Lust/What We Want
Adolf Brand was a journalist, photographer, polemicist, writer, and above all, pioneer activist for homosexual rights in Weimar society. Der Eigene is the world’s first gay publication which was published in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Brand was the subject of many public scandals and criminal trials. An early proponent of the practice of “outing,” he was imprisoned for libel after he accused Chancellor Prince Bernhard von Bülow of having a homosexual relationship.
His manifesto What We Want is a fascinating examination of a program of gay liberation. What We Want envisions a society in which each young, unmarried men, would form an essentially monogamous long-term bond with a single friend. Brand believed that essentially all men were bisexual, and so the two would tend to one another’s needs, emotional, intellectual and sexual, up to and after such time as they married nice young women (Brand 1925, 158). He upholds the importance of nudism and sport to this process, as it will allow the young men to pick wives who will be pleasing to them and deliver genetically fit offspring, “in the interest of racial improvement.” (Brand 1925, 160). Brand argues that such a practice will prevent young men from seducing young women which they don’t intend to marry, and thus help to strengthen the German family by preventing single motherhood (Brand 1925, 157). Rather than trying to gain acceptance by making homosexuality morally neutral, Brand’s goal was to identify homosexuality with a love of masculinity and masculine value. In this sense, supposedly sinful sexualities became part of the movement to create a better Germany.
Bibliography:
Brand, Adolf. “What We Want.” Der Eigene, 1925, in Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany: The Youth Movement, the Gay Movement, and Male Bonding before Hitlers Rise. Trans. Hubert Kennedy. Pp. 158-160.