June 15, 2016 A Month Celebrating LGBT+ Pride

Ferdinand Karsch was a scientist from Germany that identified as homosexual.

He was born on September 2, 1853 in Münster, Germany. He worked as an entomologist, anthropologist, and an arachnologist. He went to college at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and in 1877 he published a thesis on the gall wasp. He was the curator of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin for 43 years. He published many articles about the specimens of spiders that the museum had received from explorers and naturalists in Africa, China, Japan, and Australia.

In addition to these, he published many articles and studies on homosexuality in the animal world and in communities that were referred to as “primitive.” He lived as openly homosexual in Berlin until December 20, 1936. Unfortunately, Hitler’s rise to power and the oppression of the LGBT community by Nazi’s led to his work being disregarded for a time.