GROSS: i do believe most of the people who the Department of Blackmail and Homosexuality went after were prostitutes considering that the division, though we interpreted, did not actually want to follow, like, the class that is middle. Plus the presumption, too, i believe, had been that prostitutes who earn money when you look at the intercourse trade had been also ready to earn money through blackmailing the individuals these were – who had been having to pay them to possess intercourse.
But that results in, like, an entire other chapter within the tale, that has been that there was clearly plenty of prostitution, male prostitutes, in homosexual Berlin at that time. Therefore let’s simply target, first, how prostitutes were mostly the folks who had been prosecuted, if i am aware precisely, when you look at the blackmail area of the Department of Blackmail and Homosexuality?
BEACHY: Yeah, that is absolutely accurate. Specially by the start of century that is 20th here appeared to be something similar to a scourge of blackmail. It absolutely was just like a plague, and there were a lot of situations that there was clearly, actually increasingly, a type of a campaign that is formal it. Then when these instances would arrived at test, the blackmailers, the male prostitutes, tended to get much more substantial sentences than their victims, no matter if their victims had been additionally convicted underneath the statute that is anti-sodomy. And so the blackmail had been considered, undoubtedly, the crime that is worst.