Filosofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity

Referring to the issue of labeling, the category of sexual identity is also one of the predicators of power. The reason why people want to know the sexual orientation of someone else is a potential sexual relationship with them and, more relevantly, a prospective possibility “to engage in political or cultural activities with them,” which should be based on similar concerns (Roberts 85). For instance, it would be infeasible for a political party to successfully campaign for right-wing conservative attitudes if one of the most noticeable members of the party which publicly defends traditional procedures was an open-minded gay. If you do not have the 'right' sexual orientation, you are in advance limited by a lower likelihood of being approved for political and cultural activities with other people who correspond with norms set by society. However, as Roberts emphasizes “being more like a stereotype doesn’t make you a better person” (98).

In the context of categorization, it is also inevitable to mention Foucault's constructionist theory that “homosexuality is necessarily a modern formation because, while there were previously same-sex sex acts, there was no corresponding category of identification” (Jagose 6). Constructionists believe that whatever personal identity the individual can have is culturally-conditioned and acquired. In the extreme, it might be interpreted as the fact that nothing really exists until it is described, labeled, measured. Robb, whose essentialist conviction categorically refuses such an approach, writes: “The idea that homosexuality is peculiar to certain periods reflect a natural tendency to confuse one’s own history with the history of society” (3). Essentialist theory predominantly resides in the idea that identity is “natural, fixed and innate” and that sexual orientation is “culture-independent, objective and intrinsic property” (8). The societal climate is, by no means, seen as determining. It advocates the view that biological processes and natural factors play the most significant role in identification and self-recognition of every being. Bagemihl, also an essentialist, argues that “homosexuality occurs in nature and therefore cannot simply be dismissed as a cultural deformation or biological error” (qtd. in Marcus 203).

Many scholars, on the other hand, have dealt with the decay of categorization that, in their view, started during the 1980s, when the term ‘queer’ appeared for the first time in a new sense of the word. The categories themselves had become disorganized and subsequently meaningless and absurd, as gender and sexual roles of individuals had been redefined for the sake of a more tolerant society and they also had begun to overlap and blend into each other. Moreover, people began, broadly speaking, to be annoyed by the fact that “each sexual type was used as an instrument of state control and institutional manipulation” (Bristow 176). Jagose sees queer as “'a zone of possibilities'” and “as an umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual self-identification” (1). In fact, it can stand for every slight deviation from standard heterosexual sex behavior limited by the classification of normalcy. Marcus points out that “most human beings are not exclusively straight or gay; nor does bisexuality, which connotes an even split between two orientations, adequately describe most people's experience” (204).

Homosexuality has constituted a huge variety of challenges to social hierarchical order, has posed a considerable threat to the traditional notion of family, and, most significantly, to the system of hegemony which Sinfield calls “Straightgeist culture” (41). Hegemony is established and maintained by people who are stereotypically perceived as fulfilling social norms in the most accurate way. Omi and Winant point out that “all “socially constructed”” terms such as “race, class, and gender (as well as sexual orientation) constitute “regions” of hegemony, areas in which certain political projects can take shape” (132). Comparing categorization of sexuality with categorization of other departures from established norms, Waxman and Byington conclude that “difference of sexual orientation is more threatening to hegemony than any other form of difference” (157) and that probably because of the fact that “opposite-sex relations gained hegemony in Western society simply because of a cultural imperative to reproduce” (Bristow 172). The decline of the notion of the traditional family and the decay of strictly divided gender roles and its displays among family members, which civilization has recently faced, causes less emphasis laid on the need of reproductive ability. There is no other so compelling an instrument of power to be used in the context of sexuality as traditions and reproduction. According to Bray, an inverted sexuality was perceived as “an anarchy that threatened to engulf the established order” (62) already during the Renaissance and a similar, if not identical, attitude made its way through centuries to the 1900s. Dannecker adds that men's love does not “just come into conflict with social norms when homosexuals are ascribed a negative social role; they also come into conflict with the cultural demand for heterosexual functioning that is anchored in the individual type […]” (76). Civilization brings us a feeling of being safe among a great deal of other people, of not being alone and of being a part of a larger system. However, its disadvantages may, and also often do, outnumber its benefits. People must simply become surrenders “of personal preferences to furtherance of common with civilization” (Warren 191). Symonds had the same opinion on it:

But what is human life other than successive states of untruth and conforming to custom? We are, all of us, composite beings, made up, heaven knows how, out of the compromises we have affected between our impulses and instincts and the social laws which grid us round. (117)

The memoirists caught different periods of time in their memoirs; each period had different atmosphere and an attitude to homosexuality. No matter how dissimilar the time they were born and lived in were, their struggles were comparable. Each memoir gives us a powerful testimony in hopeless defense of the right to love. Freud says that “they [men] strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so” (Civilization 23) – but is it possible at all to be happy without being allowed to love? This is the question which Symonds, Isherwood and Monette endeavor to answer. Symonds’ Victorian England (1840s – 1890s) was too conservative, Isherwood’s Berlin of the 1930s was too nationalistic and Monette’s era of the 1980s in L.A. was too traumatic.

The Victorian era laid emphasis on highly moralistic standards, distinguished manners, Protestant religious tradition, and profound purity. The economic prosperity, social stability, cultural flourishing and relative peace of the era were the counterweight to a variety of limits set upon an individual’s concerns. Homosexuality was, of course, against the law but one of the most restrictive measures concerning men loving men was “a constant much-resented invasion of private right on behalf of public good and a steady build-up of the power and machinery of the central government” (Reader 5), which was chiefly inflicted by the Criminal Law Amendment passed in 1885. In his memoir, Symonds refers to himself as “morally a fool and legally a criminal” (273). Robb suggests that “’inversion’ was a naturally dramatic subject: love against the law, decent people forced to live like criminals, individuals at odds with their upbringing” (205). The law primarily supposed family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, common acquaintances and even passers-by would become self-proclaimed spies and report any illegal same-sex conduct. It was not well-conceived and its possible consequences were disregarded, and it definitely caused more harm than good because it expected “non-participants to serve as unofficial police inspectors, since it was possible to be held criminally liable for failing to report acts or anticipated acts of ‘gross indecency’” (Kaylor 55). However, a potentional informer might have easily got an idea that the information could be of a huge personal benefit. The Labouchere Amendment “simply created a climate in which blackmail flourished” (Higgins 191). Everyone was suspicious and suspecting at the same time. Oscar Wilde’s fate was sealed in 1895 on the basis of this legislation. Robb maintains that maybe homosexuality was a crime according to the then English laws, but it was chiefly “a crime that had no victim” (176). Symonds had the same opinion as he writes that he does not see any "harm to society or character in sensual enjoyment between man and man” (278).

The word homosexuality supposedly appeared as a coinage in 1869. Its invention is attributed to M. Kertbeny, a German critic of the laws criminalizing ‘boy-love’ (Eisenbach 222). In the 19^th century, it was widely labeled as sodomy, sin, crime, and a homosexual person as a “"criminal against nature," "sodomite," "bugger," "hermaphrodite," or "degenerate" (Endres 1). The Victorian era was also a period of time when “connections were made between sodomy and other sins” and that very often and very easily (Robb 101). Unfortunately, the above mentioned terms and negative connotation which they carry became deeply rooted in the minds of Englishmen and were also plentifully presented in media, literature, law, etc. during the following century. Roberts describes the era as follows: “For the previous century, homosexuality had been manifesting itself in individuals such as Wilde: solitary homosexuals who did fine until their rock was overturned and they were exposed to the power of society embodied in the vindictive justice system” (81). The notion of the solitary life of gay people in Victorian England is supported by Robb. He maintains that “the fact that sodomy was punishable by death in England and Wales until 1861 suggests that many people lived their lives in the shadow” (17). Woods also suggests that the last decade of the 19^th century witnessed gayness starting “to be written about as an essentially tragic condition. Sadness, loneliness and a tendency to end in either suicide or worse have been regarded by many….” (217). Symonds himself depicts an event which happened at Harrow and which he refers to as “an incident which illustrates my isolation” (88).

However, also in such a dark time for tolerance of sexual deviations as the Victorian era undoubtedly was, a few pioneers appeared. One of them was Stead, a journalist, defending Wilde’s case. He focused on the hypocritical angle of view of the prosecutors and the law itself as he “pointed out that Wilde’s ‘unnatural’ propensities were not unnatural for him, and that if he had committed adultery with his friend’s wife or corrupted young girls instead of boys, ‘no one could have laid a finger upon him” (qtd. in Robb 37). Other pioneers were Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing, who openly dealt with same-sex proclivities on a scientific level. Ulrichs, who did not have problem making a confession about his homosexuality to his friends and family and later to the public as well, “believed that ‘Uranians’ were congenitally different” from heterosexually oriented people and led a war against social intolerance during the 1860s and 1870s (Robb 10). His findings may seem fairly absurd and ridiculous nowadays but then they were ground-breaking and literally laid the foundations of gays´ way to liberation. Probably, “the most detailed typology of sexual variation” was proposed by him (Bristow 20). Ulrichs advocated the notion of a ‘third sex’, which was later adopted by Hirschfeld. He purported that sexual affection is always determined by “an attraction to an opposite pole” (24) and promoted the idea “that male inverts contained a female brain in a male body” (66), which largely contributed to the shaping of modern opinion on the effeminacy of gay men. Symonds seems to be well acquainted with this idea as he feels the need to comment it in his memoir: “I am more masculine than many men I know who adore women.” and “I have no feminine feeling for the males who rouse my desire” (65).

The works of Krafft-Ebing, a German psychiatrist, were controversial, lacking in proper research methods, full of contradictions, and, eventually, also counter-productive. According to the article “How Richard von Krafft Ebing criminalized homosexuality”, his utmost intention was serious scientific findings and not a detrimental impact on homosexuality and the legislation restricting it. His conviction was liberal and he opposed the criminalization of homosexuality, which was established by Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. Anyway, his “studies and books were often used to do exactly the opposite, and called upon as an expert reference which were cited out of context by people who had little or no real understanding of what the work really meant“ (“How Richard”).

The issue of Victorian England was not merely a conservative approach to homosexuality; it was chiefly a conservative approach to sexuality as a whole. Sex education was insufficient – or rather absent, and sexuality itself was widely considered a taboo topic. This fact usually caused not negligible embarrassment to young couples during their wedding nights because they basically did not know how to make love, for the process of sexual intercourse had never been depicted, maybe even mentioned, to them. Freud points out that an virgin girl could be easily “indignant at her husband ‘urinating into her’” (Psychoanalysis 388). Symonds himself also got into this situation as a newly married man. The words that he uses to convey what he felt speak volumes about his state of mind: “disillusion”, “only a vague notion about the structure of the female body”, “humiliating absurdity of the situation”, “found the way by accident”. “Truly we civilized people of the nineteenth century are more backward than the African savages in all that concerns this most important fact of human life” (157).

Moving to the period of the 1930s covered in his memoir by Isherwood, we will discuss the most influential personalities on the issue of homosexuality – Freud, whose essays began to appear after Symonds’ death, and Hirschfeld, the idea of curability of men’s genital activities with other men, Nazism and Communism in Berlin and homosexual practices in the Germany of that time. Isherwood, experiencing the reverberations of above mentioned anti-homosexual policy in Victorian England, sought for a better place to live, and where he could be himself. Temporarily, he managed to find it in Berlin probably because of its “strongly developed homosexual subculture” (Higgins 147). During the period between the end of the war and the outset of Nazi regime in 1933 “Germany acquired a reputation as the homosexual Mecca of Europe” (147). Isherwood confirms this suggestion: “To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys” (1). Boy-bars were a common phenomenon in Berlin then. Nationalistic ideology, however, ruined his idea as homosexual tendencies began to be seen as at least undesirable. Heinrich Himmler considered homosexuality a considerable threat to society and its standards and proposed a stricter version of the regulations which had already been set in Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. The year 1935, therefore, witnessed a definite dissipation of Isherwood’s dream of tolerant social standards via a popular argument that racial ‘impurity’ must be eradicated by careful biological selection of people potentially suitable for procreation; homosexual activities would never lead to securing perfect German babies. He writes that “Hitler denounced homosexuals leftists, and Jews as traitors who had undermined Germany’s will to resist and caused the military defeat of 1918” (10). Hirschfeld’s Institute was raided and some very valuable studies, historical books and diaries were mercilessly burnt (72). “Boy bars of every sort were being raided, now, and many were shut down” (70). He also lost his illusions about personal sets of moral principles of ordinary people. “[…] radio loudspeakers blaring forth speeches by Goering and Goebbles. “Germany is awake,” they said. People sat in front of the cafés listening to them – cowlike, vaguely curious, complacent, accepting what had happened but not the responsibility of it” (69).

It is a known fact that many homosexuals were taken to concentration camps, not wearing a yellow star but a pink triangle on their chests, executed, sentenced to jail or labor service. Heinz, his lover, and Isherwood himself were judged by German justice. Unlike Heinz, he was not arrested by the Gestapo. “The English citizen Ischervood, who unfortunately cannot be brought to justice, was accused of having committed reciprocal onanism with the prisoner in fourteen foreign countries and the German Reich” (156). The exact number of gay men who died as a result of German policy is still the subject under a debate. Higgins argues that “around 60,000 men were killed for their sexual inclinations”, while Oosterhuis presents a figure of something “between 5,000 and 15,000 primarily male homosexuals” (188) who were incarcerated in concentration camps, most of whom did not survive the harsh life conditions. Be that as it may, Nazism ensured that the seed of fear was planted both in heterosexuals and in gay men’s minds.

Now Christopher began to have mild hallucinations. He fancied that he heard heavy wagons drawing up before the house, in the middle of the night. He suddenly detected swastika patterns in the wallpaper. He convinced himself that everything in his room whatever its superficial color, was basically brown, Nazi brown. (72)

Oosterhuis also suggests that homosexuality had been quite a tolerated matter among the SA and the Hitler Youth until the stricter regulations in 1935. (190). Then, a very popular belief of the ‘sickness theory’ was brushed up on and followed, and acquired many sympathizers. It was a fallacious assumption that homosexuality is a metal disease curable by medical treatment, therapy, hypnosis, castration, re-education and via other methods (192). Paradoxically enough, Nazism itself unintentionally created a background where same-sex affection was an inevitable element of social structures because of a strict exclusion of women from public organizations and political affairs; and there were also several men with homosexual inclinations among high-ranking Nazi officers. This was, according to Oosterhuis, a part of “the masculine age that had been predicted by Nietzsche” (196) on the ground of German tradition of male bonding and male friendship that had had the status of “the germ of German nation” (199).

During the nationalistic era, Isherwood, along with a huge amount of other people, took a liking to Communist ideology as powerful opposing machinery to homophobic inferences made by the Nazis. He admits that he read about Lenin “with reverence and enthusiasm” (49) and even contemplated membership in the party. He was particularly captivated by the legislation of the Soviet Union which “recognized the private sexual rights of the individual in 1917” and which was, unfortunately, abolished again by Stalin in 1934 (184). His leftist belief was shaken by this event as he suggests that it “came into a clash with the fact that the Communists were starting to persecute the gays, after declaring earlier that they respected individual freedom in sexual matters” (Heilbrun 260). For the sake of this disappointment, he was merely able to consider political parties’ programs framed in terms of homosexuality. “His challenge to each one of them was: “All right, we’ve heard your liberty speech. Does that include us or doesn’t?”” (183).

The most influential works on homosexuality in Isherwood’s Berlin period were those by Freud and Hirschfeld. Magnus Hirschfeld,⁴ “the mastermind of the 20^th century” (Roberts 80) and “the guru of the homosexual underworld” (Higgins 150), was a consistent opponent of Paragraph 175. And “in the debate on the ‘criminality’ of homosexuality at the time, Hirschfeld’s theory played a prominent role” (Dannecker 40). He was a recognized scientist but also an object of harsh criticism from leading Nazi officers and the media under their control. His theory of a third sex created a new gender category, which identified a person as neither of a female nor a male gender, generally contributed to the notion of ‘other’. Isherwood obviously did not like the idea. “He [Christopher] could never join the ranks of Karl’s⁵ friends and play at nicey-mice third-sexism, because he refused utterly to think of himself as a queen⁶” (15). Hirschfeld not only disapproved of “the sickness theory prevalent in sexual research and psychiatry, he equally distanced himself from those theories that attributed homosexuality to external and contingent factors” (39). Despite the fact that many of his studies shared a considerable amount of ideas with psychoanalysis, he denied its scientific and moral value. For instance, similarly to Freud, Hirschelf held the view that homosexuality is congenital, and therefore incurable. On the other hand, unlike Freud, he believed that it was impossible to acquire sexual orientation through the influence of the cultural or social environment.

Due to the rapid development of psychiatry as a separate discipline in the 20^th century, Sigmund Freud’s psychiatric studies and conclusions are nowadays considered belonging to the past. However, as far as literary criticism and cultural and social anthropology are concerned, his works are still a relevant source of invaluable information and methodology. Freud saw homosexuality as an “irreversible congenital trait” (Eisenbach 223) and defended the opinion that “inversion is found in people who exhibit no other serious deviations from the normal” (The Essentials 284). And here we get to dissimilarities between his and Hirschelfd’s paradigms. Freud provided a link between homosexuality and “a variety of other contributory factors”. He writes, for an illustration, that “the frequency of inversion among the present-day aristocracy is made somewhat more intelligible by their employment of menservants, as well as by the fact that their mothers give less personal care to their children” (364). Also, Freud “frequently attacked Hirschfeld’s ’third sex‘ theory. As against the liberalism, which accepts homosexuality only on condition that it is enclosed within a different sex […]” (Hocquenghem 79). However, in reference to Hirschelf again, the key difference was the notion of bisexuality, which Freud introduced. Bisexuality is, according to him, innate and natural and later, as the personality matures, it usually begins to incline to be attracted more to one of sexes. “Even heterosexual retained some homosexual desires within their libidinal drives” (Eisenbach 223). The sexual orientation of a homosexual deeply convinced about his sexual drives was, in his view, unalterable. The main purpose of his sessions with gay people was research and not an effort to treat them.

From today’s point of view, Hirschfeld and Freud’s theories, which also constituted many myths associated with sexuality and homosexuality, can be easily determined as at least inaccurate. This ‘mythology’ is a thorn in Higgins’ side as well as in other people’s participating in the gay rights movement. Higgins audaciously labels Freud as “the greatest intellectual charlatan of the century” and most of his theories as “the product of his overheated imagination” (129). On the other hand, we must frankly admit that the studies of the two sworn opponents made a significant contribution to the existing debate about homosexuality and provoked another. The process of decriminalization was still in its infancy then but their involvement is undeniable.

Now, we will briefly focus on important aspects of what happened with the perception of homosexuality between the periods covered in Isherwood’s and Monette’s memoirs, which means from the 1940s to the 1980s in America, where Isherwood moved and Monette was born. This should provide us with a significant link between the two men. The period of forty years meant many turbulent and rapid changes for the gay community. “To have been oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies, and wiped out in the eighties is a quick itinerary for a whole culture to follow” (“Esthetics and Loss” qtd. in Clum 660). Jewish intellectuals fleeing from Germany caused a spread of the ideas based on Freudian philosophy as well as popularized psychoanalysis. Working with psychoanalysis, psychiatrists such as Sandor Rado and Irving Bieber strongly believed that homosexuality could be cured via conversion therapy. We are speaking about the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s but medical practices dealing with homosexuality reminded a strange combination of a medieval torture and shamanism. If chosen, therapeutic dialogues and prayers were the mildest ways of the treatment. Some kinds of mental treatments and ‘curing methods’, usually undergone involuntarily, might have been very brutal and traumatizing. Electric shocks to men’s genitals or lobotomy were not unusual. Numerous gay men, unfortunately, were “people unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the doctors” (Higgins 130). And in 1952 homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder, which gave legitimacy for discrimination (Eisenbach 224). It appeared on the list “along with pedophilia, travestitism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadism, and masochism” (2).