the civil code needs to be changed to allow for the accommodation of those who act on impulses that are beyond their control. It hints at a tentative argument for the decriminalization (or at least the reduction of the severity of the criminalization) and a medicalization of sexual love between men.49
A corollary to the notion that sexuality resides in the body as well as the mind is the belief that it is “natural.” Hössli explicitly announces that “male love is true nature, a law of nature.”50 Here it is of course worth recalling that male-male love was frequently condemned as “unnatural,” “the crime against nature.” Particularly in the eighteenth century, legal codes referred with increasing consistency to sodomy as “unnatural” or “against nature.”51 Johannes Valentin Müller’s 1796 Entwurf der gerichtlichen Arzneywissenschaft (Plan for a Forensic Medicine) refers to sodomy as “unnatural” as well.52 Common to both these legal attacks on sodomy and Ramdohr and Hössli’s defenses of Greek love is a Romantic Rousseauian belief in the goodness of nature. In his one extensive case study, Ramdohr describes the love of the two young men as natural: “The youth loved first—that was nature. He admired, he was suffered, felt, led, and eventually loved back—that also was nature.”53 Hössli reveals his implicit debt to Rousseau when he argues that the true “sinner against nature” is he who lacks sympathy, he “who has no tears for the misery of his brothers and the injustice and misdeed of his fathers and his fatherland.”54 This view of a sympathetic nature should ground all human institutions, he argues. Nature must undergird all pedagogy, laws, and religion: “it must say yes wherever we establish or remove laws or education, wherever we want to achieve a salutary goal for humanity, it must say yes to the marriages and religions everywhere where there is supposed to be a blessing or a salvation of our race.”55 Hössli specifically mentions marriage as an institution that needs rethinking in light of his conception of the naturalness of male-male love. At the end of volume 2, he remains certain that “this love had to be alive, present, grounded and completely a given in nature itself before laws, knowledge and the arts could lead, appreciate, understand, represent, teach and elevate it, could introduce into house and temple as life in the life of human nature.”56 In arguing that same-sex desire is “natural,” he is also claiming that it should be allowed to flourish.
Because Greek love is “natural” in the sense that it appears in “nature,” Hössli also considers his work “natural research” (Naturforschung).57 Hössli hopes for a scientific solution to the question of sexuality. The use of scientifically quantifiable, often medical sources for evidence is a hallmark of liberal approaches to sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hössli’s discussion of nature is complicated, however, by his use of the term in the sense of “human nature” or the “nature” or a particular person.58 In a locution that is particularly awkward to translate, he at times refers to people “being,” rather than “having,” a nature: those who love the other sex “cannot be the nature of those who do not love the other sex.”59 Discussing the linguistic structures of modern English, Judith Butler writes suggestively about the tension between the notion of “being” a gender and “having” a sexuality.60 Hössli contests this linguistic structure, asserting that people are their sexuality. He implies with this phrasing that the sexual nature of a person is identical with that person—that there is not even the distinction that exists between a person and the nature that he or she has. (Kertbeny also makes use of this rhetorical convention, asserting that “the homosexual is a fixed nature.”61) When Hössli does use language that suggests that someone has, rather than is, a sexuality, he rather consistently attributes that language to his intellectual opponents. It is critics of male love who argue that the men-loving men have “laid aside” their original nature.62 It is men who are sexually attracted to women who say things like, “I was born with my sexual love [Geschlechtsliebe].”63 Hössli asserts that such people regard their sexuality as a separate thing with which they are born, rather than as an essence that constitutes them. He continues the elision of the universal nature and the personal nature when he has such critics saying to men-loving men that male-male love “is not nature and is not your nature.”64 The focus of his word play is that nature (the universal order of the world) has room for the individual natures (essences) of men who are man-loving as well as those who are woman-loving.
As he begins to sum up his arguments near the end of his second volume, Hössli confidently asserts that the sexual aspect of human nature is not a product of arbitrary will, but rather a matter of the “individuality, the basic being, the most primal depths of the human psyche, his inmost unchangeable nature and being.”65 He is certainly moving here in the direction of what Foucault would call the “truth” of sex in modern society. For Hössli, Plato provides a prime example of someone whose sexuality completely imbues his productive nature: without Plato’s love of men, “the world would have no Plato, this fullness of mind, this splendor of the soul, this harmony of the body would be sunk in night and vice and would have given birth to the opposite of everything that it did bear.”66 Whereas many would like to disassociate the philosopher from his lived experience in order to concentrate on his transcendental truths, Hössli insists that Plato’s Greek love was no coincidence, but rather integral to his personality. Sexuality is at the nexus of the unified mind and body.
By the end of his first volume, he asserts that he has demonstrated that “there is a man-loving, purely humane, specific, male human nature” (eine männerliebende, rein menschliche, bestimmte, Männermenschennatur).67 His reference to a “specific” male human nature implies that this is not just part of the more general sexual nature of all men, but rather that a specific group of men have (or “are”) this nature. It is not the case, as in the Biblical story of Sodom, that any and every man in a community might be struck with lustful desires for another man. Only men with a specific immutable type of human nature are sexually attracted to other men, as Hössli flatly asserts: “The large and general portion [of the human population] that loves the other sex cannot be the sort [literally, ‘the nature’] that does not love the other sex, and the sort [again, literally, ‘the nature’] that loves its own sex cannot be lovers of the other sex.”68 The implication of the unchangeability of sexual nature is that there are discrete categories: men who sexually desire men are distinct from those who love women.
Hössli mocks the notion that any man could change his sexual desire for other men when he sarcastically paraphrases the position of women-loving men, who foolishly assume that “the man-lover has set aside his most original first nature and now glows in an arbitrarily adopted love, in a nature other than his own visage; in this other love his emotional being now suffers for completion, his heart burns, his eyes swim in tears, his bosom heaves, his soul gleams.” His antagonists erroneously argue that this male-male love “isn’t his nature, he’s set that [his real nature] aside, he’s arbitrarily exchanged it, his actual nature is silent, even when this other non-nature should lead him to destruction and even to death.”69 Hössli adds that the terrible discrimination that men who love other men face would prevent any man from exchanging a love for women with a love for men:
Is it thinkable that in this case a person, a man, would exchange an inborn love—in which he enjoys his life, his being, his general human destiny in honor, under the protection and recognition of the law, in the unperturbed enjoyment of external and internal human rights [Menschenrechte], with the respect of his people and of the entire human society, with the blessing of the dominant religion, with the public recognition of his life questioned by no one, so that he can act, effect, live as a man, as a person, as a spouse and as a citizen and can enjoy his being—for a notorious, forbidden, dishonorable outcast nature that is everywhere condemned and universally persecuted?70
The sentence is hard to get through, but Hössli’s point is that the civil protections given to male-female love are so powerful that it is virtually impossible to imagine male-male sexual love emerging as a frivolous lark.
It
