Straight (6 page)

The question on everyone's mind was whether the middle classes would prove equal to the task. There was a pervasive fear that the bourgeoisie, with their comfortable houses and citified ways, were creating men who were hopelessly enervated, dissipated, weak, and diseased. Neurasthenia was a rather vague “illness” first characterized in 1869 by American physician George Miller Beard. It afflicted men with fatigue, anxiety, headache, depression, and sexual impotence, to which they succumbed when an insufficiently sturdy constitution was subjected to an overly stressful and stimulating world. To many it seemed as if “respectable,” strong, competent white masculinity was disappearing, creating the looming specter of what Theodore Roosevelt would later call “race suicide.” As Darwin's evolutionary theory became popular, some began to wonder if perhaps it was happening backwards, the respectable classes eroding generation by generation, perhaps to the point where they might become indistinguishable from those troublesome teeming masses. When British army major-general Sir Frederick Maurice worried publicly about the problem of “where to get Men,”[
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] it wasn't the problem of finding males that concerned him. Paranoia and pessimism about manhood were so intense that Daniel Carter Beard, the highly influential founder of the American Boy Scouts, entitled his 1939 autobiography
Hardly a Man Is Now Alive.

Manliness, in turn, was tightly linked to sexuality. “Real men” were virile, but virility meant both sexual potency and its strict and well-socialized control. Any form of “deviance,” including masturbation, was not only morally wrong; it was also believed to drain men's bodies of vital essences and cause illness. Sylvester Graham, he of the eponymous health-food cracker, claimed that a man who could make it to the age of thirty without giving in to the temptations of his sexual urges would be a veritable god. Historian Angus McLaren devotes an entire book,
The Trials of Masculinity,
to looking at the ways in which unorthodox sexuality—whether real or imagined, harmless or hurtful—was used from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s as a way to separate the “real men” from the “degenerates” and “perverts.” It was a terrifically effective strategy. As William James noted
an 1895 essay entitled “Degeneration and Genius,” “Call a man a ‘cad' and you've settled his social status. Call him a ‘degenerate,' and you've grouped him with the most loathsome specimens of the race.”[
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]

Sexual degeneracy became a yardstick with which to take the measure of a man. Pimps and procurers, exhibitionists, effeminates, pornographers, and bigamists, as well as more exotic creatures like sadists, fetishists, and necrophiles, came under intense scrutiny. So too, notably, did men who had sex with other men. Rapists and those who preyed sexually on young women, however, were often ignored on the basis that they were more unmannerly or uncivil than they were abnormal or “degenerate.” Journalistic muckraker W. T. Stead noted with some truth during the 1895 Oscar Wilde trial that if Wilde, “instead of indulging in dirty tricks with boys and men, had ruined the lives of half a dozen simpletons of girls, or had broken up the home of his friend's wife, no one would have laid a finger on him.”

The desire to identify and weed out these “degenerates” and “deviants” had, by the middle third of the nineteenth century, become a pressing one. How it was to be done, on the other hand, and how exactly to describe and define the kinds of “degeneracy” in question, was far from clear. Laws concerning sexuality, mostly inherited from the canon law of the Catholic Church, tended to be vaguely worded and imprecise. Other disciplines were no better. Little wonder that the gap was not long left empty, given the pressure on the middle-class male to form the right kind of family, be the right kind of man, and, moreover, be able to specify what made him so.

THE INVENTION OF HETEROSEXUALITY

Had the German-speaking world not been going through some legislative growing pains in the 1860s, we might still live in a world without heterosexuals. Germany came together in 1866 along geographic lines that are more or less familiar to us today, an amalgamation of the multiple German-speaking kingdoms, duchies, and principalities of the North German Confederation joined together under a generally Prussian leadership. Like many civil governments, Germany was still wrestling with the implications of the French Revolution, as well as feeling the aftershocks of its own revolutionary conflicts in 1848. The new ideals of secular and civil government compelled German law-makers,
as they revised their legal codes to suit a new, composite nation, to figure out what to do with inherited collections of sex-related laws that were often more or less identical to old Church decrees.

It was a fraught process. Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code of April 14, 1851, in particular, provoked significant protest. P. 143 stipulated harsh punishments, consisting of up to five years at hard labor and accompanied by the loss of civil rights during the period of punishment, for anyone convicted of “unnatural fornication between people and animals, as well as between persons of the male sex.” The rationale given for this law, and the severity of its consequences, was that “such behavior is a demonstration of especial degeneration and degradation of the person, and is so dangerous to morality.”[
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] The law, clearly written to sound dispassionate, nonetheless sounds the old familiar religious gong of morality and sin. As befitting a post-Enlightenment, science-respecting culture, the law invoked Nature as both a stand-in for God and a dispassionate secular authority. The addition of degeneracy made it au courant with fears of a decaying race. Taken all together, P. 143 provided highly effective leverage against sexual misconduct for the government. It also, inevitably, provided the same for blackmailers. Officially or unofficially, it was a law to ruin lives with.

Among the individuals who stepped forward to oppose the law were Karl Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny. They were not friends, though they corresponded for a while, and only Ulrichs is known to have been attracted to men. But both shared the conviction that P. 143 was unjust, and it is due to their work that we have the word and the concept of the “heterosexual.”

Ulrichs's devoted opposition to P. 143 stemmed from his having been sacked from a promising bureaucratic career when his attractions to men were discovered. The injustice led him to devote his life to arguing, as logically and as rigorously as he could, that same-sex sexuality was natural, inborn, and unchangeable, and therefore ought not to be punished. Ulrichs was no scientist, but he scoured the medical literature for insights into his own sexual condition. Impressed by medical literature about hermaphrodites, he developed a theory that he too was a type of hermaphrodite. Where hermaphrodites' bodies encompassed both male-typical and female-typical organs in the same
body, Ulrichs claimed that the
Urning,
or man who loved men, had a male body but a female mind. (The notion that gender—the social aspects of sexuality—might be separable from biological sex did not become widespread until the second half of the twentieth century.) Ulrichs's theory of “sexual inversion,” rigorously logical by the standards of the day, was presented in 1864 in a pair of pseudonymously self-published pamphlets. Ulrichs hoped that his pamphlets would persuade German legislators to change their minds, and thus the law.

Austro-Hungarian Karl Maria Kertbeny shared Ulrichs's conviction that the Prussian law was unjust. A friend and coworker's suicide, committed because a blackmailer threatened to expose the young man's “abnormal tastes,” had opened Kertbeny's eyes to the problems inherent in a law that made it illegal for two men to engage in activities that a man and a woman could partake of together without consequence. Kertbeny produced two strongly worded, anonymously published pamphlets arguing against Paragraph 143 that employed the notion of human rights as derived from the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.

Ulrichs's and Kertbeny's approaches differed in many ways. While Ulrichs leaned on the innate femininity of the
Urning
psyche in order to emphasize the involuntary character of same-sex desires, Kertbeny insisted that men who loved men were typically manly and virile and deserving of full citizenship in the modern state. Ulrichs's approach, with its insistence that men who loved men were on some level not male, implicitly endorsed the idea that biological sex could be legitimate grounds for different treatment under the law. Kertbeny, by contrast, took a leaf from English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's book and argued simply that it was wrong to punish actions that harmed no one and all the more unethical to punish them selectively according to the biological sexes of the participants. The two men shared a moderately sized correspondence, but Kertbeny never adopted Ulrichs's models or his terminology. He preferred his own system of classification, first explicated in a letter to Ulrichs on May 6, 1868, in which he opposed “homosexuals” to “heterosexuals” as two parallel and, he implied, equal types of human beings.

As it turned out neither man's argument, nor their associated terminology, made any dent in the law. Paragraph 143 and similar laws
were retained through multiple incarnations of the German legal code, later becoming P. 175 in 1871 when Germany was fully united. Later, and infamously, Hitler used this law to legitimize the incarceration and murder of thousands of
Schwülen,
or “faggots,” in the concentration camps. The law was not removed from the books until 1969. By that time, the “heterosexual” and “homosexual” terminology of those who had so stalwartly resisted it in the beginning had won out, and so for the most part had the view of sexuality those terms implied.[
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] The rise of “heterosexual” was hardly instantaneous, however. Moreover, it had virtually nothing to do with Ulrichs or Kertbeny at all.

A SEXUALITY CALLED NORMAL

Thus we return to Krafft-Ebing and
Psychopathia Sexualis.
The popularization of the word “heterosexual” was far from being Krafft-Ebing's goal in writing his book. Like Kertbeny and Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing's interests did not really lie with the sexually typical or the heterosexual, but again with the heterodox, the outlier, and the sexual “deviant.” Although Krafft-Ebing did inadvertently establish “heterosexual” and “heterosexuality” as biomedical terms in its pages, his actual purpose for creating
Psychopathia Sexualis
was the systematic observation, description, naming, and categorization of sexual deviance for the sake of the law. In the 1886 introduction to the first edition, Krafft-Ebing wrote that he hoped the catalog would be of aid to the judges and legislators compelled to issue rulings in cases of sexual misconduct.

Psychopathia Sexualis
was unquestionably groundbreaking. At the same time it was derivative—Krafft-Ebing does not acknowledge his debts to either Ulrichs or Kertbeny, among others—and not very well organized. But it was the earliest known attempt at compiling a comprehensive list of disorders of the “sexual instinct.” In the grand Linnaean tradition, it is a compendium of exotic “new” species of human being, classified according to their particular sexual quirks or pathologies and given names predominantly formulated, per the well-established ritual, from bits of dead languages.

If we read between the lines of Krafft-Ebing's terminology, we get a pretty clear idea of what he was willing to characterize as appropriate, healthy sexuality: potentially procreative intercourse and very little else. Krafft-Ebing's views were rather akin to those of the Catholic
Church: anything that did not lead to the ultimate goal of procreation was inappropriate, if not outright pathological. Even at that, Krafft-Ebing held, one had to engage in this potentially procreative intercourse at the right time of life. Those who were sexual at the wrong time—during childhood or old age—suffered from
paradoxia.
One additionally had to do it with the right attitude. Too much interest in sex and you had a case of
hyperaesthesia,
too little and it was
anaesthesia.
There seemed to be an endless number of ways in which one could deviate just a bit too much from wholesome sexuality.

Newly christened and described, these and a variety of other heterodox behaviors and characteristics, including sadism, masochism, and fetishism, entered the lexicons and the communal imaginations not just of medicine but also of law, government, and the general public. Krafft-Ebing's book was highly academic, and he went out of his way to pen the really juicy bits in Latin on the theory that it would limit the consumption of potentially titillating information. This diminished the readership not at all, since most middle-class European men of the day were sufficiently well educated that a little bit of Latin posed no obstacle. In any event, there were soon translations aplenty, including the first American English edition in 1893. So much for the old catchalls of sodomy and “crimes against nature”; the increasingly widely understood message was that the modern sexual deviant
specialized.

None of these specialized behaviors, it bears repeating, were new to the annals of human experience. Many had well-established slang names. “The game at flatts,” for instance, was an Enlightenment-era English phrase referring to sex between women, both of whom had “flat” genitals. But a formal taxonomy made these activities, and those who engaged in them, real in a whole new way. Nowhere was this truer than in the case of the word “heterosexual,” twenty-four appearances of which are scattered throughout Krafft-Ebing's book.

Like its sibling “homosexual,” the word “heterosexual” is a stitched-together Frankenstein's monster of a term, half Latin, half Greek. In Krafft-Ebing, it is used alongside “normal-sexual” without much apparent preference for one over the other. It seems to have been only after
Psychopathia Sexualis
became a standard text, and its terminology began to see further use in the medical literature, that the
more scholarly sounding “heterosexual” finally found its niche.