Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in the context of "LGBTQ people"

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) movements are social movements that advocate for the inclusion, recognition, and rights of LGBTQ people and other gender and sexual minorities.

While there is no overarching organization representing all LGBTQ people, numerous advocacy groups, grassroots networks, and community-based organizations work to advance related causes. The earliest known LGBTQ rights organization was the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded in Berlin in 1897.

The first homosexual movement thrived in Germany from the late nineteenth century until 1933. The movement began in Germany because of a confluence of factors, including the criminalization of sex between men (Paragraph 175) and the country's relatively lax censorship. German writers in the mid-nineteenth century coined the word homosexual and criticized its criminalization. In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the world's first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, whose aim was to use science to improve public tolerance of homosexuality and repeal Paragraph 175. During the German Empire, the movement was restricted to the wealthy elite, but it greatly expanded in the aftermath of World War I and the German Revolution.

Reduced censorship and the growth of homosexual subcultures in German cities helped the movement to flourish during the Weimar Republic. The first publicly sold, mass-market periodicals intended for a gay, lesbian, or transvestite readership appeared after 1919, although they faced censorship lawsuits and bans on public sale after the 1926 Trash and Smut Law [de]. The first mass organizations for homosexuals, the German Friendship Society and the League for Human Rights, were founded in the aftermath of the war. These organizations emphasized human rights and respectability politics, and they excluded prostitutes and effeminate homosexual men, who were considered harmful to the movement's public image. The homosexual movement had limited success with the general public, in part because many Germans believed that homosexuality could be spread as a communicable disease.

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The Memorial to the First Homosexual Emancipation Movement (German: Denkmal für die erste homosexuelle Emanzipationsbewegung) is a memorial in the neighbourhood of Moabit in Berlin, Germany. Unveiled on 7 September 2017, the memorial is located opposite the Federal Chancellery on the Spree and commemorates the first homosexual movement, which was destroyed in 1933 by the Nazis, and especially the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee founded in 1897 to oppose the criminalization of homosexuality in Germany. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee's headquarters were located on the other bank of the Spree near the Federal Chancellery. The riverbank where the memorial is located has been named the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer since 2008. The memorial includes an information panel that has been in place since 2011 and discusses the movement with portraits of Anita Augspurg (1857–1943), Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935).