Although the Spartacus guides get mentioned in an oblique way in it, Gay Berlin is the farthest thing from one. If anything, Robert Beachy's masterly new study, subtitled Birthplace of a Modern Identity (Knopf), errs on the side of being scholarly. But the University of Chicago-trained historian of Germany joins an ever-increasing number of researchers who have learned how to turn complex studies into page-turners. As you read Gay Berlin , you may find yourself mentally casting its superbly drawn principal actors for the movie version. I'd plump for Zachary Quinto as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who appeared before the Association of German Jurists in 1867 and, in Beachy's words, "started something important with the first public coming-out in modern history."
It's no surprise that the fourth, fifth and sixth words of Gay Berlin are "Wystan Hugh Auden," naming the poet laureate of Berlin sex tourism and the inductor of Christopher Isherwood into the demimonde that would become the Berlin Stories and Cabaret. It's the obvious intro. But before he's midway through his Introduction, Beachy takes on Michel Foucault. You might think, from this particular joust, that the whole of Beachy's argument is that this episode in gay history was, more than anything else, specifically German, even Berlinish. But it's hardly that parochial, and provides instead a deep and endlessly fascinating look at one of the crucial stages in gay-rights activism, to use our lingo.
The enormously courageous Ulrichs was ultimately unable to achieve the legislative reform he sought, the overthrow of the Prussian anti-sodomy statute, and was twice imprisoned for his trouble. However, Beachly writes, Ulrichs was able to advance his "central thesis," that "Uranian love [between men] was inborn or natural, caused neither by pathology nor willful perversion, and as such its expression could not be criminalized." Furthermore, the legal review he instigated, based on facts rather than prejudices, resulted in a new word, Homosexualität, or homosexuality, a neologism coined by "the enigmatic author and journalist Karl Kertbeny."
"Perhaps Ulrichs's greatest contribution to the cause he championed," Beachy writes later, "was the inspiration for [Berlin medical doctor Magnus Hirschfeld's] founding the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin, just two years after his death in 1897." The HSC became the largest and most important gay-rights advocacy organization in Germany, and the lion's share of Beachy's study traces the myriad developments between Ulrichs' coming-out in Munich and the savage destruction of Hirschfeld's trailblazing Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin by Nazi thugs on May 6, 1933.
It's a startling story. In a revelation sure to ignite thoughts of Stonewall, Beachy writes, "On a dark winter evening in February 1885, police officers descended on Seeger's Restaurant, a small bar located in central Berlin" whose patrons were drawn to Seeger's by "the opportunity to meet men who preferred men, for love or sociability, and to do so in a safe environment." But altogether more amazing is the chronicle of painstaking work of German homosexual-rights activists �" of many persuasions �" to forge bonds with the constabulary. The police's creation first of a Department of Homosexuals and, subsequently, a Department of Blackmail and Homosexuals, turned out to be steps in the direction of legal safety for homosexuals, and, Beachy writes, "It appears that Berlin officials earned and maintained a positive reputation within the city's homosexual milieu." The stories of the scandals involving the rich and the famous, such as munitions magnate Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the "Cannon King" whose "interests in adolescent boys" ultimately led to his suicide, make for compelling reading.
The steadily unfolding story of Hirschfeld, whose rebuilt sexuality museum is a mecca for Berlin gay tourism today, is one of the unifying features of Gay Berlin. When the doctor, who entertained the notion of a "third sex," turned his attention to transvestitism (another German neologism), he became, Beachy says, "the first to argue that cross-dressing had no direct relationship to sexual orientation." "With the publication of Die Transvestiten," he continues, "Hirschfeld no longer asserted that there was a discreet 'third gender,' but claimed instead that human sexuality could be mapped on an intricate spectrum from 'absolute woman' to 'absolute man.'" The fact that Germany now, in the vanguard of nations, once again recognizes a "third sex" is not a refutation of Hirschfeld so much as evidence of his pioneering work.
The intellectual differences between Hirschfeld and another pro-gay group of "masculinists" produced what Beachy calls "the creation of a homosexual cultural canon," from Alexander the Great to Frederick the Great by way of Michelangelo and Oscar Wilde. The figures in it, including Walt Whitman �" outed, Beachy argues, by "Berlin activists" �" make for rich reading, as do the big names in Beachy's deep study of extra-Auden gay tourism to Berlin, including American architect Philip Johnson, who, during his 1928 excursion to study Bauhaus and the International Style, "availed himself of Berlin's male prostitution."
The Reichstag's elimination of the infamous anti-sodomy Paragraph 175 in 1929 was trumped by the National Socialists' subsequent, more draconian measures to suppress homosexuals. "In 1994, four years after reunification, Paragraph 175 was finally stricken completely from the German criminal code, and the legal age of consent was set at 14," Beachy notes in his Epilogue.
"The supreme irony, perhaps," he concludes, more provocatively, "is that the gay pride parades held every summer since the 1970s in Berlin and other major German cities are referred to colloquially as CSD �" 'Christopher Street Day,' an allusion to the Stonewall riot, birthplace of the 'modern homosexual rights movement.'" What's in a name? you say, but Beachy has convincingly given Germans abundant reasons to celebrate not just reunification but their place in the modern gay-rights movement.