Adolf Brand

Adolf Brand was born in Berlin in 1874. After working briefly as a teacher, he turned to publishing. In 1896, he founded “Der Eigene”, generally regarded as the world's first enduring magazine for homosexual men. It published poetry, essays, photographs and art, with interruptions, until 1932.

In 1903, Brand helped establish the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. He and his associates celebrated male friendship and an ideal of masculine love modelled on ancient Greece. They rejected Magnus Hirschfeld's account of homosexuality as an intermediate sexual category. Their campaign against persecution did not amount to a modern vision of equality: the group's thinking also included misogyny and ideas of racial hierarchy.

Brand repeatedly faced prosecution over his publications. In 1907, he publicly alleged that Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow was homosexual, hoping to expose the hypocrisy of a state that criminalised sex between men. The claim led to a libel conviction and imprisonment.

After the Nazis took power in 1933, searches and confiscations destroyed the basis of his publishing work. Brand withdrew from organised activism. He and his wife were killed when their Berlin home was hit during an Allied air raid on 26 February 1945.