One of the largest destructions of queer culture was under the Nazis. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin was emptied and all its books burned in 1933. Before that, it was run by Magnus Hirschfeld, who campaigned for gay rights as early as the 1920s, and not only collected stories of queer people, but shared them with other LGBT+ people, so they knew they weren’t ever alone.
But we don’t talk about it. In 1951, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach was published under the pen name Donald Webster Cory.