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xviii INTRODUCTION German Brownshirts and police often physically beat Hirschfeld. One month after Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, all homo- sexual rights organizations and pornography were banned. Four months later on May 6, 1933, approximately 100 students surrounded and entered the Institute for Sexual Research. They smashed and carried everything out. A public ceremony was held four days later where these materials, along with a bust of Hirschfeld, were burned. (History books contain the infamous pictures of the Nazi burning books. They imply that Nazis were “bad” for destroying books. However, what books were being burned? The fi rst fi res contained the institute’s collection on sexuality and homosexuality. Why do history books fail to mention this? Perhaps our own culture wants to suppress all references to homosexuality.) For the next two years, the Nazis staged a campaign against homosexuals. Bars were closed, groups and meetings were banned, and homosexuals were arrested in thousands. On July 3, 1934, the leader of the Brownshirts (SA) and a known homosexual, Ernst Roehm, was executed along with hundreds of other members (during what is known as the “Night of the Long Knives”). By 1935, the entire homosexual reform movement was extinguished, and thousands of homosexuals were thrown into concentration camps where at least 50,000 of them died. They were identifi ed with a lavender triangle sewn onto their clothes. Tragically, some legal-minded Allied commanders forced those who survived the camps to return to prison after the war to serve out their sentences as sexual deviants. The American Homosexual Emancipation Movement There is very little evidence of efforts toward homosexual emancipation in the United States in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The Chicago Society for Human Rights was the fi rst group in the United States to advocate for gay rights. Henry Gerber, a German American immigrant, along with a number of working-class homosexuals, launched the Society in 1929, which was granted nonprofi t corporate status from the state of Illinois. Gerber was aware of the works of Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Research. The Society created a news- letter and was able to distribute only two issues before law enforcement arrested (without warrant) all members of the board. The men were jailed, brought to trial, but ultimately set free. Gerber lost his job with the post offi ce and the Society dis- banded (Katz 1976). The early 1920s saw an increase in the number of novels with lesbian and gay themes published in the United States, although not without great controversy. A growing underground developed in Harlem in New York and in other major cit- ies such as San Francisco and New Orleans. Homosexuals were fairly free to asso- ciate with each other yet still under the fear of police entrapment and harassment. World War II and the Migration of Lesbians and Gays to the Cities Family patterns, social networks, and entire cultural systems were disrupted by World War II. Millions of men and women left their homes to enter the military or to work in factories to help make war supplies. Many of these settings were