the city, which was funny and explicit and told people how to keep going rather than how to stop.
In June 1983 he was in Denver with other men who had AIDS, working on a statement about how they expected to be treated. The Denver Principles refused the word victim, and refused patient except when you are actually in a doctor’s surgery, and asked to be called people with AIDS. They walked into the closing session of the conference carrying a banner that said FIGHTING FOR OUR LIVES.
On August 8, 1983, Campbell was on the cover of Newsweek with his arm around his boyfriend, Bobby Hilliard, under the words GAY AMERICA. It was only the second time an openly gay man had been on the cover of a mass-market American news magazine. Newsweek described Hilliard as his friend.
After that he met the Secretary of Health and Human Services to argue about discrimination and about how long people with AIDS were waiting for their Social Security. In July 1984 he spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and kissed Hilliard on the stage, because he wanted people to see that gay love is beautiful.
He died on August 15, 1984, at San Francisco General, aged thirty-two. Castro Street was closed for the funeral and about a thousand people came. The Pride parade the next year was dedicated to him.
