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1913 Alfred Redl, head of Austrian Intelligence, committed suicide after being identified as a Russian double agent and a homosexual. His widely-published arrest gave birth to the notion that homosexuals are security risks.
Other Link: A Patriot For Me
1919 - Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexology in Berlin. One of the primary focuses of this institute was civil rights for women and gay people.
1933 - On January 30, Adolf Hitler banned the gay press in Germany. In that same year, Magnus Herschfeld's Institute for Sexology was raided and over 12,000 books, periodicals, works of art, and other materials were burned. Many of these items were completely irreplaceable.
1934 - Gay people were beginning to be rounded up from German-occupied countries and sent to concentration camps. Just as Jews were made to wear the Star of David on the prison uniforms, gay people were required to wear a PINK TRIANGLE. Today, the PINK TRIANGLE has been adopted by the gay community as a symbol of identification and also as a reminder of the long struggle and persecution of homosexuals throughout the world. Although less frequent, a BLACK TRIANGLE is also used, as it is thought by some historians to be the symbol that lesbians were made to wear in Hitler's concentration camps.
Other Link: The Pink Triangle Pages
1947 - The first U.S. lesbian magazine, Vice-Versa, was published.
1948 - The Kinsey Report surprised almost everyone with its findings that 4% of men identified themselves as exclusively homosexual while 37% had had sexual relations with other men in their adult lives.
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