In 1994, a high-school history teacher in Missouri was baffled by the lack of gay and lesbian history found in textbooks. He founded LGBT history month for the month of October, dedicated to observing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history.
National Coming Out Day is Oct. 11. It started in 1988; a year after the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
In keeping with the observance of LBGT history, here’s a history lesson that pre-dates the 20th century that merits recognition.
Sappho of Lesbos
From the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho was a lyric poet who wrote love poems to both men and women in 6 B.C. The term “lesbian” comes from her homeland. There are fewer historical documentations of female homosexuality than male homosexuality, but female-loving females found their rights in the Code of Hammurabi in 1772 B.C. “Salzikrum,” literally meaning “daughter-man,” were permitted under Babylonian law to marry other women and inherit property.
From molly houses to gay bars
In 18th century England, taverns, coffee houses or private rooms were a meeting place for the underground gay community. The term “molly” was slang for effeminate, sometimes homosexual males. “Molly houses” were a social part of the hushed community, welcoming gay men and cross dressers to meet and be themselves out of the public eye.
Margaret Clap, called “Mother Clap,” ran a popular molly house in London from 1724 to 1726. It was not, by any means, a brothel. It was a private residence and coffee house that had no name. Rictor Norton, an American writer of literary and cultural history, referred to Mother Clap as the “first ‘fag hag’ to be documented in British history.” Norton’s research points that Clap kept the molly house for social pleasure more than profit, and she had a close friendship with the men that frequented her residence.
After operating for two years, the house was raided by police constables, arresting 40.
History records show that English courts in the 18th century had the option of two sentences for convicted felons: they were either turned loose or hanged.
As with the history of violence against homosexuals, five of the arrested were hanged, and Clap, among other punishments, was forced to stand in public sight clapped in a pillory.
The mob treated her so viciously in the pillory that The London and Weekly Journal reported her fainting and convulsing into fits. No other documentation of Clap after her time at the pillory was recorded.
First gay-rights activist
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was dismissed from his work as a legal adviser for the district court of Hildesheim in the Kingdom of Hanover in Germany because of his sexual preference in 1857.
In 1862, he came out to his family and friends.
The term “homosexual” wasn’t publicly named or identified until 1869.
Ulrichs used “Urning” to describe what he called the third sex—someone with “a female psyche in a male body.”
Ulrichs took the term from Plato’s Symposium text written 385-380 B.C., where Plato describes the goddess of love being born from Uranos, the god in the sky in which “the female has no part.”
Ulrich self-published booklets about homosexual nature and rights, originally published under the pseudonym “Numa Numantius.” Later, he decided to publish under his real name.
He completed 12 booklets, collectively known as “Researches on the Riddle of love between Men.”
Ulrichs spoke out publicly urging the repeal of anti-homosexual laws at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich in 1867. He was shouted down.
Here is an excerpt from Ulrichs, “Araxes: a Call to Free the Nature of the Urning from the Penal Law,” published in 1870:
“The Urning, too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature. Legislators have no right to veto nature; no right to persecute nature in the course of its work; no right to torture living creatures who are subject to those drives nature gave them.”
