Humanities Honors Program

This paper evaluates the masculinist segment of the homosexual emancipation movement in early 20th-century Germany in relation to Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, broader German society, and the emerging National Socialist Party. In particular, this paper focuses on how certain masculinists, with varying relationships to the NSDAP, aimed to center homoerotic desire and homosocial bonding within their visions of Hellenistic revival – visions which were otherwise also taken up by the National Socialists. This research primarily examines the images and essays of the early gay publication Der Eigene ("The Self-Owner," or "The Unique One") in this context. Current scholarship on Der Eigene and the masculinists – though limited in comparison to the body of work on the portion of the gay movement associated with Hirschfeld – focuses on the rhetorical dimensions of the attempted reconciliations between masculinist visions of same-sex desire and often-fascist nationalisms. Instead, this paper re-examines these reconciliations and rejections with an additional lens of aesthetic analysis, applying methods of visual analysis broadly utilized elsewhere in the field of National Socialist studies to the adjacent circles of the masculinist gay emancipation movement. This research also addresses the nuances within Der Eigene, which, while broadly conceived as espousing a vein of antisemitism not unlike that of the NSDAP, maintained a certain distance from that particular form of discrimination – though not others.