The World's First Gay Magazine Came Out in 1896. It Ran for 36 Years.

Gay print media does not start where most people assume. It does not start with The Advocate in 1967, or with ONE in 1953, or with anything American at all.

It starts in Berlin in 1896, with a magazine called Der Eigene, and it ran for thirty-six years.

The man behind it was Adolf Brand, a schoolteacher turned publisher and anarchist. The title is hard to translate cleanly. It comes out of Max Stirner's philosophy and means something close to "the self-owner", the person who belongs to himself rather than to the state or the church. Which tells you roughly where Brand was coming from.

What was actually in it

It was not a pamphlet. Across its run Der Eigene carried poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, photography and art, alongside straightforward political argument against Paragraph 175, the law that made sex between men a crime in Germany. Circulation was never huge, in the range of a couple of thousand at its best, but it came out of Berlin for three and a half decades and people across Europe read it.

In 1903 Brand founded the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, the Community of the Self-Owned, as the organization around the magazine. It put him at odds with Magnus Hirschfeld, who was running the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee across town on a completely different theory of the case. Hirschfeld argued that homosexuality was an inborn natural variation and should therefore not be criminal. Brand thought framing it as a medical condition conceded the argument, and preferred to talk about it as a cultural and masculine ideal with a pedigree running back to the Greeks.

They disliked each other for decades. The first gay rights movement had a schism before it had a flag.

What it cost him

Brand was prosecuted repeatedly, for obscenity and under Paragraph 175. The worst of it came in 1907, when he published an article outing Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow during the Eulenburg affair, a scandal that dragged the sexuality of the Kaiser's inner circle through the German press for years. Brand lost the libel case and served eighteen months.

The magazine stopped in 1932, as the ground gave way. After the Nazis took power Brand's home was raided and his remaining stock and papers were destroyed. He was not sent to a camp, in part because he was married to a woman, and he spent the rest of his life under surveillance with his work gone. He was killed in February 1945, with his wife, in an Allied bombing raid on Berlin.

Why you have not heard of it

Because it was burned, and because the people who could have told you about it were scattered, imprisoned or killed within a few years of each other, and because the movement that restarted in the 1950s in America largely did not know any of this had happened.

Thirty-six years of a gay magazine, out of Berlin, finished before the Second World War started. The covers are still here. That is most of what is left.