Ķādēsh (pi. kĕdēshim) is a Biblical Hebrew word that literally means Ȝholy or consecrated one,ȝ and is rendered Ȝsodomiteȝ or more accurately Ȝmale cult prostituteȝ in various translations of the scriptures. It is a key term for understanding the Old Testament references to homosexuality. It occurs as a common noun at least six times (Deuteronomy 23:18, I Kings 14:24, 15:12 and 22:46, II Kings 23:7, Job 36:14). It can also be restored on the basis of textual criticism in II Kings 23:24 (= Septuagint of II Chronicles 35:19a) and in Hosea 11:12. They all ostensibly designate foreigners (non-Israelites) who served as sacral prostitutes (hierodules) in the Kingdom of Judah and specifically within the precincts of the first Temple (ca. 950-622 B.C.). That these men had sexual relations with other males and not with women is proven by Hosea 4:14, which castigates the males exclusively for Ȝspending their manhoodȝ in drunken orgies with hierodules, while their wives remained at home, alone and unsatisfied, and by the reading of Isaiah 65:3 in the Qumran manuscript: ȜAnd they (m. pi.) sucked their phalli upon the stones.ȝ Their involvement in the Ishtar-Tammuz cult—an obvious rival of the monotheistic Jahweh religion—is responsible for the Biblical equation of homosexuality with idolatry and paganism and the exclusion of the individual engaging in homosexual activity from the Ȝcongregation of Israel,ȝ which persists in the fundamentalist condemnation of all homosexual expression to this day.
The Cultural Setting. To understand that the condemnation of the Ķādēsh was a cultic prohibition and the self-definition of a religious community, not a moral judgment on other acts taking place outside the sphere of the sacral, it is necessary to see the Ķādēsh or male hierodule (with the Ķĕdēshĕh as his female counterpart) in his historical and cultural setting, as a part of Northwest Semitic religion on the territory of the Kingdom of Judah down to the reforms of King Josiah (622 B.C.). The commandments forbidding male homosexual activity on pain of death in the Holiness Code (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13) were added only in the Persian period (first half of the fifth pre-Christian century specifically). Critical scholarship generally dates the Holiness Code to the beginning of that period, but Martin Noth in his major commentary Leviticus (Philadelphia, 1965) ascribes this part of Leviticus to a time slightly after 520 b.c., when the new and reformed Jewish religion set about throwing off all the associations believed responsible for the catastrophe of 586, the destruction of the first Temple and the exile of the population of Judah to Babylon. The proof of the later origin of the verses indicated above is the prophetic reading (“haphtarāh”) for the portion of the Torah including Leviticus 18, namely Ezekiel 22:10-11, a comparison of which shows that Ezekiel was alluding to a text which in the final years of the First Commonwealth began with Leviticus 18:7 and ended with 18:20, as if to say “You have committed every sexual sin in the book.” While there are those who maintain that the Levitical references condemn all male homosexual acts, the character of the Holiness Code suggests that it had the sacral aspect of the sexual liaison in mind.
Derrick Sherwin Bailey, in his Homosexuality and the Western Chris- tian Tradition (London, 1955), argued that the kedeshim “served the female worship-per” and so would translate the word as “male cult prostitute” but not “sodomite.” However, it is unlikely that women were admitted to the Temple, then or later, and all parallels from the religious life of antiquity, from Cyprus to Mesopotamia, involve male homosexual connection. Designations for the male prostitute in Hebrew and Phoenician are “dog” (kelebh) and “puppy” (gur), notably inDeuteronomy 23:17, where the kelebh is set in parallel to the zonah “(female) prostitute.” In Isaiah 3:4 the word ta’alulim is rendered effeminati by St. Jerome; it means “males who are sexually abused by others,” = German Schandbuben. Another likely reference is Isaiah 2:6, the closing hemistich of which Jerome translated et pueris alienis adhaeserunt, while the Aramaic pseudo-Jonathan Targum euphemistically renders the text “And they walked in the ways of the gentiles,” in which the Hebrew verb has an Arabic cognate that means “they loved tenderly.” In Hosea 11:12a slight emendation, together with comparison again of the Arabic meaning of the verb in the first half of the parallel, yields the meaning “And Judah is still untrue to God/but faithful to kedeshim.”
How could male prostitutes fit into the scheme of Northwest Semitic—specifically Canaanite—religion during the First Commonwealth? Foreign as the notion is to the modern religious consciousness, the worship of Ishtar and Tammuz was a fertility cult in which union with the hierodule consecrated to the service of the goddess was thought to have magical functions and powers. Such hierodules could be either male or female, and the singular kadesh in I Kings 14:24 is to be taken as a collective, meaning “hierodules as a professional caste” who were “in the land,” practicing their foreign rites. The males may even have been eunuchs, though the context of Job 36:14 “Their soul dieth in youth, and their life at the hierodules’ age” suggests that they were adolescent prosti tutes no different from the bar or street hustler of today. Furthermore, place names containing the element Kadesh, such as the one in Genesis 14:7, which also was called En-mishpat “Spring of Judgment” indicate the locales of shrines whose personnel had both erotic and mantic functions. This is independently confirmed by the glosses on the Septuagint renderings of kadesh and kedeshah in Deuteronomy 23:18, and by the fourth-century work of Firmicus Maternus, De errore profanarum religionum, which ridicules the pretensions of the effeminate pagan priests to foretell the future. This aspect of the professional activity of the kedeshim parallels the homosexual associations of the shaman in primitive cultures and of the medium in the occult underworld of modern times.
Aftermath and Parallels. The taboo on homosexuality in Western civilization is thus a legacy of the religious rivalries and conflicts in Ancient Israel, and of the formation of the Jewish community after the Babylonian captivity as a client-ethnos of the Persian monarchy—the “evilempire” against which the Greeks fought their heroic wars.
Female and male temple prostitution is known in a wide range of civilizations in the ancient world from Cyprus to India. Further comparative study is needed to clarify the place of the institution within the overall conspectus of same-sex relations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Michael Astour, “Tamar the Hierodule,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 85 (1966), 185-96; Tom Homer, Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978, chapters 5-6.
Warren Johansson
This Biblical place first appears in Genesis 14:7, where it has the alternate name En-mishpat (“Spring of Judgment”), implying that it was a cultic shrine renowned both for a theophany and as the site of an oracular spring. The following discussion is necessarily tentative and speculative, but the material cited in it has been so largely ignored in the standard reference works published by the religious establishment that it needs to be better known, if only as a starting point for further investigation. The authors whose opinions are summarized below enjoy international reputations, and their interpretations cannot simply be dismissed as the tendentious construction of a prejudiced amateur.
Modem archeologists identify the locale as En Qdes, first discovered by Rowlands in 1842, an extensive oasis with many springs lying some 80 kilometers south-southwest of Beersheba. The first component of the name, Kadesh, clearly means that the shrine housed a retinue of hierodules, male and female, who had both erotic and mantic functions. Virtually every standard religious reference work conceals this elementary fact by explaining the name simply as “holy,” which is indeed the primary meaning of the Semitic root, but in the sense of cult personnel consecrated to the worship of Ishtar, the goddess of love. Very likely because of these pagan reminiscences, the Targumim (the Aramaic translations of the Old Testament), suppress the name Kadesh Barnea, replacing it with Rekem or Rekem Gea. As for the second activity of the ķĕdēshīm, the role of homosexuals as sha-mans and seers is too well documented to need further comment.
Site of the Revelation. It was the historian Eduard Meyer (1855-1930) who first emphasized the importance of Kadesh Barnea as the site of the primitive revelation to Moses in his book Die Israeliten und ihre Nachbar Stämme (1906), and later in the second half of the first volume of his Geschichte des Altertums (1909). This locale cannot be identical with the Mount Sinai of today, since the latter has no trace of the volcanic activity which Exodus 19:16-18 unmistakably describes as the prelude to the giving of the Law. The primitive account in Exodus showed Moses leading the Israelites from bondage in Egypt to Kadesh Barnea in northwestern Arabia with its volcanic districts (the so-called harras). Elsewhere in the sacred narrative Jahweh reveals himself as a fire god, like the Greek Hephaistus and the Roman Vulcan, in particular in a late interpolation into the legend of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:24, where he rains brimstone and fire on the twin cities—that is to say, causes a volcanic eruption rather than the earthquake alone possible in Palestine proper which the earlier version describes in Genesis 19:21 and 25.
The Levites. Kadesh Barnea also belongs to the tribe, or more correctly the brotherhood of Levi, which figures in the patriarchal era as a neighbor of the tribe of Simeon in the account of the raid on Shechem in Genesis 34 and 49:5-7. Moses as a member of the tribe of Levi receives from Jahweh at Kadesh Barnea the revelation of the Law and the mysteries of the priesthood. In later centuries the Levites evolved from a warrior into a priestly caste with a covert tradition of male bonding that may have included homosexual activity, because Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 315-403) could report in his Panahon (1,2, 13, written between 375 and 377) that a Barbelognostic sect called the Levites had no intercourse with women, but only with one another. One is inclined to see analogies with the medieval Templars persecuted by the French crown with accusations of sodomy whose truthfulness remains moot. It is also relevant that Sigmund Freud, in his last major work, Moses and Monotheism (1938), speculating upon Meyer’s findings and also upon a book by the Old Testament scholar Ernst Sellin (1876-1946), Mose und seine Bedeutung für die israelitisch-jüdische Religionsgeschichte (1922), claimed that there was a secret tradition stemming from the primal revelation at Kadesh that was transmitted within the inner circles of the priest-hood to later centuries, when Judaism assumed its historic form. Layman that he was in Biblical matters, Freud was still guided by a remarkable intuition, so that the question remains open for students of the Old Testament.
God and Moses. In addition, the philologist Franz Domseiff (1888-1960), in an article rather daringly published in Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft in 1935, hence in Nazi Germany, likened the Levites of Exodus 32:26-29 to the SS of his own time and the slaughter of the three thousand “enemies of Jahweh” to the German St. Bartholomew’s Eve, the Röhm purge of June 30, 1934. He further equated the dialogue of Moses with Jahweh in Exodus 33:11 with the intercourse of the legendary Cretan legislator Minos with Zeus mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey 19,179-80, a comparison that had already been drawn in antiquity by Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata, II, 5. Domseiff also interpreted the curious passage in Exodus 33:20-24, which caused so much merriment to Victorian skeptics because Jahweh tells Moses: “Then I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts,” as the euphemistic account of a liaison in which God is the erastes and Moses the eromenos, thus as a parallel to other ancient myths in which sexual union with the god or goddess is the medium of revelation. The verb “to see” would have the same meaning as in the account of homosexual incest in Genesis 9:22. The Zohar, the classical repository of Kabbalistic lore (written in Christian Spain between 1268 and 1290), ascribes to Moses a love affair with the Shechinah, the divine presence (conceived as feminine), a theme which may be a later heterosexualizing reflex of the primitive tradition.
Conclusions. All these considerations point to the existence in the early centuries of Israel’s history (from the Landnahme beginning about 1300 B.C. to the end of the First Commonwealth in 586 B.C.) of a homoerotic and even pederastic tradition (with the eros paidagogikos) in the warrior and the priestly castes, not too different from the analogous phenomena in ancient Greece and other cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Its traces could not be wholly expunged from the older narratives even by the strong Zoroastrian influence in the fifth century, when Ezra the Scribe and the men of the Great Assembly, in formulating the laws of normative Judaism, suppressed these customs and institutionalized a homophobic tradition that became the common property of the Abrahamic religions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Franz Domseiff, “Antikes zum Alten Testament. 2. Exodus,” Zeitschrift für die alttes- tamenthche Wissenschaft, new series, 12 (1935), 153-71; Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, New York: Knopf, 1939; Eduard Meyer, Die IsraeUten und ihre Nachbarstämme, Halle am Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1906, pp. 60-82; idem, Geschichte des Altertums. 1:2. Die ältesten geschichtlichen Völker und Kulturen bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert, second ed., Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1909, pp. 376-83; Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Cultic Prostitution: A Case Study in Cultural Diffusion,” Orient and Occident: Essays presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of His Sixty- fifth Birthday, Kevelaer: Verlag Butzon & Bercker, 1973, pp. 213-22.
Warren Johansson
Kaliardá is the most common term for Modem Greek homosexual argot, specifically the argot used by the “passive” homosexual (the kinaidhos or, pejoratively, the poustis), but not by his “active” sexual partner, the kolombarás. Synonyms of Kaliardá include Kaliardi, Kaliardo, Tsinavota, Liardo, Doura Liarda, Latiníka (“Latin”), Vathia Latiníka (“Deep Latin”), Etrouska (“Estruscan”), Loubinistika, and Frangoloubinistika. The argot may also be divided into a “common” Kaliardá and a much more esoteric Kaliardá, Doura Liarda (also “Deep Latin” or “Etruscan”), the latter known only to a select few. The language was first studied by the folklorist Elias Petropoulos in his book Kaharda: An Etymological Dictionary of Greek Homosexual Slang (1971). For this at first privately printed dictionary Petropoulos served a seven-month prison term in 1972. The etymology of the term Kaliarda is to be derived, according to Petropoulos, from the French word gail-lardj Gordon M. Messing has suggested, however, that the term may derive from a common Romany term meaning “Gypsy.”
The great flexibility of the Greek language, the facility with which foreign words are assimilated and compounds formed, as well as the conscious wordplay carried on by the gay Greek while speaking the argot, explain in part why Kaliarda is a rich conglomerate of several languages. Besides words deriving directly from Modern Greek and phonetically transformed, many English, French, Italian and Turkish words are employed, as well as terms borrowed from Romany. A Kaliarda compound can indeed be an alloy of two or three roots from two or three different languages. Sometimes foreign-sounding endings are attached to a Greek (or foreign) root-word. Onomatopoeias are also common. Among the grammatical curiosities of the argot is the fact that nearly all nouns and adjectives are used in the feminine form. As opposed to other Greek argots (such as underworld slang) which grammatically are Modern Greek but with slang terms inserted, Kaliardá is nearly a language in itself: only a few Greek words are necessary, along with two particles required in the construction of verbal tenses. Articles are generally not used in Kaliardá where they would be in Greek. Kaliardá nicknames, proverbs, curses, and place-names also exist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Elias Petropoulos, Kaliardd: An Etymological Dictionary of Greek Homosexual Slang, 4th ed., Athens: Nefeli, 1984.
John Taylor
Danish novelist. At the age of twenty-one he fled the stifling atmosphere of his family and went to Paris to study French, at the same time seeking to come to terms with his homosexuality. In 1973 he published Visse hensyn (Certain Considerations) the first in a series of four novels exploring social changes in Denmark from the 1950s to the 1970s through the lens of five children (one of them gay) in a well-to-do Rungsted family. The other novels in the quartet are Faste forhold (Firm Relationship, 1974), Rene Linier (Straight Lines, 1975), and Andre nader (Other Ways, 1975). With Fomemmelser (Feelings, 1977) he initiated an autobiographical sequence, showing how he first tried to go with women and even married, but later had to admit that he was gay; his growing self-understanding led him into the Gay Liberation Front. This novel was followed by Videre trods alt (Onwards in Spite of All, 1979) and I glimt (In a Flash, 1980).
For the last thirteen years of his life Kampmann lived with a fellow writer, Jens Michael Schau. Their relationship was stormy, characterized by insecurity on both sides; Schau was plagued with chronic depression. On September 12,1988, at their retreat on the island of Laeso, Schau beat Kampmann to death only hours before the premiere of Schau’s Danish television drama, Perhaps Next Month. The play dealt with a bisexual married man who was infected with the AIDS virus by his friend.
Stephen Wayne Foster
German-American historian. Scion of a Prussian family of liquor producers, Kantorowicz served as an intelligence officer on the Turkish front in World War I. Returning to Germany, he became active in the Freikorps, a rightist paramilitary organization that fought the left before he joined the elitist Stefan George circle. Under its auspices his first masterpiece, Frederick the Second [1927], conceived in the grand manner of monumental history as recommended by Friedrich Nietzsche, presented not only the facts but the mythical elements of the medieval emperor’s personality and times. Although sharply criticized for being almost erotically engaged with his nearly superhuman subject, Kantorowicz vindicated himself with the supplementary volume of 1931 that showed his thorough mastery of the sources. The mystical and nationalistic fervor that enlivens some pages of the biography appealed to the National Socialists, despite Kantorowicz’s Jewish origins.
After serving briefly as a professor of history at Frankfurt am Main, Ernst Kantorowicz fled the Nazis, going first to Oxford and then to the United States. He taught at Berkeley from 1939 to 1951, where he fitted into the gay scene, notably befriending the poet Robert Duncan and one of Duncan’s many lovers, Werner Vordtriede, a fellow ex-member of the Stefan George circle. One of the few brave enough to refuse to sign the loyalty oath required of all employees in the state of California as a result of the McCarthyite agitation, he was invited (like the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who also refused) to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. As a homosexual immigrant he might, of course, have been deported.
After the war, Kantorowicz welcomed a fellow German gay medievalist Theodor Mommsen, Jr., grandson of the most famous German classical historian and nephew of the sociologist Max Weber and of the classical philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Having taught during the war at Groton, Mommsen came to Princeton University and unselfishly contributed to Kantorowicz’ second masterpiece. Composed at Princeton, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), peerlessly commands a vast range of disciplines from law to art history. Like their colleague in French Maurice Coindreau, who translated Faulkner and Hemingway, Kantorowicz and Mommsen did what they could to counter the homophobia and discrimination that still routinely resulted in the expulsion of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the firing or refusal to grant promotion or tenure to suspected gay teachers at Princeton, but they had to be discreet. Parting sadly from his colleague the gay art historian A. M. Friend, Mommsen left for Cornell University, where he joined the most distinguished professor in the history department, the gay M. L. W. Laistner. In 1958 Mommsen committed suicide.
Kantorowicz was succeeded at the Institute for Advanced Study, which sheltered so many brilliant exiles and émigrés, by the grandson of the composer Mendelsohn, Felix Gilbert, whose autobiography in 1988 splendidly memorialized his close friends Kantorowicz and especially Mommsen. Gilbert’s distant cousin Clara née Mendelsohn had been the wife of Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833-1890), the author of the first, epoch-making psychiatric article on sexual inversion (1869).
In his later work Kantorowicz showed how the strict philological training that he had received in Europe could be combined with an interdisciplinary approach to shed light not only on the past but on the present as well. Combining precision and scope, his work might well guide today’s gay scholars, who are seeking to emerge from advocacy and provincialism to a fuller understanding of their infinitely ramified subject.
William A. Percy
American novelist. Born to a working-class French-Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac entered Columbia University on a football scholarship in 1941. His early friendships on Morningside Heights with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg nourished his leanings toward experimental literature. Kerouac’s first published novel, however, the sprawling The Town and the City (1950), was couched in a somewhat elegiac mode deriving from Thomas Wolfe. Then the writer entered a footloose period that took him to Mexico, Tangier, France, and San Francisco. He forged a buddy relationship with the goofy but charismatic Neal Cassady, who in turn was loved by Ginsberg.
Through the influence of oriental literature, jazz, and a liberal infusion of mind-altering drugs, Kerouac formed an ideal of literary spontaneity: one should write as quickly as possibly and revisions should be eschewed as reducing the freshness. Revised or not, his first major work, On the Road (1957) records his wanderings, his friends, and his aesthetic ideals. Under different names, the characters reappear in such novels as The Subterraneans (1958), Dharma Bums (1958), and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). However, some critics believe the early work Visions of Cody (written in 1951-52) is his masterpiece.
In the Eisenhower years the media focused upon Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and their friends as something new, dubbing them “the beat generation,” heralds of the full-fledged counterculture that was to entrance millions a few years later. Kerouac, however, never completely fit the mold, and in his later years he even became an ally of William Buckley’s conservative National Review. Kerouac also stood apart from his two major confreres—in public estimation at least—as the purely heterosexual balance to his two gay associates, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Accumulating evidence, however, shows that Kerouac’s own homosexual experience was more than casual, though it usually occurred while he was (conven iently for later excuses) high or otherwise non compos. In contrast with his iconoclasm in other spheres, sexually he clung to an almost stereotypical straight image. The one great love of his life was surely Neal Cassady, his straight buddy, and being unable to express his feelings, he gradually sank into alcoholism and despair. Despite major flaws in his writing, Kerouac nonetheless succeeded in capturing the spirit of an America that was on the move, and he may even have succeeded in shifting its course somewhat.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac, New York: Penguin, 1979; Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, New York: Grove Press, 1983.
Wayne R. Dynes
Germ an-Hungarian writer, translator, and journalist. He bore the surname Benkert until 1847; then the police of his native city of Vienna authorized him to use the Hungarian noble name of his family as his sole name. Kertbeny is considered the inventor of the words homosexuality and heterosexuality. The draft of a private letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs of May 6, 1868 contains for the first time the expressions homosexual and heterosexual.
From 1869 to 1875 Kertbeny lived in Berlin, and here in 1869 he wrote two pamphlets that were published anonymously, demanding freedom from penal sanctions for homosexual men in Prussia and the Prussian-dominated North German Confederation. They were entitled §143 des Preussischen Strafgesetzbuchs und seine Aufrechterhaltung als §152 des Ent-wurfs eines Strafgesetzbuchs fiir den Norddeutschen Bund (Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code and its Maintenance as Paragraph § 152 of the Draft of a Penal Code for the North German Confederation) and Das Gemeinschädliche des §143 des Preussischen Strafgesetzbuches …(The Social Harm Caused by Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code…). Here for the first time the word Homosexual-ität is found as a substitute for the designation Urningthum that Ulrichs had introduced in 1864. Instead of Urninge Kertbeny used the word Homosexualis-ten; instead of Urninden (lesbians), Homosexualistinnen.
The book by the professor of zoology and anthropology Gustav Jaeger (1832-1917) of Stuttgart contains parts of a text that Kertbeny had written on the sexual instinct, in which the expression Heterosexualität occurs for the first time. A continuation of this text, which Jaeger had at first thought too offensive, he published only in 1900 in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen without mentioning Kertbeny’s name. Jaeger designated the author only as “Dr. M.,” a pseudonym that probably contributed to the oft-repeated but erroneous belief that Kertbeny was “a Hungarian doctor.” A bibliography of his works printed in a doctoral dissertation at the University of Szeged in 1936 shows that he never received a doctorate in any subject and wrote nothing on medicine or the natural sciences.
Kertbeny’s arguments for the emancipation of the homosexuals correspond roughly to those employed by Ulrichs, but his chief emphasis lies less on the assertion that homosexuality is natural and inborn than on the demand that the modern constitutional state extend to homosexuals its principle of non-interference in the private life of its citizens. That is to say, instead of focusing on the claim of exclusive homosexuals to be free of legal hindrances, he asserted the right of all human beings to engage in homosexual activity on the basis of the liberal doctrine that the state itself has no right to interfere in such a private matter as sexual behavior. In this respect he continued the line of reasoning that had begun with the crimi nal law reformers of thé eighteenth century and was further elaborated by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill.
Kertbeny repeatedly claimed that he himself was a Normalsexualer, hence not homosexual. However, there is no proof of that assertion, or for the hypothesis of his homosexuality or bisexuality. The collection of Kertbeny’s manuscripts in the Hungarian National Library in Budapest does contain evidence for Kertbeny’s authorship of the aforementioned texts, so that alongside Heinrich Hoessli and Ulrichs he ranks as one of the most important advocates of homosexual emancipation in the nineteenth century.
Kertbeny died in Budapest in 1882, supposedly in consequence of the late stages of a syphilitic infection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. J.-C. Feray, “Une histoire critique du mot homosexualité,” Arcadie (1981), 325: 11-21, 326: 115-24, 327: 171-81, 328: 246-58; Manfred Herzer, “Kertbeny and the Nameless Love,” Journal of Homosexuality, 12 (1985), 1-25; idem, “Ein Brief von Kertbeny in Hannover an Ulrichs in Wüzburg,” Capri, 1 (1987), 25-35.
Manfred Herzer
British economist. A polymath, Keynes cultivated many interests, from book collecting to probability theory. His real importance, however, stems from the epistemic break he achieved with the classical theory of economics, changing the landscape of that discipline for all time. Keynes was no ivory-tower theorist, and the thirty-year boom in Western industrial countries (1945-75) has been called the Age of Keynes.
Bom into an academic family in Cambridge, Maynard Keynes’ parents carefully groomed him to be a member of the upper echelon of Britain’s elite. After attending Eton, where he won many prizes, it was a foregone conclusion that he should attend King’s College, Cambridge. There he blended effortlessly into the idealistic atmosphere of the “higher sodomy,” which attained its most rarified form in the secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles, to which he was almost immediately elected. In the Apostles he met his lifelong friends Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. Believing himself ugly, Keynes tended to be shy in the presence of the undergraduates he admired. In 1908, however, he began a serious affair with the painter Duncan Grant, whom he later said to be the only person in whom he found a truly satisfying combination of beauty and intelligence.
After leaving Cambridge, Keynes launched his career in the India Office in London, where he made many useful professional contacts. He also joined the nascent Bloomsbury group, participating with relish in its merry-go-round of intellectual, social, and sexual contacts. In 1908, however, he obtained a lecturership in economics at King’s College, and the courses he gave there were the foundation of his later writings in the field. As editor of the Economic Journal he actively promoted new trends in the discipline outside of Cambridge. Yet he did not turn immediately to the core of the subject, as he spent a number of years writing a challenging Treatise on Probability, which was published in 1921.
The outbreak of World War I caught Keynes and his Bloomsbury friends, ensconced in their own comers of Edwardian comfort, initially unawares. Although most his associates became conscientious objectors, Keynes elected to enter the Treasury where, despite the chronic disapproval of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, he worked wonders in managing the wartime economy. During this period the homosexual members of Bloomsbury (Keynes included) found their supply of eligible young men cut off, and began to engage in flirtations and even liaisons with women. After the end of the war Keynes spent a frustrating period as an adviser at the Paris peace conference, trying to limit voracious Allied demands for reparations from defeated Germany. Returning to London, he set down his pungent reflections on the event in what became his most widely read book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which eroded the resolve of the Allies to enforce the Treaty of Versailles, at least in its financial provisions.
In 1925 Keynes, now famous, married the noted ballerina Lydia Lopokova. He became an adviser to government and business, consolidating his practical knowledge of economic affairs. These experiences contributed to his great book, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). He held that money was not only a medium of exchange but also a store of value. Believing that unregulated capitalism had proved to be its own worst enemy, he sought to explore ways whereby state intervention could stimulate productive capacity, while forestalling anarchic effects. By “fine tuning” the economy, the state could ward off unemployment and the noxious effects of downturns in business cycles. Because of the stubbornness of traditional forces, Keynes’ ideas were largely ignored during the great Depression, which they might have alleviated. Their more general utilization after World War II has been credited with a major role in the extraordinary prosperity of that period, though the full extent of this effect remains uncertain. Economic difficulties after 1975 subjected Keynsian views, which had become orthodoxy, to contemporary reassessment.
In 1940 Keynes again became an adviser to the Treasury. Through taxation policies he sought to limit the ravages of inflation in wartime Britain. In 1944 he was leader of the British delegation at the Bretton Woods Conference in Washington, DC, which set the terms for the emerging economic structure of the post-war world. He also coordinated the Lend Lease program, which was vital to the Allied war effort. In 1942 Keynes was raised to the peerage. Returning from the United States in April 1946, he was near collapse, and died at his home in Sussex on Easter Sunday, April 12, 1946.
Keynes’ family background and elite education prepared him for a leading role in England’s ruling class which, after some permutations, he duly obtained. Yet he participated equally in the genteel adversary cultures of the Cambridge Apostles and Bloomsbury. Surprisingly, in the decades after the conviction of Oscar Wilde, his numerous affairs with young men never caused the slightest legal or even social trouble. This charmed life can be explained only by his combination of extreme personal brilliance, family and professional connections, and remarkable self-confidence. Although Keynes married he never had children. The economic historian Joseph Schumpeter has noted that his economic theory, which concentrated on short-term effects, was compatible with a mentality that had given no “hostages to fortune” through offspring.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Charles H. Hession, John Maynard Keynes: A Personal Biography, New York: Macmillan, 1984; Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, New York: Viking, 1983.
Wayne R. Dynes
American entomologist and sex researcher. When Kinsey died at the age of sixty-two, “he was one of the most widely known scientists of this century, a household name in the United States and a familiar figure in the rest of the civilized world….Kinsey’s two landmark volumes, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) raised one of the most violent and widespread storms since Darwin, not only in the scientific community but among the public at large” (Pomeroy). No doubt part of the uproar derived from Kinsey’s plain, straight-out way of reporting on sex and sexual variations. Loud disapproval was registered by moralists, not only by priests and preachers, but also by psychiatrists, clinicians of many stripes, parts of the legal profession, and still others who for various reasons chose to defend the mores; often they seemed to feel their provinces had been invaded with contradictory, possibly destabilizing information.
To many, the Kinsey revelations were alarming not only because of the surprisingly high figures on premarital, extramarital and particularly on homosexual sex, but also because of the auspices of the work. From this conservative professor in a respected midwestern University came countless alarming sexual facts and surprises—all obtained with direct backing from Indiana University, the National Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the list of close consultants read like a cross-section of American men of science.
Intrinsic Value of the Kinsey Research. Of course, the substance of the Kinsey Research lay elsewhere than in what seemed sensational. Then, as now, its great value was the establishment of reliable baseline data. In the past it had been easy enough for the prudish and uninformed to warn of dire consequences from sex, even from masturbation. But such a judgment was suddenly made untenable by the realization that masturbation is practiced by at least 95 percent of males (with no indication of blindness or depleted male virility). Likewise, it had been easy to attribute homosexuality to various flaws in nature or to some illness when it was thought rare; but it was quite another matter to account for its occur-rence in over a third (37 percent) of males, or for the fact that fully 50 percent of adult males admit having been sexually attracted at least sometimes to other males, or that 10 percent of married males in their twenties make overt homosexual contacts after being married, and so on.
Could these and other “Kinsey figures” have significantly changed in the intervening years as a result of the sexual revolution and other social forces? Some certainly have. The average age-at-first-intercourse is clearly down from age 17 where it once was, just as the amount of premarital intercourse is decidedly higher than it was in Kinsey’s time. The frequency of homosexuality, which Kinsey found to be stable for five generations, has probably remained so. At least, judging from several subsequent studies (e.g., Gebhard; Bell), nothing indicates it has either increased or decreased.
Kinsey’s Background. The marked originality of Kinsey’s work, his easy readiness to avoid conventional concepts, and to examine every sexual event on its own merits frequently raise the double question of how Kinsey came to sex research, and then arrived at such a fresh start. In 1938 Indiana University instituted its first marriage course, and Kinsey was elected to teach it. When his students asked far-ranging questions about sex, he would try to answer them, or look them up in the existing literature—literature he found appalling by its general lack of evidence and rigor. He quietly decided to collect his own data. He began to interview people, to ask basic questions about their sex lives, and to polish and greatly expand his questions. Out of both generosity and wanting to extend his own knowledge of “the reality” as he used to call it, he did a good deal of private counseling of students and of married couples from his course (conducting some 280 of these personal conferences during the spring semester of 1939 alone).
Bom into a rigidly religious family, Kinsey had a father who refused to allow his family to ride to church on Sunday, even with the minister. The father also taught Sunday school and demanded a triple Sabbath for the whole family—Sunday school, church, and evening prayer meeting. Part of this moralism stayed with young Kinsey until at least his first year in college where, as he later recalled with amusement, a classmate once came to him and confessed he was masturbating excessively, as he thought, and had to tell someone. Kinsey took his friend back to the dormitory and knelt down beside him to pray for God to help the boy stop.
Although Kinsey soon rejected religion, in other respects it seemed for some time as if he would continue on a conventional path. As a young zoologist he accepted an appointment at Indiana University as an assistant professor, got married, fathered four children, and pursued a career of teaching, writing, and fieldwork in entomology. In fact, a theme never to reverse itself was Kinsey’s lifelong fascination with nature, and with its effect on his interpersonal relations.
As a boy he was entranced by the out-of-doors, by going it alone on long hikes over the countryside, everywhere noticing the plants and animals, and particularly the differences and similarities between individuals of the same species. He was fascinated, too, by the sorts of people he found on every side—farmers and country folk from a generally less educated background than his own, but whose permission he often needed to cross their land or to camp out. Everywhere he learned to meet strangers very different from himself, to tune into their views and attitudes, to establish rapport quickly, and to gain their cooperation in whatever he was doing.
Field Methodology. These abilities were greatly in use and perfected during 20 years of “bug hunting” as he called it—hiking thousands of miles in search of gall-wasps in the 48 states, in Guatemala, and especially in the mountainous back-regions of Mexico. He quickly overcame the initial suspicion of the Indians, getting them to scour the hillsides searching for oak trees with the galls on their leaves that contained the tiny wasps, bringing them back by the hundreds to his tent. From such experiences he formulated certain cardinal principles that were to stand him in good stead in sex research. “Try never to move forward or back, especially in dangerous situations, be they dealing with the mafia, interviewing prostitutes, or getting “round the nervousness of ordinary people.” (Moving forward can seem intrusive, moving backwards can look defensive or rejecting.) “Be considerate and thoughtful, never selfish in your own pursuit; let people know what you want, then allow them to bring it to you”—and many others.
From his boyhood hiking days, and from his many new experiences in dealing with the sorts of anxieties people feel about sex, Kinsey learned whole new modes of dealing with it and of making people comfortable. He could almost instantly put strangers at ease and win their confidence with his kindly, never judgmental quality, and even his simple language. As he always reminded his college-bred interviewers: “The lower-level individual is never ill or injured, though he may be sick or hurt. He does not wish to do something, though he wants to do it. He does not perceive, though he sees. He is not acquainted with a person, though he may know him.….” Everywhere in his approach it seemed that even plainness and politeness were powerful stuff, part of his respect for each person’s makeup and right to be who they are, regardless of their current position or predicament. He insisted that anyone generous enough to give a history deserves to be treated as a friend or guest, “The tottering old man who is a victim of his first penal conviction appreciates an interviewer’s solicitation about his health and that he is provided with tobacco, candy, or other things the institution allows one who has sufficient funds. The inmate in a woman’s penal institution particularly appreciates those courtesies which a male would extend to a woman of his own social rank, in his own home.”
Sex Research. Early on he realized a need for a far broader knowledge of what sex is like in special and diverse contexts; he wanted to see behind the curtains of privacy that people use to dis guise or to hide entirely what they do from others, and sometimes from themselves. By July 1939, Kinsey had collected some 350 sex histories, and from this material he realized he needed more information on homosexuality. From a student whose history he had taken he heard of “someone in Chicago who could introduce him to homosexuals and show him how they live”. Acting on this tip with a trial visit to meet that contact in Chicago, he soon began weekly trips. (He would leave Bloomington after his last class on Friday, drive the more than 200 miles to Chicago, work through the weekend, and drive back in time for his 8:30 class Monday morning.)
Within two months he had collected scores of homosexual histories, and was astonished at the countless variations he had seen for himself on every side. (The Chicago groups he met did, indeed, constitute valuable urban samples, although he was later amused at how naive he had been about “the homosexual” and the miles he had traveled to find the sorts of histories which, had he known more at the time, he could have had in abundance within walking distance of his Bloomington office.)
On other occasions, too, he traveled far and wide to find and explore particular groups: prisoners and prostitutes and paragons of virtue from religious sects. Nothing he saw ever diverted or defeated him, for as a colleague put it, “he was always able to look through the ugliness to something lovely beyond.” Whenever he ran into anything unique, he immediately tried to investigate it. Once when a man said he could come to orgasm in ten seconds from a flaccid start, the man was asked if he could demonstrate this (he could and did, on the spot). Deep in rural Kansas, Kinsey searched out a community where, remarkably, all the women were easily able to reach orgasm in ordinary intercourse. (It turned out that their prevailing style of pacifying small children involved a particular patting and stroking technique that soon induced sleep,; unbeknownst to the mothers it was first and accidentally bringing the babies to orgasm, thereby leaving traces in the sexual substrate which made them “easy responders” for life.) Other special cases (tabulated separately to keep from biasing the averages) involved such things as the sexual responses of people who had had brain surgery, others who for religious reasons had struggled all their lives against any sexual expression, members of nudist colonies, and groups of paraplegics.
Besides many investigations of plain and special people, Kinsey pursued literally dozens of subprojects. He and his coworkers made an extensive study of the differences between the sexes that so affect their psychology and compatibility. (A central finding was that male sexuality tends to be genitally focused, while females are more “peripheral” i.e., tend to place more value on the stimulations, the moods, and the ambience around sex than on genital stimulations.) There were separate studies of fourteen mammalian species, extensive studies of human neurology and physiology, as well as ancient and modem cross-cultural surveys, including a detailed investigation of sex practices in pre-Columbian civilizations, and another to trace the shifts in Japanese mores for 400 years. Legal experts were brought in to help trace the relationship between a man’s education and how he is treated by the courts. And a bevy of translators worked to bring into English the first accurate record of important classical literature, and so on and on.
The Fate of the Kinsey Research. But nothing was more important to the fate of the Kinsey Research than was homosexuality. For while it was only one of the six basic forms of sex examined, and represented only a fraction of the research effort, nothing disturbed the critics more, nor brought them to such a fever pitch of hate as did the homosexual findings. As A. H. Hobbs (associate professor of sociology, University of Pennsylvania) charged, “There must be something wrong with Kinsey’s statistics, which [coupled with] the prestige of the Rockefeller Foundation, give unwarranted weight to implications that homosexuality is normal, and that premarital relations might be a good thing.” Others insisted “homosexuality just can’t be that prevalent”—and, anyway, “by talking about it you encourage it.”
Similar sentiments came from Congressmen, from a handful of anthropologists and psychoanalysts, and more stridently from Union Theological Seminary’s Henry Van Dusen (also on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation). The hue and cry cast aspersions on the Kinsey data, causing the National Research Council to request the ASA (American Statistical Association) to examine the work in detail. Kinsey was well prepared for this challenge but not for the delay it entailed, during which his financial backing began to evaporate. Only years later came the ASA’s report; it rated Kinsey’s research as the best ever done in the field, and characterized it as “a monumental endeavor.” (Here too, homosexuality was a central issue and the only form of sex dealt with in the Committee’s 338-page report.) But by then the battle with reaction was lost.
Heartsick at losing support for his “right to do sex research” as he always put it, and exhausted by great efforts at seeking new support, Kinsey, in failing health, died on August 25, 1956. Numerous researchers have since stepped in to continue his work, with success in a few areas, but nothing has come close to the quality and detail of Kinsey’s Male and Female volumes. These endure as standard reference works on what people did and mostly still do sexually. In particular, Kinsey’s considerations on “Interviewing” and on “Homosexual Outlet” in the Male volume, his “Psychologic Factors in Sexual Response” in the Female volume, and a unique separate essay, “Concepts of Normality and Abnormality,” are unlikely to be surpassed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith, Sexual Preference: Its Development in Men and Women, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981; Cornelia V. Christenson, Kinsey: A Biography, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971; William G. Cochran, Frederick Mosteller, John W. Tukey, and W. O. Jenkins, Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Washington: American Statistical Association, 1954; Paul H. Gebhard, ed., Youth Study, unpublished manuscript, Institute for Sex Research, Bloomington: ca. 1969; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, “Concepts of Normality and Abnormality,” in Paul H. Hoch and Joseph Zubin, eds., Psychological Development in Health and Disease, New York: Grune & Stratton, 1949; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953; Wardell B. Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, New York: Harper & Row, 1972; C. A. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix, second ed., New York: New American Library, 1987.
C. A. Tripp
German playwright and short story writer, whose The Broken Pitcher is esteemed as possibly the greatest of (and among the few) German comedies. Overshadowed by his contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kleist’s significance came to light only after his suicide at age 34, a secretive joint pact made with a terminally ill female friend.
Kleist’s slim literary production (eight plays and eight short stories) vividly and violently captures the historical break between Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic mysticism, often framed as either a psychological conflict (Das Kàthchen von Heilbronn, Penthesilea) or a political one (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Die Hermannsschlacht). A profound sense of the irrational and absurd permeates Kleist’s works. In stories such as “Michael Kohlhaas” or “Earthquake in Chile,” individuals stand powerless before arbitrary circumstances. Kleist’s remarkable heroines, who bear uncanny resemblance to Kleist psychologically, act from the unconscious, for example when “The Marquise of O” places a newspaper ad in hopes of discovering the gentleman responsible for her pregnant condition, or when Penthesilea’s confusion between love and war leads her, while intending to kiss her lover Achilles, instead to tear him from limb to limb with her bare hands and teeth.
Kleist’s personal life was as bizarre and fascinating as his works. His love of secrecy and disguise has, for example, left us with no explanation for his mysterious trip to Wurzburg in 1800 with a male friend. Debate over this trip has established a sexual dysfunction at the root of the matter, but it remains unresolved whether Kleist was a compulsive masturbator, suffered a phimosis, was bisexual or homosexual. His passionate attachment for men (unusual even for his society), the inconclusive engagement to Wilhelmine von Zenge, his periodic suicide notes, and his famous “Kant crisis” (if eternal truths cannot be conclusively established through human faculties, then reality can never have any meaning) unequivocally reveal a sensitive and dramatic nature. Kleist’s striking mental imbalance, at times penetratingly insightful but at other times oblivious to the obvious, has long obscured the debate on his homosexuality.
The only document which seems to reveal Kleist’s true feelings is a letter, dated January 7, 1805, to his friend Ernst von Pfuel: “You reawakened in my heart the age of the Greeks, I could have slept with you, you sweet youth; thus did my entire soul embrace you. Often I looked upon your beautiful body with truly girlish feelings whenever you waded into the lake at Thun before my eyes…. Come with me to Ansbach and let us enjoy our sweet friendship … accept my proposal. If you do not do this, then I shall feel that no one on earth loves me.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Diethelm Bruggemann, Drei Mystifikationen Heinrich von Kleists, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985; Joachim Maass, Kleist: A Biography, transl. by Ralph Manheim, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983; William C. Reeve, In Pursuit of Power, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.
Leslie K. Wright
The civilization of Korea, the “land of the morning calm,” cannot be understood in isolation. Having received major influences from China—including Buddhism, Confucianism, and the bureaucratic form of state organization—the peninsular nation transmitted them in turn to Japan.
Old Korea had three classes of shamans, of whom two were the Mootangs and thePaksoos. The Mootangs are women who while shamanizing always wear the outer dress of a man; they outnumber a hundred to one the Paksoos, who in turn wear the outer dress of a woman. This practice was styled “change of sex” by some anthropologists, “change of dress” by others, but it possesses some mystical significance and is far more than a simple change of garments. Modern Koreans do not know the origin of the custom, but adhere to it meticulously. It is no doubt a legacy from their ancestral home, as shown by the fact that the name for the female shaman is practically the same in all the languages of Siberia, from Mongolian to Kirgiz.
Before the introduction of Buddhism in the Kogoryu period (which began about the time of Christ) elite youth, distinguished by their beauty and known as hwarang, seem to have been involved in shamanistic practices. During the Silla period (from ca. a.d. 350 onwards) the hwarang were turned into a military elite formed by austere training. After their period of service, many became officials and landowners. Although full information is not available, they seem to have been bound by homoerotic loyalties, recalling the Sacred Band of Thebes, the Ottoman Janissaries, and the Japanese Samurai.
Even as late as the period just before the Japanese conquest in 1895, the palace rejoiced in handsome pages. The Buddhist priesthood was said to be given to pederasty.
The Korean theatre employed only men, and vestiges of homoerotic traditions survive in this context to this day. As a type of indigenous performing theatre in Korea down to 1920, the Namsadang troupes roamed the country with a program of six variety entertainments. This troupe seems to have been a homosexual commune, composed of 40 to 50 single homeless males, with some 14 senior performers and a number of novices. According to a native source, they were divided into groups of Sutdongmo (“butch”) and Yodongmo (“queen”); all newcomers had to be Yodongmo. Homosexuality was highly immoral in the view of Confucianism. In a society permeated by strong Confucian influence for hundreds of years, the Namsadang performers were probably treated simply as outcasts and ignored by the educated class, but their homosexuality was ignored by the common people whose voice they were. Hatred of the ruling class and exceedingly subtle parody were the traits in which their performances surpassed those of other varieties of folk theatre. Although independent Korea attempted to preserve the Namsadang tradition as part of its folk heritage, the performing skills are in a process of extinction, as the authentic actors are too old and few are interested in mastering their art.
The authoritarian government of the early 1980s used the AIDS crisis as an excuse to harass gay bars, and to stifle an emerging gay movement. Given insufficient information about the disease, many people in South Korean society assume all gay men are AIDS carriers. The older tendency to think of homosexuals as feminine or even transvestites persists, and the media do little to educate the public. In the words of one Korean activist: “Under the guise of protection from AIDS gays are treated like cheap bargain sale material. For the seed of gay liberation to grow again, the mass communications will have to stop their anti-gay pronouncements.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Young Ja Kim, “The Korean Namsadang,” Drama Review, 15 (1981), 9-16; Richard Rutt, “The Flower Boys of Silla (Hwarang),” Transactions of the Korean Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 38(1961), 1-66.
Ward Houser
German-Austrian psychiatrist, forensic authority, and writer of medical treatises on psychiatry and sexual psychopathology. A leading figure in the history of psychiatry, his works were the starting point for the treatment of “abnormal” sexuality by Freud and Jung, to cite only two of the major figures who came aftsr him. During his career he held professorships at Strasbourg, Graz, and Vienna—then the world’s leading medical school.
Krafft-Ebing’s speculations on homosexuality reveal the influence of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ concept of the “Urning” and Karl Westphal’s discovery of “contrary sexual feeling” (1869). He began to develop his theories on the manifestations and etiology of homosexuality in the wake of a survey of the recent publications on the subject of sexual psychopathology that he compiled in 1876. In the following year he published an article in which homosexuality was defined as “an absence of normal sexual feeling, with compensatory attraction to members of the same sex.” His proclivity for schematization on the basis of the current Darwinian notions of evolution led him to insert every known variety of abnormality of sexual attraction, gender, and constitution into a global framework that later inspired Magnus Hirschfeld’s concept of “sexual intermediate stages.” Krafft-Ebing did recognize that these subjects were basically happy with their lot and that their distress stemmed from society’s laws and attitudes. He even placed their love—as an emotion—on a footing with those of “normal feelings.” However, he clung to the belief in “degeneration” as a cause of such mental illnesses, and it was with disturbed individuals in prisons and insane asylums that, as a forensic psychiatrist, he mainly came into contact.
Krafft-Ebing’s classic work, Psychopathici sexualis (1886), focused attention on four subgroups: “psychosexual hermaphrodites” (= bisexuals), homosexuals, effeminates and “viraginites” in whom the psychic disposition corresponds to that of the opposite sex, and androgynes. His etiological scheme differentiated sharply between “inborn” and “acquired” homosexuality in line with the forensic bias of his work.
After studying Hirschfeld’s writings at the turn of the century, Krafft-Ebing revised his views in 1901, stating in an article in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen that homosexuality was not a manifestation of degeneracy or pathology, but could occur in otherwise normal subjects. But this retraction written shortly before his death could do little to alter the tremendous impression made on the public by the many editions of Psychopathia sexualis (12 in his lifetime), which was translated into other languages and achieved an authority no previous volume on abnormal sexuality had ever enjoyed; and his definition of “every expression of the sex drive that does not correspond to the purposes of nature, i.e., reproduction” as “perverse” (= unnatural, hence immoral) greatly shaped the notion of “abnormal” sexuality.
Krafft-Ebing’s legacy solidified the category of “sexual inversion” in psychiatry. It was the clinical psychiatrist and depth psychologist who now undertook the treatment and analysis of those to whom this definition attached.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Albert Caraco, Supplément à la Psychopathia sexualis, Lausanne: Edition L’âge d’homme, 1983; Klaus Pacharzina and Karin Albrecht-Désirat, “Die Last der Ärzte,” in J. Hohmann, ed., Der unterdrückte Sexus, Lollar: Achenbach, 1977, pp. 97-113.
Warren Johansson
Baltic German painter, writer, and thinker. The son of a physician who was a hereditary nobleman, Elisàr von Kupffer—or as he later called himself, Elisarion—inherited a labile constitution which he ascribed to his father’s dependence on tobacco and opium. In 1891 he went to St. Petersburg, where later he attended courses in Oriental languages at the University. He also studied in Switzerland and Bavaria and composed his first dramatic work, Die toten Götter (The Dead Gods). In the following years he wrote other plays, now and then encountering his friend Eduard von Mayer. The beginning of the homosexual emancipation movement in 1897 had a profound effect on Elisarion. Living in Berlin in the winter of 1898-99, he compiled an anthology of Lieblingsminne und Freundeshebe in der Welthteratur (Love of Comrades and Friends in World Literature), inspired by the writings of Krafft-Ebing and by the debates that followed the trial of Oscar Wilde in London. The publication of the anthology by Adolf Brand in 1900 brought the author as much rejection as approval. His uncle Hugo von Kupffer, the editor in chief of the Berliner Lokalanzeiger, tried vainly to keep it from appearing; an attempted confiscation of the book was rescinded thanks to the intervention of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Franz von Liszt, and Rudolf von Gottschall. Benedict Friedlaender later declared that Elisarion’s anthology marked a “new phase in the emancipation movement,” while Meyers Grosse Enzyklopädie stressed that for the first time since Plato Elisarion had presented “a cultural and ethical appraisal of the phenomenon of pederasty.”
In 1902 Elisarion and Eduard von Mayer moved to Florence, where they lived until the outbreak of war in 1915. Like Winckelmann, he felt the aesthetic attraction of the Mediterranean culture of Italy, and here his life’s work in painting and philosophy matured. A product of these studies is the 1908 monograph on the Renaissance painter Sodoma, perhaps the first full-length study of an artist to reflect the ideals of the homosexual movement. In 1911 the two founded in Munich the “Klaristische Verlag Akropolis”—later moved to Leipzig—whose task it was to communicate his ideas to a larger public, but in fact no one outside a narrow circle of followers ever shared them. They amounted to a “confessionless Christianity” and a comprehensive social, aesthetic, and political program that was intended to lead to a renaissance. In the same year he published the two basic works of the “claristic” movement: the Hymnen der Heiligen Burg (Hymns of the Holy Citadel) and Ein neuer Flug und eine Heilige Burg (A New Flight and a Holy Citadel).
The war obliged Elisarion to move to Muralto in Switzerland, and in 1922, following the Russian Revolution, he became a citizen of the canton of Ticino. In 1925 the companions acquired a property in Minusio on which over the years he constructed a temple that reflected his ideals. Elisarion gave this Sanctuarium a remarkable, if somewhat academic complement of frescoes that depict male friendship in idyllic-arcadian terms. Elisär von Kupffer died in Minusio in 1942, his last work—a revision of Ein neuer Flug—appearing a year later under the title Heldische Sicht und froher Glaube (Heroic Vision and Joyous Faith). Now the property of the municipality, the Sanctuarium has since his death undergone some modifications.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Ekkehard Hieronimus, Elisár von Kupffer (1872–1942), Basel: Kunsthalle, 1979.
Warren Johansson
Russian poet and short story writer. Although 1875 is usually given as the year of his birth, recent investigation has shown that Kuzmin was born in 1872 at Yaroslavl on the Volga River into a family of Old Believers. His interest in the theatre was kindled by attending operettas at nearby Saratov. In 1885 the family moved to St. Petersburg. A major influence on the young Kuzmin was the future Soviet diplomat (and homosexual) Georgii Vasil’evich Chicherin(1872-1936). Among the arts Kuzmin’s first love was music, and in August 1891 he enrolled in Rimsky-Korsakov’s composition course at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but remained for only three years out of the full seven. Even among writers of a remarkably erudite period, Kuzmin was outstanding for his knowledge of languages, and when Soviet literary policy had made it impossible for him to publish his own work, he was still able to earn a living by translating from Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, and English. The wide thematic range of his poetry and its allusion to recondite Gnostic matters also attest to the vastness of his learning.
In 1895 he accompanied his mother to Egypt, and settled in Alexandria, where he remained until early in 1896. His Alexandrian Songs reflect his real experience in the Levantine milieu, where he endured a religious crisis and a tragic love affair. Wholly independent of his contemporary Constantine Cavafy, he created his own myth of Alexandria, where refined eroticism rubbed shoulders with Gnostic mysteries. In March 1897 he left for Italy, another foreign country whose ambiance was to pervade his later work; the Italian episode of Wings is mainly autobiographical. There followed an exceedingly mysterious period of his life in which he traveled through northern Russia, searching for his familial and religious roots by living with Old Believer monastic communities in northern Russia, an episode reflected in the second part of Wings, where the young hero Vania lives with an Old Believer family.
On his return to St. Petersburg Kuzmin was in 1904 introduced by Chicherin to the circle that had formed in the penumbra of the journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art), edited by Sergei Diaghilev. This milieu he found immensely sympathetic, and to boot several of its members shared his sexual orientation. The revolution of 1905, by putting an end to Tsarist censorship, gave Russian literature its brief (and only) taste of true freedom. Kuzmin’s Wings appeared in the symbolist journal Vesy (The Scales) in November 1906, and created the great literary scandal of its day; edition after edition sold out. The same periodical also published twelve of Kuzmin’s Alexandrian Songs. In 1907, however, the authorities confiscated the little volume Three Plays, because one of the three, The Perilous Precaution, was an adroit minuet of sexual identities that poked fun at conventional morality. In 1906 Kuzmin also began his association with the theatre, whose atmosphere gave him an ideal opportunity to play roles which expressed his contradictory nature—the decadent dandy with the made-up eyes or the bearded, long-robed Old Believer. He also attended the Wednesday evening salon of the poet Viacheslav Ivanov and his second wife, Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, who was incidentally the author of the first lesbian work in Russian, Tridtsat’ tri urod-stva [Thirty-three Freaks).
The Bolshevik Revolution Kuzmin greeted with warm optimism, and during the bitter years of the civil war participated in the enterprise for translating classics of world literature which Gorky and Lunacharsky had created to keep the literary intelligentsia from literally starving. During the NEP period he was still able to publish, but the themes and the style of his writing were so alien to the Soviet scene that Leon Trotsky in Literature and Revolution dubbed him an “internal émigré.” As late as 1927 he was able to place a few poems in various periodicals, but after that lapsed into silence. In 1928 he gave his last public reading, a touching occasion marked by the invasion of a throng of Leningrad homosexuals many of whom showered him with flowers during the ovation that followed. By 1929 Kuzmin was reduced to scraping together a living by translations, turning into Russian an enormous set of Western classics, Shakespeare above all. All this work was lost during the Stalinist terror when much of the Kuzmin archive was destroyed. He himself escaped execution only by dying of pneumonia in a Leningrad hospital on March 1, 1936.
After his death, Kuzmin’s status was that of a non-person, because he had been a homosexual, and not a “closet case,” but openly and defiantly gay. In fact, the word gay even in its primary meaning would have fitted Kuzmin perfectly. Although homosexual fiction was by then appearing in Germany, for a Russia that had not escaped the yoke of Tsarist censorship until the October Manifesto of 1905, the shock value of Wings—essentially a frank defense of the homosexual way of life—was tremendous. He even dared to present homosexuality as a liberating force of the personality. Wings gave the journalists of his day endless matter for debate, parody, and innuendo. Homosexuality remained a major component of Kuzmin’s poetry and fiction, and even slips into his theatre, in which the motif of male dyad endangered by a female interloper occurs with obsessive frequency, even if rarely with a tragic denouement. Kuzmin also belonged to a group of homosexuals at the heart of the Russian cultural scene of his day, among them Konstantin Andreevich Somov ¡1869-1939), a leading Russian painter of the period, who did a fine portrait of the writer. Dismissed by official criticism in the Soviet Union as an example of “bourgeois decadence,” Kuzmin awaits rediscovery and appreciation in the homeland whose literature he magnificently enriched.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Mikhail Kuzmin, Selected Prose eP Poetry, edited and translated by Michael Green, Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980.
Warren Johansson