Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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of which attracted as many as 700 guests and were known throughout Europe.5
In the same year, Magnus Hirschfeld (1865–1935) corroborated Näcke’s account in a popular book called Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex). Hirschfeld describes a metropolis in which well over 50,000 male and female homosexuals lived, often in harmony with their “normal sexual” friends and family. They formed long-lasting pairs, gathered in social parties in milieus ranging from the working class to the aristocratic, supported a lively subculture of cross-dressing entertainers and transvestite balls, frequented their own cafes and bars, placed personal ads in local papers, and patronized large numbers of sex workers, many of whom came from the underpaid military.
By the end of the century, regularly appearing periodicals discussed same-sex desire. In 1896, Adolf Brand (1874–1945) began publishing Der Eigene, an anarchist publication that quickly became devoted to, as its subtitle soon clarified, “masculine culture.” The journal’s title cannot be translated adequately, because of its unusual use of the word eigen, which most frequently means “own” as in “my own.” Less frequently the word can mean “peculiar” (or even “queer”) as well. Most translations attempt to incorporate both senses of the meaning, as well as Brand’s acknowledged debt to Max Stirner’s anarchist treatise, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (which has been translated as “The Ego and His Own”): “The Special,” “The Exceptional,” “The Personalist,” “The Free,” or “The Self-Owner.”6 In 1899, Hirschfeld and his colleagues at the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee began publishing its own more scholarly journal, Das Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (The Yearbook for Sexual Intermediary Types).
The activities and writing surrounding same-sex desire and sexuality in that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-speaking realm of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzerland produced a plethora of sexual terminology. While certainly there was extensive work on sexuality in other countries as well—in addition to Ellis and Symonds, one thinks of Paolo Mantegazza of Italy, Ambroise Tardieu of France, Arnold Aletrino of Holland and Edward Carpenter of England—those writing in German conceptualized sexual vocabulary first. Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the term “homosexual” in 1869 and was the first to employ the vocabulary of “heterosexual” in writings that were published in 1880. Not surprisingly, the term “heterosexual” took much longer to catch on; in Berlins drittes Geschlecht, aimed at a popular audience, Hirschfeld still prefers the term “normal sexual” to “heterosexual.” By 1903, Eric Mühsam and Edwin Bab are debating each other in print about “bisexuality” (Bisexualität).7 The terms “fetischism” (Fetischismus), “masochism” (Masochismus), and “sadism” (Sadismus) make their first appearance in any language in the world in Psychopathia sexualis by the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). Krafft-Ebing’s enormously successful compendium of sexual disorders, which went through many editions and translations and within a few decades was found in libraries in communities all over the globe, also introduced the concepts of homo- and heterosexuality to many readers. Hirschfeld was the first to coin the term “transvestite” in his 1910 volume on cross-dressing called Die Transvestiten. Other languages and cultures soon borrowed these terms, where they successfully formed the base for a modern global discourse of sexuality. Freud’s subsequent influential conceptualization of the Oedipal crisis and the id, the ego, and the superego was just the icing on a vast cake of sexological vocabulary whipped up in German and Austrian kitchens before the First World War.
Figure 1. Der Eigene, vol. 6 (1906): A Book for Art and Masculine Culture. Personal collection of author.
In the decade between 1898 and 1908, over one thousand works were published on homosexuality, most written originally in German.8 Even many of those works written by non-Germans were published first in Germany. The work by Ellis and Symonds cited at the beginning of this Introduction had to be published first in Germany under the title Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl (Sexual Inversion [1896]), before Ellis could find a way to publish it in English. Scandalized by it sexual content, Symonds’s heirs purchased and destroyed the entire run of the English edition printed in 1897.9 Eventually, Ellis slipped it into his English-language collection, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1905). In publishing in Germany, he followed the example of Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), whose Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society, which was privately printed in an extremely limited run in England in 1894, was much more publically available in Germany as Die homogene Liebe und ihre Bedeutung in der freien Gesellschaft in 1895. This publication activity, as well as the other evidence of a lively homosexual subculture in Germany and Austria, underscores the importance of the question: What cultural phenomena powered this tremendous amount of work done on sexuality in German-speaking central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century?
1869 and Sodomy
The year 1869 saw the publication of a number of important documents that can provide a useful introduction to the phenomenal increase in discussions of sexuality in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-speaking world. A century before the famous Stonewall Riots in New York City’s Greenwich Village ignited the gay liberation movement, three authors published texts in German that would help lay the foundations for modern discourses of sexuality, making intelligible the very claim to gay liberation. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) published two brochures defending the legal rights of urnings. In the same year, Ulrichs’s “comrade” Karl Maria Kertbeny was the first person in any language to use the word “homosexual” in print; he employed it in two lengthy pamphlets urging the decriminalization of sodomy in the penal code that was being written for the North German Confederation. Finally, in an 1869 article that Michel Foucault has claimed can stand in for the birth of the homosexual, the psychiatrist Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal diagnosed two patients as sexual “inverts”—one, a woman who had always felt like a man and loved other women, and the other, a man who cross-dressed as a woman compulsively, even though it repeatedly landed him in jail. These initial attempts to describe same-sex attraction constructed the groundwork for modern sexual identities, establishing the discursive framework that still informs many intellectual, academic, cultural, and political discussions regarding sexuality.
A quick look at these documents provides an introductory snapshot that sheds light on the structures informing the emergence of modern sexual identities. To be sure, none of these authors is unknown in the history of sexuality. Nevertheless, the actual writings of Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal have rarely been the object of sustained scholarly scrutiny. Usually there is merely an acknowledgement of Kertbeny’s linguistic contribution to the history of sexuality and a reference to Foucault’s citation of Westphal. Compared to Westphal, Ulrichs and Kertbeny are particularly neglected, for their works have until recently been much harder to obtain. While Westphal’s medical analyses of same-sex desire were published in journals that were widely distributed in the late nineteenth century and are thus generally available at research libraries around the Western world, the radical political pamphlets of Kertbeny and Ulrichs were much less likely to be collected by libraries and are thus virtually impossible to locate in the original nowadays. They have been reprinted a few times, notably by Hirschfeld in the decades preceding the First World War and more recently by Verlag rosa Winkel in Berlin, but even these reprinted editions are not necessarily available, even in the best research libraries in the United States. Translations into English by Michael Lombardi-Nash and others of some of the most important works are also still not always easy to obtain.10 The digitalization of rare texts means many of these documents have recently become easier to find again.
These essays by Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal repay close reading because they reveal many of the tendencies that helped shape the contour of modern notions of sexuality. They ask questions that have historically been asked about homosexuality: Is homosexuality a sin, a crime, a sickness? Is sexual orientation a product of nature or nurture? Can a person’s sexual orientation change? Are gay men effeminate? Are lesbians masculine? Do gay men and lesbians have anything in common? Are homosexuals a threat to children? Are they a threat to the nation and national security? Do homosexuals