Photo from a microfilm of a
booklet published by the German
Reformed Church, New York City,
1898. No clearer, printed
copy has been discovered.
As we
celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Resistance for
initiating a new era of LGBT militant activism, we can now also honor the pioneering
activism of a Presbyterian minister 62 years earlier.
Newly
discovered evidence shows that the Reverend Carl Schlegel, a German immigrant
to the U.S., publicly defended homosexuals’ desires and acts in New Orleans, in
1906 and 1907. This makes him the earliest known U.S. homosexual emancipation
activist, one of a dozen-or-so known pre-Stonewall politicos.
Schlegel
advocated for homosexuals within his church and distributed the publications of
a Berlin-based, German homosexual emancipation organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee. A later pioneering activist, Henry Gerber, was inspired by that same
German organization to found the Society for Human Rights in Chicago, in 1924,
the first U.S. homosexual liberation organization. News of German homosexual
organizing traveled internationally with these two pioneers.
The new
evidence, published on OutHistory.org on June 1, 2019, appears in the Minutes
of the Presbytery of New Orleans for January 29, 1907. These Minutes report
the members of the Presbytery judging Rev. Schlegel guilty of defending "the
lawfulness and naturalness of the condition, and in some cases of the actual
practice of homo-sexualism, Sodomy, or Uranism. . . ."
"Uranism”
was an awkward adaptation of the German “Urning,” a nineteenth-century term for
a biological male understood to be born with the psyche of a female, meaning at
the time, a man whose sexual desire was for men.
Schlegel’s
own words were quoted. He advocated “the same laws” for “homosexuals,
heterosexuals, bisexuals, [and] asexuals.” Asserting the legal equality of
homosexuals and heterosexuals was a daring stance at the time. It would become
a major tactic of U.S. LGBT activists later in the century. Schlegel’s
including bisexuals and asexual persons in his proselytizing is the
earliest-known U.S. bid for these groups’ legal equality.
This
minister was also quoted as urging the same punishment for all persons who
committed the following acts: “First, if they use compulsion. Second, if they
are found to offend publicly. Third, if they use or misuse children.”
On
January 29, 1907, members of Presbytery of New Orleans voted to find Schlegel
guilty of “sin” and fired him. Earlier, in 1905, Schlegel had also been fired
from the ministry of a prominent New York church, probably for promoting the
same homosexual emancipation ideas and literature.
After
Schlegel's demotion, a New Orleans newspaper reported: to those accustomed to
the proper conduct of Presbyterian ministers "Mr. Schlegel was always
queer."
I discovered
the new evidence of Schlegel’s pioneering activism in the archive of the
Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia. Relevant pages of the major
document, The Minutes of the Presbytery of New Orleans, are republished
on OutHistory.
Though
Schlegel’s activism appears to have had no lasting effect, his daring was
remarkable. Perhaps the documentation of his activism will lead to the
discovery of other lost, LGBT activist pioneers.
Carl
Schlegel’s life and all the known documentation of his homosexual emancipation
activities are detailed in the following new feature on OutHistory.org: The Reverend Carl Schlegel by Jonathan Ned Katz
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