Pride Hero Henry Gerber

Cruising and lusting

The Pride sex movement wants you to believe these things:

1. Sexual identity is immutable and a characteristic you are born with, and therefore it should be treated in the same category as race and ethnicity.

2. Sexual identity is whatever a person chooses it to be, and it can change multiple times in a person’s lifetime.

3. Their movement is just about love and people getting to express who they truly are in loving relationships.

4. Relationships are whatever each individual says they are and don’t have to conform to what society thinks relationships look like.

With that contradictory thinking, they set out to confuse the weak-minded with emotional pleas about people who just want to be together in love like Romeo and Romeo but society refuses their love.

Let’s test that narrative to see if it is true by continuing our series on the heroes of Pride sex.

Henry Gerber is considered a forerunner of the modern LGBTQ+ movement in the United States. He moved to the United States from Bavaria in 1913 when he was 21. Gerber served in the army and traveled to Berlin to be part of the gay community there. He founded the Society for Human Rights and listed this as its purpose:

To promote and protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of factors according to modern science among intellectuals of mature age. The Society stands only for law and order; it is in harmony with any and all general laws insofar as they protect the rights of others, and does in no manner recommend any acts in violation of present laws nor advocate any manner inimical to the public welfare. link

In other words, it was founded on the claim that these are persons who have mental and physical abnormalities and are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness.

Contemporary LGBTQ+ sex advocates do not want to be considered to have mental and physical abnormalities as an explanation of their sexual desires. But that is how Gerber started it for his group. Nor is anyone hindered from pursuing happiness because no Founding Father believed that the pursuit of lust is the same as the pursuit of happiness. Preventing persons from pursuing lust (which hardly happens in our culture) is not identical to preventing them from seeking happiness; in fact, it would be good for a person not to pursue lust, it would increase their mid- and long-range happiness.

Gerber lost his job as a postal worker and was brought up on charges for being part of a “strange sex cult,” but seems to have bribed his way out of conviction.

He reenlisted in the army and began a correspondence network with other gay men. After this, he moved to D.C. to join its homosexual community and indulge in the cruising scene for anonymous sex.

And so we see what it is this hero of the Pride sex movement wanted out of life: to be able to keep up correspondence with other men about their lusts and to cruise for homosexual sex with anonymous strangers.

His purpose was not lifelong homosexual marriage, or friendship and family; it was indulging his homosexual lust. Next, we will turn to other Pride heroes of this time who told the Americans to be more “open-minded” about lust.

The philosophical problem they face is the same as for any sin. They can honestly report, “I was born with this lust,” because humans are born with sinful desires of all kinds. The Psalms and the Apostle Paul tell us, “None seek, none understand, and none do what is right.”

The solution is not to indulge the lust, nor is it merely to repress the lust. The solution is repentance of sin and turning to Christ to lead a holy life that pleases God. The sinner is dead in their trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1) and must be born again (John 3:3).

The more we look at these “heroes,” the more we will see that holiness is the farthest thing from their minds.