Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity

German scholar Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity adds to the growing literature of pre-Stonewall GLBTQ history.

Beachy‘s research reaches back to the early 1800s in his investigation of how homosexuals lived their lives even before they were scientifically or socially categorized—part of a vital reality check to the growing industry of homophobes and politicians who want to paint gay civil rights movements as a recent phenomenon. 

Gay Berlin conjures the mystique of Weimar Berlin of the 20s as a nexus for gay writers and artists wanting to participate in its renegade nightlife and its burgeoning liberated gay, lesbian, and transgender culture.

Beachy focuses on the life of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay man and sexologist who established the Institute of Sexual Science that focused on the spectrum of issues—medical, psychological, and therapeutic—as regards to sexual health. Hirschfeld became an activist in the burgeoning sexual liberation movement that ushered in the Weimar Berlin.  

By the late 1800s, Germans could still be prosecuted under Paragraph 175 that made sodomy a crime, but it was mostly invoked as a mechanism to shake down hustlers and blackmailers, rather than persecute consenting adults acting in private. Berlin police encouraged a gay red-light district that catered to gay men, in part for surveillance, to play both sides of the changing social landscape.

There were rumors of aristocratic and royal scandals, but social acceptance in a dominant heterosexual society was another story. A series of very public scandals in the late 1800s involving hustlers, crime, and gay sex, further complicated any positive homosexual rights movement. With the conspiracy of silence culturally in place, Beachy nonetheless depicts an overview of how homosexuality was appropriated, politicized, and exploited by people in power.

Meanwhile, equally contentious, are the politics within the homosexual movement itself as there were various factions at odds with each other trying to define homosexual culture and frame the movement. 

Hirschfeld’s more liberating views, from a modern perspective, still have entrenched religious and cultural aspects that can only be explained as internalized homophobia. There was no medical peer literature, for instance, that established homosexuality as being immutable and innate, but Hirschfield tried to bolster those gay-positive theories in his empirical research. 

Hirschfeld was up against views of homosexuality as reflecting everything from a crime against nature, religion, or country to merely a scandalous and diseased avocation—opinions actually that are not so far from viewpoints put forth today by homophobic entrepreneurs Scott Lively and Lou Engle, or politicians Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, who have built their careers demonizing GLBTQ people.  

Despite Hirschfield’s enlightenment about homosexuality being innate and in spite of some societal acceptance, bigotry and hate were fueled to the point that the Nazis wanted to expose, imprison, and murder gay people. When Hitler came to power, Paragraph 175 was wielded with a vengeance by the Nazis to eradicate gay men and women from Germany.   

Some of the academic historical text is admirable, but dense going; other parts, like the chapter Sex Tourism and Male Prostitution in Weimar Berlin, constitute completely revelatory social history. Beachy doesn’t blink at the sexual aspects, and his examination is framed by the larger context. He asks, “Who were these young men and boys who sold themselves for sex and why was Berlin such a magnet?”  

Just on the verge of a humanist approach regarding gay, lesbian, and transgender people, Beachy’s epilogue, however brief, begins with the brutal and tragic destruction of the Hirschfield Institute and the burning of his collection of books—a haunting testament to the surviving, immutable truths of GLBTQ lives, then and now.