Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin

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СКАЧАТЬ the individual.¹⁹ The list of authors of the report included such scientific luminaries as the Berlin physician and scientist Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow (1821–1902). The minister of justice, Gerhard Adolf Wilhelm Leonhardt (1815–1880), apparently initially concurred with the commission and had himself adopted a liberal policy on sodomy in Hanover in 1840.²⁰

      The restructuring of the Habsburg Empire as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was similarly the occasion for rethinking the legal code. In 1856, paragraph 129 I b of the Habsburg Empire had prohibited “lewd behavior [Unzucht] with the same sex,” calling for prison sentences lasting from one to five years.²¹ Krafft-Ebing reports that in the 1860s the government, relying on the advice of a medical commission, proposed the elimination of these penalties for sodomy, among other points arguing that “from various sides, it is maintained that the action prohibited by this paragraph is a natural need for a class of people.”²² Hubert Kennedy reports that the minister of justice, Anton Emanuel von Komers (1814–1893) had proposed decriminalization on June 26, 1867. By 1870, however, a new minister of justice, Eduard Herbst (1820–1892), had rejected the proposal.²³

      Ultimately, the efforts of all those working to decriminalize sodomy were in vain. The Austrian efforts to decriminalize same-sex acts were rejected and the only “reform” was the rewriting of the language to make sexual acts between women—as well as those between men—illegal. The Prussian government chose to ignore its own commission, concluding that sodomy “exposed such a degree of degeneration and degradation and was so dangerous for morality that it could not remain unpunished.”²⁴ Ulrichs assumed that the law remained in place in order to placate orthodox religious interests. Krafft-Ebing apportions the blame more specifically on conservative minister of culture Heinrich von Mühler (1813–1874), who had special responsibility for issues of religion and education. Mühler wrote to Minister of Justice Leonhardt on April 12, 1869, urging retention of the sodomy paragraph “in the interest of public morality.”²⁵ Prussia’s Paragraph 143 became Paragraph 152 in the North German Confederation’s penal code, which a few years later became Paragraph 175 in the German Empire’s penal code; Paragraph 175 continued to criminalize sodomy in Germany until 1969.²⁶ In Austria, decriminalization began in the 1970s.²⁷

      Both Kertbeny and Ulrichs report that, upon deciding to retain the sodomy laws in the new unified North German legal code, the framers of the new code justified their decision with the conclusion: “While decriminalization can be justified from the standpoint of medicine and through some arguments taken from the theory of law, the legal consciousness of the folk judges these acts to be not merely a vice, but also a crime.”²⁸ A century before the publication of Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité, these bureaucrats knew very well that the institutions of law, medicine, religion, and the state were competing for the control of sexuality.

      Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the Urning

      The future of the sodomy laws in the North German Confederation was on Ulrichs’s mind when he composed his two brochures in 1869. Ulrichs, who lived from 1825 to 1895, was extraordinarily committed to the rights of urnings and urningins, his words for men who sexually loved other men and women who sexually loved other women. He took the term “urning” from Pausanius’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, which claims Venus Urania is the goddess devoted to the masculine love of men. Ulrichs’s word for men who were sexually attracted to women was “dioning.”

      A lawyer by training, Ulrichs began publishing a series of pamphlets in 1864 demanding that the rights of urnings be respected. He continued publishing until 1879—all twelve of the pamphlets were subsequently collected and published as Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Studies on the Riddle of Male-Male Love).²⁹ In these writings, Ulrichs unfolds a theory of sexual desire explaining same-sex attraction, a theory that he hopes will combat civic and religious prejudice against urnings. His publications became a clearinghouse for information about urning life throughout the world. He proposed such practical initiatives as a monthly journal devoted to urnings (Prometheus, of which only the first issue, called Uranus, appeared in 1870). On August 29, 1867, he went to a convention of German lawyers in Munich, revealed himself to be an “urning,” and publicly called upon his colleagues to denounce the Prussian anti-sodomy laws. Far ahead of his time, he was hooted out of the convention hall. His openness about his own identity as an urning caused him difficulties. The Freies Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt, a prestigious liberal cultural institution, refused to admit him, saying that the organization had rules concerning the admission of men and women, but no provisions for people of other sexes.³⁰ More concrete and specific charges concerning sexual activities were probably behind his resignation from his job as a civil servant in 1854.³¹ The same allegations probably prevented him from being named mayor of the German town of Uslar in 1865.³² Ultimately, he gave up on Germany and, like so many bourgeois northern European homosexual men, moved to Italy, where he died impoverished and forgotten by most, although Krafft-Ebing occasionally exchanged letters with him and Symonds even visited him.

      Ulrichs’s 1869 texts both focus on the Zastrow case. In January of 1869, Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst von Zastrow (1821–1877), a lieutenant in the Prussian army, was accused of anally raping and brutally murdering a five-year-old boy named Emil Hanke.³³ The crime was so notorious that the verb zastrieren briefly came to mean “to rape homosexually” (rhyming with the German word for “castrate,” it could be rendered as something like “to zastrate”). An outraged public demanded vengeance against this Zastrow, as well as all other “Zastrows.” Zastrow denied having committed the crime and could prove he had been on the other side of town a half an hour before the crime was committed. Citing Ulrichs, he insisted in his defense that he was an “urning”—a man sexually attracted to other men—and that the mob misinterpreted his sexual nature to think he was sexually attracted to children. Despite his claims of innocence, the court convicted Zastrow. The prosecutors proved he could have gotten across town to the scene of the crime within thirty minutes and located a number of Zastrow’s personal effects near the corpse.³⁴

      Ulrichs, who had coined the term “urning” a few years before, wrote two lengthy pamphlets about Zastrow in 1869, one called Incubus and the other called Argonauticus, boldly defending the legal rights of the accused and carefully delineating the argument that urnings were not murderous pederasts, indeed not pederasts at all. As Kennedy explains, whatever Ulrichs thought about Zastrow’s innocence, he was sure that the man had not received a fair trial. Ulrichs’s willingness to take on the challenge of defending the rights of someone accused of such an atrocious crime is especially remarkable. Not that he was condoning the rape and murder of children, of course—he was at least initially convinced of Zastrow’s innocence. When Zastrow was ultimately convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Ulrichs was willing to abandon him, suggesting that if Zastrow had committed these atrocities, he couldn’t be an urning. With his liberal instincts, Ulrichs knew how important it was to fight against the lynching mentality of the mob; with his legal training, he had the tools to lead such a fight.

      The core of Ulrichs’s argument was his insistence that the populace misunderstood urnings and thus was willing to blame an urning like Zastrow for any horrendous crime. At the beginning of Incubus, Ulrichs defines urnings as “men who as a result of their inborn nature feel drawn by the force of sexual love exclusively to male individuals.” An urning’s body is that of a man, but “his erotic drive is that of a female being.”³⁵ Ulrichs confirmed Zastrow’s suspicions that he was an urning. Ulrichs noticed, for instance, that the newspapers reported that Zastrow had “a shadowy, catlike appearance,” which Ulrichs concluded was nothing other than his innate femininity. Like a girl—Ulrichs argued—Zastrow had religious tendencies and enjoyed spiritual music.³⁶ These generalizations about gender were an important part of Ulrichs’s defense of Zastrow, because he argued that the delicate tender feminine nature of an urning made it practically impossible for him to commit violent atrocities.

      Ulrichs СКАЧАТЬ