With Adolf Brand and ten others, Friedlaender founded the homosexual organization called Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (GdE), usually translated as Community of the Special, in 1903. The word Eigenen can mean both "peculiar, distinctive, odd" (as in Oddfellows) and "owned, possessed", and the GdE's name was inspired in part by Max Stirner's libertarian philosophy of "self-ownership" or autonomy. The GdE repudiated Hirschfeld's understanding of homosexuality in a transgender spectrum and instead emphasized the masculinity of male-male sexuality, as did André Gide in 1924 in his Corydon.