Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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revolutionary activities of 1848 broke out in Berlin, but his subsequent political battles with Prussia and the forces of reaction make clear his progressive sympathies.45 He even sent one of his 1869 writings, Incubus, to Karl Marx, who passed it on to Friedrich Engels. Engels responded to Marx on June 22, 1869: “That’s a very curious ‘urning’ whom you have sent me. Those are extremely unnatural revelations. The pederasts are beginning to count themselves and they’re finding that they are a power in the state. Only organization is lacking, but according to this it seems already to exist secretly.” Engels fears that the new slogan will be guerre aux cons, paix aux trous-de-cul (French in the original: “war on the cunts, peace to the assholes”) and remarks that “it’s lucky that we are personally too old to have to fear that with the victory of this party we would have to pay bodily tribute to the winners.” He concludes that such piggishness, such a Schweinerei, is only possible in Germany.46 Engels’s references to “pederasts” and his fears of rapacious urnings exacting tribute show that he doesn’t understand Ulrichs’s argument, for the feminine urning is supposed to be quite a different species from the pederast, and delicate and nonviolent at that. Nonetheless, Ulrichs’s effort to reach out to Marx shows his interest in cultivating support from leftist political thinkers. Marx’s willingness to send the publication on to Engels suggests he does not dismiss Ulrichs’s radical sexual proposals out of hand, even if Engels’s response is curt and derisive.
Ulrichs sets down in his writings a vision of same-sex desire that resonates powerfully throughout the following century. While his assumptions on gender are traditional, his notion that an innate, natural, fixed and biologically provable sexual desire can ground a claim to human and civil rights that ensures equal protection under the law and in the eyes of religion still remains a basic structure for many apologists for homosexuality. His calls for the creation of a stronger sense of community among urnings and the establishment of a legal defense fund for urnings remain relevant today. Arguing first for the elimination of sodomy laws and then for the right of urnings to marry, his practical concerns resemble those of twenty-first-century Western gay rights organizations.47
Karl Maria Kertbeny and the Homosexual
Karl Maria Kertbeny (1824–1882) was born a Benkert, into a German-Hungarian family in the Habsburg Empire. An enthusiastic proponent of Hungarian nationalism, he changed his name to the Hungarian-sounding Kertbeny and devoted himself to promoting the Hungarian cause, including translating and championing Hungarian literature throughout Europe.48 Habsburg police reports give an instructive summary of his life: “Benkert, Karl Maria, also known as Kertbent and Remkhazy, writer from Pest, was a partisan for democracy and the Hungarian insurrection of 1848.”49 He wrote biographies of such Hungarian nationalist poets as Sandor Petöfi (1823–1849) and published anthologies of Hungarian poetry. Although he claimed to have medical training (for which reason some historians of sexuality have listed him as one of the physicians who helped medicalize homosexuality), he did not practice medicine and instead supported himself as a man of letters. This was not a lucrative career path, for which reason Kertbeny’s usual pattern can be summed up as Herzer does: Kertbeny would (1) arrive in a European city, (2) make contact with local literary and leftist political figures, (3) borrow money, and (4) get out of town when the creditors showed up.50
Despite this pattern, Kertbeny enjoyed relative stability from 1868 to 1874, when he lived in Berlin, in part to encourage the German intelligentsia to support the Hungarian cause. There he became embroiled in the discussions concerning the fate of the sodomy laws in the North German Confederation, publishing two lengthy pamphlets on the subject, addressed to Leonhardt, the Prussian Minister of Justice, encouraging him to decriminalize sodomy. It is Kertbeny’s lasting contribution to the history of sexuality that he is the first person in any language known to have combined the Greek prefix homo (same) with the Latin noun sexus (sex) to create a word describing someone who is sexually attracted to members of his own sex. He refers, for instance, to “the natural riddle of homosexuality [Homosexualität].”51 At other times, he uses the term Homosexualismus (homosexualism), as well as the adjective homosexual and the noun, der Homosexuale.
Given that Kertbeny supported himself primarily as a translator and man of letters, his linguistic coinage perhaps deserves more respect than it usually receives.52 Although the term is often dismissed as an ugly linguistic hybrid, it joins a successful set of global vocabulary that similarly combines Greek and Latin roots to describe modern phenomena: the Greek auto (self) and Latin mobilis (to move) form “automobile” and Greek tele (far) and Latin visio (to see) stand behind “television.” Men who were products of a nineteenth-century central European education based on the classical tradition that consisted of a variety of Greco-Roman elements were in a strong position to name technologies that changed the course of history. Kertbeny was not working on his own in developing his terminology, as he and Ulrichs had met in the early 1860s and considered each other “comrades.”53 In fact, prior to its use in public in 1869, the term “homosexual” appears in an 1868 letter from Kertbeny to Ulrichs, although Ulrichs never adopted the word.
In print, Kertbeny writes, “in addition to the normal sexual drive of all of humanity and the animal kingdom, nature seems in her sovereign whimsy to have given a homosexual drive [den homosexualen Trieb] at birth to certain male and female individuals, to have bequeathed upon them a sexual fixedness, which makes the affected physically as well as psychologically unable, even with the best of intentions, to achieve a normal sexual erection.” Kertbeny continues by saying that this condition “exposed them to a direct horror of the opposite sex and made it therefore impossible for those affected by this passion to escape the impressions that particular individuals of the same sex have on them.”54 In this passage, a number of characteristics of Kertbeny’s “homosexual” emerge: first, homosexuals can be of either sex—there isn’t a conceptual distinction between male sodomites and female tribades, to use an earlier vocabulary. Additionally, homosexuals have sexual “drives.” The drive transcends the barrier between mind and body, affecting both equally; it is, as Judith Butler notes in a discussion of Freud, “precisely what is neither exclusively biological nor culture, but always the site of their dense convergence.”55 This drive is responsible for the mental “horror” of the opposite sex and the physical inability to achieve an erection in “normal” situations. The homosexual drive stands in contrast to the “normal sexual” drive, but, despite its deviance from the “normal,” it is natural.
In personal letters, Kertbeny discourages Ulrichs from relying too heavily on the claim that sexual desire is inborn, arguing that such a claim might not redound to the benefit of homosexuals: “there are people with an innate bloodthirstiness…. One doesn’t let these people do whatever they want or follow their desires, and even if one doesn’t punish them for intentional acts if their constitution is proven medically, one does isolate them as much as possible and protect society from their excesses.” Kertbeny concludes that “nothing would be won if the proof of innateness were successful.”56 In his open letter, however, he does assert that nature implants the homosexual drive at birth. However, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Kertbeny’s conception of sexuality is more open to cultural influences than Ulrichs’s understanding of innate gender inversion.
Despite his wariness of arguments relying on innate desire, Kertbeny asserts that “the homosexual [der Homosexuale] is a fixed nature who, however much he strives, can never prefer a woman.”57 Any hope of convincing the homosexual to change his desire is hopeless. At the same time, Kertbeny allays the fears of the “normal sexuals” by assuring his readers that “normal sexual” desire is also fixed, so that there is no danger of sexual contagion.58 Significantly—especially in light of the Zastrow scandal that caused Ulrichs to write so prolifically in 1869—there is also no danger that Kertbeny’s homosexual will abuse children, because the male homosexual’s desire is fixed on virile men. The notion of a fixed sexuality serves a number of important political purposes for Kertbeny: homosexuals can’t be changed, heterosexuals don’t need to worry about seduction, and children are safe.
Kertbeny