Johannes Dörrast

Johannes Dörrast was a German Youth Movement leader, writer, and gay rights activist.

Youth Movement work and arrest

During the Weimar era, Dörrast was involved in the German Youth Movement, producing a journal for the movement in the 1930s. After World War II, Dörrast worked as secretary for the West German Scouts (German: Pfadfinder) until he was arrested for breaking Paragraph 175, the German law that criminalised sex between men.[1]

Gay rights activism

In 1951, Dörrast became involved in the homophile movement in Germany, and founded a gay rights organisation, the Club of Friends (Club der Freunde) in May 1951. That same month, he released the first issue of Die Freunde ("The Friends"), which included "a short story about a sexual adventure on the Mediterranean, pictures of nude men running and playing sports, an essay on male beauty, and a second essay outlining a Kantian critique of Paragraph 175".[1] It was one of the first postwar gay magazines.[2] A number of contributors to Die Freunde had previous experience with the gay rights movement in Weimar Germany.[1]

As editor-in-chief of Die Freunde, Dörrast was repeatedly prosecuted under the "Trash and Smut" laws (German: Schmutz- und Schundgesetz) of West Germany.[3] Even when he removed all images of nude men from the magazine, the magazine was prohibited by the city government to be delivered by mail. Dörrast renamed the magazine Freond. However, this re-branding was unsuccessful and the magazine was no longer viable by 1952.[4]

Bibliography
  • Dörrast, Johannes (1945). Handbuch für Buben: dem Pfadfinderbuch Baden-Powell's nacherzählt (in German).

See also

References
  1. Whisnant, Clayton J. (22 May 2012). Male Homosexuality in West Germany: Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945-69. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 80–81. ISBN 978-0-230-35500-2.
  2. Hagemann, Karen; Harsch, Donna; Brühöfener, Friederike (2 April 2019). Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements. Berghahn Books. p. 286. ISBN 978-1-78920-192-5.
  3. Guenther-Pal, Alison (2007). Projecting Deviance/seeing Queerly: Homosexual Representation and Queer Spectatorship in 1950s West Germany. University of Minnesota. p. 48.
  4. Ramet, Sabrina P. (29 October 2020). Nonconformity, Dissent, Opposition, and Resistance in Germany, 1933-1990: The Freedom to Conform. Springer Nature. p. 234. ISBN 978-3-030-55412-5.
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