GROSS: i do believe a lot of the people who the Department of Blackmail and Homosexuality went after were prostitutes as the division, though we interpreted, did not housewife pussy genuinely wish to pursue, like, the middle-income group. As well as the presumption, too, i believe, had been that prostitutes who generate income when you look at the intercourse trade had been additionally happy to generate income through blackmailing the individuals these were – have been spending them to own intercourse.

But that results in, like, a complete other chapter within the tale, that was that there clearly was lots of prostitution, male prostitutes, in homosexual Berlin at the time. Therefore let’s simply address, first, how prostitutes had been mostly the folks have been prosecuted, if i realize properly, within the part that is blackmail of Department of Blackmail and Homosexuality?

BEACHY: Yeah, which is absolutely accurate. Particularly by the start of the twentieth century, here appeared to be something similar to a scourge of blackmail. It absolutely was almost like a plague, and there have been a lot of instances that there was clearly, actually increasingly, some sort of a formal campaign against it. Then when these situations would arrive at trial, the blackmailers, the male prostitutes, had a tendency to get much weightier sentences than their victims, just because their victims had been additionally convicted beneath the anti-sodomy statute. So that the blackmail ended up being considered, definitely, the worst criminal activity. Continue reading “Between World Wars, Gay Customs Flourished In Berlin” →