Four or five days earlier, on 14 or 15 May, in Berlin, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Comitee, WhK) was set up to launch a campaign against Article 175 of the German penal code banning homosexual relations, being the first organisation to defend LGBT rights.

The coincidence of two episodes 125 years ago in a few days is casual, but the violent environment against homosexuals of the time is not. Oscar Wilde was a well-known person and sought exemplary punishment. The judgment had a great impact and caused intolerance to sexual and gender freedom to be maintained, not only in Britain, but throughout Europe. Many homosexual artists suffered reprisals. In Germany, for example, the painter Paul Höcker had to be exiled.

Article 127 was in force in Germany, which penalised sexual relations between men with imprisonment, and the law did not include women. And to fight this law came together sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, editor Max Spohr, lawyer Eduard Oberg and writer Franz Joseph von Bülow. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee was created in Hirschfeld’s own house and was based on his theory: homosexuality was the biological “third sex” between men and women. The Commission was unable to extend and accept the theory, but it had a clear objective: if homosexuality came from birth, if it was not the conduct chosen, the right could not sanction it.

What happened in that spring week of 1897 did not cause immediate and dramatic changes. Oscar Wilde left prison “materially and spiritually depressed,” according to Irish writer Frank Harris, and spent the few years remaining in exile in France. Hirschfeld's biological determinism provoked internal divisions and criticism in the committee. In 1929 Hirschfeld himself was forced to resign. Therefore, before the Nazis dissolved the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1933, the forerunner of the LGBT rights movement was weakened.