The Birth of the Homosexual?
The purpose of comparing Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal is not to establish an exact taxonomy of the urning, the homosexual, and the invert. The language of sexuality in German at the end of the nineteenth century was far too fluid for such an endeavor. By the end of the century, the three terms were often used interchangeably.87 Texts such as Albert Moll’s Die conträre Sexualempfindung (Sexual Inversion) of 1891 and Krafft-Ebing’s Der Conträrsexuale vor dem Strafrichter (The Sexual Invert before the Judge) of 1894 seem to be typical of the period, in that they use urning, homosexual, and invert as synonyms.88 Those who did make distinctions between the terms usually constructed their own idiosyncratic ones. Comparing the three texts published in 1869 can, however, highlight the questions that were in play as sexuality was under construction.
Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal all share a number of similarities. Born within ten years of each other (between 1824 and 1833), they all lived through the revolutionary fervor of 1848 as young men and became political liberals of varying degrees of radicalism. All writing in German, they were deeply imbued in central European bourgeois culture and highly aware of the political developments of their time. While they were not all physicians, as proponents of the “medicalization” of sexuality have tended to imply, they were professionals—lawyers and men of letters, as well as doctors. Neither aristocratic nor working class, their middle-class upbringing colored their view of the world, no matter what their subsequent financial state and politics became. This shared heritage helped forge the conceptions of sexuality that they articulated and that then spread throughout the world.
The depictions of same-sex desire in Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal all possess a number of common features. The male urning, homosexual, and invert all have a fixed sexual attraction to men, while the female counterpart has a similarly fixed sexual attraction to women. All three see men who love men and women who love women as belonging to the same overarching category. Ulrichs is certain that the phenomenon can be found in all cultures and all time periods. Westphal’s somatic medical model implies as much. Kertbeny argues along similar lines at times, although, as we shall see, he does allow more room for the cultural construction of identity. For all three authors, sexual desire transcends its physical origins to affect psychology as well.
All three authors agree that the fixedness of sexual desire means that it is unlikely to spread. Both Ulrichs and Kertbeny are quite explicit that those who are not urnings or homosexuals will not change their sexuality. Thus there is no need to fear that urnings or homosexuals will seduce or otherwise recruit new members of their order. Westphal is not so explicit, but his emphasis on the physical, hereditary nature of sexual inversion implies that it is not something one could catch from a neighbor, even if it is a sickness. The authors also concur that a natural, fixed desire should not be criminalized. Ulrichs and Kertbeny, in particular, assert that their urnings and homosexuals deserve political rights and protection from interference by the state or religion. They both make arguments relying on a general notion of human rights and tend to rely on left-liberal elements of the political spectrum. Interestingly, both feel strongly the need to fight for the religious rights of urnings and homosexuals as well. While Westphal was in fact a political liberal, he does not make any explicit arguments for providing rights to his inverts, other than suggesting that medical experts are better than police at handling cases of inversion.
While not the case for Kertbeny, Ulrichs and Westphal emphasize gender inversion as the explanation for sexual attraction between members of the same sex—male urnings have female souls and male inverts have many feminine characteristics, while female urnings have male souls and female inverts have masculine characteristics. For Ulrichs, Zastrow’s way of walking and speaking are perhaps more telling than his sexual deeds. Westphal too is immediately struck by the effeminate behavior of “Ha …”, and particularly notes his peculiarly womanly voice, while leaving open the question of whether his patient is sexually active with men at all. Similarly, “N” has never been interested in feminine occupations and aspires to a traditionally masculine career.
The status of the sexual partners of the urnings and the inverts is not clear at all. Although Ulrichs does refer to an urning couple marrying each other, he seems at other times to imply that urnings are often sexually attracted to “dionings,” or men with both male souls and male bodies, rather than to other urnings. Indeed, according to Ulrichs, the sexual partner of the urning is often a soldier in financial need. Nor is Westphal particularly interested in pathologizing the women with whom “N” sleeps or the men who approach “Ha …” in the train station. In general, Westphal portrays the sexual partner of the invert as duped and defrauded. As mentioned before, Kertbeny differs from his contemporaries in this point, and does not rely too heavily on gender inversion to explain the attraction of his homosexuals for members of their own sex. For him, a whim of nature causes the male homosexual to desire men and the female homosexual to desire women. While this has less explanatory power, it does get him out of the conundrum of explaining who the partners of homosexuals are—presumably other homosexuals.
It should be clear by now that this snapshot of several texts on same-sex desire published in 1869 just begins to scratch the surface of what was going on in the second half of the nineteenth century in German-speaking central Europe. Subsequent sexologists, activists, and literary authors take the the ideas articulated in 1869 to promote a vision of same-sex as natural, fixed, related to gender-inversion, analogous with race, comprehensible in liberal bourgeois terms, and manageable by medical and political interventions.
Chapter 1
Swiss Eros: Hössli and Zschokke, Legacies and Contexts
Although Kertbeny’s “homosexuality,” Westphal’s “contrary sexual feelings” or sexual inversion, and Ulrichs’s urnings all made appearances in print in 1869, it makes more sense to begin the story of the emergence of modern sexual discourses in German-speaking central Europe with two Swiss accounts of male-male desire: Heinrich Zschokke’s novella, Eros, of 1821 and Heinrich Hössli’s monumental two-volume apology for male-male love of the 1830s, called Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen, ihre Beziehung zur Geschichte, Erziehung, Literatur und Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten (Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks, Its Relationship to History, Education, Literature, and Legislation of All Times). Not even this seeming point of origin, however, is final. The writings of Zschokke and Hössli emerge at the intersection of a variety of geographically and chronologically determined ideas of language, biology, race, gender, and social and political change.
Hössli’s Eros sketches the outlines of a modern conception of same-sex desire that is fixed and the basis of identity. His thought builds on discussions taking place in German-speaking central Europe, where vocabulary such as “sexuality” (Sexualität) itself was just beginning to appear. Hössli makes the case for a desire between men that is distinct from friendship and explicitly sexual. His study uses his era’s biology to posit sexuality as natural, involuntary, immutable, transhistorical, universal, and the basis of individuality. It toys with the idea that same-sex desire is related to gender inversion, and indirectly compares men who sexually love other men to Jews. It concludes that, like women and Jews, such men are in need of social justice through political action.
Hössli deserves credit as the first thinker on the subject of same-sex desire in the German-speaking realm to put together so many of these ideas into the package that many sexologists and activists in the homosexual emancipation movement would transmit throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. However, it is also important to realize how deeply rooted his thinking was in the culture of early nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois central Europe, which glorified a Romantic vision of organic nature and adopted