Translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash
Prometheus Books. 1209 pages, $200.
Reviewed by William A. Percy and John Lauritsen
The Gay & Lesbian Review, November-December 2002
"The Magnum Opus of Magnus Hirschfeld"
The gay movement has never known anyone quite like Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), a small, pudgy, Jewish, cross-dressing Berlin physician. A first-class scholar of the old (rigorous) school, he co-founded the world's first homosexual rights organization, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee) in 1897. For over three decades he was the leading spokesman for homosexual emancipation, and a leader of the World League for Sexual Reform.
It is unfortunate that many gay scholars are
not aware of
works written before Stonewall or in languages other
than English.
In the last third of the 19th century and the first
third of the
20th, Berlin was in many ways the world center of
scholarship,
certainly in gay studies and in medicine,
outdistancing even its
closest rival Vienna. The 23 volumes of the
Scientific
Humanitarian Committee's Yearbook (1899-1923)
contain seminal
and authoritative articles on literature, ancient
and modern
history, biography, jurisprudence, anthropology, the
homosexual
rights movement, and such sex-related phenomena as
transvestism.
Hirschfeld's magnum opus is the longest,
and arguably the
best book written about gay men and lesbians by a
single
individual. After the Nazis' "cleansing" of many
books, the 1914
German original of this great work could be found
only in a few
large research libraries until 1984, when it was
reprinted by de
Gruyter, with an informative introduction by Erwin
J. Haeberle.
Prometheus Books has now published a new English
translation by
Michael Lombardi-Nash, to whom we owe a debt of
gratitude for his
translations of the works of [K]arl Heinrich Ulrichs
and
Hirschfeld's study on transvestitism. This volume
also contains a
new introduction by the venerable historian of sex,
Vern Bullough,
who subsidized the publication.
Hirschfeld's predecessor, Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs, began the
movement to decriminalize sodomy (sex between males
defined as
widernatürliche Unzucht or unnatural lewdness)
when Bismarck
prepared to extend the Prussian ordinance against
sodomy to the
German Reich in the Constitution of 1871. (Under
the Code
Napoléon, sodomy was not a crime in the German
Confederation at
that time.) Ulrichs, a civil servant in Hanover,
took up the
cudgels, and for the next thirty years fought a
lonely battle
against the repressive laws. (His contemporary, Károly Mária
Kertbeny, who invented the term "homosexual" in
1869, confined his
efforts to writing.) First he informed his family
that he was
going to make a public campaign. Then he spoke out
against the
laws at a 1867 conference of judges and lawyers, who
promptly
shouted him down. But Ulrichs refused to retreat
and published
thirteen pamphlets over the years (all translated by
Lombardi-Nash
some years ago). He died in Italy, poor and
unknown, in 1895.
Ulrichs believed that Urnings -- his term for
gay men --
represented a kind of intermediate sex; they
had "female souls
trapped in male bodies." Magnus Hirschfeld would
carry the idea
even further with his category of "sexual
intergrades" (sexuelle
Zwischenstufen), under which he grouped male and
female
homosexuals, transvestites, and "pseudo-
hermaphrodites."
Hirschfeld's sexual intergrades fell between normal
men and normal
women -- physically as well as psychologically. As
might be
expected, men who favored the Ancient Greek model of
male love
were outraged by Hirschfeld's obsessive focus on
effeminate males
and mannish females. Elisar von Kupffer commented
in his 1900
anthology of romantic male friendship,
Lieblingminne und
Freundesliebe in der Weltlitteratur, that the
geniuses and heroes
of Greece could "hardly be recognized in their
Uranian
petticoats."
Hirschfeld seems to have learned from such
criticism, since
by 1914 his notions of the "third sex" and "sexual
intergrades"
had pretty much fallen by the wayside, though he
never
relinquished the idea that human beings are born
with discrete and
unchangeable sexual orientations (heterosexual,
bisexual or
homosexual).
The Homosexuality of Men and Women is
divided into two
parts. The first has a clinical character, with
penetrating
analyses of the sexological theories then in
existence. From his
interviews with more than 10,000 homosexual men and
women,
Hirschfeld describes the practices and
characteristics of gay men
and lesbians. Nothing in gay literature is quite
like the
hundreds of anecdotes and case studies with which he
illustrates
his generalizations. For example, he observed two
Urnings in
criminal court, re-united after weeks of being
imprisoned
separately, who achieved mutual orgasm simply by
touching. No one
in the courtroom noticed except Hirschfeld, who
asked them
afterwards if this is what had happened. They said
that it had.
After chapters on the diagnosis of
homosexuality and the
childhood and adolescence of Uranian boys and girls,
Hirschfeld
devotes several chapters to "differential
diagnoses," which
distinguish between genuine homosexuality and such
things as
friendship, pseudohomosexuality, bisexuality,
heterosexual horror,
hermaphroditism, gynandromorphia, and transvestism.
(With regard
to "pseudohomosexuality," one of Hirschfeld's
opponents, Benedict
Friedlaender, commented scathingly, "It is
inconceivable what is
pseudo about it.")
In the chapter called "Classification of
Homosexuals
according to Their Direction of Taste in Choice of
Partner and
Forms of Sexual Activity" Hirschfeld makes the
serious error of
lumping together the sexual practices of male and
female
homosexuals. Even so, assuming that his discussion
is mainly
about males, he gives us a good idea what gay men
did in his time.
Manual sex or mutual masturbation was the most
common form of
intercourse, practised exclusively by approximately
40% of his
cases. Next was oral sex, also by about 40%. Less
common was
femoral (thighs) intercourse, our "Princeton Rub,"
preferred or
practised exclusively by about 12%. Least common
was anal
intercourse, favored by the remaining 8%.
Hirschfeld describes
all of these practices in detail. For anal
intercourse men in his
day used olive oil as a lubricant, and sometimes
used condoms.
Hirschfeld then analyzes theories on the
origin and nature
of homosexuality. His own opinion was that
homosexual,
heterosexual or bisexual orientations were inborn and
unmodifiable. He was unable to accept the
bisexuality theories of
Benedict Friedlaender, who believed that all men
were born with
the capacity for same-sex love, and that a
completely straight man
was a stunted being (Kümmerling), whose psyche had
been
artificially crippled by theological morality.
Part Two treats homosexuality from the
standpoints of
sociology, history, anthropology, zoology and law.
Although
Hirschfeld assumes authorship for the book as a
whole, it is clear
that the chapters here are written by or in close
collaboration
with the specialists he acknowledges in the
Introduction.
The 80-page chapter on "Homosexuality in
Classical
Antiquity" is superb. The main collaborative author
here is
probably the classical scholar Paul Brandt (who
sometimes wrote as
"Hans Licht"). Even Brandt's later 3-volume work,
Sittengeschichte Griechenlands (1925-28),
translated into
English in 1932 as Sexual Life in Ancient Greece,
fails to
include much of the raw material found in
Hirschfeld. After a
brief survey of Egypt, Assyria and other cultures of
the Near
East, the chapter concentrates on Ancient Greece.
Especially
acute are analyses of the Plato dialogues and the
Timarchea (a
speech misinterpreted by homophobes, who falsely
claim that the
Greeks proscribed sex between males).
An excellent chapter, "The Legal and Social
Victimization,
Persecution, and Prosecution of Homosexual Man and
Women," was
either written by or under the direction of Eugen
Wilhelm, a
jurist who wrote for the Yearbook under the
pseudonym of Numa
Praetorius. After examining the Jewish and
Christian scriptures
and the writings of Philo Judaeus, Hirschfeld
declares: "With
regard to homosexuality, there cannot be any doubt
that the
historical bases of our present laws and
interpretations are
rooted in Judeo-Christianity." He disposes of the
claim, based on
a prejudicial interpretation of a passage from
Tacitus, that the
ancient Germanic peoples punished sex between
males. To the
contrary (quoting a Norwegian writer): "In the case
of the North
Germanic peoples, penal laws against the practice of
man-manly
love were introduced first by the Christians."
A chapter on the victimization of homosexuals
by
blackmailers and con artists is definitive. The
final chapters
deal with the struggle to restore the standing of
gay men and
lesbians, with an authoritative history of the early
homosexual
emancipation movement.
Hirschfeld sometimes made mistakes, and some
of his ideas
and information are mainly of historic interest.
Nevertheless,
this work is indispensable and unsurpassed in many
areas. It
belongs in every large library and in the private
collection of
every aspiring gay or lesbian scholar.
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Translator's note: The original German version for this translation was the 1920, second edition published by Louis Marcus Books in Berlin.