drive is responsible for the mental “horror” of the opposite sex and the physical inability to achieve an erection in “normal” situations. The homosexual drive stands in contrast to the “normal sexual” drive, but, despite its deviance from the “normal,” it is natural.
In personal letters, Kertbeny discourages Ulrichs from relying too heavily on the claim that sexual desire is inborn, arguing that such a claim might not redound to the benefit of homosexuals: “there are people with an innate bloodthirstiness…. One doesn’t let these people do whatever they want or follow their desires, and even if one doesn’t punish them for intentional acts if their constitution is proven medically, one does isolate them as much as possible and protect society from their excesses.” Kertbeny concludes that “nothing would be won if the proof of innateness were successful.”56 In his open letter, however, he does assert that nature implants the homosexual drive at birth. However, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Kertbeny’s conception of sexuality is more open to cultural influences than Ulrichs’s understanding of innate gender inversion.
Despite his wariness of arguments relying on innate desire, Kertbeny asserts that “the homosexual [der Homosexuale] is a fixed nature who, however much he strives, can never prefer a woman.”57 Any hope of convincing the homosexual to change his desire is hopeless. At the same time, Kertbeny allays the fears of the “normal sexuals” by assuring his readers that “normal sexual” desire is also fixed, so that there is no danger of sexual contagion.58 Significantly—especially in light of the Zastrow scandal that caused Ulrichs to write so prolifically in 1869—there is also no danger that Kertbeny’s homosexual will abuse children, because the male homosexual’s desire is fixed on virile men. The notion of a fixed sexuality serves a number of important political purposes for Kertbeny: homosexuals can’t be changed, heterosexuals don’t need to worry about seduction, and children are safe.
Kertbeny uses a noun to describe the sexuality as well as the sexual person, writing that “history teaches us that along with normal sexuality [Normalsexualis], homosexualism [Homosexualismus] is and was present always and everywhere among all races and climates and could never be suppressed even by the most bestial persecutions.”59 Kertbeny does acknowledge some level of cultural specificity in the forms that homosexuality takes, arguing, for instance, that homosexuals among more southerly peoples like the Greeks tend to prefer younger men, while homosexuals among more northerly peoples like the Germans are fixed on mature men.60
Kertbeny believes that the “homosexual,” with his (or her) natural, fixed sexual identity deserves the protection of the modern legal state—the kind of state, that is, that was emerging in Germany and Austria-Hungary. He praises the Napoleonic penal code for decriminalizing many sexual acts. Similarly, he extols Feuerbach’s 1813 penal code in Bavaria. For Kertbeny, the modern legal state had “no other goal than to protect rights.”61 He views homosexuality as a matter of human rights: “Human rights [Menschenrechte] begin with the human being, and the most immediate aspect of a human being is his body.”62 Like Ulrichs, Kertbeny insists upon the natural and innate nature of sexual desire in order to make a liberal claim for political rights.
As part of his liberal appeal for a modern state of law, Kertbeny takes on the religious forces that motivate the legal codes that persecute the people he describes as homosexuals. He puts religious prohibitions against homosexuality in the same category as “original sin, the devil and witchcraft,” all of which he consigns to superstition. For him, all these beliefs are merely the product of “the historical development of Judaism and Christianity.”63
Kertbeny’s vocabulary of the homosexual spread slowly at first. Herzer has uncovered some writings in Dutch that use the terms homo sexualisme, homosexualiteit, and homosexuelle verkeering in 1872. The words appear in a ten-volume German book, Scandal-Geschichten europäischer Höfe (Scandalous Stories of European Courts), translated into German by Daniel von Kaszony, one of Kertbeny’s acquaintances. Also a supporter of the Hungarian revolution, Kaszony mentions Kertbeny’s work on same-sex desire in three letters written in 1868.64 This suggests that Kertbeny’s vocabulary on sexuality enjoyed a certain currency among Hungarian nationalists.
Jonathan Ned Katz has usefully summarized the further history of the word “homosexual.” The term really took off when Gustav Jäger, a professor of zoology at the University of Stuttgart, published some of Kertbeny’s work on homosexuality in the second edition of his book Entdeckung der Seele (Discovery of the Soul) in 1880. Jäger, also known incidentally for his promotion of rational dress reform and the usage of natural animal fibers (in particular wool), appropriated Kertbeny’s vocabulary of “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” From there the term spread to other medical and sexological authors, including Krafft-Ebing. In the second edition of Psychopathia sexualis (1887) it shows up in some of the patients’ self-descriptions; Krafft-Ebing himself adopts the term in the fourth edition of 1889.65 The general public came to know the term through sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing. According to Hirschfeld, the word was in general circulation by the last decade of the nineteenth century.66
Although Kertbeny claimed medical standing and used that standing to legitimize his arguments, it is worth lingering on the political origins of the word “homosexual.” It clearly emerges out of a political demand for rights that has nothing to do with pathology or medicalization. Moreover, this demand for rights takes place at the creation of the modern nation state of Germany and the reorganization of the Habsburg Empire into the Dual Monarchy. Kertbeny’s concept of a natural, innate, fixed homosexuality that is deserving of equal rights protection in a secular liberal modern nation-state is intrinsically involved with the political developments taking place in Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Carl Westphal and the Invert
The final of the three authors who published in German on same-sex desire in 1869 is Carl Westphal, whom Foucault cites as one of the begetters of the modern homosexual in a frequently quoted passage from Histoire de la sexualité: “One must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted on the day that it was characterized—Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on ‘contrary sexual sensations’ can serve as its date of birth.”67 Foucault not only gets the year wrong, but he also cites the journal incorrectly. The article did not appear in the Archiv für Neurologie (Archives of Neurology), but actually the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (Archives for Psychiatry and Neurology), which Westphal himself cofounded and coedited.68 Foucault’s point, however, remains valid—this depiction of “contrary sexual sensations” (or “sexual inversion,” as the term was often translated) became central in the depiction of same-sex desire.
Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833–1890) was a leading figure in the medical institutions of the time. Unlike the outsiders Ulrichs and Kertbeny, Westphal was firmly entrenched in the establishment. The son of a prominent physician, he began working in 1857 for the Charité, the famous hospital that Frederick I had established in Berlin in 1710. By 1869, he was director of the Clinic for Neurology there, a post he retained for twenty years. In 1868, he founded the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, which ran until 1983, when it became the European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, under which title it still appears. Although he didn’t name sexual inversion after himself, numerous other human medical features are named after him, including the Erdinger-Westphal nucleus (in the oculomotor nerve), Erb-Westphal symptom (an anomolous reflex caused by nervous system syphilis), and Westphal’s Syndrome (an inherited form of intermittent paralysis). Even from these phenomena, one can see that Westphal was primarily interested in locating the bodily origin of mental and nervous ailments. Westphal’s position at the well-established clinic in Berlin was unassailable and his work with somatic explanations of mental illness gave him the prestige of the hard sciences in which so many advances were taking
