This advertisement, which appeared in a 1927 issue of the lesbian magazine Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), promoted all of the gay periodicals that Friedrich Radszuweit’s publishing house produced at the time. Radszuweit later launched a couple more titles, including Das dritte Geschlecht—Die Transvestiten, which focused on a transgender readership.

Along with Magnus Hirschfeld and Adolf Brand, Radszuweit was one of the leading figures in Weimar Germany’s homosexual emancipation movement. Unlike Hirschfeld and Brand, however, who had both been active in the movement since the 1890s and, indeed, had been the key figures in its founding, Radszuweit had only just come to the cause of gay rights in early 1922, after hearing one of Hirschfeld’s lectures in Berlin. Radszuweit immediately joined a gay organization, rose within just a few months to its top leadership position, and launched an ambitious program of organizing gay people across the country and lobbying for gay rights.

Radszuweit founded his own publishing house in February 1923 to promote this program via a number of magazines that aimed at what we would today call an LGBTQ+ readership. Most of the magazines put out issues of 8-12 pages, but issues occasionally numbered up to 20 pages, thanks in part to the fact that Radszuweit regularly recycled articles from one magazine in the others and dug up old lectures and treatises, sometimes from before the war, for republication. Nevertheless, the magazines served as an important conduit for information about politics and sexuality. They also enabled readers to meet one another, learn about upcoming social activities, and feel less alone, especially if they did not live in Berlin or one of the other large cities that had bars and clubs that catered to gay people.

Die Freundin had appeared on a weekly or biweekly basis since September 1924 and printed a mix of fiction, poetry, illustrations, news, commentary, items of interest from mainstream newspapers, letters from readers, and personals ads. The personal ads, in particular, got the magazine into trouble with government censors, especially after 1926, when officials interpreted such self-advertising as a violation of a law passed that year to prevent the “corruption” of young people. When censors briefly banned the publication of Die Freundin altogether in the late 1920s, Radszuweit replaced it with a similar magazine title Ledige Frauen (Single Women). By the early 1930s, circulation for all of the publishing house’s magazine titles suffered, as a result of government harassment, the economic depression, and Friedrich Radszuweit’s death from cancer in spring 1932.