I've got a fun question!

Hey y'all, I'm a trans woman starting some preliminary study on my master's in history, and I want to focus on fascism and queerness (not at all relevant to today, amirite?).One of the things I've found in my research on the early gay scene in Berlin in the late 1800s is that gay men would give themselves female nicknames, and refer to each other as "girl", "sister", and "Auntie", much in the same way that gay men do today.I'm curious why. If this is something that you and your friends do, why? What's the impetus for this practice in your opinion?For this practice to occur over 100 years apart in different places in the world, logically there would be a connection--but obviously there's no real cultural connection between LGBTQ people of 19th century Berlin and LGBTQ people of 21st century US (for example, as I am American).If I can understand why gays today do it, maybe I can start figuring out why gays back then did it....