Hans Peter
OBERMAYER Introite! Nam et hoc templum
naturae est! Classical Literature as a
Reference System for Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' Theory of
Homosexuality
The
founding of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre
Komitee by Magnus Hirschfeld and the first petition
towards the abolition of the anti-homosexual paragraph
175 in the German Reichstag in 1897 are generally
considered in the gay historiography the beginning of the
„gay movement.“ Berlin’s Gay Museum thus celebrated
the supposed centennial anniversary of the birth of the
movement in the summer of 1997 with the exhibition “Goodbye
to Berlin––100 Years of the Gay Movement”.
But this
dating is in need of correction. Thirty years prior, on
August 29, 1867, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs stepped up to the
lectern at the Sixth Congress of German Jurists in
Munich, his "heart pounding heavily,“ and publicly
defended his proposal for decriminalization of male-male
love: „&that the inborn love of men for the
male gender [&] should go unpunished.”
This
demonstration of „Gay Courage“ (as Rosa von
Praunheim’s film on Ulrichs is titled) was preceded
by a series of booklets under the radical motto
"Vincula frango [I will tear the bonds
asunder!]" in which Ulrichs attempts to offer a
"scientific" explanation of the „riddle of love
between men“. Five individual articles with the
programmatic Latin titles Vindex ("Liberator"),
Inclusa ("Enclosed"), Vindicta ("Staff of
Freedom"), Formatrix ("Nature Creating"), and
Ara Spei ("Altar of Hope") were already published
before the congress, and seven further articles were to
follow. Ulrichs, who Sigusch terms „the first gay
man of world history,“ developed in a total of
twelve „Researches on the Riddle of Love between
Men“ (1864-1879) the „first modern theory
of male-male attraction.“
Unlike
Magnus Hirschfeld, Ulrichs decided to make a unique kind
of „coming out“: in 1862, two years before
the publication of the first two „studies“
Vindex and Inclusa, he informed his family
of his sexual disposition in four confessional letters.
In 1867, he dropped the pseudonym Numa Numantius,
publishing from then on under his own name: „today
I am opening the visor.“
This paper
will focus on Ulrichs’ method and scholarly
approach. From the very beginning, this „man of
universal scholarship“ uses Greek and Roman
literature as a model and evidence for his theory.
Already his mere choice of terminology („Uranismus“
for mm love, „Uranier“ and „Urning“
for male-loving men, and „Dionäer“ or „Dioning“
for a woman-loving men) is based on an interpretation of
Pausanias speech on the two forms of Eros, the two
Aphrodites in Plato’s Symposium.
Arguing
that the urning has a "woman's soul confined by a man's
body" (anima muliebris virili corpore
inclusa), Ulrichs adapts Plato’s notion that
the body holds the soul like a prison. He also uses
passages from Greco-Roman literature to support and
certify the main theses of his theory and his own
empirical observations. Two examples:
The
presentation of evidence in Inclusa, in a section
subtitled „Scholarly Evidence for the Inborn Nature
of mm Sexual Love“ ends with a listing of „Evidence
from <ancient> Authors for the Inborn Character of
Urnic Love“: Plato’s Symposium,
Phaedrus and Petronius. The „wonderful pleasure of
touch“ is not only supported by the evidence of
subjective experience („do we feel attracted to one
another by an invisible [&] power":
Inclusa, p. 24), but also supported by „further
evidence“ like Xenophon’s Symposium,
Historia Augusta’s Heliogabal, and Plato’s
Politeia.
A deeper
analysis of the ancient reference texts will show that
Ulrichs prefers to refer to Latin authors. He here
differs significantly from other participants in the
early struggle towards the emancipation of male-male
love, like Paul Brandt (a.k.a. Hans Licht), who with his
series "Der paidon eros in der griechischen
Literatur" (I-X: 1906-1922) in the Jahrbuch für
sexuelle Zwischenstufen ignores the Roman world in a
Winckelmanian spirit.
In
contrast, Ulrichs argument focuses on Petronius,
Phaedrus, Juvenal, and particularly Martial. He even
integrates the last of these into his classification
scheme: unlike Ulrichs, who considers himself a „Weibling,“
Ulrichs finds Martial a typical representative of a „virile“
"Mannling".
Before this
backdrop, it must seem like a painful loss that Ulrichs
anthology „Nemus sacrum" (Sacred Grove), a
collection of urnic poetry [&] of the Greeks,
Romans, Persians [&] and the Germans,“
which he had planned from the very beginning, was never
realized. We have a vague notion of what this collection
would have contained from a preliminary sketch of topics,
but the file with the material fell victim to the whim of
the Prussian police, when after Ulrichs’ second
imprisonment on April 2, 1867, all his manuscripts were
confiscated in the course of a house search and never
returned.