Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

by Huw Lemmey

[H]omosexuals are … widely consigned to the same category of things as drugs, the category of illicit dirty things that people have to be protected from … since the homosexual is continually taught by the world around him that his natural home is the sewer, the homosexual is uniquely equipped to discover what truly belongs and doesn’t belong in the sewer … Gary Indiana, Three-Month Fever

The huge social movement that followed, driven by a core belief in the value of self-actualization, advanced the idea that to overcome political oppression queer people also had to overcome their personal shame. Within this context, writers, poets, and artists looked back through history to find examples to prove that we had always been here, and that our lives need not be lived cloaked in shame or fear. If Oscar Wilde, Sappho, Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Leonardo da Vinci, Billie Holiday, and Alexander the Great could be gay, and if they could be gay and live their lives to the fullest, then so could you. These people may have had their true selves repressed, both by their peers and by history, but by uncovering it LGBTQ people were building their own histories.

The Florentine experience of sodomy as part of the functioning social system and the rise of both cultures of sodomy and its persecution in the early modern world suggest, in Chitty’s reading, an intimate relationship between homosexual sex, class struggle, and the development of capitalism. It also puts paid to many contemporary liberal readings of the persecution of sodomy and homosexuality as some kind of primitive urge that exists in superstitious societies or ‘lower classes’, with the idea that we are progressing in a straight line through education towards tolerance.

As we will see, over his life James was to make powerful interventions and decisions that shaped the growth of colonialism and capitalism, the development of the early modern state, and ultimately the clash between Parliament and his son Charles I in the English Civil War. Yet all these developments were highly influenced by the ongoing intrigue of his royal court, not least the fallout from his persistent, foolhardy habit of falling head over heels for beautiful, arrogant, and reckless favourites – for James had realised that the unease of the crown-wearing head could be eased significantly if it lay beside a beautiful young man.

James’s desire for men was obvious, and a cause for concern, even as a teenager, decades before he took the English throne. Concerns around his upbringing had meant he was surrounded by a rolling retinue of teachers and regents who were to shape the young prince, and both his spiritual and earthly desires.

The problem with their relationship for Scottish nobles, and particularly the Protestants, was not so much the same-sex desire they showed for each other, but more that, in their relationship, they saw the consolidation of power in the hands of the king’s favourite – a dynamic which became a lifelong concern for James’s court – and especially a Catholic favourite. The peace in Scotland was fragile, and the Kirk (the Scottish national church, a Presbyterian, protestant institution) was young: only six years older than James himself. For James to be ‘in such love with [Esmé] as in the open sight of the people often he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him’ must have seemed like a potential existential threat, not least because within the minds of Protestants there was a link between sodomy and Catholicism.

The poet Alexander Gill the Younger described James as ‘the old fool’, a refrain that has followed older men who fall hopelessly for handsome younger men down through the centuries.

It is interesting here to think about homosexuality as a path towards anti-colonial alliance, and about the shared births of colonialism and homosexuality in the modern West. Many scholars of colonialism, including Silvia Federici, have established the mind-body binary as a central problem of colonial capitalist epistemology, in which bourgeois Protestant discourses of the mind-body binary led to two parallel phenomena: the colonization of the imagined ‘body’ by the imagined ‘mind,’ and the colonization of non- European peoples who were seen to be simply body.

Major eye roll @ this particular bit of theory wrt: sexuality specifically.

English antiquarians at this time were often thought to be morbidly, queerly obsessed with old objects and the past, much as some decadent orientalists used fantasies of mysterious and magical other lands to escape bourgeois life.5 Back in England, Lawrence was shunned for having been born out of wedlock, and homosexual sex was still an illegal offence; for him, the Middle East seems to have opened up a new world of exotic, and erotic, experiences. These experiences were and continued to be, however, predicated on a view of the native population as ‘noble savages’ – representatives of romanticized primitive man, free to express themselves without the corrupting influences of civilisation. A 2014 monograph by Joseph Boone focusing on homosexuality and orientalism in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century anglophone literary cultures argues that ‘Western fantasies of the “Orient” ‘ contained ‘the potential for unexpected eruptions of sex between men that … disrupt European norms of masculinity and heterosexual priority’.

Magnus Hirschfeld himself was, as the historian Susan Stryker argues, ‘a pioneering advocate for transgender people’ who worked with the police to develop certificates that trans people could use to avoid arrest for wearing clothing ‘incorrect’ for their sex. He also hired trans people to work at his Institute for Sexual Science, although often in menial roles.24 But in Hirschfeld’s scientific publications, trans people were spoken for and about: mostly described by cisgender male doctors, evaluated and photographed like scientific specimens. On at least some of the pages of The Third Sex, trans people regularly wrote about their own trans lives. Alongside scientific articles, short fiction and essays about daily life, by and for trans people, filled its pages. Various entities catering to trans people – parties and associations, and businesses including bars and restaurants – advertised in its pages. The magazine was available on newsstands and had a high subscriber base. Radszuweit’s magazines focusing on lesbian-identifying women were similarly written at least in part by the people whom they were about.

The reasons why Radszuweit took such a turn after 1929 are best explained by the historian Laurie Marhoefer in their argument about the ‘Weimar Consensus’ on the regulation of sexuality. Again, the thesis is this: rather than understanding the Nazi rise to power as a mass public backlash against a permissive society gone mad, there was instead a broad consensus about sexuality in Weimar political life shared by a coalition of sexologists and politicians from left to centre, one which believed that ‘the state’s relationship to sexuality ought to be scientific and rational. In a new and democratic era, religious morality ought not to have a major influence on law and public policy.’26 Opposition to this consensus came from a coalition of conservative women’s movements, some moderate politicians, and right-wing conservatives and nationalists. The result of the battle between these factions was, in the functioning democracy of pre-1929 Weimar, ‘one of compromise … resulting in sexual liberation for some at the expense of others’.

In 1925, a coalition of conservative parties attempted to add harsh prison sentences for male sex workers, as well as increasing penalties against abortion.

In the article, Radszuweit argued that even right-wing parties could be trusted to come around on the homosexual question: We do not want to argue here and to justify what morality and so-called custom are, we only want to make the point that everything can be changed over the course of time. Moral concepts are different today than they were a hundred years ago. This is even acknowledged by right-wing circles … the vast majority of homosexual men of Germany do not intend to publicly display their relations, and would never have thought of creating a homosexual movement if the legislators were not so irrational … The homosexual men of Germany are of the opinion that one should not talk about these things at all, and that no one is concerned with the way in which two men, by their free will, and by mutual consent, have sexual intercourse in their secret chamber.37 This is rhetoric that should be familiar to anyone who has engaged with the mainstream respectability politics of gay rights movements. While a more developed analysis of sexuality (like the one we are proposing in this book) reveals otherwise, this line has always been popular for several reasons. It binds white queers to whiteness and (especially) male queers to maleness. And it feels safe: even if proponents of this rhetoric would rather not be governed by people they fear hate them, they think that declaring themselves non-threatening to far-right forces (or even allying with them) will somehow make them safer....

"they think that declaring themselves non-threatening to far-right forces (or even allying with them) will somehow make them safer."

Answering a questionnaire that the homosexual masculinist Adolf Brand put to various political parties in 1928, the Nazi response read, in part, ‘Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a fight and it’s madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally.’42 While Röhm had claimed in his letters to Karl-Gunther Heimsoth that his Nazi colleagues knew of his sexuality and tolerated it, this seems to have been a more complicated story. Laurie Marhoefer calls this attitude ‘self-delusion’, pointing out that in Goebbels’s diary of 1931, an entry read: ‘Severe attack on Röhm because of 175 [a reference to the anti-sodomy statute] … Is this supposed to be true?’43 His position in the party relied on Hitler’s support and trust – earned through effective management of the often unruly and conflicting SA paramilitaries – connections in the German army, and a loyalty confirmed in the 1923 putsch.

After the Reichstag Fire on 27 February 1933, elections took place that were neither free nor fair. Immediately afterwards, centrist and conservative parliamentarians signed the Enabling Act, making Hitler essentially a dictator by the end of March 1933. On 6 May 1933, members of the SA and the Hitler Youth stormed the library and archives of Hirschfeld’s Institute, brought the books and documents to a public square next to the State Opera in the centre of Berlin, and burned them.

Shaped by her own sense of difference and outsider status as a queer woman, Mead focused her scientific research and advocacy on the description of cultural difference and the use of cultural relativism to combat the rigid hierarchies of scientific racism, and to question the sex-gender system that othered her in her home culture. Blind to the meaning of the enormous economic and racial privilege of her upbringing, she helped to construct post-war American racial liberalism: a political world-view that understands anti-racism in terms of ‘color-blindness’ rather than resistance to structural racial capitalism, is deeply invested in the exceptionalism of the United States, and collaborated with the US national security state’s destructions of and incursions into the self-determination and liberation struggles of colonized peoples.10 This racial liberalism was also, as Lee Baker and others have argued, a key part of ‘color-blind’ discourses in the United States that minimize racial inequality and disconnect understandings of capitalism from understandings of the origins of race and racism.

Those who could afford their own flats, rooms in private clubs, or chambers were less likely to suffer exposure, prosecution, or criminalization. That is not to say there were not high-profile people caught up in vice policing. Then, as now, there was a discrete and closeted but very active homosexual subculture within the Houses of Parliament. As in the lives of Hadrian or James VI and I, power was not just an aphrodisiac, but a shield.

Certain narratives within liberal gay circles like to paint the gay rights enjoyed in some Western countries not just as the inevitable product of the Western nation-state, a slow forward march towards rights and justice, but also as permanent, intractable, the end-point of progress. But the history of bad gays complicates that; our history is full of failed attempts at liberation, at new boundaries rolled back in public book burnings, of the ever-present threat of state suppression and social stigma. The value of your liberation may go down as well as up.

Where some might see the wide-ranging acceptance that some forms of homosexuality now enjoy in some places as a result of increased liberalism bringing more people into the social contract of the state, we see, instead, the fruits of hundreds of political, social, and cultural movements making homosexuality visible;