Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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role of women in embracing this ideology. He argues that such asceticism creates a class of “the stunted,” men whose ability to love other men has atrophied under the influence of heterosexual moralistic obligations. Nietzsche and his followers often literalize this distrust of the priestly class as an attack on the Jews, who supposedly are responsible for one of the most insidious forms of priestliness—Christianity. The belief that women are particularly prone to submit to the teachings of the priests underscores the misogynist tendencies of this group. With the exception of Mackay, most of the masculinists exhibit these anti-Semitic and misogynist inclinations. In addition, the brilliant dénouement of Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral (Genealogy of Morals), where he identifies science as the new, nihilist religion of the modern age, influences many of these masculinist thinkers, who urgently reject the medical and psychiatric efforts to treat them. Following Nietzsche’s lead, they see such scientific efforts as deleterious continuations of the tradition of religious strictures against sexual behavior.
The Civilizing Legacy of the Greeks
Let us return for a moment, though, to the period before Nietzsche’s thought reset the image of the Greeks. Throughout the nineteenth century, Greece provided legitimization for same-sex love and sexuality. Almost everyone in that era who thought about same-sex desire felt obliged to comment on the prominence of same-sex sexual acts in ancient Greek culture. Those who wanted to justify or condone such sexual acts found tremendous legitimizing authority in accounts of sapphism and platonic love. Even those who condemned such inclinations found it necessary to address and explain their open presence in a culture routinely held up as a model for Germany in particular and the West in general.
Even though Zschokke’s Eros is set in nineteenth-century Switzerland, the Greek precedent colors this novella too. Not only do various characters cite ancient Greek examples throughout the text, but the whole work is constituted as a response to Plato’s Symposium. In Eros, as in the Symposium, a series of characters discuss the significance of male-male love, although in the case of the nineteenth-century story the occasion is a dreadful crime of passion in which an older man has murdered his beloved younger friend, rather than the celebration of Agathon’s victory in a dramatic competition. In the Swiss story, a wise man has the last word, mirroring Socrates’ role in the Symposium; tellingly, it is not the character based on Hössli, Holmar, but the moderate narrator, Beda: “Go ahead Beda, you be our Socrates at our symposium.”17 Holmar in fact is styled as the intemperate Alcibaides, who interrupts Plato’s Symposium by arriving drunk at the end to put the group’s wisdom into question. When Holmar shows up late to the discussion group in order to sing a defense of sensual relations between men, his demand for wine serves as a hint to the reader that he has taken on the role of the drunken Alcibiades: “I’ll gladly take a glass!”18 This is all of course an ironic inversion of Plato’s text, which cannot have pleased Hössli, especially since Holmar is not even beautiful like Alcibiades.
Hössli himself argues that ancient Greece provides the most convincing evidence on the nature of male love: “No phenomenon in all history is more inexplicable in our days than this love of the Greeks,” he declares with a certain ironic detachment.19 Summing up the thoughts of his contemporaries, Hössli continues: “We believe (sadly enough) either that the Greeks had a different nature than the general, eternally unchangeable nature that we now have, or that they sacrilegiously defiled their nature.”20 He states his own actual position about Greek love more forcefully later: “If it was nature then, it is still nature now.”21 The unchangeability of male-male love proves that it is just and natural, according to Hössli. Repeatedly, Hössli forcefully rejects critiques of sexual attraction between men by citing the Greek precedent.
By midcentury, though, the terrain began to shift. To be sure, Kertbeny, Ulrichs, and Hirschfeld still mention the Greek example when it suits them. Kertbeny provides historical background when he makes such statements as “it is well known that the Greeks named such female homosexuals ‘tribades’” and “such homosexuals were known among the Greeks as ‘paiderastos.’”22 Ulrichs bases his vocabulary of the “urning” on Plato’s Symposium, in which Pausanius defines “uranian” love as the higher love that men have for men. Later in the nineteenth century, Magnus Hirschfeld would rely on the classical tradition for his first book, Sappho und Sokrates oder Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechtes? (Sappho and Socrates or How Can One Explain the Love of Men and Women to Members of Their Own Sex?). Published in 1896 under the pseudonym “Th. Ramien,” some consider it “the founding manifesto of the modern gay movement.”23
On the other hand, Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, and others in the medical community rarely devoted more than a few sentences to Greek examples. As scientists, they wanted hard empirical evidence, rather than speculation based on classical texts. From their perspective, the Greek examples provided at most some evidence of the permanence of the diagnosis that they were using. Because many homosexual emancipation activists, such as Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, worked closely with their contemporaries in the realm of the natural sciences and medicine, they too began to devote more and more time to non-Greek examples of same-sex desire.
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