K
KÁDÉSH
Kádesh
(pl.
kedéshim)
is a
Biblical Hebrew word that literally means "holy or consecrated one,"
and is rendered "sodomite" or more accurately "male cult
prostitute" in various translations of the scriptures. It is a key term
for understanding the Old Testament references to homosexuality. It occurs as
a common noun at least six times (Deuteronomy 23:18, I Kings 14:24, 15:12 and
22:46, H Kings 23:7, Job 36:14). It can also be restored on the basis of
textual criticism in II Kings 23:24 (- Septuagint of II Chronicles 35:19a) and
inHosea 11:12. They all ostensibly designate foreigners (non-Israelites) who
served as sacral prostitutes (hierodules) in the Kingdom of Judah and
specifically within the precincts of the first Temple (ca. 950-622 b.c.). That these men had sexual relations with other males and
not with women is proven by Hosea 4:14, which castigates the males exclusively
for "spending their manhood" in drunken orgies with hierodules, while
their wives remained at home, alone and unsatisfied, and by the reading of
Isaiah 65:3 in the Qumran manuscript: "And they (m. pl.) sucked their
phalli upon the stones." Their involvement in the Ishtar-Tammuz cult - an
obvious rival of the monotheistic Jahweh religion - is responsible for the
Biblical equation of homosexuality with idolatry and paganism and the exclusion
of the individual engaging in homosexual activity from the "congregation
of Israel," which persists in the fundamentalist condemnation of all
homosexual expression to this day.
The
Cultural Setting. To understand that the condemnation of the kadesh was a cultic prohibition
and the self-definition of a religious community, not a moral judgment on
other acts taking place outside the sphere of the sacral, it is necessary to
see the kadesh or male hierodule (with the kedishah as his female counterpart)
in his historical and cultural setting, as a part of Northwest Semitic religion
on the territory of the Kingdom of Judah down to the reforms of King Josiah
(622 b.c.). The commandments
forbidding male homosexual activity on pain of death in the Holiness Code
(Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13) were added only in the Persian period (first half
of the fifth pre-Christian century specifically). Critical scholarship generally
dates the Holiness Code to the beginning of that period, but Martin Noth in
his major commentary Leviticus (Philadelphia, 1965) ascribes this part of Leviticus to a
time slightly after 520 b.c.,
when the
new and reformed Jewish religion set about throwing off all the associations
believed responsible for the catastrophe of 586, the destruction of the first
Temple and the exile of the population of Judah to Babylon. The proof of the
later origin of the verses indicated above is the prophetic reading ["haphtarah") for the portion of the
Torah including Leviticus 18, namely Ezekiel 22:10-11, a comparison of which
shows that Ezekiel was alluding to a text which in the final years of the First
Commonwealth began with Leviticus 18:7 and ended with 18:20, as if to say
"You have committed every sexual sin in the book." While there are
those who maintain that the Levitical references condemn all male homosexual
acts, the character of the Holiness Code suggests that it had the sacral aspect
of the sexual liaison in mind.
Derrick Sherwin Bailey, in his Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London, 1955), argued that
the kedeshTm "served the female
worshipper" and so would translate the word as "male cult
prostitute" but not "sodomite." However, it is unlikely that
women were admitted to the Temple, then or later, and all parallels from the
religious life of antiquity, from Cyprus to Mesopotamia, involve male
homosexual connection. Designations for the male prostitute in Hebrew and
Phoenician are "dog" {kelebh)
and
"puppy" (gar),
notably
in Deuteronomy 23:17, where the kelebh
is set in
parallel to the zonah
"(female)
prostitute." In Isaiah 3:4 the word ta'alullm is rendered effeminati by St. Jerome; it means
"males who are sexually abused by others," = German Schandbuben. Another likely reference
is Isaiah 2:6, the closing hemistich of which Jerome translated etpueris alienis adhaeserunt, while the Aramaic
pseudo-Jonathan Targum euphemistically renders the text "And they walked
in the ways of the gentiles," in which the Hebrew verb has an Arabic
cognate that means "they loved tenderly." InHosea 11:12a slight emendation,
together with comparison again of the Arabic meaning of the verb in the first
half of the parallel, yields the meaning "And Judah is still untrue to
God/but faithful to kedeshlm."
How could
male prostitutes fit into the scheme of Northwest Semitic - specifically
Canaanite - religion during the First Commonwealth? Foreign as the notion is
to the modem religious consciousness, the worship of Ishtar and Tammuz was a
fertility cult in which union with the hierodule consecrated to the service of
the goddess was thought to have magical functions and powers. Such hierodules
could be either male or female, and the singular kadesh in I Kings 14:24 is to be
taken as a collective, meaning "hierodules as a professional caste"
who were "in the land," practicing their foreign rites. The males may
even have been eunuchs, though the context of Job 36:14 "Their soul dieth
in youth, and their life at the hierodules' age" suggests that they were
adolescent prostitutes no different from the bar or street hustler of today.
Furthermore, place names containing the element Kadesh, such as the one in Genesis
14:7, which also was called Enmishpat
"Spring
of Judgment" indicate the locales of shrines whose personnel had both
erotic and mantic functions. This is independently confirmed by the glosses on
the Septuagint renderings of kadesh
and kedeshah in Deuteronomy 23:18, and
by the fourth-century work of Firmicus Maternus, De enoieprofanamm religionum, which ridicules the pretensions
of the effeminate pagan priests to foretell the future. This aspect of the professional
activity of the kedeshlm
parallels
the homosexual associations of the shaman in primitive cultures and of the
medium in the occult underworld of modem times.
Aftermath and Parallels. The taboo on homosexuality
in Western civilization is thus a legacy of the religious rivalries and
conflicts in Ancient Israel, and of the formation of the Jewish community
after the Babylonian captivity as a client-ethnos of the Persian monarchy - the
"evil empire" against which the Greeks fought their heroic wars.
Female and male temple prostitution is known in a wide range of civilizations
in the ancient world from Cyprus to India. Further comparative study is needed
to clarify the place of the institution within the overall conspectus of
same-sex relations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Michael Astour, "Tamar the Hierodule," Journal of Biblical
Literature, 85 (1966), 185-96; Tom Horner, Jonathan Loved David:
Homosexuality in Bibhcal Times, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978, chapters 5-6.
Warren Johansson
Kadesh Barnea
This
Biblical place first appears in Genesis 14:7, where it has the alternate name
En Mishpat ("spring of judgment"), implying that it was a cultic
shrine renowned both for a theophany and as the site of an oracular spring. The
following discussion is necessarily tentative and speculative, but the material
cited in it has been so largely ignored in the standard reference works
published by the religious establishment that it needs to be better known, if
only as a starting point for further investigation. The authors whose opinions
are summarized below enjoy international reputations, and their interpretations
cannot simply be dismissed as the tendentious construction of a prejudiced
amateur.
Modem archeologists identify the locale as En Qdes, first discovered by
Rowlands in 1842, an extensive oasis with many springs lying some 80 kilometers
south-southwest of Beersheba. The first component of the name, Kadesh, clearly
means that the shrine housed a retinue of hierodules, male and female, who had
both erotic and mantic functions. Virtually every standard religious reference
work conceals this elementary fact by explaining the name simply as
"holy," which is indeed the primary meaning of the Semitic root, but
in the sense of cult personnel consecrated to the worship of Ishtar, the
goddess of love. Very likely because of these pagan reminiscences, theTargumim
(the Aramaic translations of the Old Testament), suppress the name Kadesh
Barnea, replacing it with Rekem or Rekem Gea. As for the second activity of the
kedeshfm, the role of homosexuals as
shamans and seers is too well documented to need further comment.
Site of the Revelation. It was the historian
Eduard Meyer (1855-1930) who first emphasized the importance of Kadesh Barnea
as the site of the primitive revelation to Moses in his book Die Isiaeliten undihreNachbarstdmme (1906), and later in the
second half of the first volume of his Geschichte
des Alteitums (1909). This locale cannot be identical with the Mount Sinai
of today, since the latter has no trace of the volcanic activity which Exodus
19:16-18 unmistakably describes as the prelude to the giving of the Law. The
primitive account in Exodus showed Moses leading the Israelites from bondage in
Egypt to Kadesh Barnea in northwestern Arabia with its volcanic districts (the
so-called harras).
Elsewhere
in the sacred narrative Jahweh reveals himself as a fire god, like the Greek
Hephaistus and the Roman Vulcan, in particular in a late interpolation into
the legend of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19:24, where he rains brimstone
and fire on the twin cities - that is to say, causes a volcanic eruption rather
than the earthquake alone possible in Palestine proper which the earlier
version describes in Genesis 19:21 and 25.
The Levites. Kadesh Barnea also belongs
to the tribe, or more correctly the brotherhood of Levi, which figures in the
patriarchal era as a neighbor of the tribe of Simeon in the account of the raid
on Shechem in Genesis 34 and 49:5-7. Moses as a member of the tribe of Levi
receives from Jahweh at Kadesh Bamea the revelation of the Law and the
mysteries of the priesthood. In later centuries the Levites evolved from
awarrior into a priestly caste with a covert tradition of male bonding that may
have included homosexual activity, because Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 315-403)
could report in his Panarion
(1,2, 13,
written between 375 and 377) that a Barbelognostic sect called the Levites had
no intercourse with women, but only with one another. One is inclined to see
analogies with the medieval Templars persecuted by the French crown with
accusations of sodomy whose truthfulness remains moot. It is also relevant
that Sigmund Freud, in his last major work, Moses and Monotheism (1938), speculating upon
Meyer's findings and also upon a book by the Old Testament scholar Ernst Sellin
(1876-1946), Mose
und seine Bedeutung fur die
israelitisch-jüdische
Religionsgeschichte (1922), claimed that there
was a secret tradition stemming from the primal revelation at Kadesh that was
transmitted within the inner circles of the priesthood to later centuries,
when Judaism assumed its historic form. Layman that he was in Biblical matters,
Freud was still guided by a remarkable intuition, so that the question remains
open for students of the Old Testament.
God and Moses. In addition, the
philologist Franz Dornseiff (1888-1960), in an article rather daringly
published in Zeitschzift
fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft in 1935, hence in Nazi Germany, likened the Levites of
Exodus 32:26-29 to the SS of his own time and the slaughter of the three
thousand "enemies of Jahweh" to the German St. Bartholomew's Eve, the
Rohm purge of June 30, 1934. He further equated the dialogue of Moses with
Jahweh in Exodus 33:11 with the intercourse of the legendary Cretan legislator
Minos with Zeus mentioned in Homer's Odyssey 19,179-80, a comparison that had
already been drawn in antiquity by Clement of Alexandria in his Stromata, II, 5. Dornseiff also
interpreted the curious passage in Exodus 33:20-24, which caused so much merriment
to Victorian skeptics because Jahweh tells Moses: "Then I will take away
mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts," a the euphemistic account of
a liaison in which God is the erastes
and Moses
the eiomenos, thus as a parallel to
other ancient myths in which sexual union with the god or goddess is the
medium of revelation. The verb "to see" would have the same meaning
as in the account of homosexual incest in Genesis 9:22. The Zohar, the classical repository
of Kabbalistic lore (written in Christian Spain between 1268 and 1290),
ascribes to Moses a love affair with the Shechinah, the divine presence
(conceived as feminine), a theme which may be a later heterosexualizing reflex
of the primitive tradition.
Conclusions. All these considerations
point to the existence in the early centuries of Israel's history (from the Landnahme beginning about 1300 b.c. to the end of the First Commonwealth in 586 b.c.) of a homoerotic and even pederastic tradition (with the eros paidagogikos) in the warrior and the
priestly castes, not too different from the analogous phenomena in ancient
Greece and other cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Its traces could not be
wholly expunged from the older narratives even by the strong Zoroastrian
influence in the fifth century, when Ezra the Scribe and the men of the Great
Assembly, in formulating the laws of normative Judaism, suppressed these customs
and institutionalized a homophobic tradition that became the common property
of the Abrahamic religions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Franz Dornseiff, "Antikes zum Alten Testament. 2. Exodus," Zeitschrift für die alttestamenthche Wissenschaft, new series, 12 (1935), 153-71; Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, New York: Knopf, 1939; Eduard Meyer, Die Israehten und ihre Nachbarstämme, Halle am Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1906, pp. 60-82;
idem, Geschichte des Altertums. 1:2. Die ältesten geschichtlichen Völker und Kulturen bis zum
sechzehnten Jahrhundert, second ed., Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1909,
pp. 376-83; Edwin M. Yamauchi, "Cultic Prostitution: A Case Study
in Cultural Diffusion," Orient and Occident: Essays presented to Cyrus H. Gordon on
the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, Kevelaer: Verlag Butzon & Bercker,
1973, pp. 213-22.
Warren Johansson
Kaliardä
Kaliardä is the most common term
for Modern Greek homosexual argot, specifically the argot used by the "passive"
homosexual (the kinaidhos
or, pejoratively,
the poustis), but not by his "active"
sexual partner, the kolombards.
Synonyms
of Kaliardä include Kaliardi,
Kahardo, Tsinavota, Liardo, Doura Liarda, Latinika ("Latin"), Vathia Latinika ("Deep Latin"), Etrouska ("Estruscan"), Loubinistika, and Frangoloubinistika. The argot may also be
divided into a "common" Kaliardä and a much more esoteric Kaliardä,
Doura Liarda (also "Deep Latin" or "Etruscan"), the latter
known only to a select few. The language was first studied by the folklorist Elias Petropoulos in his book Kaliardá: An Etymological Dictionary of Greek Homosexual
Slang (1971).
For this at first privately printed dictionary Petropoulos served a
seven-month prison term in 1972. The etymology of the term Kaliardá is to be derived,
according to Petropoulos, from the French word gaillard; Gordon M. Messing has suggested,
however, that the term may derive from a common Romany term meaning
"Gypsy."
The great flexibility of the Greek language, the facility with which foreign
words are assimilated and compounds formed, as well as the conscious wordplay
carried on by the gay Greek while speaking the argot, explain in part why Kaliardá is a rich conglomerate of
several languages. Besides words deriving directly from Modern Greek and
phonetically transformed, many English, French, Italian and Turkish words are
employed, as well as terms borrowed from Romany. A Kaliardá compound can indeed be an
alloy of two or three roots from two or three different languages. Sometimes
foreign-sounding endings are attached to a Greek (or foreign) root-word.
Onomatopoeias are also common. Among the grammatical curiosities of the argot
is the fact that nearly all nouns and adjectives are used in the feminine form.
As opposed to other Greek argots (such as underworld slang) which grammatically
are Modern Greek but with slang terms inserted, Kaliardá is nearly a language in
itself: only a few Greek words are necessary, along with two particles required
in the construction of verbal tenses. Articles are generally not used in Kaliardá where they would be in
Greek. Kaliardá nicknames, proverbs, curses, and place-names also exist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Elias
Petropoulos,
Kaliardá:
An
Etymological Dictionary of Greek Homosexual Slang, 4th ed., Athens: Nefeli,
1984.
John Taylor
Kampmann, Christian (1939-1988)
Danish
novelist. At the age of twenty-one he fled the stifling atmosphere of his
family and went to Paris to study French, at the same time seeking to come to
terms with his homosexuality. In 1973 he published Visse hensyn (Certain Considerations)
the first in a series of four novels exploring social changes in Denmark from
the 1950s to the 1970s through the lens of five children (one of them gay) in a
well-to-do Rungsted family. The other novels in the quartet are Faste forhold (Firm Relationship, 1974),
Rene Linier (Straight Lines, 1975),
and Andre nader (Other Ways, 1975). With Fomemmelser (Feelings, 1977) he
initiated an autobiographical sequence, showing how he first tried to go with
women and even married, but later had to admit that he was gay; his growing
self-understanding led him into the Gay Liberation Front. This novel was
followed by Videre
trods alt (Onwards in Spite of All, 1979) and I glimt (In a Flash, 1980).
For the last thirteen years of his life Kampmann lived with a fellow writer,
Jens Michael Schau. Their relationship was stormy, characterized by insecurity
on both sides; Schau was plagued with chronic depression. On September 12,1988,
at their retreat on the island of Laeso, Schau beat Kampmann to death only
hours before the premiere of Schau's Danish television drama, Perhaps Next Month. The play dealt with a
bisexual married man who was infected with the AIDS virus by his friend.
Stephen Wayne Foster
Kantorowicz, Ernst (1895-1963)
German-American
historian. Scion of a Prussian family of liquor producers, Kantorowicz served
as an intelligence officer on the Turkish front in World War i. Returning to Germany, he became active in the Freikorps, a
rightist paramilitary organization that fought the left before he joined the
elitist Stefan George circle. Under its auspices his first masterpiece, Frederick the Second [1927], conceived in the grand
manner of monumental history as recommended by Friedrich Nietzsche, presented
not only the facts but the mythical elements of the medieval emperor's
personality and times. Although sharply criticized for being almost erotically
engaged with his nearly superhuman subject, Kantorowicz vindicated himself
with the supplementary volume of 1931 that showed his thorough mastery of the
sources. The mystical and nationalistic fervor that enlivens some pages of the
biography appealed to the National Socialists, despite Kantorowicz's Jewish
origins.
After serving briefly as a professor of history at Frankfurt am Main, Ernst
Kantorowicz fled the Nazis, going first to Oxford and then to the United
States. He taught at Berkeley from 1939 to 1951, where he fitted into the gay
scene, notably befriending the poet Robert Duncan and one of Duncan's many
lovers, Werner Vordtriede, a fellow ex-member of the Stefan George circle. One
of the few brave enough to refuse to sign the loyalty oath required of all
employees in the state of California as a result of the McCarthyite agitation,
he was invited (like the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who also refused) to
join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. As a homosexual immigrant
he might, of course, have been deported.
After the war, Kantorowicz welcomed a fellow German gay medievalist Theodor
Mommsen, Jr., grandson of the most famous German classical historian and nephew
of the sociologist Max Weber and of the classical philologist Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorf f. Having taught during the war at Groton, Mommsen came
to Princeton University and unselfishly contributed to Kantorowicz' second masterpiece.
Composed at Princeton, The
King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), peerlessly commands
a vast range of disciplines from law to art history. Like their colleague in
French Maurice Coindreau, who translated Faulkner and Hemingway, Kantorowicz
and Mommsen did what they could to counter the homophobia and discrimination
that still routinely resulted in the expulsion of undergraduate and graduate
students, as well as the firing or refusal to grant promotion or tenure to
suspected gay teachers at Princeton, but they had to be discreet. Parting sadly
from his colleague the gay art historian A. M. Friend, Mommsen left for
Cornell University, where he joined the most distinguished professor in the
history department, the gay M. L. W. Laistner. In 1958 Mommsen committed
suicide.
Kantorowicz was succeeded at the Institute for Advanced Study, which sheltered
so many brilliant exiles and emigres, by the grandson of the composer
Mendelsohn, Felix Gilbert, whose autobiography in 1988 splendidly memorialized
his close friends Kantorowicz and especially Mommsen. Gilbert's distant cousin
Clara née Mendelsohn had been the wife of Karl Friedrich Otto
Westphal (1833--1890), the author of the first, epoch-making psychiatric article
on sexual inversion (1869).
In his later work Kantorowicz showed how the strict philological training that
he had received in Europe could be combined with an interdisciplinary approach
to shed light not only on the past but on the present as well. Combining
precision and scope, his work might well guide today's gay scholars, who are
seeking to emerge from advocacy and provincialism to a fuller understanding
of their infinitely ramified subject.
William A. Percy
Kerouac, Jack (1922-1969)
American
novelist. Born to a working-class French-Canadian family in Lowell,
Massachusetts, Kerouac entered Columbia University on a football scholarship
in 1941. His early friendships on Morningside Heights with William Burroughs
and Allen Ginsberg nourished his leanings toward experimental literature.
Kerouac's first published novel, however, the sprawling The Town and the City (1950), was couched in a
somewhat elegiac mode deriving from Thomas Wolfe. Then the writer entered a
footloose period that took him to Mexico, Tangier, France, and San Francisco.
He forged a buddy relationship with the goofy but charismatic Neal Cassady,
who in turn was loved by Ginsberg.
Through the influence of oriental literature, jazz, and a liberal infusion of
mind-altering drugs, Kerouac formed an ideal of literary spontaneity: one
should write as quickly as possibly and revisions should be eschewed as
reducing the freshness. Revised or not, his first major work, On the Road (1957) records his wanderings,
his friends, and his aesthetic ideals. Under different names, the characters
reappear in such novels as The
Subterraneans (1958), Dharma
Bums (1958),
and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). However, some
critics believe the early work Visions
of Cody (written in 1951-52) is his masterpiece.
In the Eisenhower years the media focused upon Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs,
and their friends as something new, dubbing them "the beat
generation," heralds of the full-fledged counterculture that was to
entrance millions a few years later. Kerouac, however, never completely fit the
mold, and in his later years he even became an ally of William Buckley's
conservative National
Review. Kerouac also stood apart from his two major confreres -
in.public estimation at least - as the purely heterosexual balance to his two
gay associates, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Accumulating evidence, however, shows
that Kerouac's own homosexual experience was more than casual, though it
usually occurred while he was (conveniently for later excuses) high or
otherwise non compos. In contrast with his
icono-clasm in other spheres, sexually he clung to an almost stereotypical
straight image. The one great love of his life was surely Neal Cassady, his
straight buddy, and being unable to express his feelings, he gradually sank into
alcoholism and despair. Despite major flaws in his writing, Kerouac nonetheless
succeeded in capturing the spirit of an America that was on the move, and he
may even have succeeded in shifting its course somewhat.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, lack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac, New York: Penguin, 1979;
Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, New York: Grove Press,
1983.
Wayne R. Dynes
Kertbeny, Károly Maria (Karl Maria Benkert; 1824-1882)
German-Hungarian
writer, translator, and journalist. He bore the surname Benkert until 1847;
then the police of his native city of Vienna authorized him to use the
Hungarian noble name of his family as his sole name. Kertbeny is considered the
inventor of the words homosexuality
and heterosexuahty. The draft of a private
letter to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs of May 6, 1868 contains for the first time the
expressions homosexual
and heterosexual.
From 1869
to 1875 Kertbeny lived in Berlin, and here in 1869 he wrote two pamphlets that
were published anonymously, demanding freedom from penal sanctions for
homosexual men in Prussia and the Prussian-dominated North German
Confederation. They
were entitled 143 des Pieussischen Strafgesetzbuchs und seine Aufrechterhaltung
als 152 des Entwurfs eines Strafgesetzbuchs für den
Norddeutschen Bund (Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code and its Maintenance
as Paragraph 152 of the Draft of a Penal Code for the North German
Confederation) and Das
Gemeinschädliche des 143 des Preussischen Strafgesetzbuches ... (The Social Harm Caused by
Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code ...).
Here for the first time the word Homosexualität
is found
as a substitute for the designation Urningthum
that
Ulrichs had introduced in 1864. Instead of Urninge Kertbeny used the word Homosexualisten¡ instead of Urninden
(lesbians),
HomosexuaHstinnen.
The book
by the professor of zoology and anthropology Gustav Jaeger (1832-1917) of
Stuttgart contains parts of a text that Kertbeny had written on the sexual
instinct, in which the expression Heterosexuahtät
occurs
for the first time. A continuation of this text, which Jaeger had at first
thought too offensive, he published only in 1900 in Hirschf eld's Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen without mentioning
Kertbeny's name. Jaeger designated the author only as "Dr. M.," a
pseudonym that probably contributed to the oft-repeated but erroneous belief
that Kertbeny was "a Hungarian doctor." A bibliography of his works
printed in a doctoral dissertation at the University of Szeged in 1936 shows
that he never received a doctorate in any subject and wrote nothing on
medicine or the natural sciences.
Kertbeny's arguments for the emancipation of the homosexuals correspond
roughly to those employed by Ulrichs, but his chief emphasis lies less on the
assertion that homosexuality is natural and inborn than on the demand that the
modern constitutional state extend to homosexuals its principle of non-interference
in the private life of its citizens. That is to say, instead of focusing on the
claim of exclusive homosexuals to be free of legal hindrances, he asserted the
right of all human beings to engage in homosexual activity on the basis of the
liberal doctrine that the state itself has no right to interfere in such a
private matter as sexual behavior. In this respect he continued the line of
reasoning that had begun with the criminal law reformers of the eighteenth century
and was further elaborated by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill.
Kertbeny repeatedly claimed that he himself was a Normalsexualer, hence not homosexual.
However, there is no proof of that assertion, or for the hypothesis of his
homosexuality or bisexuality. The collection of Kertbeny's manuscripts in the
Hungarian National Library in Budapest does contain evidence for Kertbeny's
authorship of the aforementioned texts, so that alongside Heinrich Hoessli and
Ulrichs he ranks as one of the most important advocates of homosexual
emancipation in the nineteenth century.
Kertbeny died in Budapest in 1882, supposedly in consequence of the late stages
of a syphilitic infection.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
J.-C Feray, "Une histoire critique du mot homosexualité," Arcadie (1981), 325: 11-21, 326:
115-24, 327: 171-81, 328: 246-58; Manfred Herzer, "Kertbeny and the Nameless Love," Journal of Homosexuality, 12 (1985), 1-25; idem, "Ein Brief von Kertbeny in Hannover an Ulrichs in Wuzburg," Capri, 1 (1987), 25-^5.
Manfred Herzer
Keynes, John Maynard (1883-1946)
British
economist. A polymath, Keynes cultivated many interests, from book
collecting to probability theory. His real importance, however, stems from the
epistemic break he achieved with the classical theory of economics, changing
the landscape of that discipline for all time. Keynes was no ivory-tower
theorist, and the thirty-year boom in Western industrial countries (1945-75)
has been called the Age of Keynes.
Bom into an academic family in Cambridge, Maynard Keynes' parents carefully
groomed him to be a member of the upper echelon of Britain's elite. After attending
Eton, where he won many prizes, it was a foregone conclusion that he should
attend King's College, Cambridge. There he blended effortlessly into the
idealistic atmosphere of the "higher sodomy," which attained its most
rarif ied form in the secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles, to which
he was almost immediately elected. In the Apostles he met his lifelong friends
Ly tton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. Believing himself ugly, Keynes tended to be
shy in the presence of the undergraduates he admired. In 1908, however, he
began a serious affair with the painter Duncan Grant, whom he later said to be
the only person in whom he found a truly satisfying combination of beauty and
intelligence.
After leaving Cambridge, Keynes launched his career in the India Office in
London, where he made many useful professional contacts. He also joined the
nascent Bloomsbury group, participating with relish in its merry-go-round of
intellectual, social, and sexual contacts. In 1908, however, he obtained a
lecturership in economics at King's College, and the courses he gave there were
the foundation of his later writings in the field. As editor of the Economic Journal he actively promoted new
trends in the discipline outside of Cambridge. Yet he did not turn immediately
to the core of the subject, as he spent a number of years writing a challenging
Treatise on Probability, which was published in
1921.
The outbreak of World War I caught Keynes and his Bloomsbury friends, ensconced
in their own corners of Edwardian comfort, initially unawares. Although most
his associates became conscientious objectors, Keynes elected to enter the
Treasury where, despite the chronic disapproval of the Prime Minister, David
Lloyd George, he worked wonders in managing the wartime economy. During this
period the homosexual members of Bloomsbury (Keynes included) found their
supply of eligible young men cut off, and began to engage in flirtations and
even liaisons with women. After the end of the war Keynes spent a frustrating
period as an adviser at the Paris peace conference, trying to limit voracious
Allied demands for reparations from defeated Germany. Returning to London, he
set down his pungent reflections on the event in what became his most widely read
book, The Economic
Consequences of the Peace (1919), which eroded the resolve of the Allies to enforce
the Treaty of Versailles, at least in its financial provisions.
In 1925 Keynes, now famous, married the noted ballerina Lydia Lopokova. He
became an adviser to government and business, consolidating his practical
knowledge of economic affairs. These experiences contributed to his great book,
General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money (1936). He held that money was not only a medium of exchange
but also a store of value. Believing that unregulated capitalism had proved to
be its own worst enemy, he sought to explore ways whereby state intervention
could stimulate productive capacity, while forestalling anarchic effects. By
"fine tuning" the economy, the state could ward off unemployment and
the noxious effects of downturns in business cycles. Because of the
stubbornness of traditional forces, Keynes' ideas were largely ignored during
the great Depression, which they might have alleviated. Their more general
utilization after World War II has been credited with a major role in the
extraordinary prosperity of that period, though the full extent of this effect
remains uncertain. Economic difficulties after 1975 subjected Keynsian views,
which had become orthodoxy, to contemporary reassessment.
In 1940 Keynes again became an adviser to the Treasury. Through taxation
policies he sought to limit the ravages of inflation in wartime Britain. In
1944 he was leader of the British delegation at the Bretton Woods Conference in
Washington, DC, which set the terms for the emerging economic structure of the
postwar world. He also coordinated the Lend Lease program, which was vital to
the Allied war effort. In 1942 Keynes was raised to the peerage. Returning from
the United States in April 1946, he was near collapse, and died at his home in
Sussex on Easter Sunday, April 12, 1946.
Keynes' family background and elite education prepared him for a leading role
in England's ruling class which, after some permutations, he duly obtained. Yet
he participated equally in the genteel adversary cultures of the Cambridge
Apostles andBloomsbury. Surprisingly, in the decades after the conviction of
Oscar Wilde, his numerous affairs with young men never caused the slightest legal
or even social trouble. This charmed Ufe can be explained only by his combination of extreme
personal brilliance, family and professional connections, and remarkable
self-confidence. Although Keynes married he never had children. The economic
historian Joseph Schumpeter has noted that his economic theory, which
concentrated on short-term effects, was compatible with a mentality that had
given no "hostages to fortune" through offspring.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Charles H. Hession, John Maynard Keynes: A Personal Biography, New York: Macmillan, 1984; Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920,
New York:
Viking, 1983.
Wayne R. Dynes
Kinsey, Alfred C. (1894-1956)
American
entomologist and sex researcher. When Kinsey died at the age of sixty-two,
"he was one of the most widely known scientists of this century, a household
name in the United States and a familiar figure in the rest of the civilized
world - Kinsey's two landmark volumes, Sexual
Behavior in theHuman Male (1948) and Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female (1953) raised one of the most violent and widespread storms
since Darwin, not only in the scientific community but among the public at
large" (Pomeroy). No doubt part of the uproar derived from Kinsey's plain,
straight-out way of reporting on sex and sexual variations. Loud disapproval
was registered by moralists, not only by priests and preachers, but also by
psychiatrists, clinicians of many stripes, parts of the legal profession, and
still others who for various reasons chose to defend the mores; often they
seemed to feel their provinces had been invaded with contradictory, possibly
destabilizing information.
To many, the Kinsey revelations were alarming not only because of the
surprisingly high figures on premarital, extramarital and particularly on
homosexual sex, but also because of the auspices of the work. From this
conservative professor in a respected midwestern University came countless
alarming sexual facts and surprises - all obtained with direct backing from Indiana
University, the National Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the
list of close consultants read like a cross-section of American men of science.
Intrinsic Value of the
Kinsey Research. Of course, the substance of the Kinsey Research lay
elsewhere than in what seemed sensational. Then, as now, its great value was
the establishment of reliable baseline data. In the past it had been easy
enough for the prudish and uninformed to warn of dire consequences from sex,
even from masturbation. But such a judgment was suddenly made untenable by the
realization that masturbation is practiced by at least 95 percent of males
(with no indication of blindness or depleted male virility). Likewise, it had
been easy to attribute homosexuality to various flaws in nature or to some
iliness when it was thought rare; but it was quite another matter to account
for its occurrence in over a third (37 percent) of males, or for the fact that
fully 50 percent of adult males admit having been sexually attracted at least
sometimes to other males, or that 10 percent of married males in their twenties
make overt homosexual contacts after
being
married, and so on.
Could these and other "Kinsey figures" have significantly changed in
the intervening years as a result of the sexual revolution and other social
forces? Some certainly have. The average age-at-first-intercourse is clearly
down from age 17 where it once was, just as the amount of premarital
intercourse is decidedly higher than it was in Kinsey's time. The frequency of
homosexuality, which Kinsey found to be stable for five generations, has
probably remained so. At least, judging from several subsequent studies (e.g.,
Gebhard; Bell), nothing indicates it has either increased or decreased.
Kinsey's Background. The marked originality of
Kinsey's work, his easy readiness to avoid conventional concepts, and to
examine every sexual event on its own merits frequently raise the double
question of how Kinsey came to sex research, and then arrived at such a fresh
start. In 1938 Indiana University instituted its first marriage course, and
Kinsey was elected to teach it. When his students asked far-ranging questions
about sex, he would try to answer them, or look them up in the existing
literature - literature he found appalling by its general lack of evidence and
rigor. He quietly decided to collect his own data. He began to interview
people, to ask basic questions about their sex lives, and to polish and greatly
expand his questions. Out of both generosity and wanting to extend his own
knowledge of "the reality" as he used to call it, he did a good deal
of private counseling of students and of married couples from his course
(conducting some 280 of these personal conferences during the spring semester
of 1939 alone).
Bom into a rigidly religious family, Kinsey had a father who refused to allow
his family to ride to church on Sunday, even with the minister. The father
also taught Sunday school and demanded a triple Sabbath for the whole family -
Sunday school, church, and evening prayer meeting. Part of this moralism
stayed with young Kinsey until at least his first year in college where, as he
later recalled with amusement, a classmate once came to him and confessed he
was masturbating excessively, as he thought, and had to tell someone. Kinsey
took his friend back to the dormitory and knelt down beside him to pray for God
to help the boy stop.
Although Kinsey soon rejected religion, in other respects it seemed for some
time as if he would continue on a conventional path. As a young zoologist he
accepted an appointment at Indiana University as an assistant professor, got
married, fathered four children, and pursued a career of teaching, writing,
and fieldwork in entomology. In fact, a theme never to reverse itself was
Kinsey's lifelong fascination with nature, and with its effect on his
interpersonal relations.
As a boy he was entranced by the out-of-doors, by going it alone on long hikes
over the countryside, everywhere noticing the plants and animals, and particularly
the differences and similarities between individuals of the same species. He
was fascinated, too, by the sorts of people he found on every side - farmers
and country folk from a generally less educated background than his own, but
whose permission he of ten needed to cross their land or to camp out.
Everywhere he learned to meet strangers very different from himself, to tune
into their views and attitudes, to establish rapport quickly, and to gain their
cooperation in whatever he was doing.
Field Methodology. These abilities were
greatly in use and perfected during 20 years of "bug hunting" as he
called it - hiking thousands of miles in search of gall-wasps in the 48 states,
in Guatemala, and especially in the mountainous back-regions of Mexico. He
quickly overcame the initial suspicion of the Indians, getting them to scour
the hillsides searching for oaktreeswiththe galls on their leaves that
contained the tiny wasps, bringing them back by the hundreds to his tent. From
such experiences he formulated certain cardinal principles that were to stand
him in good stead in sex research. "Try never to move forward or back,
especially in dangerous situations, be they dealing with the mafia,
interviewing prostitutes, or getting 'round the nervousness of ordinary
people." (Moving forward can seem intrusive, moving backwards can look
defensive or rejecting.) "Be considerate and thoughtful, never selfish
inyourown pursuit; let people know what you want, then allow them to bring it
to you" - and many others.
From his boyhood hiking days, and from his many new experiences in dealing with
the sorts of anxieties people feel about sex, Kinsey learned whole new modes of
dealing with it and of making people comfortable. He could almost instantly
put strangers at ease and win their confidence with his kindly, never judgmental
quality, and even his simple language. As he always reminded his college-bred
interviewers: "The lower-level individual is never ill or injured, though
he may be sick or hurt. He does not wish to do something, though he wants to do
it. He does not perceive, though he sees. He is not acquainted with a person,
though he may know him. . . ." Everywhere in his approach it seemed that
even plainness and politeness were powerful stuff, part of his respect for each
person's makeup and right to be who they are, regardless of their current
position or predicament. He insisted that anyone generous enough to give a
history deserves to be treated as a friend or guest, "The tottering old
man who is a victim of his first penal conviction appreciates an interviewer's
solicitation about his health and that he is provided with tobacco, candy, or
other things the institution allows one who has sufficient funds. The inmate
in a woman's penal institution particularly appreciates those courtesies which
a male would extend to a woman of his own social rank, in his own home."
Sex Research. Early on he realized a
need for a far broader knowledge of what sex is like in special and diverse
contexts; he wanted to see behind the curtains of privacy that people use to
disguise or to hide entirely what they do from others, and sometimes from
themselves. By July 1939, Kinsey had collected some 350 sex histories, and from
this material he realized he needed more information on homosexuality. From a
student whose history he had taken he heard of "someone in Chicago who
could introduce him to homosexuals and show him how they live." Acting on
this tip with a trial visit to meet that contact in Chicago, he soon began weekly
trips. (He would leave Bloomington after his last class on Friday, drive the
more than 200 miles to Chicago, work through the weekend, and drive back in
time for his 8:30 class Monday morning.)
Within two months he had collected scores of homosexual histories, and was
astonished at the countless variations he had seen for himself on every side.
(The Chicago groups he met did, indeed, constitute valuable urban samples,
although he was later amused at how naive he had been about "the
homosexual" and the miles he had traveled to find the sorts of histories
which, had he known more at the time, he could have had in abundance within
walking distance of his Bloomington office.)
On other occasions, too, he traveled far and wide to find and explore particular
groups: prisoners and prostitutes and paragons of virtue from religious sects.
Nothing he saw ever diverted or defeated him, for as a colleague put it,
"he was always able to look through the ugliness to something lovely
beyond." Whenever he ran into anything unique, he immediately tried to
investigate it. Once when a man said he could come to orgasm in ten seconds
from a flaccid start, the man was asked if he could demonstrate this (he could
and did, on the spot). Deep in rural Kansas, Kinsey searched out a community
where, remarkably, all the women were easily able
to reach orgasm in ordinary intercourse. (It turned out that their prevailing
style of pacifying small children involved a particular patting and stroking :
technique that soon induced sleep; unbeknownst to the mothers it was first and
accidentally bringing the babies to orgasm, thereby leaving traces in the
sexual substrate which made them "easy responders" for life.) Other
special cases (tabulated separately to keep from biasing the averages)
involved such things as the sexual responses of people who had had brain
surgery, others who for religious reasons had struggled all their lives against
any sexual expression, members
of nudist colonies, and groups of paraplegics.
Besides many investigations of plain and special people, Kinsey pursued
literally dozens of subprojects. He and his coworkers made an extensive study
of the differences between the sexes that so affect their psychology and
compatibility. (A central finding was that male sexuality tends to be genitally
focused, while females are more "peripheral" i.e., tend to place
more value on the stimulations, the moods, and the ambience around sex than on genital
stimulations.) There were separate studies of fourteen mammalian species,
extensive studies of human neurology and physiology, as well as ancient and
modem cross-cultural surveys, including a detailed investigation of sex
practices in pre-Columbian civilizations, and another to trace the shifts in
Japanese mores for 400 years. Legal experts were brought in to help trace the
relationship between a man's education and how he is treated by the courts. And
a bevy of translators worked to bring into English the first accurate record of
important classical literature, and so on and on.
The Fate of the Kinsey Research. But nothing was more
important to the fate of the Kinsey Research than was homosexuality. For while
it was only one of the six basic forms of sex examined, and represented only a
fraction of the research effort, nothing disturbed the critics more, nor
brought them to such a fever pitch of hate as did the homosexual findings. As
A. H. Hobbs (associate professor of sociology, University of Pennsylvania)
charged, "There must be something wrong with Kinsey's statistics, which
[coupled with] the prestige of the Rockefeller Foundation, give unwarranted
weight to implications that homosexuality is normal, and that premarital
relations might be a good thing." Others insisted "homosexuality just
can't be that prevalent" - and, anyway, "by talking about it you
encourage it."
Similar sentiments came from Congressmen, from a handful of anthropologists
and psychoanalysts, and more stridently from Union Theological Seminary's Henry
Van Dusen (also on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation). The hue and cry
cast aspersions on the Kinsey data, causing the National Research Council to
request the ASA (American Statistical Association) to examine the work in
detail. Kinsey was well prepared for this challenge but not for the delay it entailed,
during which his financial backing began to evaporate. Only years later came
the ASA's report; it rated Kinsey's research as the best ever done in the
field, and characterized it as "a monumental endeavor." (Here too,
homosexuality was a central issue and the only form of sex dealt with in the
Committee's 338-page report.) But by then the battle with reaction was lost.
Heartsick at losing support for his "right to do sex research" as he
always put it, and exhausted by great efforts at seeking new support, Kinsey,
in failing health, died on August 25, 1956. Numerous researchers have since
stepped in to continue his work, with success in a few areas, but nothing has
come close to the quality and detail of Kinsey's Male and Female volumes. These
endure as standard reference works on what people did and mostly still do
sexually. In particular, Kinsey's considerations on "Interviewing"
and on "Homosexual Outlet" in the Male volume, his "Psychologic
Factors in Sexual Response" in the Female volume, and a unique separate
essay, "Concepts of Normality and Abnormality," are unlikely to be
surpassed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith, Sexual Preference: Its
Development in Men and Women, Blooming ton: Indiana University Press, 1981; Cornelia V.
Christenson, Kinsey: A Biography, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1971; William G. Cochran, Frederick Mosteller, John W. Tukey,
and W. O. Jenkins, Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report on Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male, Washington: American Statistical Association, 1954; Paid H.
Gebhard, ed., Youth Study, unpublished manuscript, Institute for Sex Research,
Bloomington: ca. 1969; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E.
Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia: Saunders,
1948; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H.
Gebhard, "Concepts of Normality and Abnormality," in Paul H. Hoch
and Joseph Zubin, eds., Psychological Development in Health and Disease, New York: Grune &
Stratton, 1949; Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul
H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Philadelphia: Saunders,
1953; Wardell B. Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research, New York: Harper &.
Row, 1972; C. A. Tripp, The Homosexual Matrix, second ed., New York: New
American Library, 1987.
C. A. Tripp
Kleist, Heinrich von (1777-1811)
German
playwright and short story writer, whose The Broken Pitcher is esteemed as possibly
the greatest of (and among the few) German comedies. Overshadowed by his
contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kleist's significance came to light
only after his suicide at age 34, a secretive joint pact made with a terminally
ill female friend.
Kleist's slim literary production (eight plays and eight short stories) vividly
and violently captures the historical break between Enlightenment rationalism
and Romantic mysticism, often framed as either a psychological conflict {Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, Penthesilea) or a political one (Prinz Priedrich von Homburg, Die
Hermannsschlacht). A profound sense of the irrational and absurd permeates
Kleist's works. In stories such as "Michael Kohlhaas" or
"Earthquake in Chile," individuals stand powerless before arbitrary
circumstances. Kleist's remarkable heroines, who bear uncanny resemblance to
Kleist psychologically, act from the unconscious, for example when "The
Marquise of O" places a newspaper ad in hopes of discovering the
gentleman responsible for her pregnant condition, or when Penthesilea's
confusion between love and war leads her, while intending to kiss her lover
Achilles, instead to tear him from limb to limb with her bare hands and teeth.
Kleist's personal life was as bizarre and fascinating as his works. His love
of secrecy and disguise has, for example, left us with no explanation for his
mysterious trip to Würzburg in 1800 with a male friend. Debate over this trip has established
a sexual dysfunction at the root of the matter, but it remains unresolved
whether Kleist was a compulsive masturbator, suffered a phimosis, was bisexual
or homosexual. His passionate attachment for men (unusual even for his
society), the inconclusive engagement to Wilhelmine von Zenge, his periodic
suicide notes, and his famous "Kant crisis" (if eternal truths cannot
be conclusively established through human faculties, then reality can never
have any meaning) unequivocally reveal a sensitive and dramatic nature.
Kleist's striking mental imbalance, at times penetratingly insightful but at
other times oblivious to the obvious, has long obscured the debate on his
homosexuality.
The only document which seems to reveal Kleist's true feelings is a letter,
dated January 7, 1805, to his friend Ernst von Pfuel: "You reawakened in
my heart the age of the Greeks, I could have slept with you, you sweet youth;
thus did my entire soul embrace you. Often I looked upon your beautiful body
with truly girlish
feelings
whenever you waded into the lake at Thun before my eyes. . . . Come with me to
Ansbach and let us enjoy our sweet friendship ...
accept my proposal. If you do not do this, then I shall feel that no one on
earth loves me."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Diethelm Bruggemann, Drei Mystifikationen Heinrich von Kleists, Frankfurt am Main: Peter
Lang, 1985; Joachim Maass, Kleist: A Biography, transl. by Ralph Manheim,
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983; William C. Reeve, In Pursuit of Power, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1987.
Leslie K. Wright
Korea
The
civilization of Korea, the "land of the morning calm," cannot be
understood in isolation. Having received major influences from China -
including Buddhism, Confucianism, and the bureaucratic form of state
organization - the peninsular nation transmitted them in turn to Japan.
Old Korea had three classes of shamans, of whom two were the Moo tangs and the
Paksoos. The Moot angs are women who while shamanizing always wear the outer
dress of a man; they outnumber a hundred to one the Paksoos, who in turn wear
the outer dress of a woman. This practice was styled "change of sex"
by some anthropologists, "change of dress" by others, but it
possesses some mystical significance and is far more than a simple change of
garments. Modern Koreans do not know the origin of the custom, but adhere to it
meticulously. It is no doubt a legacy from their ancestral home, as shown by
the fact that the name for the female shaman is practically the same in all the
languages of Siberia, from Mongolian to Kirgiz.
Before the introduction of Buddhism in the Kogoryu period (which began about
the time of Christ) elite youth, distinguished by their beauty and known as hwarang, seem to have been involved
in shamanistic practices. During the Silla period (from ca. a.d. 350 onwards) the hwarang were turned into a
military elite formed by austere training. After their period of service, many
became officials and landowners. Although full information is not available,
they seem to have been bound by homoerotic loyalties, recalling the Sacred
Band of Thebes, the Ottoman Janissaries, and the Japanese Samurai.
Even as late as the period just before the Japanese conquest in 1895, the
palace rejoiced in handsome pages. The Buddhist priesthood was said to be given
to pederasty.
The Korean theatre employed only men, and vestiges of homoerotic traditions
survive in this contetext to this day. As a type of indigenous performing
theatre in Korea down to 1920, the Namsadang troupes roamed the country
with a program of six variety entertainments. This troupe seems to have been a
homosexual commune, composed of 40 to 50 single homeless males, with some 14
senior performers and a number of novices. According to a native source, they
were divided into groups of Sutdongmo
("butch")
and Yodongmo ("queen"); all
newcomers had to be Yodongmo.
Homosexuality
was highly immoral in the view of Confucianism. In a society permeated by
strong Confucian influence for hundreds of years, the Namsadang performers were probably
treated simply as outcasts and ignored by the educated class, but their
homosexuality was ignored by the common people whose voice they were. Hatred of
the ruling class and exceedingly subtle parody were the traits in which their
performances surpassed those of other varieties of folk theatre. Although independent
Korea attempted to preserve the Namsadang
tradition
as part of its folk heritage, the performing skills are in a process of
extinction, as the authentic actors are too old and few are interested in
mastering their art.
The authoritarian government of the early 1980s used the AIDS crisis as an
excuse to harass gay bars, and to stifle an emerging gay movement. Given
insufficient information about the disease, many people in South Korean
society assume all gay men are AIDS carriers. The older tendency to think of
homosexuals as feminine or even transvestites persists, and the media do
little to educate the public. In the words of one Korean activist: "Under
the guise of protection from ADDS gays are treated like cheap bargain sale
material. For the seed of gay liberation to grow again, the mass communications
will have to stop their anti-gay pronouncements."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Young Ja Kim, "The Korean Namsadang," Drama Review, 15 (1981), 9-16; Richard
Rutt, "The Flower Boys of Silla (Hwarang)," Transactions of the Korean
Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 38 (1961), 1-66.
Ward Houser
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von (1840-1902)
German-Austrian
psychiatrist, forensic authority, and writer of medical treatises on psychiatry
and sexual psycho-pathology. a leading figure in the
history of psychiatry, his works were the starting point for the treatment of
"abnormal" sexuality by Freud and Jung, to cite only two of the major
figures who came after him. During his career he held professorships at
Strasbourg, Graz, and Vienna - then the world's leading medical school.
Krafft-Ebing's speculations on homosexuality reveal the influence of Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs' concept of the "Urning" and Karl Westphal's
discovery of "contrary sexual feeling" (1869). He began to develop
his theories on the manifestations and etiology of homosexuality in the wake of
a survey of the recent publications on the subject of sexual psychopathology
that hecompiledinl876.Inthe following year he published an article in which
homosexuality was defined as "an absence of normal sexual feeling, with
compensatory attraction to members of the same sex." His proclivity for
schematization on the basis of the current Darwinian notions of evolution led
him to insert every known variety of abnormality of sexual attraction, gender,
and constitution into a global framework that later inspired Magnus Hirschf
eld's concept of "sexual intermediate stages." Kraff t-Ebing did
recognize that these subjects were basically happy with their lot and that
their distress stemmed from society's laws and attitudes. He even placed their
love - as an emotion - on a footing with those of "normal feelings."
However, he clung to the belief in "degeneration" as a cause of such
mental illnesses, and it was with disturbed individuals in prisons and insane
asylums that, as a forensic psychiatrist, he mainly came into contact.
Krafft-Ebing's classic work, Psychopathia
sexualis (1886), focussed attention on four subgroups:
"psychosexual hermaphrodites" (= bisexuals), homosexuals,
effeminates and "viraginites" in whom the psychic disposition
corresponds to that of the opposite sex, and androgynes. His etiological scheme
differentiated sharply between "inborn" and "acquired" homosexuality
in line with the forensic bias of his work.
After studying Hirschfeld's writings at the turn of the century, Krafft-Ebing
revised his views in 1901, stating in an article in the Jahrbuch fOr sexuelle Zwischenstufen that homosexuality was not
a manifestation of degeneracy or pathology, but could occur in otherwise
normal subjects. But this retraction written shortly before his death could do
little to alter the tremendous impression made on the public by the many
editions of Psychopathia
sexualis (12 in his lifetime) that was
translated into other languages and achieved an authority no previous volume on
abnormal sexuality had ever enjoyed; and his definition of "every expression
of the sex drive that does not correspond to the purposes of nature, i.e.,
reproduction" as "perverse" (= unnatural, hence immoral) greatly
shaped the notion of "abnormal" sexuality.
Krafft-Ebing's legacy solidified the category of "sexual inversion"
in psychiatry. It was the clinical psychiatrist and depth psychologist who now
undertook the treatment and analysis of those to whom this definition attached.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Albert Caraco,
Supplément
à la Psychopathia sexualis, Lausanne: Edition L'âge d'homme, 1983, Klaus Pacharzina and Karin Albrech t-Désirat, "Die Last der
Ärzte," in J. Hohmann, ed., Der unterdrückte Sexus, Lollar: Achenbach, 1977,
pp. 97-113.
Warren
Johansson
KUPFFER, ELISÁR VON (1872-1942)
Baltic
German painter, writer, and thinker. The son of a physician who was a
hereditary nobleman, Elisar von Kupffer - or as he later called himself,
Elisarion - inherited a labile constitution which he ascribed to his father's
dependence on tobacco and opium. In 1891 he went to St. Petersburg, where later
he attended courses in Oriental languages at the University. He also studied in
Switzerland and Bavaria and composed his first dramatic work, Die toten Cotter (The Dead Gods). In the
following years he wrote other plays, now and then encountering his friend
Eduard von Mayer. The beginning of the homosexual emancipation movement in
1897 had a profound effect on Elisarion. Living in Berlin in the winter of
1898-99, he compiled an anthology of Lieblingsminne
und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (Love of Comrades and Friends in World Literature), inspired
by the writings of Krafft-Ebing and by the debates that followed the trial of
Oscar Wilde in London. The publication of the anthology by Adolf Brand in 1900
brought the author as much rejection as approval. His uncle Hugo von Kupffer,
the editor in chief of the Berhner
Lokalanzeiger, tried vainly to keep it from appearing; an attempted
confiscation of the book was rescinded thanks to the intervention of Ulrich von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Franz von Liszt, and Rudolf von Gottschall. Benedict
Friedlaender later declared that Elisarion's anthology marked a "new phase
in the emancipation movement," while Meyers Grosse Enzyklopädie stressed that for the
first time since Plato Elisarion had presented "a cultural and ethical
appraisal of the phenomenon of pederasty."
In 1902 Elisarion and Eduard von Mayer moved to Florence, where they lived
until the outbreak of war in 1915. Like Winckelmann, he felt the aesthetic
attraction of the Mediterranean culture of Italy, and here his life's work in
painting and philosophy matured. A product of these studies is the 1908
monograph on the Renaissance painter Sodoma, perhaps the first full-length
study of an artist to reflect the ideals of the homosexual movement. In 1911 the two founded in Munich the
"Klaristische Verlag Akropolis" - later moved to Leipzig - whose task
it was to communicate his ideas to a larger public, but in fact no one outside
a narrow circle of followers ever shared them. They amounted to a
"confessionless Christianity" and a comprehensive social, aesthetic,
and political program that was intended to lead to a renaissance. In the same
year he published the two basic works of the "claristic" movement:
the Hymnen der Heiligen
Burg (Hymns
of the Holy Citadel) and Ein
neuer Flug und eine Heilige Burg (A New Flight and a Holy Citadel).
The war obliged Elisarion to move to Muralto in Switzerland, and in 1922,
following the Russian Revolution, he became a citizen of the canton of Ticino.
In 1925 the companions acquired a property in Minusio on which over the years
he constructed a temple that reflected his ideals. Elisarion gave this
Sanctuarium a remarkable, if somewhat academic complement of frescoes that
depict male friendship in idyllicarcadian terms. Elisär von Kupffer died in
Minusio in 1942, his last work - a revision of Ein neuer Flug - appearing a year later
under the title Heldische
Sicht und froher Glaube (Heroic Vision and Joyous Faith). Now the property of the municipality, the Sanctuarium has
since his death undergone some modifications.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Ekkehard Hieronimus, Ehsar von Kupffei (1872-1942), Basel: Kunsthalle, 1979.
Warren Johansson
Kuzmin, Mikhail Alekseevich (1872-1936)
Russian poet and short story
writer. Although 1875 is usually given as the year of his birth, recent
investigation has shown that Kuzmin was bom in 1872 at Yaroslavl on the Volga
River into a family of Old Believers. His interest in the theatre was kindled
by attending operettas at nearby Saratov. In 1885 the family moved to St.
Petersburg. A major influence on the young Kuzmin was the future Soviet diplomat
(and homosexual) Georgii Vasil'evich Chicherin (1872-1936). Among the arts
Kuzmin's first love was music, and in August 1891 he enrolled in Rimsky-Korsakov's
composition course at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but remained for only
three years out of the full seven. Even among writers of a remarkably erudite
period, Kuzmin was outstanding for his knowledge of languages, and when Soviet
literary policy had made it impossible for him to publish his own work, he was
still able to earn a living by translating from Greek, Latin, French, German,
Italian, and English. The wide thematic range of his poetry and its allusion to
recondite Gnostic matters
also attest to the vastness of his learning.
In 1895 he accompanied his mother to Egypt, and settled in Alexandria, where
he remained until early in 1896. His Alexandrian
Songs reflect his real
experience in the Levantine milieu, where he endured a religious crisis and a
tragic love affair. Wholly independent of his contemporary Constantine Cavafy, he created his own myth of Alexandria, where refined eroticism rubbed shoulders with
Gnostic mysteries. In March 1897 he left for Italy, another foreign country whose
ambiance was to pervade his later work; the Italian episode of Wings is
mainly autobiographical. There followed an exceedingly mysterious period of
his life in which he traveled through northern Russia, searching for his
familial and religious roots by living with Old Believer monastic communities
in northern Russia, an episode reflected in the second part of Wings, where the young hero Vania lives with an Old
Believer family.
On his return to St. Petersburg Kuzmin was in 1904 introduced by Chicherin to
the circle that had formed in the penumbra of the journal Mir iskusstva (World of Art), edited by Sergei Diaghilev. This milieu he found immensely sympathetic,
and to boot several of its members shared his sexual orientation. The revolution
of 1905, by putting an end to Tsarist censorship, gave Russian literature its
brief (and only) taste of true freedom. Kuzmin's Wings appeared
in the symbolist journal Vesy
(The Scales) in November
1906, and created the great literary scandal of its day; edition after edition
sold out. The same periodical also published twelve of Kuzmin's Alexandrian Songs. In 1907, however, the authorities confiscated
the little volume Three
Plays, because
one of the three, The
Perilous Precaution, was
an adroit minuet of sexual identities that poked fun at conventional morality.
In 1906 Kuzmin also began his association with the theatre, whose atmosphere
gave him an ideal opportunity to play roles which expressed his contradictory
nature - the decadent dandy with the made-up eyes or the bearded, long-robed
Old Believer. He also attended the Wednesday evening salon of the poet
Viacheslav Ivanov and his second wife, LydiaZinovieva-Annibal, who was
incidentally the author of the first lesbian work in Russian, Tridtsat' tri modstva [Thirty-three Freaks).
The Bolshevik Revolution Kuzmin greeted with warm optimism, and during the
bitter years of the civil war participated in the enterprise for translating classics
of world literature which Gorky and Lunacharsky had created to keep the literary
intelligentsia from literally starving. During the NEP period he was still
able to publish, but the themes and the style of his writing were so alien to
the Soviet scene that Leon Trotsky in Literature
and Revolution dubbed him an "internal emigré." As late as 1927 he was
able to place a few poems in various periodicals, but after that lapsed into
silence. In 1928 he gave his last public reading, a touching occasion marked by
the invasion of a throng of Leningrad homosexuals many of whom showered him
with flowers during the ovation that followed. By 1929 Kuzmin was reduced to
scraping together a living by translations, turning into Russian an enormous
set of Western classics, Shakespeare above all. All this work was lost during
the Stalinist terror when much of the Kuzmin archive was destroyed. He himself
escaped execution only by dying of pneumonia in a Leningrad hospital on March 1, 1936.
After his death, Kuzmin's status was that of a non-person, because he had been
a homosexual, and not a "closet case," but openly and defiantly gay.
In fact, the word gay even in its primary
meaning would have fitted Kuzmin perfectly. Although homosexual fiction was by
then appearing in Germany, for a Russia that had not escaped the yoke of
Tsarist censorship until the October Manifesto of 1905, the shock value of Wings - essentially a frank defense of the homosexual way of Ufe - was tremendous. He even
dared to present homosexuality as a liberating force of the personahty. Wings gave the journalists of his day endless matter for debate,
parody, and innuendo. Homosexuality remained a major component of Kuzmin's
poetry and fiction, and even slips into his theatre, in which the motif of male
dyad endangered by a female interloper occurs with obsessive frequency, even if
rarely with a tragic denouement. Kuzmin also belonged to a group of homosexuals
at the heart of the Russian cultural scene of his day, among them Konstantin
Andreevich Somov (1869-1939), a leading Russian painter of the period, who did
a fine portrait of the writer. Dismissed by official criticism in the Soviet
Union as an example of "bourgeois decadence," Kuzmin awaits
rediscovery and appreciation in the homeland whose literature he magnificently
enriched.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Mikhail Kuzmin, Selected Prose é) Poetry, edited and translated by Michael Green, Ann Arbor, MI:
Ardis, 1980.
Warren Johansson