The Great War: The Gay Angle

By advertising in the international press after the war, asking people to send him accounts of their sexual experiences during the conflict, renowned German sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld (who features in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin writing) discovered there were transvestites in the trenches with ball gowns in their backpacks. In the archives of the Imperial War Museum, I discovered other personal diaries that detailed same sex behaviour between serving soldiers. Hirschfeld also found accounts of drug clubs, and nudist clubs in London, Paris and Berlin. Even in suburban Clapham, a teenage Noel Coward and Esmee Wynne, his companion/muse, wore “futurist pyjamas”, and swapped clothes to run riot, in drag, in the West End...

Lovely piece by Philip Hoare in The Guardian on how 'The First World War was about decadence as well as death'; "From 1914 to 1918 no fewer than 150 illegal nightclubs opened up in Soho alone. With new attitudes to gender and sex, the war might be regarded as a catalyst for positive social change"

There's rather a lot about the war in the papers today...

Guardian: A Letter To My Great-Uncle Richard

I never met you, and no one ever talked about you, except Mum from time to time, late at night, when we were alone together, and we had drunk a few glasses too many. She never talked about you with Dad or my sisters. Yet I have always been aware of you, and this weekend I will think of you again.

You lived in the wrong place, Berlin, at the wrong time – the 1930s – with the wrong sexual orientation, although they didn't call it "gay" in those days. You were way ahead of your time in believing that this shouldn't be a barrier to enjoying a full and happy life.

Like me, you became a lawyer and used your skills to work for gay equality. You were remarkably brave to get involved with Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research and to campaign for the decriminalisation of gay sex in Germany, although you didn't see it that way at the time.

But it meant that the Nazis could find out about you when they shut the institute in May 1933 and seized the names and addresses of supporters. You were unlucky to have a brother-in-law – Mum's adored father – who was a loyal Nazi party member, and who had become rich by means no one talked about either. He was involved with supplying the Wehrmacht and had to be above suspicion. You had become an embarrassment, maybe even a liability, to the family.

Mum heard that you "disappeared" at some stage in 1934 or 35. You were arrested, but she was only a girl at the time and nobody told her why...

From The Guardian series, The Letter You Always Wanted To Write.

Blimey.

PS Photo Magnus Hirschfeld and friends.