The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [24]
Berlin’s reputation as the decadent drag nightclub of the Continent attracted many foreign visitors. Some of the most vivid descriptions of Weimar Berlin and its inhabitants were penned by the writer Christopher Isherwood, who with his friends Wystan and Stephen (the poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender) traveled to Berlin in search of the sexual freedom they could not find as gay men at home in England. Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories formed the basis for the Broadway show (and later film) Cabaret. Years later, in his frank memoir, Christopher and His Kind, published in 1976, Isherwood reveals the sly artifice behind the city’s seedy reputation, the knowing wink that accompanied the perverse erotic invitation. He contrasts the ambience of his favorite gay bar, The Cosy Corner, “plain, homely and unpretentious,” with the tourist traps of West End Berlin, “dens of pseudo-vice catering to heterosexual tourists. Here screaming boys in drag and mono-cled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the hijinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe.” Wryly, Isher-wood questions whether or not Berlin’s “famous decadence” wasn’t simply a public relations ploy, “a commercial line which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris. Paris had long since cornered the straight girl—market, so what was Berlin left to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?” Like many hard-luck ladies, Berlin may have found that offering forbidden sex to strangers put food on the table. Still, the city’s winking tolerance of homosexuality and gender diversity was real, not feigned.
This tolerance was surely due in part to the efforts of Hirschfeld and his colleagues, who worked for nearly three decades to increase public and scientific understanding of homosexuality, under the auspices of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, widely acknowledged as the world’s first gay-rights organization. The committee produced the first scientific journal focusing on homosexuality and other sexual variations, the Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Stages, which published articles by all the pioneers of sexology. In 1921, Hirschfeld organized the first International Congress for Sexual Reform on a Sexological Basis, and in 1928, he organized and served as one of the first presidents of the World League for Sexual Reform. All of this activity, combined with his heavy schedule of speaking engagements, primarily to working-class audiences, bore fruit in the increasing tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality and gender variance in Weimar Germany.
Perhaps the most significant of Hirschfeld’s achievements was the founding of the Institute for Sexual Science. Researchers at the institute created the first premarital counseling service in Germany and advised young couples planning to marry on the likelihood of health problems in their children, based upon their genetic history. They studied and treated impotence and venereal disease, intersex and trans-gender conditions, all types of fetishes, and what later came to be called “paraphilias” (disorders of desire). Men who were being prosecuted under Paragraph 175 came to the institute for treatment and lived under the protection of Hirschfeld until their cases came to trial, at which time they were represented by the institute’s legal staff. The staff of the institute delivered public presentations in an auditorium decorated with busts of Darwin and the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Scholars and visitors from around the world came to the institute and carried out research in its library, which contained more than twenty thousand volumes and thirty-five thousand pictures and photographs. Many years later, Christopher Isherwood described the broad impact of the institute: “It was a place of education for the public, its lawmakers and its police.”
Hirschfeld’s great mission was the reduction of suffering through a scientific