Windy City Times, The Voice of Chicago's Gay and Lesbian Community, Dec 27, 2000Copyright © 2000 Lambda Publications Inc. All rights reserved. |
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by Karen Hawkins
When pioneering activist Henry Gerber attempted to bring liberation to Chicago's gay residents in the early 1920s, it earned him an arrest, jail time, three costly trials and the loss of his job. Now, nearly 80 years later, the city wants to honor Gerber in a way that even famous residents such as Carl Sandburg and Walt Disney haven't been recognized: The Commission on Landmarks has recommended that his former home be given landmark protection status.
It was at the two-story Queen Anne row house at 1710 N. Crilly Ct. that Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights, an organization that is believed to be the first gay-rights group in American history, and published the newsletter Friendship and Freedom, the nation's first documented gay-rights publication.
Gerber was born in Bavaria, Germany, in 1892 and came to Chicago with his family in 1913, according to an account of Gerber's life written by the late Joseph Sprague. Sprague was a co-founder of the GLBT library that bears Gerber's name, the Henry Gerber/ Pearl M. Hart Library: The Midwest Lesbian and Gay Resource Center.
After serving with the U.S. Army of Occupation in Germany from 1920 to 1923, Gerber moved back to Chicago, bringing with him the liberation mindset of Germany's homosexual emancipation movement. While in Germany, he subscribed to homophile magazines and had contact with the Berlin-based Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC), Europe's oldest gay-rights group. The SHC served as a model for Gerber's Society for Human Rights. Once in Chicago, Gerber gathered about 10 members for his organization, which was largely snubbed by the city's gay community as too risky. Sprague notes that even in 1924 Chicago had a thriving gay subculture, much of it located around the Near North neighborhood of Towertown. The SHR was incorporated in Illinois on Dec. 10, 1924, and through it Gerber hoped to "win the confidence and assistance of legal authorities and legislators in understanding the problem; that these authorities should be educated on the futility and folly of long prison terms for those committing homosexual acts," Sprague wrote.
Gerber managed to publish two copies of Friendship and Freedom before he and other SHR members were arrested in July 1925. The arrests came after one member's wife found out about his sexual relationships with men and reported them to a social worker, who turned the man over to police. At the time, simply being gay was a crime. Officers discovered the existence of SHR and rounded up most of its members, including Gerber. They confiscated all of his documents and materials related to the organization, much of which was never returned to him. As the sole proof of Gerber's "sexual deviance," the police produced a powder puff they claimed to have found in his apartment. Gerber maintained that officers had planted it there because he had never used makeup. In a recent article on Gerber, the Chicago Tribune reported that Gerber paid a lawyer $200 to fix his case for him, and after three trials, a judge dismissed the case because officers didn't have a search warrant. Though he avoided a prison term, Gerber was fired from his job at the post office for "conduct unbecoming a postal worker." He then left Chicago&emdash;never to return.
He moved to New York City and re-enlisted in the Army, serving for 17 more years. He kept up his pro-gay activities, but this time more quietly. He wrote for underground gay journals and, using a pseudonym, responded to anti-gay articles in national journals in the 1930s and '40s. After WWII, he retired to the Soldier's Home in Washington, D.C., and lent quiet support to the Mattachine Society and ONE. According to the Tribune, Gerber's later writings spoke of how unappreciated he had felt in Chicago.
"I was willing to slave and suffer and risk losing my job and savings and even my liberty for the ideal," Gerber wrote in 1962. "On of our greatest handicaps was the knowledge that homosexuals don't organize. Being thoroughly cowed, they seldom get together. Most feel … they should not let their names be on a homosexual organization's mailing list any more than notorious bandits would join a thieves' union."
He lived long enough to see Stonewall and the beginnings of the gay liberation movement. He died on Dec. 31, 1972. His home on Crilly Ct. in the Old Town Historic District is already a protected landmark, the Tribune reported, but city officials said they want to give the house distinct historic status. The City Council must approve the landmark designation, and the process could take more than a year.
"This is, arguably, the first place the gay and lesbian movement took hold," said Peter Scales, a spokesman for the city's Planning Department, to the Tribune. "It is a significant part of history and deserves recognition."
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