$6.95 US, $7.95 Canada DAVID TACIUM ‘Warm Brothers’ in 18th-century Berlin FINN BALLARD The House That Hirschfeld Built REBECCA BATLEY A Sacred Order for Sexual Outsiders MICHAEL LOMBARDI-NASH Uranian Women, Unite! WILL ROSCOE The Making of the Mattachine JOHN D’EMILIO The Case for Frank Kameny’s Place EVE GOLDBERG 1967: Protest at the Black Cat DAVID CARTER What Made Stonewall Different GLRk March–April 2025 Origins When did the LGBT Movement begin? An Encore Issue
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The Gay & Lesbian Review March–April 2025 • VOLUME XXXII, NUMBER 2 The Gay & Lesbian Review/WORLDWIDE®(formerlyThe Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscription rates: U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” ISSN: 1077: 6591 © 2025 by Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. POEMS &DEPARTMENTS CONTENTS FEATURES REVIEWS CORRESPONDENCE 5 BTW 6 RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. POEM— “In Moderation” 22 JOANNE COFRANCESCO POEM— “Come to Me Only with Soft Hands” 26 ASHISHKUMAR SINGH POEM— “The Danger of Creating Danger” 35 MARKEVANCHIMSKY CULTURAL CALENDAR 47 Alan Hollinghurst —Our Evenings: A Novel 33 ANDREWHOLLERAN Shai Baitel, editor —David Hockney: Paper Trails 34 ALFREDCORN Pedro Almodóvar —The Last Dream 36 PHILIP GAMBONE Margaret Vandenburg —Craze 37 HANKTROUT BRIEFS 38 S. J. Naudé —Fathers and Fugitives 39 ANNE CHARLES Love Is a Dangerous Word: The Selected Poems of Essex Hemphill 40 GABRIELX. HENDRIX Martha C. Nussbaum —The Tenderness of Silent Minds 41 ALANCONTRERAS Michael G. Lee —When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts 42 BRIANBROMBERGER Ben Grossberg —The Spring before Obergefell: A Novel 43 MICHAELQUINN Ricky Ian Gordon –Seing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs, and Opera 44 CHARLES GREEN Judith Barrington —Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs 45 BRUCE SPANG Yael van der Wouden —The Safekeep 45 MONICACARTER Stephanie Burt, ed. –Super Gay Poems; Cheryl Clarke –Archive of Style 46 DALE BOYER Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation(exhibit) 48 MARKTIMOTHYHAYWARD Luca Guadagnino, director —Queer (film) 50 BRIANALESSANDRO WEBSITE: www.GLReview.org • SUBSCRIPTIONS: 847-504-8893 • ADVERTISING: 617-421-0082 • SUBMISSIONS: Editor@GLReview.org Editor-in-Chief and Founder RICHARDSCHNEIDER JR. Literary Editor MARTHAE. STONE Poetry Editor DAVIDBERGMAN Associate Editors SAMDAPANAS PAULFALLON JEREMYFOX MICHAELSCHWARTZ Contributing Writers ROSEMARYBOOTH DANIELA. BURR COLINCARMAN ANNE CHARLES ALFREDCORN ALLENELLENZWEIG CHRIS FREEMAN PHILIP GAMBONE MATTHEWHAYS HILARYHOLLADAY ANDREWHOLLERAN IRENE JAVORS JOHNR. KILLACKY CASSANDRALANGER ANDREWLEAR FELICE PICANO JAMES POLCHIN JEANROBERTA VERNONROSARIO Contributing Artist CHARLES HEFLING Publisher STEPHENHEMRICK Webmaster BOSTONWEBGROUP WebEditor ALLISONARMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors ART COHEN(CHAIR) EDUARDOFEBLES ROBERT HARDMAN STEPHENHEMRICK HILARYHOLLADAY DAVIDLAFONTAINE JIMJACOBS ANDREWLEAR RICHARDSCHNEIDER, JR. (PRESIDENT) THOMAS YOUNGREN(TREASURER) STEWARTCLIFFORD(CHAIR EMER.) WARRENGOLDFARB(SR. ADVISOR EMER.) WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118 Origins WORLDWIDE March–April 2025 3 “Warm Brothers” in 18th-c. Berlin 9 DAVIDTACIUM The Enlightenment yielded the first wave of (homo)sexual activism The House That Hirschfeld Built 11 FINNBALLARD He founded the first institution devoted to sexual liberation (1890s) A Sacred Order for Sexual Outsiders 15 REBECCABATLEY George Cecil Ives’ Order of Chaeronea had ancient Greek roots Uranian Women, Unite! 17 MICHAELLOMBARDI-NASH In a 1904 speech, Anna Rüling laid out the case for lesbian rights The Making of the Mattachine 20 WILLROSCOE In the 1950s, Harry Hay saw that it was time to get organized The Case for Kameny’s Place 24 JOHND’EMILIO He led the first public marches against government oppression 1967: Protest at the Black Cat 27 EVE GOLDBERG After a police raid, L.A. activists staged a city-wide demonstration What Made Stonewall Different 30 DAVIDCARTER This time, the protesters didn’t go away, and a movement was born
Kameny began to organize marches at government buildings in Washington and Philadelphia so as to bring the message of “homophile” rights out into the open, and in places that symbolized the struggle for equality. But are we being too U.S.-centric here? A strong case can be made for Germany as the cradle of LGBT liberation beginning in the late 19th century. The term “homosexual” was coined by Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1868; the cause was taken up by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who used the term “Urnings” and advocated broad sexual reform; and it was institutionalized by Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897 and campaigned for sexual tolerance until the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. Meanwhile, a kind of LGBT consciousness was emerging in England in the era of Oscar Wilde, when there arose a group called the Order of Chaeronea that looked back to ancient Greece and envisioned a separate society for sexual nonconformists. Short of going back to Greece itself, there was an undercurrent of sexual liberation during the Enlightenment that shows up in the works of Goethe and the Frenchphilosophes, among others. Returning to Germany, we learn from a series of letters written in 1782 of a secret society of men who saw themselves as sexual outsiders and used the expression “warm brothers” to describe their association. RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. THIS ENCORE ISSUE takes up the age-old question: when and where did the LGBT movement truly begin? The convention of dating its origins to the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 is all but written in stone by now, but it has not gone unchallenged. This issue brings back eight articles from past issues, seven of which disclose that there were riots and protests and LGBT organizations long before Stonewall. They can be seen to form essentially two clusters historically and geographically, each of which corresponds to an argument that takes exception to the primacy of Stonewall. There has been a persistent voice of dissent holding that the West Coast is where the movement really began. Two years before Stonewall, a police raid at the Black Cat bar in Los Angeles gave rise to a city-wide protest in February 1967. It was there that the term “pride” was first used and the slogans of liberation chanted in the streets. Their message can be traced back to the 1950s with the founding of the Mattachine Society in L.A. and, soon thereafter, the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco, which evolved into national organizations that published monthly magazines and won legal battles and endured for decades. And they served as the organizational framework on which the Gay Liberation movement itself was built after Stonewall. Indeed, some would argue that it was only when the Mattachine reached the East Coast that the possibility of a political revolution emerged. Starting in the early 1960s, Frank Spring of Hope: ‘Origins’ FROM THE EDITOR 4 TheG&LR
Theme Title Was Insensitive To the Editor: I write to share my concerns about how the January-February 2025 issue is framed, specifically the invocation of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as a thematic anchor. While I recognize the creative effort to explore themes of “strangeness” and “fruitiness,” using “Strange Fruit” in this way—without acknowledging that it concerns a lynching—comes across as a deeply troubling act of whitewashing. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is more than simply a song. It is a profound, haunting artistic response to the lynching of Black bodies in the United States—a harrowing critique of systemic violence and racial terror. To decouple it from its historical and cultural weight, reducing it to a whimsical reference for unrelated explorations of queerness, is culturally inappropriate and diminishes the experiences of those whose suffering inspired this work. It is essential, especially in LGBTQ+ spaces, to approach such cultural symbols with the sensitivity, historical accuracy, and cultural competency they demand. While the issue aims to celebrate diversity and nuance, mishandling a piece as significant as “Strange Fruit” risks alienating communities that have long struggled for recognition and respect, struggles just like those experienced by our LGBTQ+ communities. I encourage you and the editorial team to reconsider how this framing might be perceived and to engage with the song—and its legacy—with the reverence it deserves. It might also be beneficial to include an acknowledgment of its origins in any related content, ensuring readers understand its context. I appreciate the work you do to elevate queer histories and voices, and I hope my feedback resonates as an opportunity to broaden and deepen the cultural inclusivity of your publication. Lorise Diamond Director, Linguistic Communication Development Center, Los Angeles, CA Sexual Tolerance in Colonial America To the Editor: I read John Gilbert McCurdy’s Vicious and Immoral, which is discussed by Andrew Holleran in the November-December 2024 issue, shortly after reading TheOverflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic, by Richard Godbeer, which offers an enlightening glimpse into 18th-century colonial society. Godbeer studied a facet of upper-class colonial society in which written sentiments of closeness and fraternalism flourished. In stark contrast to the pre-Revolutionary British regiment whose morality was strictly dictated by Mother Ireland, 18thcentury America entertained a value of personal freedom that was in keeping with the new democratization, free from the former patriarchal system. Open and effusive expressions of desires for both fraternal and physical love, as seen in correspondence between men, reflected that era’s sensibility toward a new social and political contract. Jonathan Wind, New York, NY Notes on Lorca and Dalí Dear Editor: I enjoyed the two articles about Federico Garcia Lorca and his relationship with Salvador Dalí [Nov.-Dec. 2024 issue], as the “Generation of 1927” is a favorite subject of mine. Here are a couple of further considerations. The first is that Federico was able to move on into some very constructive relationships after Dalí, including one during his trip to the U.S. On a two-week sojourn in Eden Mills, Vermont, he re-connected romantically with an American student, Philip Cummings (who was discussed in a fascinating article in the Nov.-Dec. 2019 issue titled “Lorca in Vermont: The Untold Story”). Their romance and creative collaboration have yet to be fully integrated into Lorca studies. Tragically, Lorca’s murder in 1936 had repercussions throughout the intellectual life of Spain and the Spanish-speaking world. Dalí was among the many people who were shocked and horrified by this event. However, in 1947 Dalí made his peace with Franco, the Falange, and Catholicism. He returned to Spain and was heralded as a symbol of artistic freedom in Franco’s Spain. This is the same government that not only murdered Lorca but imprisoned thousands of Spanish intellectuals. Any assessment of Dalí must acknowledge this support for a regime that took the life of his close friend. Interesting, too, is Dali’s friendship with film director Luis Buñuel, with whom he had collaborated in writing the surrealist short film “Un chien andalou.” While Buñuel, no fan of the Franco regime, was living in exile in Mexico in the 1950s, Dalí approached him about doing a sequel to the 1929 film. Lorca had believed this film to be a parody of him and an affront to his Andalusian heritage. Buñuel declined the collaboration. Consequently, Dalí’s friendship with the director did not endwell. Ken Borelli, San Jose, CA Correspondence March–April 2025 5 For itineraries, dates, & prices, visit: OscarWildeTours.com Look for site on Facebook / Instagram All trips designed and led by Prof. Andrew Lear, founder of Oscar Wilde Tours. $200DISCOUNT FOR G&LRREADERS! OWT Trips in 2025 UPCOMINGTOURDATES Really Gay Paree: May 5 – 13 Northern Italy: May 17 – 27 Gay Scandinavia: September 19 – 28 Gay Greece: October 1 – 10 Michelangelo: The Dying Slave
6 TheG&LR Livin’ in the Age of Impunity The proposition that the intensity of a politician’s homophobia rises in direct proportion to the darkness of his desires received a boost soon after Election Day when a mega-MAGA spokesman was arrested on eight counts of possessing child pornography. Jason Yates was the CEO of My Faith Votes, and he left a record of speeches and op-ed pieces urging people to “think biblically about the issues … to help Christians navigate every political issue through the lens of the Word.” In a Washington Times op-ed, he rallied Christians to fight “sexually deviant” messages and those sympathetic to the LGBT cause. The shocker came when a relative of Yates accidentally came across a hard drive in his office that contained images of child porn. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension stepped in and found over 100 still photos and videos featuring the sexual abuse of minors under fourteen. So,Yates will probably disappear for a while, but it’s worth noting that he had close ties to Ben Carson, Trump’s former HUD Secretary, who served as the honorary chair of My Faith Votes going back to 2016. So, Yates may not be gone for good, who knows? Indeed it turns out he had a prior conviction for possession of child porn, but somehow it had disappeared from the record in our age of impunity. Remember the Hoopla A twist on the theme of homophobic penance was provided by anti-LGBT activist Corey DeAngelis, author of the 2024 bookThe Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools. Who would have suspected that the author was once a gay porn star who appeared as “Seth Rose” on the adult website GayHoopla in videos titled “Jerk-Off Race” and “Super Star Compilation! How Many Strokes Til You Cum?”? (And who knew there was such a thing as competitive masturbation?) Now that DeAngelis is an author and a media star, viewers began to point out his resemblance to Seth Rose, and he had little choice but to come clean. Like everyone in his situation, he tried to dismiss his past behavior as a youthful indiscretion. “I was a victim of poor decisions and poor influences,” he declared on X. (So now one can be a “victim” of one’s own decisions?) And will the rule of impunity prevail this time? On the one hand, DeAngelis’ major institutional affiliation, the American Federation for Children, has scrubbed his existence from its website. But he’s still getting airtime on Fox News, for which the gay porn thing probably spices things up and boosts ratings. It’s a close call. Working Lies We need to talk about a feature of the November election that’s kind of an elephant in the LGBT room. Transgender issues were a major talking point for the enemies of transgender rights, as many Republican candidates filled their campaign speeches and ads with anti-trans messages. Of course it was pure demagoguery, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t effective, a possibility that Machiavelli recognized 500 years ago. BTW
March–April 2025 7 LGBT organizations like the HRC have officially denied that trans issues threw the election to Trump—as if to argue otherwise might suggest that we’re “blaming” trans people for the outcome. Clearly the blame rests squarely with those who promulgated blatant lies about trans athletes and restroom voyeurs. One claim in particular became a brickbat: In their debate, Trump had accused Kamala Harris of supporting “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” a falsehood that they used in TV ads that saturated the airwaves during sports programs. An analysis by The New York Times found that the race shifted by 2.7 percent in Trump’s favor after this campaign. And there were other lies, such as Trump’s claim that schools were conducting surgery on trans youths without parental consent. It seems quixotic to deny that these crusades could have had an impact, especially among male voters (notably Black and Latino men). What’s needed is a message that can neutralize these lies and convince people that trans rights are human rights, and that means all of us. The Wages of Homophobia Some time ago, we ran an article titled “Uganda in the Hands of an Angry God” that featured an interview with activist Roger Ross Williams discussing a proposed law which would brutally punish LGBT people for a range of crimes (G&LR, July-August 2014). Heavily promoted by American evangelical groups, the Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) was finally signed into law by Uganda’s president in May 2023. The so-called “kill the gays” law imposes a life sentence for promoting homosexuality and the death penalty for transmitting HIV. The law was denounced by everyone from Joe Biden to Pope Francis, and all the negative publicity has apparently sunk in. A study by the think tank Open for Business concluded that Uganda lost up to $1.6 billion in the year following the law’s adoption due to losses in international aid, a drop in foreign investment, and a downturn in tourism. All this adds up to around three percent of Uganda’s GDP, a drop in income that’s hurting not only LGBT people but the entire population of this desperately poor country. Someone in Kampala needs to rerun the cost-benefits analysis on this law. Prosaic Justice On a lighter note, Tennessee State Senator Ken Yager, a major anti-LGBT force in his state, was recently caught with his pants down—almost literally. Among his anti-LGBT legislative actions, Yager spearheaded his state’s ban on gender-affirming care for young people and voted to allow clerks to refuse to perform same-sex marriages. Early in December, the senator was caught on camera peeing his pants while undergoing a police sobriety test. It seems the senator was stopped near Jekyll Island, Georgia, for a hit-and-run incident after running a stop sign. In the video, an obviously intoxicated Yager can be seen failing miserably to walk a straight line, at one point stumbling and falling to the ground. He gets back on his feet, but soon a dark stain starts growing on the front of his khaki trousers and spreading down his leg. Following his arrest, he spent the night in jail. Whether he faces criminal prosecution is unknown, but the video has gone viral, and it’s hilarious. (To find it, go toTVLT.TVand search for the senator by name.)
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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. Counter-revolutionary Prussia didn’t get around to that until 1794, though in practice no one was burned to death for homosexual acts after 1740. (England maintained the death ESSAY ‘Warm Brothers’ in 18th-c. Berlin DAVIDTACIUM 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). penalty for sodomites until 1861.) The Prussian court was also well connected to Enlightenment thinkers. Voltaire spent considerable time there; indeed, our Austrian officer suggests holding Voltaire responsible for rendering fashionable the homosexual profligacy he had witnessed in Berlin. While Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s (1709–1751) Anti-Sénèquewasbanned throughout Prussia practically the moment it appeared (he wrote it in Potsdam in the last year of his life), its argument for the relativity of sexual mores and the ultimate sovereignty of the pleasure principle was gaining acceptance. Although Frederick poked fun at the pedophilia of the Jesuits, he himself was known to have cultivated a love for soldiers and guards in his all-male world. In retrospect, Prussian society was evolving into a recognition and even an acceptance of homosexual identity. Our curious Letter 16 cites another jurist of the time. Hofrath Sommel evokes the biblical story of Onan in order to shift the interpretation from the religious to medical discourse, a tendency that would accelerate throughout the 19th century, until Tissot’s Onanismebecame the century’s bestseller, going through 75 editions. Our Austrian officer glides smoothly from homosexuality to masturbation, scarcely pausing to differentiate two depravities that to him are worthy of similar legal treatment. He wants both stamped out, but from a legal standpoint his final judgment wavers. It is almost funny to read how he goes back and forth from sentence to sentence, calling for extreme measures only to recommend clemency. He becomes so obsessed with masturbation that he seems to let the libertine off the hook. The reasoning seems to be that since masturbation leads to promiscuous same-sex relations, it is masturbation that must be addressed. As for the abomination of sodomy, the author agrees with the progressive criminologists of the time in trusting that educational reforms can root out the problem, specifically by abolishing boys’ schools in favor of co-ed institutions. Briefe über die Galanterien von Berlinhas none of the militancy of the Encyclopedists. The polemical intent of the latter is charted by Robert Darnton in his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). The Austrian officer’s letters are leagues behind a work such as Thérèse philosophe (1748), for instance, in which free thinking is associated with sexuality. The Austrian officer reiterates a reactionary conservative view that presupposes a common moral standard, an unquestioned assumption of what is natural. The friend to whom he writes is conveniently engaged to be married, and he feels compelled to fuss over the virtue of his friend’s fiancée. She must not fall upon any of his X-rated material. He In 1782, an Austrian officer reported on a network of depraved but sophisticated well heeled men, a whole clandestine subculture organized around a specific social identity. March–April 2025 9
has something sensationalist to reveal and seems to revel as one playing with fire. Neither the Prussian ruler nor his homosexual brother Prince Heinrich ever receives mention in these letters. The author’s milieu is elsewhere—out on the streets, where a certain “fashion” has taken hold, so that the officer can report on a well-developed network of depraved but sophisticated, wellheeled men who know what they like and go for it. This is a whole clandestine subculture organized around a specific social identity. His outings begin in good company; he freely admits that these men are elegant. They are “warm brothers” (warme Brüder). It is interesting that this term for homosexual men persisted in common usage in Germany until after World War II. The author meticulously records what he sees in the privatefumoir where men meet boys, right down to the complex interplay of dress code signals and haircut styles. The Austrian officer is “between men,” to borrow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term for the slipping boundary between homo-sociality and homosexuality in this general period of Western history. Can it be that the Austrian officer’s ambivalence about sodomy stems from ties he has forged with some of its practitioners? From the way the whole warm brotherhood goes unnamed, one can assume he has been sworn to secrecy. His chaperone is Herr W___, and we never learn a thing about him or about the relationship between the two. One may wonder how he has gained such easy and total access to the underground. How thick with them is he? While the writer seems confident that no suspicion will reflect on him, today’s reader might detect a trace of the homosexual panic described in Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet. The Austrian officer professes horror over the exchanges he bears witness to between heavy-set upper bourgeois men and their cooperative mignons. He feels compelled to flee this den of iniquity. But he goes back the next day, and the next, unable to contain his curiosity, titillated by his “new discoveries.” The curiosity to which he alludes is a familiar feature of texts that shy away from outright apology, for there is no doubt in his mind that homosexuality, or pederasty as he calls it, is a bestial vice. No sooner has the author expressed revulsion than he presents, in perfect devil’s advocacy form, another point of view, theirs, quoting them as they evoke the Greeks and Romans. These letters are not private, whatever he pretends, for he has published them. They are not fiction, but they are certainly more than the record of a police report. Only their anonymity might suggest a report written up for the police, if it weren’t for the literary convention brought into play, similar to Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1758). In any case, we needn’t speculate as to who the author was, because he came out two years later, in 1784, as one Johann Friedel, born in 1755, indeed Viennese, but hardly an officer. In fact, he issued from a military family, but after a stint of military service, he turned to theater and the acting profession. This is the work of a 27-year-old who, one year later, as if to disclaim his fifteen-month travelogue, went on to publish Briefe aus Wien: Verschiedenen Inhalts an einem Freund in Berlin, this time fifty fictional letters mainly attacking the Church, the Pope, and religion in general. This second text is even more firmly anchored in its day, reflecting the Enlightenment absolutism of the reign of Joseph II. Friedel justifies himself as author of the Berlin text on the grounds of his potentially contributing to human knowledge. This honors the Enlightenment ideal of spreading information, fostering widening spheres of discussion including the medium of the letter. For all Friedel’s hope that his text would contribute to the understanding of human behavior, it seems not to have enjoyed much in the way of circulation. It’s astonishing that no English translation has hitherto been available of a text that has so much to offer, such a rare window into sexual politics in late 18thcentury German society, the era of Frederick II of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria. FROM: JULY-AUGUST 2019. 10 TheG&LR Above: Title page to a 2017 edition of the Letters about the Gallantries of Berlin published by Eulenspiegel Verlag in Berlin. Right: A silhouette from this edition. Artwork by Roland Beier.
ON JULY 6, 1919, the Institute for Sexual Science opened to the public in a villa in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s central park, a stone’s throw from the Reichstag. The Institute was the first building in the world to house a coherent program of scientific research into human sexual behavior and gender identity, as well as surgical procedures for transgender people. Its director was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish social democrat and the world’s foremost advocate for what we would call LGBT liberation. How could a man like Hirschfeld flourish in the city that became the capital of the Third Reich in 1933? And why are his achievements so little known today? To answer the first question, we need to go back to the German-speaking activists who came before Hirschfeld. In 19th-century Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, a large number of treatises were published that detailed the historical trajectory of homosexuality and “nontraditional” sexual practices, particularly fetishes or “paraphilia.” In the 1830s, the Swiss author (and hat designer) Heinrich Hössli had published Eros: The Greeks’ Love of Men, an effort to legitimize homosexual practices by grounding them in Classical Greece. A few decades later, the German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs created a taxonomy of sexual identities, providing a set of terms for academic discussion of these types, notably “Uranian” for male homosexuals. In a paper titled “The Riddle of Man-Manly Love,” Ulrichs contended that same-sex leanings in both men and women were neither “sinful” nor temporary, but innate, immutable, and the result of a mix-up in utero. He identified himself as a “Uranian,” a term he derived from the Greek legend of Aphrodite Urania. Heterosexual men he labeled as “Dionian,” masculine gays, as “Männling,” effeminate queens as “Weibling.” He soon dropped the pseudonym Numa Numantius to write under his own name, and came out publicly before the Congress of German Jurists in Munich—only to be more-or-less laughed out of his profession. He wandered to Italy, where he died in obscurity in 1895. It was in a letter to Ulrichs that his Austrian colleague Karl Maria Kertbeny—who claimed himself to be “normally sexed” but whose diaries intimate a string of gay encounters or at least affections—had coined the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” Kertbeny went on to publish a taxonomy of his own, referring to “monosexualists” (masturbators), “pygists” (practitioners of anal sex), and more. These terms were borrowed by the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, coiner of the ESSAY The House That Hirschfeld Built FINNBALLARD Finn Ballard, founder and operator of Finn Ballard Tours, offers a wide range of historical and cultural tours of Berlin. terms “sadism” and “masochism,” whose tome Psychopathia Sexualis was a forensic study of sexual behaviors practiced by those he believed to be of degenerative heredity. He proposed psychotherapy as a “cure,” but later revised his view and maintained that “contrary sexual feeling” was no illness. As for Freud, he posited an innate bisexuality prior to social conditioning, and adopted a generally enlightened position: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of. ... We consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development.” § WITH THAT AS PRELUDE, we can now catch up with Magnus Hirschfeld, who was born in 1868 into a family of Ashkenazi Jews, his father a renowned physician. Hirschfeld studied philosophy and philology before taking up medicine, and would qualify as a doctor in 1892, when Berlin—still constrained by Prussian militarism and parochial traditions but suddenly exploding into a modern metropolis—was the host to a fledgling gay subculture. After medical school, Hirschfeld lived for a time in Chicago, where he found a similar gay enclave in the area now known as “Boystown,” and learned that cities as far-flung as Tokyo, Tangier, and Rio de Janeiro were home to similar neighborhoods. Back in Germany, Hirschfeld made his way to Berlin and opened a homeopathy clinic in the wealthy Charlottenburg neighborhood. Word soon spread about this 28year-old doctor who was writing essays about homosexual love under the pseudonym Ramien, and a number of patients booked appointments, largely to find someone with whom to discuss their sexual orientation and the fears it generated (of isolation, arrest, etc.). One of Hirschfeld’s patients, a young army officer too much in despair to be saved, even dedicated his suicide note to the doctor, with the parting words: “The thought that you could contribute to a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death.” Indeed, this was not an easy time to live in Germany for anyone who wasn’t heterosexual, affluent, male, and of course white. In 1896, the “Great Industrial Exposition of Berlin” was held. It included nine so-called “human zoos” exhibiting colonial subjects from various African countries, Samoa, and New Guinea. Hirschfeld attended, with interpreters, to interview the people displayed in these exhibits as part of his effort to determine whether homosexuality was a cross-cultural phenomenon. It was, he concluded. His studies of non-European cultures alerted him to the variety of gender expressions and of nonbinary identities in other societies. Much of this research was included in his 1914 bookThe Homosexuality of Men and Women, Magnus Hirschfeld qualified as a doctor in 1892, when Berlin was the host to a fledgling gay subculture. March–April 2025 11
for which he claimed to have assessed 10,000 homosexual men and women of all ethnicities, ages, and social classes, starting with an ancient Egyptian document written on papyrus. With discussions of homosexuality in the military, in prisons, and in other institutions, Hirschfeld presented homosexuality as a natural variation that could not and should not be “treated,” as its origins were biological. By the time he published this tome, Hirschfeld had already cofounded the world’s first organization to promote LGBT rights—the civil activist group calling itself the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. The Committee, which grew to around 500 members and had branches in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, was primarily dedicated to campaigning for the repeal of Section 175, under which male homosexual behavior could be prosecuted. To that end, the group wished to demonstrate the normality, prevalence, innateness, and global nature of the homosexual orientation, and gathered the signatures of prominent figures, mostly straight allies like Albert Einstein. Committee member Kurt Hiller’s paper, “Section 175: The Disgrace of the Century,” was delivered to the German government—but to no avail. Hirschfeld himself was called to testify at a highly controversial trial lasting from 1907 to 1909, during which a number of men in the inner circle of Kaiser Wilhelm II were accused of homosexual conduct. These proceedings were electrified when journalist Maximilian Harden exposed the relationship between Prince Philipp of Eulenburg and Hertefeld, and General Kuno von Moltke—two of the Kaiser’s closest friends—and suggested that Philipp’s palace was operating as a gay salon. Prince Philipp and Moltke both attempted to sue Harden for libel. Hirschfeld testified that he believed Moltke to be homosexual— but said there was nothing wrong with that. The right-wingers of the day were outraged by what they saw as an attempt to besmirch the honor of the German military. Hirschfeld’s clinic was vandalized with graffiti—a harbinger of things to come: “Dr. Hirschfeld a Public Danger: the Jews are Our Misfortune!” In the end, the trial had quite the opposite effect to what Hirschfeld had sought. Rather than raising awareness of the plight of gay men and ameliorating their situation, it ushered in a crackdown on homosexual behavior and a rise in court cases and convictions. At the same time, the Kaiser instigated a cover-up of queerness in the German army—during which time, at one of his hunting-lodge parties, the chief of the Military Secretariat, Dietrich von Hülsen-Häsaler, died of a heart attack while performing a dance in a tutu. § THESCIENTIFIC-HUMANITARIANCOMMITTEEproduced numerous publications from 1899 to 1923, including its annual Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Types, a series of case studies on homosexual, intersex, and transgender individuals. Many subjects spoke of vacillating between male and female presentation, and would be photographed in a dress, a suit, or indeed naked. This was the world’s first scientific journal to deal with variant sexual behavior, with contributors such as Richard von KrafftEbing. Earlier still, in 1896, Adolf Brand began to publish the magazineDerEigene(“The Special Few”), the world’s first gay magazine. With a print run of around 1,500, Der Eigene appealed to a readership interested in what might be called hypermasculinity, focusing on physical fitness and virility. For lesbians, the leading magazines were Die Freundin(“The Girlfriend”) andFrauenliebe(“Love of Women”). Hirschfeld wrote 12 TheG&LR Costume party at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft with Magnus Hirschfeld (second from right). Courtesy Archive of Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft.
the preface to Berlin’s Lesbian Women, by the journalist Ruth Röllig, an overview of lesbian gathering places in the capital, which was freely available in the city’s kiosks and train stations. Hirschfeld had already published his own report on queer nightlife and cruising, “Berlin’s Third Sex,” in which he described a dozen major gay bars in the capital, sex work of all permutations, and the city’s drag scene. He elaborated on the old idea of homosexuals as a “third sex” by making a clear distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity, and he became engrossed in research on the latter. In 1910, he coined the term “transvestite,” and he later identified two types of transvestism, one intended to bring about sexual arousal, what is now called transvestic fetishism, the other an expression of an innate, permanent—what we would call transgender—identity. From 1908 onward, patients of Hirschfeld were able to apply for special “transvestite certificates,” diagnostic notes that the holder could take to the police to obtain a stamped document guaranteeing their right to wear masculine or feminine clothing in public. One of those to obtain such a license was the Berliner trans man Berthold Buttgereit, born in 1891, who was identified as female at birth but who felt himself to be male from an early age. He visited Hirschfeld at age twenty and was diagnosed as a “total transvestite,” meaning that he fully identified as male. He was able to obtain a transvestite certificate in 1912 and even a corresponding passport in 1918. When a new ruling in April 1920 made it possible for “transvestites” to legally change their names, he did exactly that, publishing a classified ad in his local newspaper to announce his new moniker. Buttgereit stayed in Germany, survived the Nazi era, and died at the age of 92. The name-change legislation of 1920 is emblematic of how much progress was made during the Weimar Republic, the period from 1918 to 1933. In the first years of this era, Hirschfeld’s work took on new momentum. Berlin’s leftist government initially forbade prosecution under Section 175. Hirschfeld purchased his villa near the House of Parliament to house his Institute for Sexual Science. From here, he and his staff sent out thousands of surveys to glean information about people’s sexual experiences and proclivities. Passersby—many of them heterosexual, concerned about marital harmony, contraception, and venereal disease—could also deposit anonymous letters in the postbox on the clinic’s fence, which would be answered in a public plenum each Monday evening. In addition, Hirschfeld offered counseling services geared to what he called “Adaptation Therapy,” not to be confused with “conversion therapy.” Hirschfeld’s goal was to “reassure the homosexual personality, whether male or female; we explain that they have an innocent, inborn orientation, which is not a misfortune in and of itself but rather experienced as such because of unjust condemnation.” Hirschfeld also opened a new Museum of Sex, an educational resource open to the public. On display were a bicyclepowered masturbation machine and an international collection of dildos. On the clinical staff were psychiatrists, a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, and a dermatologist, all paving the way for the development of the first medical treatment of transgenderism. The Institute became Europe’s ultimate gathering place for sexual minorities, and particularly for trans people, many of whom moved in for a brief or longer spell, sometimes joining the staff to pay their way. Hirschfeld, too, moved into his own quarters, which he shared with his life partner Karl Giese. Passing through were philosopher Walter Benjamin, dancer Anita Berber, communist publisher and Reichstag deputy Willi Münzenberg, French writer André Gide, Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, and English archeologist Francis TurvillePetre with his friends Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden. Some of the earliest transgender people to undergo gender reassignment surgery—hormone therapy was not yet available—also stayed at the Institute for a time. Dora or “Dörchen” Richter, who had been a patient at the Institute and remained there as a domestic servant, was the first known trans woman to undergo a complete surgical transition. She had been brought up on a farm in conditions of abject poverty, had always identified as a girl, and had been imprisoned for cross-dressing before finding a home at the Institute. She completed her surgical transition in 1931. Lili Elbe, whose story was the basis for the movie The Danish Girl, was also treated in Germany, having her first surgery at the Institute with Dr. Erwin Gohrbrandt under Hirschfeld’s supervision, and going on for further treatment at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic. Regarding Dresden as the place of her rebirth, she changed her surname to “Elbe” in honor of the river that runs through the city—but died at 48 of complications following her final surgery. Another patient, or client, at the Institute was the trans (probably intersex) German-Israeli author and social reformer Karl M. Baer (1885–1956). Having been raised as a girl, Baer was in his twenties when he met with Hirschfeld. In 1906, he became the first person to undergo sex reassignment surgery. The next year, he obtained a new birth certificate listing him as male. He was a social worker and advocate for women’s right March–April 2025 13 NEW FROM CAMBRIDGE ‘An indispensable microhistory of Cambridge and the networks of queer men that thrived within the walls of its most famous college.’ DIARMUID HESTER, Research Associate in English, Emmanuel College and author of Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories Discover more at cambridge.org/queercambridge
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