Gay Studies

The French Revolution's republican ideologies prompted much of Europe to reexamine its anachronistic, antigay worldview: The Napoleonic Code in 1810, Bavaria in 1813, and Spain in 1822 all legalized consensual homosexuality. With the rise of nineteenth-century industrialism, however, homosexuality was no longer only a sinful offense to God, but a social offense to an emerging bourgeois state attempting to manufacture conformist, nationalistic, and procreative-cum-capitalistic values. Thus was the stage set for modernity's first gay-rights struggle. Under an umbrella of progressive medical science and the burgeoning discipline of psychology, early German gay-rights activists sought to debunk the 1851 Prussian penal code's antigay Paragraph 143, asserting that same-sex attraction was not a sin borne of Christian free will but an innate, genetic trait beyond one's control. In 1864 Karl Heinrich Ulrichs began publishing his multipart, pseudoscientific Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Researches into the riddle of "man-manly" love), which theorized homosexuality as a natural mental "hermaphroditism" causing discontinuities between gender and sexual object choice. Continuing Ulrichs's notion of genetic abnormality, in 1869 Karl Westphal, a German physician, described a condition of "contrary" sexuality, of masculine women and effeminate men, a view later echoed by the German neuropsychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; Sexual psychopathology). Though Westphal opposed punishment of homosexuality, he believed contrary sexuality could be remedied—unlike Ulrichs, who passionately pled for open tolerance. In English, Westphal's "contrary" sexuality became mistranslated as "inversion," a term popularized by Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion (1896), whose humanistic case studies argued that "inverts" should live as productive citizens, not be punished for received, arbitrary genetics. Perhaps more progressive was Karl Maria Benkert (creator of the word homosexual), who in 1869 published tracts that sought to undermine the Prussian penal code and rebuked Ulrichs's special pleadings, and instead advanced sexual egalitarianism based on French Revolutionary principles.

The most celebrated early gay scholar was the German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (coiner of the term transvestite), who first argued for sexual broadmindedness in Sappho und Sokrates (1896) and Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1899–1923; Yearbook for intermediate sexual types) the world's first homosexually themed journal, which suggested that homosexuals constituted a "third," intermediate sex. In 1919 Hirschfeld founded his Institute for Sexual Science—eventually torched by the Nazis in 1933—and cowrote the screenplay for the world's first gay film, Anders als die Andern (Different from the others), which again pleads for homosexual tolerance on medical-genetic grounds. Hirschfeld, certainly, was marginal within the psychological community, and Freud's idea of an arrested latent stage, as coupled with an unresolved Oedipal complex, became the accepted model of homosexual identity until the contemporary gay-rights movement. Unlike Westphal and Krafft-Ebing, Freud viewed homosexuality not as an inborn defect but as a commonplace neurosis no worse than any other, and in 1930 he signed a public statement calling for the repeal of Paragraph 175 (an 1871 revision of Paragraph 143), which the Nazis would soon use to persecute homosexuals.

Undoubtedly, the pathologization of homosexuality affected all spheres of contemporary art and culture: Homosexual or bi-sexual authors such as Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852) and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) endured psychological torment because of their efforts to suppress their illicit desires, Marcel Proust (1871–1922) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955) framed their homosexualities as upper-class neurosis and decadence, and those who dared de-closet themselves risked the imprisonment Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) suffered, even if, occasionally, the romantic, private verse of an Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) or A. E. Housman (1859–1936) covertly legitimized a tender gay sensibility. When Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness—currently regarded as the first lesbian novel—first appeared in 1928, audiences were shocked that its tale of "sexual inversion" was presented in heroic, albeit tragic, terms. Immediately banned in Britain, it became the focus of notorious obscenity trials, and then a touchstone for early lesbian rights movements. Meanwhile, the nations of a rapidly modernizing Asia suppressed (or, in the case of Maoist China, erased) their millenniaold homosexual histories and blindly adopted Western medical prejudice. Japanese homosexuality would reappear (albeit with Western notions of shame attached) only in 1948 with Yukio Mishima's Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a mask), and in the early twenty-first century consensual homosexuality remains illegal in communist China, whose memory-impaired leaders insist it is a decadent, Western illness.

Nevertheless, the antibourgeois anarchism that fueled the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions also birthed a tentative, fleeting acceptance of modern homosexuality, and the 1922 Bolshevik criminal code officially legalized consensual sodomy. Though a paranoid Joseph Stalin, the Soviet premier, would fully recriminalize homosexuality in 1933, the antibourgeois radicalism first witnessed in Russia still ignites much of modern and postmodern (homo)sexual discourse.