HISTORIES OF HOMOSEXUALITY in the Germanic world tend to begin in the middle of the 19th century. That’s where the term “homosexuality” was coined, by Karl Maria Kertbeny, in 1867. It’s where political activism began with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) and continued with Magnus Hirschfeld into the 1930s. Seldom do historians dive further back in time. This is surely an oversight, for the Age of Goethe was the height of the Romantic cult of friendship, and it’s a short leap from there to homoerotic relations and sexual possibilities. One tipoff that this fixation on “friendship” went beyond the conventional definition is that it was accompanied by a re-awakened interest in Greek mythology and Greek love in all its forms. In fact, there are passages in Goethe’s own writing that belong in any gay anthology.
Briefe über den Galanterien von Berlin, a travelogue by an anonymous Austrian officer published in Vienna in 1782, might make it into such an anthology, albeit in a different section. For this eyewitness account of sexual mores observed during a sojourn of fifteen months in Berlin is far from lyrical in its praise. Indeed, it passes stolidly reactionary judgment on Berlin’s “excesses”—or purports to do so, expressing horror in rhetorical flourishes on every page. For us, what matters is not what this anonymous author thinks about these goings-on but the fact that he reports on their existence.
These thirty letters [three in particular, which appeared in the July-August 2019 issue]deal specifically with “sodomy” and “pederasty” and offer clues as to why silence was the watchword throughout the 18th century. Perhaps the key factor was the law, an issue addressed by Letter 16. Lo and behold, this staunchly conservative observer quotes at length the 18th-century Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), a leading thinker of the Enlightenment. Beccaria argued that sodomy was not a crime but instead a weakness of “animality.” The enlightened absolutism of Kaiser Joseph II was reversing the censorship that had prevailed under his predecessor, the puritanical Maria Theresa. Under Joseph, Austria became the first European land to abolish the death penalty for sodomy, in 1787.
David Tacium, PhD, based in Montreal, is the author of the novel Taking Down the Golden Boy. His doctoral thesis is titled Dandyism & Crisis in 19th Century Masculine Identity (in French).
