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Before the Nazis,Berlin as a liberal hotbed of homosexuality
Berlin was a liberal hotbed of homosexuality and a mecca for cross dressers and transsexuals where the first male-to-female surgery was performed - until the Nazis came to power, new book reveals
- An uninhibited urban gay sexual scene flourished in Berlin, Germany in the wake of World War One
- The science of ‘transsexuality’ was founded at the Institute of Sexual Science where the first male-to-female surgery was performed
- German scientists concluded that same-sex love was a natural, inborn characteristic and not merely the perversion of a ‘normal’ sexual tendency
- There were 30 separate homosexual periodicals
- Cross-dressers found dressmakers who tailored for large sizes and singles searching for gay love could place ads
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Think Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray in Carberet. Think West Hollywood, Greenwich Village and Provincetown and the Castro, known as hotbeds of homosexuality.
But they are nothing like the uninhibited urban gay sexual scene and vast homosexual subculture that flourished in Berliin under Germany's Weimar Republic.
Sexual experimentation between the same sexes and medical advances of helping genders ‘trapped within the wrong body’ in Germany more than one hundred years ago shaped our understanding of gay identity today.
The city's liberal years - before the rise of Hitler - are detailed in a new book, Gay Berlin
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Police mugshots of Berlin prostitute Johann Scheff, arrested in July 1932. Youths dressed in women's clothing who successfully passed for women, descended on department stores en masse stealing large quantities of merchandise.
The cover of Die Intel, December 1930, advertising a serialized installment of Men for Sale (Manner zu verkaufen). German gay magazines also offered gay and lesbian friendly services to the gay subculture including medical doctors specializing in 'sexual disturbances', detective agencies offering to investigate blackmail threats, as well as dressmakers and restaurants
Transvestite prostitutes sitting on the laps of gay men in the popular Berlin gay bar Marienkasin
Hansi Sturm, was the winner of the Miss Eldorado transvestite pageant in 1926
Transvestites having drinks in the Eldorado club that was not hidden away but celebrated in the golden age of the gay bar and club scene in Weimar Berlin. It was a hot spot for high society and partying until dawn was the norm
Picture postcard of the gay club Silhouette, popular in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Always under a blue haze of cigarette and cigar smoke, film stars, cabaret artists and wealthy nobility were regulars including a young Marlene Dietrich alongside princes, counts and barons.
Nazi officials sort through 'un-German' and 'perverted' materials in the debris of the Institute for Social Science, that was ransacked on May 6, 1933, for a book burning event they staged four days later.
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With the Great Depression of 1929, and the crash of the American stock market, the Golden Age was slipping away to a Hitler-led government by spring 1930, the Nazis were on the rise with the new Reichstag election.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler completed his march to power - and with fury the Nazis pursued Hirschfeld as a symbol of all they hated – as Jew, homosexual and sexologist.
The party in Berlin was over.
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz3K6CdDGzY
I am going to get me this book!
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