ENTANGLEMENTS OF SEX AND POLITICS
The life of Richard Schultz traverses the 20th century and the different phases of gay history in Germany. Born in 1889 in a small town in Mecklenburg, the son of a third-generation shoemaker, Schultz decided not to follow his father’s craft but to work in what is now called the hospitality industry. He served an apprenticeship as a waiter in restaurants in Lübeck and Hamburg, and, at the age of 17, travelled to Britain, where he secured a job at the chic hotel Claridge’s in London. From this point on, he led a somewhat peripatetic existence, working in hotels in Paris, the south of France, Vienna, and then back in England, before being offered a position at a hotel in Khartoum, in the Sudan (which also gave him a welcome chance to travel in Egypt). By 1914 he had a job lined up in St Petersburg, but the outbreak of war forced him to settle in Berlin, where he remained for the rest of his life. With great luck, he escaped the horrors of the First World War, despite being mobilized for service. He found employment at the grand Bristol Hotel on Unter den Linden and moved up the ranks until he was chief of staff of the service workers, a position he retained until Allied bombing destroyed the hotel in 1942.
Schultz seems to have had his first homosexual love affair – a happy relationship with a fellow waiter – by the time he moved to Berlin. Once there, he began frequenting the salon of Adolf Brand, a writer who, though married, was one of the leaders of the homosexual emancipation movement. Unlike Magnus Hirschfeld, who theorized about homosexuals as a ‘third sex’, Brand looked to antiquity for a model of virile comradeship. He welcomed all comers to his receptions, which provided a forum for discussion and social gatherings. Brand’s drawing room was one of many meeting places for homosexuals in the fast-paced world of Weimar Berlin, albeit significantly quieter than the cabarets made famous in Christopher Isherwood’s novellas, and the bars and sex-clubs that attracted homosexual clients from near and far.
Schultz’s support for homosexual emancipation was discreet. He was not an intellectual and did not contribute to the burgeoning body of literature on homosexuality. Yet he met and befriended many other homosexuals, both prominent figures and the office workers, businessmen, sailors and soldiers who also joined Brand’s gatherings. Schultz’s friends – men and women – took part in the recreational pursuits popular at the time, such as going for holidays to the island of Rügen, where they romped naked in the Baltic sun. Through these gatherings Schultz met men with whom he had affairs, like the blond Rudi Wolf, to whom he gracefully gave his blessings when Wolf eventually fell in love with a woman. Although homosexual acts were illegal under the German penal code – and despite the grave economic and political problems that beset the country – Schultz and many others lived agreeable lives during this period.
Soon after Hitler came to power, Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research was ransacked, and Nazis searched Brand’s house on five occasions. The government closed homosexual clubs and forbade the publication of homosexual journals and magazines. The Nazis also rooted out homosexuals in their own midst; the best known was Ernst Röhm, chief-of-staff of the paramilitary SA. (His private life provided an additional reason for his political enemies to target him, even if homosexuality was not ultimately the motive for his murder.) The regime arrested and imprisoned thousands of men and women with same-sex inclinations, many of whom perished in concentration camps and extermination camps.
In the violently homophobic climate that characterized even the early years of Nazi rule, it was impossible for Brand’s well-known gay gatherings to continue, but some of the habitués began to meet in Schultz’s apartment in Charlottenburg. Right through until the end of the war, Schultz welcomed homosexual friends in his home, though he took great precautions. He consigned a bust of Antinous and several paintings featuring young men to a female neighbour, and hung a heavy curtain over his door to muffle sounds. His visitors confined their discussions to literary matters that would not compromise their security – a necessary measure at a time when Hitler’s forces were rounding up homosexuals and some, including one of Schultz’s close friends, were driven to suicide.
On the eve of the Second World War, Schultz was experiencing his most significant romantic relationship: a partnership with Hans Spann, a tall, blonde, handsome man fifteen years his junior, whom he had met in 1938. Even after the fighting began, Schultz, Spann and their friends met regularly, enjoyed themselves at the beach and had their pictures taken by a friend who was a professional photographer. One image captures the couple elegantly dressed in suits and ties: they wear similar rings, and the salt-and-pepper-haired Schultz holds a book. Spann, almost inevitably, was sent to the front. He and Schultz continued to exchange letters, in which they spoke of their companions, their own friendship and, as far as censorship permitted, the war and their hope for its end. In 1944, however, one of Schultz’s letters was returned to him with a handwritten message on the envelope that Spann had ‘died for the greater Germany’.
Grieving for his friend, out of work after the destruction of the Bristol, and living through the bombardment of Berlin – where, miraculously, his own apartment escaped damage – Schultz hid several Jews in his lodgings and helped others in the war’s final months. After the end of the war, Schultz joined the new Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands (‘League of culture for the democratic regeneration of Germany’), a club that attracted many homosexuals. He became a leading force, organizing dinners and other activities. He also hosted gay soirées at his apartment – his jours fixes, as he called them – which continued until the mid-1970s. In rooms decorated with antiques, paintings, sculptures (including the Antinous, which he recovered) and bibelots, every few weeks Schultz served a buffet dinner to some twenty visitors, who would then hear a talk on a homosexual topic. Schultz himself gave a presentation on Brand; the translator of Gide’s works into German discussed the French gay writer; and others talked about James Baldwin and Jean Genet. Late in life, Schultz made friends with a young student, Hans Haug, with whom he travelled around Germany and to whom he recounted his life.
Schultz died at the age of 88, in 1977. His was an ordinary life rendered extraordinary by the circumstances in which he lived. Surviving Nazism and the Second World War was itself an achievement for a homosexual man like Schultz. He had managed to enjoy love and friendship during a time of great troubles, and he contributed in a quiet way to the gay culture of Berlin and to its revival after the catastrophes of the Hitler period.
Federico García Lorca 1898–1936
On 19 August 1936 a small band of men, supporters of the rebellion that would eventually bring Francisco Franco to power, burst into a house in Granada, shouting that they were looking for the maricón (‘queer’). They ‘arrested’ Federico García Lorca, tortured him and dragged him away. In an Andalusian olive grove, the ringleader later bragged, he shot two bullets ‘into the queer’s arse’ and then killed Lorca along with three other men.
The fascists had many reasons for wanting to assassinate Lorca. He was Spain’s leading modernist poet, fêted in New York, Havana and Buenos Aires, as well as in Madrid. He directed an experimental theatre troupe set up by the Republican government, consorted with socialists, and had signed pro-Republican petitions. Rumours had reached Granada that he had just finished a play that focused on the sexual frustrations of the local elite. Rebels considered Lorca’s family too sympathetic to workers and peasants, and too little pious in their Catholicism. Insurgents had already killed his brother-in-law, the left-wing mayor of Granada. Lorca’s homosexuality – and especially his cruising for the sturdy young peasants who excited his libido – caused outrage among his enemies.
After Lorca’s murder, his remains were thrown into a common grave, but he quickly became a Republican hero and martyr. Some activists and critics, as well as family members, remained uncomfortable with Lorca’s sexual proclivities, however, and for decades Spanish commentators concealed both his sexual orientation and the homosexual motifs in his works. When the newly discovered Sonnets of Dark Love, inflected by Lorca’s love for a male companion, were first published in the 1980s, the adjective oscuro (‘dark’ or ‘secret’) – a codeword for his sexual desires – was deleted. Only through the research of scholars such as Ian Gibson, Paul Binding and Angel Sahuquillo have readers become fully aware of Lorca’s gay milieu and the many allusions to gay love secreted in his esoteric verse. Yet for Gibson, ‘if he had not been a maricón, he would not have been the poet that he is’: the ‘search for erotic plenitude … is the central theme of all of his work.’
Gibson identifies a gay network in early 20th-century Spain, which centred on Lorca and his fellow poets Luis Cernuda, Emilio Prados and the Nobel Prize-winner Vicente Aleixandre, and also extended to visiting Americans. Their professional and personal links helped to define that particularly vibrant moment in Spain’s cultural history before the Falange took power.
In his early poems, Lorca hinted at ‘romantic secrets’, and his choice of subjects, such as Narcissus and Verlaine, speaks of a gay sensibility. An ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’, written in New York, swings from an almost violent denunciation of effeminate ‘queers’ (using a litany of homophobic synonyms current in the Hispanophone world) to an eroticized appreciation of American workers and a guarded celebration of Whitman’s creed of comradeship. Stocky peasants, ambiguous angels, St Sebastian, the exotically alluring black men of Harlem, and the sexy gypsies of Andalusia all appear in Lorca’s poems. Binding has even discovered coded references to oral and anal intercourse buried in his work. Lorca’s plays – of which Blood Wedding (1932), Yerma (1934) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936) are among the most important in the modern repertoire – often touch on issues of sex: the dilemma of a woman torn between a respectable fiancé and her true love; a household of women damned to chaste solitude; a barren wife; a spinster.
Lorca himself did not lack for sexual encounters either in Spain or overseas, sleeping with a sailor, a mestizo and the scion of a bourgeois family in Havana, and possibly having orgiastic encounters with African-Americans in New York. He often had the misfortune to fall in love with men unable fully to reciprocate his passion. His first great love was Salvador Dalí, a fellow student at a university college in Madrid where Lorca took up residence in 1919. The budding Andalusian poet and the Catalan painter became close friends, bound by a vision of a new culture that would break the bounds of Spanish traditionalism – linked, according to Lorca, by ‘love, friendship and [enigmatically] swordplay’. Photos from a beach in Cadaqués in 1925 show the intimacy that existed between these two bright and privileged friends, and Lorca soon published a beautiful ode about his companion. To what extent theirs was a physical relationship will remain unclear. An ageing Dalí recounted that he had on several occasions refused anal intercourse with Lorca, as he found the exercise painful and was not himself gay; he characterized their love as ‘tragic’, because he could not entirely satisfy Lorca’s desires. After a while the two drifted apart. Lorca was hurt when in 1929 Dalí collaborated with Luis Buñuel, a mutual friend with homophobic tendencies, on the film Un Chien Andalou, which Lorca considered an insult to him (‘the Andalusian dog’) and his reprobate urges. They remained in contact, however, even after Dalí married his irrepressible muse, Gala.
Lorca’s second obsession was the handsome Emilio Aladrén, a sculptor and classmate of Dalí’s whom Lorca’s friends (and biographers) found superficial, egotistical and manipulative. Lorca was smitten, writing febrile letters to him when they were separated, and suffered when Aladrén announced his intention to marry an Englishwoman. Ill fate also beset Lorca’s relationship with Eduardo Rodríguez Valdivieso, an 18-year-old whom he met at a carnival in Granada in 1932. A bored bank clerk, Valdivieso loved literature and seems to have loved Lorca, who posted touching letters from Madrid. Distance worked against the romance, and Lorca had moved on in the meantime.
The ‘three Rs’ was what Lorca called his final great love, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún. Though not predominantly homosexual, Rapún fell for the charming writer. The 22-year-old son of a worker, he was an engineering student and an activist in the socialist party. In 1933 he had volunteered to be a secretary-accountant for La Barraca, Lorca’s theatre company. Handsome, athletic, engaging and intelligent, he seemed the poet’s ideal, and remained a faithful friend. Rapún was so devastated by Lorca’s murder that he volunteered as a soldier for the Republicans; exactly a year after Lorca’s death, Rapún fell to Francoist gunners.
Lorca wrote his last completed work, the Sonnets of Dark Love (1936), for Rapún. Aleixandre called it ‘a prodigy of passion, enthusiasm, happiness, torment, a pure and glowing monument to love’. Lorca here proclaimed his love, yearned for letters, rejoiced in a telephone conversation, mused about sending Rapún the gift of a dove, wrote that ‘the beloved sleeps on the poet’s breast’, and described a night (so the coded words suggest) of ardent lovemaking.
Lorca also wrote a gay play, The Public (1929–30; published posthumously), only part of which survives. He informed a friend that the theme was ‘frankly homosexual’. The experimental and virtually unperformable work calls for the liberation of all sorts of love, challenging the verities of bourgeois beliefs as well as theatrical conventions.
Only a couple of generations after Lorca’s death, gay life flourishes in Spain, from the bars of Barcelona to the beaches of the Balearic islands. Pedro Almodóvar’s films dramatized the sexual liberation of the post-Franco movida. Under a socialist government, Spain – land of the Inquisition, bullfights and Franco – became, in 2005, one of the first countries to legalize gay marriage and adoption.
Gay men in mid-20th-century America found many opportunities for intimacy and pleasure, but they also faced the possibility of harassment and arrest, even when they tried to remain discreet. One such man who fell foul of persecution was Newton Arvin.
Born in Indiana to a middle-class family, Arvin studied English at Harvard. Soon after graduation, he found a job at Smith College, a small, elite women’s institution located in rural Northampton, Massachusetts. Arvin may have been part of the ‘lost generation’ but, unlike those who fled overseas, he remained immune to Europe’s temptations and in 1922 settled down to what promised to be a quiet life in a leafy college town. At regular intervals he produced well-received books, such as works on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, as well as articles for newspapers and magazines. He earned a reputation as one of America’s leading literary critics and scholars, and moved up the ranks to a professorship and election to the American Institute of Arts and Letters. In academic New England his leftist political views, which he occasionally voiced in political debates, provoked little of the opposition that they might have sparked elsewhere.
The local community knew of and accepted the close friendships and ‘Boston marriages’ that existed between women on the Smith College staff, though male homosexuals found less of a welcome. While Arvin did have several affairs with male colleagues, he avoided associating with those who were obviously homosexual. Like many at that time, he married, having started a relationship with a former student in the 1930s; after a couple of years of happiness the couple drifted apart, then became antagonistic and finally divorced in 1940. Arvin’s inability to accept his sexuality frequently cast him into severe depression, and more than once he attempted suicide. Therapy in private clinics and public hospitals, including electroshock treatment, failed to provide either a ‘cure’ or to help him accept his desires.
Arvin nevertheless found a congenial refuge where he enjoyed academic stimulation and easier contact with other sexual dissidents. This was Yaddo, a 55-room mansion set in 400 acres in Saratoga Springs, New York. It had been built by Spencer and Katrina Trask, who had made a fortune on the stock market. After the deaths of their children, the Trasks turned their property into a ‘residence and retreat’ for writers and scholars, welcoming some of the most celebrated names in American cultural life. From the late 1920s onwards, Arvin benefitted from regular sojourns. Sexuality posed no problem for the administrators and fellows at Yaddo: among those with whom Arvin mixed were a number of famous homosexual figures, including the writer Carson McCullers, who became a close friend.
It was at Yaddo that the 46-year-old Arvin met the 21-year-old wonder boy of American writing, Truman Capote. The two fell in love, enjoying a happy sexual and emotional relationship, though Capote was far more flamboyant than Arvin. Capote began to spend every other weekend at Smith. A feature on Yaddo in Life magazine, which pictured the strikingly handsome Capote sprawled seductively on a couch next to a photo of Arvin making his bed, caused minor embarrassment to the professor. Their affair gradually metamorphosed into a lifelong friendship sustained by letters and mutual interests. Arvin resumed a quieter life but, now in his fifties, became bolder in his sexual explorations. He had several affairs with young lecturers at Smith, episodically ventured into the saunas and bars of New York, and began cruising for sexual partners at the bus station and public toilets of Springfield, a small city near his college. This was dangerous behaviour at a time when homosexual acts remained illegal and police entrapment was common. Even the occasional soirées at which Arvin and his friends passed around their collection of physique pictorial magazines and beefcake photographs were risky.
In 1960 a Smith alumna (the sister of the conservative political commentator William F. Buckley) published a pamphlet denouncing ‘liberals’ at her old college. In the meantime, the American Postmaster-General had begun a campaign to crack down on ‘smut’: American law made the sending or receiving of ‘obscene’ materials by post illegal. Concerned about radicalism at Smith, and probably having tapped Arvin’s mail, police raided his house and those of seven other men in Northampton, including several fellow Smith lecturers. They found compromising photographs and mail-order picture magazines, as well as Arvin’s diary, which recounted his sexual adventures. Although the raid was illegal, since the police lacked a warrant, they arrested Arvin. Under pressure, he revealed the names of two other homosexual men, whom police also arrested. His world shattered as the 60-year-old professor was taken to jail. Pleading guilty to the transport of obscene materials and to being a ‘lewd and lascivious person’ (another offence on the statute books), he received a one-year suspended sentence, a hefty fine and a long probation.
The arrests of Arvin and the other lecturers threw the college into turmoil. Smith decided to grant Arvin early retirement, on pay, though it rescinded the contracts for his untenured colleagues. Yaddo, after much debate, did not renew his membership on their board. Many distinguished academics and personal friends (including Capote) sent Arvin messages of support and money. After voluntarily spending several months in a mental hospital, he returned to Northampton with embarrassment and some discomfort, and began to rebuild his life by writing a book on the poet Longfellow. Just after the book was published, in 1963, Arvin died of pancreatic cancer.
The law courts later overturned the convictions of Arvin’s ‘accomplices’ (one of them a former lover), but his life provides ample illustration of the ways in which social opprobrium, misguided medical treatments and the law threatened a homosexual, even a reclusive scholar, with self-destructive mental agitation, public shame and arrest.
In his will Capote established a prize for literary criticism in Arvin’s memory. In 2002 Smith College set up the Newton Arvin Prize in American Studies, and a Fund for the Study of Civil Liberties and Freedom of Expression, in honour of Arvin’s colleagues who had suffered dismissal.
Lilly Wust 1913–2006 and Felice Schragenheim 1922–1944
In the early 1990s Lilly Wust, an aged woman living alone in a small flat in Berlin, opened the contents of two trunks of letters, diaries and photographs to a Viennese feminist, Erica Fischer. The book that resulted, Aimée and Jaguar, brought to light the extraordinary story of a lesbian love affair between a model German woman of the Third Reich and an outlawed Jew. The book led to an exhibition, and inspired a television documentary and a film. ‘I gave my story to the world,’ said Wust, and her papers now rest in the archives of Berlin’s Jewish Museum.
In 1942 Lilly Wust was, to all appearances, an upstanding German citizen. She came from a middle-class Berlin background. She was married to a soldier, then stationed outside the capital, who was vocally supportive of the Nazis, even if he was not a member of the National Socialist Workers’ Party. By giving birth to four Aryan children Wust earned a motherhood medal from Hitler’s government. She had kept her fine figure and sported an alluring head of reddish hair around her pretty face. She lived a comfortable life looking after her young family. Yet all was not as it seemed. Günther Wust kept a mistress, with whom he would soon live, and Lilly enjoyed dalliances with several male lovers. The arrival of a young woman in her household introduced her to still other pleasures.
Inge Wolf, an assistant in a bookshop, landed on Lilly’s doorstep to work as a domestic help, sent there as part of her national service. The two became friends, and Inge gradually introduced Lilly to her circle of women friends. Among them was Felice Schragenheim, a feisty, quick-witted and elegantly attractive young woman turned out in tailored clothes, the daughter of two dentists who had died in her childhood. Felice enchanted Lilly, with her sparkle and her kindness, visiting her in hospital, large bunches of roses in her hand, when Lilly underwent minor surgery. Soon Felice seduced her, and the two fell madly in love (to the slight consternation of Inge, who had been romantically linked to Felice). Felice visited Lilly more and more regularly, making friends with her children and presenting her to her other friends. Sometimes Felice disappeared for hours or even days for purposes that she did not disclose to Lilly; she did disclose, however – partly in response to a passing anti-Semitic comment from Lilly – that she was a Jew.
German anti-Semitism was entering its most virulent and murderous phase when the two women met. Jews were barred from their professions and forbidden to own telephones, take public transport, buy newspapers or sit on park benches other than those designated for their use. Their identity papers were marked with a ‘J’, and they were forced to wear a yellow star. Their property was confiscated, and ultimately most would be rounded up and deported to extermination camps.
Felice had earlier made plans to escape from Germany: she had relatives in America, England and Palestine, and Felice herself had obtained an entry permit to Australia. But the start of the war had made it impossible for her to get passage out. When she met Lilly, she was leading a clandestine and very dangerous existence, seeking refuge with friends, trying to safeguard her possessions, and perhaps working (it seems) for the Jewish underground during those unexplained absences. Yet the horrors of life for a Jew in Hitler’s Germany did not overwhelm the happiness that Lilly and Felice – or Aimée and Jaguar, as they called each other – shared for almost two years. They made do on the increasingly reduced rations of wartime, they danced and went for walks, they socialized with other lesbians and heterosexual friends, and they played with what they now called ‘our’ children. Lilly secured a divorce from her husband, and the two women, on what they knew as their ‘wedding day’, exchanged rings. When they were apart, even for a day, they wrote each other intensely passionate letters. On 21 August 1944 they took an excursion to the beach at the Havel river; photographs taken with a timer show them relaxing in prim bathing costumes and kissing each other on the lips.
When they returned from the idyllic outing, they found two Gestapo agents waiting in Lilly’s apartment. They arrested Felice and carried her off to a Jewish detention centre, while Lilly was subjected to lengthy interrogation. She managed to visit Felice in the detention centre, taking her parcels of food and clothing before Felice was sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. Desperate, Lilly followed her by train, using an illicit travel document, but the attempt to see her was unsuccessful. She did succeed in getting packages and letters to her, and even dared to write of her love, knowing that her letters might be read by Nazi officials: ‘Dearest, we must have hope, my sweet! … Without you I would never have known what love is, what love is capable of. How happy we were, how happy! Do you remember how I rushed to meet you each time? Do you remember how, when we were first together, I always traced your mouth with my finger? … Oh, I must love you, and only you, for eternity.’
Fate did not prove kind, and the letters from Felice stopped coming. After the liberation of Berlin, Lilly learned that Felice had been marched, along with thousands of others, to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where she no doubt perished.
Lilly Wust lived for another six decades. Soon after the war, she tried to commit suicide. She had a one-year marriage with a brutish man, in whose shop she worked. Living in hermit-like near poverty, she then took jobs as a cleaner. She frequented the tiny Jewish community in Berlin, in honour of her friend (and one of her sons migrated to Israel). Obsessively preserving her memories of Felice, every year, on 21 August, she opened her trunks to read the letters and poems that they had written to each other.