Hello and welcome to episode 7 of Bad Gays, a podcast where we uncover the dark side of gay men in history.

I'm Hugh Lemmy, a writer and novelist. And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, gay historian, and member of the board of the gay museum in Berlin.

And each episode, we profile a different gay villain from history, looking at their life in context and how their sexuality inform their infamy.

We want to complicate gay history by talking about evil and complicated people, focusing on men because cis men we can all agree are definitionally the most bad.

We want to ask why we don't remember our villains as well as we sometimes remember our heroes.

Last week we looked at the Spy Who Loved Me, Anthony Blunt.

Ben, who are we looking at this week?

This week we're going to be talking about the Weimar-era gay publisher and activist Friedrich Ratzuweid.

Should we do another German pronunciation lesson?

No.

Okay.

So, born in 1876, Radsuvite came to public gay prominence in 1923 when he founded the Bonfier

Mentionrecht, the Federation for Human Rights.

I jokingly mistranslate this as the Human Rights Campaign, and you'll see why later,

and began to publish a lot of gay, lesbian, and trans-themed periodicals.

So, Rzewaet was born in Koenksberg in 1876, and in 1901, he moved to Berlin, he married a woman,

Johanna Schneider, and he opened a ladies' clothing shop. Around 1901, or rather around the turn of the 20th century,

the organizations that will come to structure the ideological and organizational spectrum

of the pre-Nazi German gay movements are beginning to form

and take shape. So on one poll founded in 1890, you have the Wysenchastikus Humanitarist

Committee, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which is the movement that grew up around the work

and activism of the Jewish socialist, gay, sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld.

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