Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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Socialists took power in 1933 is fascinating, but it is such a huge topic, requiring such delicacy, that I would like to leave it for future studies.
Peripheral Desires is not the first effort to answer these questions regarding the relationship between German culture and modern sexual categories. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of material available. In Germany, activist scholars like Manfred Herzer have uncovered and republished important documents from the nineteenth-century homosexual emancipation movement. Due to the work of Herzer and his colleagues, a significant number of early texts by Hössli, Ulrichs, Kertbeny and others are available in reprints. In the United States, the Arno Press republished in the 1970s a number of important documents from the German homosexual rights movement as well. James Steakley’s pioneering Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany appeared in 1975, long before gay and lesbian studies was accepted in the academy. His ground-breaking analysis still structures most thinking on the emergence of the nineteenth-century homosexual rights movement in Germany—my own work is deeply indebted to it. Not only is Steakley’s work written in English, many of the early sexological and emancipatory texts are published in English translation. Translators such as Michael Lombardi-Nash have translated Ulrichs as well as Hirschfeld into English.11 Hubert Kennedy has not only written an extensive biography of Ulrichs (available both in German and English), but also helped keep the work of authors such as John Henry Mackay in print. In Germany, curators at the Schwules Museum and scholars at the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft have continued to uncover new primary material while also holding the door open for new interpretations. There have been several major exhibitions devoted to the subject, notably the 1984 exhibit Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur (El Dorado: Homosexual Women and Men in Berlin, 1850-1950: History, Daily Life, and Culture) and the follow up, Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung, which opened at the Berlin’s Academie der Künste in 1997. Rosa von Praunheim has cinematically documented this history in his 1998 documentary, Schwuler Mut: 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung (Gay Courage: 100 Years of the Gay Movement) and his 1999 biopic about Hirschfeld, The Einstein of Sex. Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplace of an Identity, published in 2014, testifies to the ongoing interest in the subject as it presents a brisk and lively overview of the history of male homosexuality in the German context.
Given this large amount of scholarship, it might seem that another book on the subject was superfluous. But as previously unknown source material from the nineteenth century has been rediscovered, our understanding of the era needs redefinition and refinement. When Steakley’s work appeared in 1975, very little of the foundational theoretical work of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory had appeared—the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality was not published in English until 1978, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men did not appear until 1985, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble came out in 1990. On the other hand, many of the fundamental texts in gay and lesbian studies and queer theory don’t interact with the historical German texts. Foucault, for instance, had apparently little first-hand knowledge of Ulrichs, Kertbeny and the other emancipationists. There is therefore a need to bring together newer findings in the history and literature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German sexuality with more recent theoretical work in gay and lesbian studies and queer theory.
The need is more than purely academic. The cultural constructs in which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-language authors wrote established the framework for their discussions of sexuality. That framework has remained remarkably consistent in the intervening two centuries, as these modern discourses of sexuality have become globally omnipresent. Much of the scientific research on sexual orientation continues to work on the assumption that homosexuals constitute a discrete minority, with biologically identifiable characteristics that often have something to do with gender inversion; this research typically claims to be part of a liberal political agenda. At the same time, a counter-discourse persists, according to which most people are bisexual and capable of strong erotic and emotional bonds with members of their own sex, even if they typically favor heterosexual liaisons; many of the theoreticians behind this position frame their arguments as a critique of liberalism. The outlines of this debate go back to the discussions between liberal sexologists and emancipationists, who believe in a specific homosexual identity, and the masculinist critics of liberalism, who believe in a broader, more diffuse, eros. Those who believe in a specific homosexual identity tend to think not only in terms of gender inversion, but also in terms of analogies to race, also a trope that begins in the nineteenth century. The politics of the discussion have remained largely unchanged, hovering between demands for decriminalization and hopes for gay marriage, although of course the goals of the movement have come closer to realization than ever before.
It is particularly striking that so many of these debates continue at the highest levels of science, politics and culture in the United States, a country that was certainly on the periphery of the imagination of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-language writers whom we will be reading. Now, of course, the United States has taken on a central role, not only in the cultural construction of gender, but also in specifically in terms of gay and lesbian self-awareness and assertion, as well as queer theory. Journalistic, scientific, legal, political and administrative discourses have tended to coalesce around biologistic theories of fixed sexual identity and clear sexual categories; academic theorists who work in the realm of queer theory have been more skeptical of such identity politics, as have literary sources, such as Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall (2010) and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011). From newspaper accounts of current scientific research on sexual orientation to legally binding documents released by various branches of the government of the United States of America, from contemporary queer theory to critically acclaimed novels, we shall see that the debates begun by nineteenth-century German thinkers on sexual identity remain vibrant in the twenty-first century.
Introduction. 1869—Urnings, Homosexuals, and Inverts
The British sexologists Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) and John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) observed at the end of the nineteenth century that “Germany is the only country in which there is a definite and well-supported movement for the defense and social rehabilitation of inverts,” adding that “the study of sexual inversion began in Germany and the scientific and literary publications dealing with homosexuality issued for the German press probably surpass in quality and importance those issued for all countries put together.”1 If we assume Ellis and Symonds are correct, the question arises, why was Germany—and more generally, German-speaking central Europe—so fertile a ground for homosexual subcultures at the turn of the century? What factors helped construct the modern forms of sexuality that were emerging in this time period in central Europe? What intellectual, cultural, philosophical, religious, and social developments informed the ways that scholars, writers, artists, political actors, and other individuals thought about sexuality in the second half of the nineteenth century in German-speaking cultures?
One of Ellis’s patients wrote about Berlin, “here are homosexual baths, pensions, restaurants, and hotels, where you can go with one of your own sex at a certain fee per hour. Berlin is a revelation.”2 One aristocrat claimed in 1897, after having spent forty years traveling throughout the world, that the life of “urnings” (people with the bodies of one sex and the souls of another) in Berlin was “more extensive, freer and easier than anywhere else in the Orient or the Occident.”3 In 1904 physician Paul Näcke published an article titled “A Visit with the Homosexuals of Berlin” in Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik (Archives for Forensic Anthropology and Criminology), in which he describes attending a meeting of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Magnus Hirschfeld’s (1865–1935) advocacy group for homosexuals. According to Näcke, between two and three hundred people were in attendance, “including fifteen ladies”; they listened to a speech by a former Catholic priest about sexuality and the Church. Näcke met couples who considered themselves married, as well as a shy young girl of seventeen or eighteen, discovering this world for the first time herself. Näcke reports on bars catering to homosexuals, places where homosexuals could pick up soldiers hoping to earn some money on the side, and dance establishments where young men “honored with great passion Terpsichore,”