Society for Individual Rights

The word homophile or homophilia is a dated term for homosexuality. The use of the word began to disappear with the emergence of the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, replaced by a new set of terminology which provides a much clearer identity such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender.

The term homophile is favoured by some because it emphasizes love ("-phile" from Greek φιλία) rather than sex. Coined by the German astrologist, author and psychoanalyst Karl-Günther Heimsoth in his 1924 doctoral dissertation Hetero- und Homophilie, the term was in common use in the 1950s and 1960s by homosexual organizations and publications; the groups of this period are now known collectively as the homophile movement.

The Church of England has used the term "homophile" in certain contexts since at least 1991 – e.g., "homophile orientation," and "sexually active homophile relationship."

[...] In British English and American English, "homophilia" was used to some extent; but by the end of the 1960s, it was replaced [in those languages] by "homosexual", "gay", and "lesbian". "Homofili" was first used in Norwegian in a 1951 brochure from the Norwegian branch of the Danish "League of 1948". Norway is one of the few countries where this trend [to use words based on "homophil-" instead of "homosexual-"] is still widespread.

After the gains made by the homosexual rights movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the vibrant homosexual subcultures of the 20s and 30s became silent as war engulfed Europe. Germany, the traditional home of such movements (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) and activists (Magnus Hirschfeld, Ernst Burchard, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs or Max Spohr), went from being the best place in Europe to be gay, lesbian or transgender, to the worst, under the Nazis. The Swiss journal Der Kreis ("the circle") was the only homosexual publication in Europe to publish during the Nazi era. Der Kreis was edited by Anna Vock, and later Karl Meier; the group gradually shifted from being female-dominated to male-dominated through the 1930s, as the tone of the magazine simultaneously became less militant.

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