# Society for Human Rights The **first known gay-rights organization in U.S. history**, chartered in **Chicago on December 10, 1924** by German-American postal worker **Henry Gerber**. The Society published two issues of a newsletter called *Friendship and Freedom* — the first American gay-rights publication — before being raided and effectively destroyed by Chicago police in **July 1925**, less than a year after its founding. ## Why It Mattered Gerber had encountered the European homophile movement (notably **[[Magnus Hirschfeld]]'s Institute for Sexual Research** in Berlin) during his postwar service in occupied Germany, and the Society for Human Rights was an attempt to import that model. It failed, but its existence demonstrates that organized American gay-rights advocacy began **a quarter-century before** the [[Mattachine Society]] — a fact obscured by the police raid that destroyed almost all the Society's records and by the Chicago papers' refusal to print the word "homosexual" when reporting the arrests. ## The Police Raid as Template The 1925 raid on the Society's officers — including Gerber, who was held without bail and then forced from the postal service — established the **federal-and-municipal repression template** that would be repeated against gay organizing for the next half-century: the [[Lavender Scare]] (1950s federal purges), the constant gay-bar raids of the 1950s–1960s leading to [[Compton's Cafeteria Riot]] and the [[Stonewall Riots]], and the 1953 destruction of Henry Gerber's papers when he was forcibly retired. Gerber lived to see Stonewall and died in 1972 in a veterans' home in Washington, D.C., having lived long enough to write essays for *ONE Magazine* and to be acknowledged as the founder of the American movement he had failed to build half a century earlier. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Mattachine Society]]