# Henry Gerber Born Heinrich Joseph Dittmar on June 29, 1892 in Passau, Bavaria; died December 31, 1972 in a U.S. Army veterans' home in Washington, D.C. **The founder of the first known gay-rights organization in U.S. history** — the [[Society for Human Rights]], chartered in Chicago on December 10, 1924. ## The Berlin Influence Gerber immigrated to the United States in 1913. During his post-WWI service in the U.S. Army of occupation in Germany (1920–1923), he encountered **[[Magnus Hirschfeld]]'s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee** and **Institute for Sexual Research** in Berlin — the world's first organized homosexual-rights movement, which Gerber later described as the model he tried to import to the United States. ## The Society for Human Rights Gerber chartered the Society in Chicago in late 1924 with a small group of working-class gay men. The Society published two issues of a newsletter, *Friendship and Freedom* — the first American gay-rights publication. In **July 1925** Chicago police raided the Society's officers, seized all records, and arrested Gerber. He was held without bail and ultimately released without charges, but he lost his postal-service job and the Society effectively collapsed. ## Late-Life Recognition Gerber continued writing under pseudonyms for the homophile press through the 1950s and 1960s — most notably for *ONE Magazine* and the *Mattachine Review*. He lived long enough to see the [[Stonewall Riots]] (1969) and to be acknowledged in homophile-movement publications as the founder of the American movement he had failed to build half a century earlier. The Henry Gerber House at 1710 N. Crilly Court in Chicago — where the Society for Human Rights was chartered — was designated a **National Historic Landmark** in 2015. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Society for Human Rights]]