Together with three "inverted" friends who co-founded the group, Gerber published several issues of Friendship and Freedom, the first American publication for gays, but neither the magazine nor the organization lasted long; within a few months of the society's incorporation, Chicago police shut them down.  Authorities first learned of the group from the disgruntled wife of one of a Society member when she complained that her husband had sex with men in their home - in front of their children.  The charges were spurious, but when the police came to arrest the accused husband, they discovered papers from the Society, and hauled its founders to jail.  Even though Gerber escaped conviction, he lost his job as a post office clerk when his superiors learned of the fracas.

The German-born Gerber had been inspired to start the Society by the example of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific Humanitarian Committee, a group he had witnessed first-hand before his emigration to the United States in 1914.  He had not anticipated the ferocity of the American police, or the extent to which Chicago homosexuals were afraid to resist, and the personal disaster he experienced made him bitter.  Even though he had lost his job and his life savings of $ 800, no one volunteered to help him out.  He felt that the homosexuals he had set out to liberate should have revered him as a wounded hero, but they abandoned him instead.  

Still, he never managed to extinguish his activist enthusiasm.  In the 1940's, he exchanged a series of letters with Manuel Boyfrank who wanted to start an organization similar to the Society for Human Rights.  Even though he often warned Boyfrank that "selfish, uncultured, ignorant" homosexuals were unlikely to support the planned organization, some of his letters were encouraging.  The two ultimately parted company, though, when Boyfrank made it clear that he wanted to create a grass-roots organization, and Gerber insisted on a hierarchical one designed to appeal only to the "better sort of homosexuals."

The organization Boyfrank envisioned was never formed, but when the Mattachine Society and One were founded in the 1950s, Gerber wrote many articles for their publications under the pseudonym parisex.  The embittered and sometimes misanthropic Gerber died in 1972, a flawed man, but still a significant figure in the struggle against homosexual oppression in America.