100 Heroes: Adolf Brand
The gay man who pioneered the concept of a magazine for homosexual men.
Gustav Brand was a writer and pioneering campaigner for the normalisation of bisexuality and homosexuality.
Life and career
Born in 1874 in Berlin, Brand's father was a blacksmith.
He became a school teacher briefly before establishing a publishing firm and producing a German homosexual periodical, Der Eigene (The Unique) in 1896.
Der Eigene is believed to be the first ongoing publication in the world for gay men. Brand published Der Eigene until 1931. Each issue of the publication was distributed to about 1500 subscribers.
Brand's writings - together with those of other contributors to Der Eigene - aimed at a revival of Greek pederasty as a cultural model for modern homosexuality.
In 1900, Brand was sentenced to a year in prison for insulting Center Party leader Ernst Lieber. In 1903, he was incarcerated for two months due to the sexual content published in Der Eigene.
Working with Benedict Friedlaender and Wilhelm Jansen, Brand formed Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (the GdE). This group met weekly at Brand's house. For members of the GdE, male-male love, in particular that of an older man for a youth, was viewed as a simple aspect of virile manliness available to all men - they rejected the medical theories of doctors such as Magnus Hirschfeld who found that a gay man was a certain type of person, the intermediate sex.
The GdE was a sort of scouting movement that echoed the warrior creed of Sparta and the ideals of pederasty in Ancient Greece, and the ideas on pedagogic eros of Gustav Wyneken. The GdE was heavily involved with camping and trekking. They occasionally practised nudism. In the 1920s this would develop into the Freikörperkultur under Adolf Koch.
The GdE believed that homosexuality was the epitome of manliness and brotherly love, to be expressed by any man. The group tended towards elitism who based their ideas of attractiveness around Germanic racial purity. Their views towards women were often misogynistic.
In the early 1930s, Brand retreated from activism, married a woman, and retired. He and his wife were killed by an Allied bomb in Berlin-Rahnsdorf on 2 February 1945. He was 70 years old.