There is no doubt that the concept of love in the texts of Stefan George is a homoerotic one. That is to say, even if George never would have called himself “a homosexual,” the main subject of his texts is love of men and boys. There are so many love poems to a male addressee that — even if critics have paid little attention to this central subject of his work — it was (and still is) quite easy to claim George for a history of gay literature. This is what the gay emancipation movement did at the latest in 1914, when the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld published Peter Hamecher's (1879–1938) article “Der männliche Eros im Werke Stefan Georges” in his Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, edited since 1899 on behalf of the “Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee,” the first organization of the gay emancipation movement, founded in 1897. The newsletter of the “Gemeinschaft der Eigenen” (another gay emancipation group, founded in 1903), published in 1924 an annotated list (“Flüchtiger Ueberblick über die Schöne Literatur, soweit sie Freundesliebe zum Inhalt hat”) recommending to gay readers George's Maximin-Gedenkbuch, Der Stern des Bundes, Der Siebente Ring, Der Teppich des Lebens, Das Jahr der Seele, and the anthologies Deutsche Dichtung I–III (1900–1902) as well as George's translations in Zeitgenössische Dichter (1905). In the early 1930s Hans Dietrich Hellbach wrote in his thesis Die Freundesliebe in der deutschen Literatur that the triumph of Eros in modern German literature was achieved by George, who gave a new social-ethical dimension to what Hellbach called “Freundesliebe,” a term used by the early German gay emancipation movement to stress the cultural impact of male- male relationships. Modern gay anthologies such as The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983) also include George; there are articles on George in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, edited by Wayne R. Dynes (1990) and Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, edited by Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (2001), in Claude J. Summers's The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (1995), and in Frauenliebe Männerliebe: Eine lesbisch-schwule Literaturgeschichte in Porträts (1997).