Queer and trans media flourished throughout the 20th century, even as obscenity laws forced publishers underground. These self-published newsletters and magazines shared resources, built solidarity, allowed people to discuss their lives away from the straight world’s pathologizing eye.
The oldest LGBTQ archive in the United States grew out of one 1950s publication. You don’t need to publish such writing anonymously anymore, or unwrap its plain brown wrapper with halting hands—so how to preserve that liberating sense of autonomy? What does self-representation mean to us, in the wake of these DIY accounts of who queers were, and who we would become?
Let’s go back: In 1924, a group cautiously named the Society for Human Rights began meeting around Chicago. It was America’s first public gay organization, its newsletter Friendship and Freedom the earliest perodical about that same audience. When local police dismantled the Society by force a few months later, they confiscated and destroyed the group’s papers.
We only know that Friendship and Freedom existed because one issue later appeared in a German homophile magazine, photographed by sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—who was gay himself, and almost alone among researchers of his day for treating queer people with sympathy rather than clinical distaste. Some of Hirschfeld’s acquaintances probably found their way into The Third Sex, a Weimar-era magazine aimed at trans readers, or recognized themselves for the first time in its personal essays and candid portraits. After the Nazis seized power, they burned Hirschfeld’s library and shut down The Third Sex, trying to scour their enemies from history.