HISTORY HANGS by a thread and always has—gay history especially. It’s not just the inevitable forgetting but also the dangers to which we are heir. With scissors, a snippet of a letter can be censored, a diary disemboweled, and gay reference lost. Whether from obliviousness, squeamishness, or outright prejudice, survivors, scholars, and archivists (and today blindly obedient bureaucrats) have destroyed and are destroying or ignoring LGBT history, so that even some who make the cut survive as half-shadows or sanitized geldings. Yet despite these obstacles, past LGBT lives and stories are still emerging—more and more, in fact, as more of us react, glean, examine, and chase down facts to reclaim (for good or for ill) neglected figures.
A few decades ago, researching something else, I stumbled upon a bit of history that had long been silenced, a tale that may be one of the oddest gay American love stories of the early 20th century. In his day, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) was hailed as a popular and prolific novelist as well as a cultural and literary critic. He became one of his era’s most prominent intellectual spokesmen for Jewish and Zionist causes and was a founding faculty member of Brandeis University. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962) gained fame as a poet, memoirist, and editor of a national magazine, with friends including Theodore Roosevelt. Viereck published widely on everything, but during World War II, following a conviction later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, he was imprisoned as a Nazi provocateur. That these two apparently polar opposites—one a Zionist Jew, the other a Hitler devotee—had once been lovers was a too-hot-to handle story that never got out in their youth, and as their careers took off, they molded their personas to fit their publics, a tactic some biographers abetted, using the power of their pens and their prejudices to shape how we have come to know these men.
The first to come to my attention was Lewisohn. Born in Berlin, he was the only child of a very assimilated Jewish family that moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when Lewisohn was young. He fell in love with the English language and the beautiful Southern city, wanting nothing more than to belong to a society that could not quite assimilate a Semitic-looking youngster who nevertheless self-identified as a Christian and a Southern gentleman. He was so obviously brilliant that, in a gesture of noblesse oblige, the locals took up a collection for his education, and off he went to Columbia University.
Standard biographies tell of his fight to become a college professor when universities would not hire Jews (though he identified as a Methodist). As World War I began, he saw his career as a champion and translator of German literature further stymied. His marriage to a much older woman soured, and his 1926 novel about it, The Case of Mr. Crump, praised by the likes of Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud, could only be published in Paris, where Lewisohn had fled with another woman and soon came to associate with artists and authors like James Joyce. His personal life kept him in the headlines, as his first wife refused to divorce him, his common-law wife stalked him, and when he was finally free, he married again and again. (One jilted lover broke into a wedding ceremony, giving the officiating rabbi a heart attack. Needless to say, tabloids loved him.) After claiming his Jewish identity, he warned the world of Hitler and the coming Holocaust.
So much for many of the standard biographies.
In the early 20th century, looking for a room to rent in New York City, he met the Viereck family, whose paterfamilias was an illegitimate descendant of the Hohenzollern family, with rumors that his father was the Kaiser himself. The young, German-born son of the family, George Sylvester, known mostly as Sylvester (and eventually as Swastika), was seen as a genius with an alluring, magnetic personality. Lewisohn and Viereck became lovers, inspiring both to write verse referencing a dangerous love that would earn them scorn, which Lewisohn was willing to accept to keep his lover’s caresses and “scarlet” kisses. (The manuscript drafts of poetry in a local archive had, by squeamish, oblivious, or merely incurious cataloguers, been denuded of their homosexual content.)
Viereck blossomed under Lewisohn’s encouragement (the latter drawing an ejaculating penis in the margins of his texts), and together they published Viereck’s first work with an appreciation, staged in scholarly prose, by his lover Lewisohn. Then came Viereck’s 1907 Nineveh and Other Poems—a slap in the face to the tastes of the day and what just may have been America’s first home-grown book of decadent and Uranian verse—which catapulted him to sudden fame. Proclaimed the country’s brightest talent, he’d crest early, however, becoming just a flash in the pantheon of American poets, many of whom would later drum him out of the Poetry Society of America for his politics. Taking Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and Jesus Christ as his idols, he befriended Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas and tried to start a rumor that Wilde was still alive.
Also in 1907, long before Anne Rice, Viereck authored a homoerotic vampire novel. A handsome young writer in The House of the Vampire is metaphorically, if not literally, sucked dry by another male artist who, engorged with his talent, becomes more successful, a nod to The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Indeed, German editions put Wilde’s face on the cover.) Lewisohn may have seen himself as victim when Viereck, having used Lewisohn’s greater fame to gain attention, threw him over, leaving his lover bereft, and beginning a string of affairs with women that generally ended badly. While Lewisohn’s novels focused on “free love” (i.e., sex beyond marriage) of men and women, one could argue that it was really gay male love he was always seeking and never finding. That may be why his marriages (and most of his novels) failed. Championed by the likes of Theodore Dreiser, beginning in his first autobiography, Upstream, Lewisohn began to cast himself messianically not just as a Jewish voice but as a martyr against American prudery in literary matters and its Victorian view of marriage and sex, but he remained silent about his same-sex erotic experiences.
Viereck continued writing books and poems that teased his readers as he implied that bisexuality was the norm. His Confessions of a Barbarian (1910) was followed in 1931 by My Flesh and Blood: A Lyric Autobiography, with Indiscreet Annotations, which contained a very tame reference to Lewisohn, who would never mention Viereck in his forthcoming autobiographical volumes. Each messianic in his causes, it’s almost as if they were trying to outdo the other in vying for the attention of the American public.
While Lewisohn weighed in on the fate of Jews in Europe and Palestine and spun off a very Freudian interpretation of American literature (he began analysis with Freud but stopped fearing the loss of the conflicts that fueled his art), Viereck published books and endless articles wondering, for instance, whether most Americans would become nudists (probably not), or if the young gay murderers Leopold and Loeb had been in a sadomasochistic relationship. He also cast himself as liberator and martyr to sexual and other freedoms, interviewing and befriending playwright George Bernard Shaw, the early gay rights researcher and advocate Magnus Hirschfeld (whom he called “the Einstein of Sex”), Einstein himself, and even Freud, who asked for his help in popularizing psychoanalysis. Nikola Tesla befriended him, but it was his interview with Adolph Hitler that was most fateful.
Denying that he was an anti-Semite, Viereck nevertheless became enthralled with Nazism, not having learned from his support of Germany in World War I, when a mob of angry Americans had tried to lynch him. He was sentenced to two to six years in prison in 1942 for failing to register as an agent of a foreign government. Released by the Supreme Court, he was again imprisoned, even as Lewisohn authored Breathe Upon These (1944), one of the earliest novels of the Holocaust. (Forgetful of his same-sex affair with Viereck, Lewisohn had earlier concluded that the Nazi Party was “drenched” in homoeroticism.) After his release, Viereck published Men into Beasts (1952), a very early gay pulp title. His tell-all book of life behind bars, including frank and thus startling depictions of situational homosexuality (which he only witnessed, he claimed), became an underground bestseller. His earlier novel All Things Human (1949) revolved around an ostensibly straight man pondering “Grecian love” of men while imprisoned, and later somewhat regretfully romancing women when free.
But try as he might, Viereck never regained the public’s attention, as both he and his long-ago lover Lewisohn faded from view. Each fathered a son, both sons became poets, and both repudiated their fathers rather publicly. Viereck’s son Peter, a Pulitzer-prize winner for poetry who far outshone his father’s early promise, argued against Nazism, and Lewisohn’s son James converted to Catholicism after going to prison for killing his wife (accidentally, he pleaded), following the plot of Lewisohn’s most famous novel. As if in a final act of one-upmanship, Lewisohn died on Viereck’s birthday, the latter dying less than a decade later. After a burst of obituaries, both faded into obscurity—until a couple of biographers appeared.
Lewisohn is the subject of a 1998 biography in two volumes by the scrupulously honest Ralph Melnick, who seems to have recorded his subject’s every thought and activity. Readers never would have guessed from any of Lewisohn’s writings (his Uranian poems were not published) or reports about him that, while supposedly a Don Juan with women, he had had a male lover, a future supporter of Hitler, no less. Melnick writes frankly of their love and sex life, though he never seems to see it as other than an aberration, nor does he, in a very psychologically oriented work, entertain the idea that Lewisohn’s constant and impossible positioning of women on pedestals, only to be disappointed, may have really stemmed from conflicted homoerotic inclinations. Neither the word homosexuality nor any of its synonyms appears in the index, however, making the search for queer content in its more than 1,000 pages difficult. Like so much queer scholarship, you have to know it’s there in the first place to find it.
With Viereck, the much more “out” of the two, this information is virtually impossible to find. He attracted two biographers—Elmer Gertz, author of Odyssey of a Barbarian (1979), and Niel M. Johnson, author of George Sylvester Viereck, German-American Propagandist (1972). What with his lurid lyrics, his teasing references to male beauty, his professed attraction to Wilde and Whitman, and his frequent depictions of male-on-male sex (All That is Human is included in Anthony Slide’s Lost Gay Novels), you’d think there would at least be a reference or two to Viereck’s homosexual tendencies. But astonishingly, these authors (certainly more prudish than their subject), who are not hesitant to call out his amorality, his narcissism, and his willfully ignoring the deaths of millions caused by the man he lionized, are incredibly shy about alluding to Viereck’s sexuality. It’s as if they are afraid to besmirch a moral monster with the taint of being queer. This skittishness may reflect the times when their books were published, the 1970s—versus Melnick’s book on Lewisohn in 1998—but therein lies not just a lesson but a warning.
Lewisohn and Viereck—once in love with each other and then each in love with the contrasting missions they tried to personify—covered up facts of their own lives to better represent their ideals. Each seemed incapable of realizing they had done anything morally perverse, but for historians to do the same, to hide things that make them uncomfortable, is inexcusable. Perhaps we thought it was a thing of the past—queer lives neutered by writers’ own reticence on the subject—but it’s still going on and even accelerating with governmental approval. “Never again” applies not only to the Holocaust but also to enforced silencing and denial of LGBT lives and stories.
Harlan Greene is a novelist, historian, and archivist based in Charleston, SC, whose books include The Real Rainbow Row: Explorations in Charleston’s LGBTQ History.
