One of the opening pages of a 1924 edition of Der Eigene, said to be the world's first gay magazine, is missing a piece. The carefully cut-out segment, a few centimetres across, removes the text of an inscription - likely the recipient's name - that was pencilled in by someone named "Gertrud" nearly 20 years after the issue was first published.
It isn't a stretch to imagine that the missing name speaks to the risks of owning or being linked with such a magazine in Nazi Germany, according to Andrew Stewart, the reading room co-ordinator at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.
"There's not much information about gay lives at this point because people were very much closeted," Stewart says.
"It's very unusual to have people be so open about their private stories and desires like this. I think that's where the value lies - in that they are speaking their minds and attaching their names to articles, which would have been very risky at the time."
Der Eigene provides a rare window on gay life and the homosexual rights movement in Germany from the end of the German Empire through to the Third Reich, a period when homosexuality was considered criminal. Not many copies of the magazine survived. Researchers say it had just 1,500 subscribers, even at its peak in the 1920s, and that many copies were later destroyed.
U of T Libraries recently acquired five issues of the magazine dating from the 1920s for its collection - plus a donated hardcover version.
