has. Admittedly, Westphal cites passages from Ulrichs in which Ulrichs insists the love of urnings is of the highest and most noble order, but he does so in order to refute the claim. He believes this love is pathological to its core.
Westphal’s writings achieved a more widespread readership than either Ulrichs’s or Kertbeny’s essays. The Journal of Mental Science printed a review of the essay in 1871, using the term “inverted sexual proclivity” as a translation for conträre Sexualempfindung. Havelock Ellis became the first to use the term “sexual inversion” in English in his essay on same-sex desire of 1897. Quickly, “invert” and “inversion” came to be used as frequently as “homosexual” and “homosexuality.”
The widespread availability of Westphal’s writings has led to an overemphasis of the medical tradition in histories of sexuality, at the expense of activists such as Ulrichs or Kertbeny. Strikingly, Foucault does not discuss either Ulrichs or Kertbeny in his Histoire de la sexualité, while granting Westphal paternity to the very concept of homosexuality. It could well be that Foucault was unaware of Kertbeny’s work or unable to access it, but Westphal quotes Ulrichs extensively in his article. The absence of a direct reference to Ulrichs suggests that something larger than ignorance is at work in Foucault’s writing. Writing his introduction to the history of sexuality originally in the 1970s, Foucault has little interest in a romantic representation of nineteenth-century heroes of sexual emancipation. Despite his allusion to “the constitution of a discourse ‘in reverse,’” in which “homosexuality began to speak of itself, demanding its legitimate and ‘natural’ rights, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified,”84 an important part of Foucault’s work puts into question the validity of many claims of sexual emancipation and liberation. He is much more interested in the ways in which sexual categories are produced by and play into forces and powers that are much larger than any individual physician like Westphal or lawyer like Ulrichs or homme de lettres like Kertbeny. Instead, he focuses on the medical institutions that create modern homosexuality.
Because of Foucault’s emphasis on the power of institutions, relatively little attention was paid in the immediate wake of his work to the acts of resistance apparent in the case studies of the patients.85 As Rubin has argued, however, there was “a complicated tango of communication and publication” between “the medically credentialed sexologists, the stigmatized homosexual intellectuals, and the mostly anonymous but active members of the burgeoning queer communities.”86 Especially those patients whose sense of entitlement or lack of respect for authority allowed them to disregard the prestige of the medical establishment often picked and chose what they wanted to hear from the physicians. As grateful as they were for the attention of physicians like Krafft-Ebing, most patients wanted primarily to hear that their condition was natural and not deserving of criminality. Rare was the patient who accepted the diagnosis of mental illness.
The Birth of the Homosexual?
The purpose of comparing Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal is not to establish an exact taxonomy of the urning, the homosexual, and the invert. The language of sexuality in German at the end of the nineteenth century was far too fluid for such an endeavor. By the end of the century, the three terms were often used interchangeably.87 Texts such as Albert Moll’s Die conträre Sexualempfindung (Sexual Inversion) of 1891 and Krafft-Ebing’s Der Conträrsexuale vor dem Strafrichter (The Sexual Invert before the Judge) of 1894 seem to be typical of the period, in that they use urning, homosexual, and invert as synonyms.88 Those who did make distinctions between the terms usually constructed their own idiosyncratic ones. Comparing the three texts published in 1869 can, however, highlight the questions that were in play as sexuality was under construction.
Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal all share a number of similarities. Born within ten years of each other (between 1824 and 1833), they all lived through the revolutionary fervor of 1848 as young men and became political liberals of varying degrees of radicalism. All writing in German, they were deeply imbued in central European bourgeois culture and highly aware of the political developments of their time. While they were not all physicians, as proponents of the “medicalization” of sexuality have tended to imply, they were professionals—lawyers and men of letters, as well as doctors. Neither aristocratic nor working class, their middle-class upbringing colored their view of the world, no matter what their subsequent financial state and politics became. This shared heritage helped forge the conceptions of sexuality that they articulated and that then spread throughout the world.
The depictions of same-sex desire in Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal all possess a number of common features. The male urning, homosexual, and invert all have a fixed sexual attraction to men, while the female counterpart has a similarly fixed sexual attraction to women. All three see men who love men and women who love women as belonging to the same overarching category. Ulrichs is certain that the phenomenon can be found in all cultures and all time periods. Westphal’s somatic medical model implies as much. Kertbeny argues along similar lines at times, although, as we shall see, he does allow more room for the cultural construction of identity. For all three authors, sexual desire transcends its physical origins to affect psychology as well.
All three authors agree that the fixedness of sexual desire means that it is unlikely to spread. Both Ulrichs and Kertbeny are quite explicit that those who are not urnings or homosexuals will not change their sexuality. Thus there is no need to fear that urnings or homosexuals will seduce or otherwise recruit new members of their order. Westphal is not so explicit, but his emphasis on the physical, hereditary nature of sexual inversion implies that it is not something one could catch from a neighbor, even if it is a sickness. The authors also concur that a natural, fixed desire should not be criminalized. Ulrichs and Kertbeny, in particular, assert that their urnings and homosexuals deserve political rights and protection from interference by the state or religion. They both make arguments relying on a general notion of human rights and tend to rely on left-liberal elements of the political spectrum. Interestingly, both feel strongly the need to fight for the religious rights of urnings and homosexuals as well. While Westphal was in fact a political liberal, he does not make any explicit arguments for providing rights to his inverts, other than suggesting that medical experts are better than police at handling cases of inversion.
While not the case for Kertbeny, Ulrichs and Westphal emphasize gender inversion as the explanation for sexual attraction between members of the same sex—male urnings have female souls and male inverts have many feminine characteristics, while female urnings have male souls and female inverts have masculine characteristics. For Ulrichs, Zastrow’s way of walking and speaking are perhaps more telling than his sexual deeds. Westphal too is immediately struck by the effeminate behavior of “Ha …”, and particularly notes his peculiarly womanly voice, while leaving open the question of whether his patient is sexually active with men at all. Similarly, “N” has never been interested in feminine occupations and aspires to a traditionally masculine career.
The status of the sexual partners of the urnings and the inverts is not clear at all. Although Ulrichs does refer to an urning couple marrying each other, he seems at other times to imply that urnings are often sexually attracted to “dionings,” or men with both male souls and male bodies, rather than to other urnings. Indeed, according to Ulrichs, the sexual partner of the urning is often a soldier in financial need. Nor is Westphal particularly interested in pathologizing the women with whom “N” sleeps or the men who approach “Ha …” in the train station. In general, Westphal portrays the sexual partner of the invert as duped and defrauded. As mentioned before, Kertbeny differs from his contemporaries in this point, and does not rely too heavily on gender inversion to explain the attraction of his homosexuals for members of their own sex. For him, a whim of nature causes the male homosexual to desire men and the female homosexual to desire women. While this has less explanatory power, it does get him out of the conundrum of explaining who the partners of homosexuals are—presumably other homosexuals.
It should be clear by now that this snapshot of
