The widespread belief that the Stonewall riots were the birth of resistance by LGBTQI+ folks against institutionalized violence, is an erasure of our elders who made Stonewall possible, who made us possible.

This space attempts to document some of the history that gave birth to our present:

The Homophile Movement is a collective term used to describe LGBTQI+ organizations, publications and movements in the 1950s-60s across the world, that would often take place in blind-drawn living room gatherings, following World War II.

The movement’s philosophies was informed by the work of lawyers and physicians like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, who advocated for unlearning the criminalization of queerness and transness through the imposed lens of mental illness.

Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (S-HC) founded in Germany in 1897, is considered the world’s first gay rights organization, and grew to have over 500 members and 25 chapters worldwide.

While Hirschfeld’s biological determinism model on sexuality is widely rejected, his work seemed to center self-determination for trans and gender-nonconforming folks – something that the cisgender-heterosexeual gaze often continues to medicalize.

In 1919, Hirschfield opened the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin – known as a place of “research, teaching, healing, and refuge” and the birthplace of the first ‘modern’ gender-affirming surgeries (or the first trans clinic).

But the formation of Nazi Germany led to the irreperable loss of Hirschfeld’s groundbreaking work in 1933, when troops attacked the building, and burnt more than 20,000 books that provided historiography for nonconforming people.

“The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed ‘the intellectual garbage of the past’ to the flames,” Brandy Schillace writes.

Postal clerk Henry Gerber founded America’s first homophile organization Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1924, promoting it through the newsletter "Friendship and Freedom." Within a year, Gerber’s postal career was terminated, his materials were seized and he and his associates were arrested.