Erwin J. Haeberle

An Accidental Career

Looking back at my life as a sexologist

This selection offers texts written over the last 40 years. I wrote them spontaneously or on invitation, depending on various circumstances at the time. In any case, they did not follow an overall plan or design. Also, I do not present them here in chronological order.

As I realize now, apart from my textbook “The Sex Atlas”, most of my print publications in English over the last 40 years have been dealing with historical matters, either with the history of sexology itself or with related subjects. They make up the bulk of the present volume. Only the last six of the texts address current problems and try to look into the future not only of my own field of study, but of the academic world in general. The collection ends with an updated Chronology of Sex Research that I had written long ago when I first became interested in sexology.

Fortunately, in this online version of my book, I can present my most important contribution to our field, i.e. the invention and pioneering of “open access” online courses (today known as MOOCs). In January 2003 I put the first of these courses online under the title “Basic Human Sexual Anatomy and Physiology”. One year later, in 2004, I demonstrated it with some additional courses at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, and soon thereafter they were translated not only into Chinese, but also into other languages. Today, I am offering a complete curriculum of 6 courses (6 semesters) in sexual health in the internet, freely accessible in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (in simplified and traditional script), Russian, Czech and Hungarian. Some of the courses are also available in other languages. If used by professional organizations, this curriculum can lead to certificates or diplomas and, if used by universities, it can lead to academic degrees (B.A. or M.A.). Moreover, it can be studied not only on PCs, but also on tablets and smart phones. At this time, however, I am aware of their regular use only in China, where they help in the training of a great many sex educators every year. American and European universities and professional organizations still seem reluctant to take advantage of my offer and to follow the Chinese lead.

Returning to the present text selection, I would like to add a few comments on my own family background, academic training, and career:

My Family Background

My parents were both born in the same year 1902 in our hometown Bochum. Neither of them enjoyed any form of higher education. Throughout her long life, my mother was a “Hausfrau”. A few years after the sudden death of my father at the age of 60, she moved to Brussels, joining my sister, who had married a lawyer at the EU. When he also unexpectedly died at a young age, my mother was able to support her daughter in the household and to help her in bringing up her two small sons. She was fortunate enough to see her beloved grandsons grow into successful university graduates. As she often said: These were the happiest years of her life. She died at the age of 94.

My father had received some training at a local bank, but, as a still very young man, had become self-employed as a book keeper for a number of small and medium-sized, mostly Jewish businesses. However, with the anti-Jewish race laws of 1935, the authorities presented him with a “Berufsverbot”, i.e. a prohibition to continue working in this capacity.

After the war, he did not speak very much about what must have been a traumatic experience. I do remember though, that he once mentioned taking the train to Amsterdam and smuggling a great deal of cash - sewn into his jacket - to one of his former Jewish customers, whose family was ready to board a ship to Argentina. The money was theirs of course, but they had not been able to take it with them when they fled.

At that time, he started a new career as a self-employed sales representative of several shoe companies, receiving a percentage of his sales. However, after a promising start, even this ended suddenly with the beginning of WW II. On its first day, my father was drafted into the army, and 6 years later, still a private, he deserted in the spring of 1945 from the Western front, which, by that time, had moved rather close to our city. He put on civilian clothes, evaded arrest and imprisonment by the allied troops and came home.

Looking back now at the first, very hard post-war years, I remember three things about my father:

1. He apparently still clung to the world he knew best and loved before the Nazis had come to power. This showed itself in his language, which had remained full of Yiddish expressions (I am using here the German spelling): The words “Tacheles”, “koscher”, “meschugge”, “die Mischpoche”, “der Zores”, and “der Dalles” were parts of his everyday speech. Sometimes he used the words along with some sarkastic comments like: “Gannef, the son-in-law”, or “Tinnef, the wedding present” etc.. This unshakable habit was obviously an echo of his early working life. I don’t know how he got away with it during the entire “Third Reich”.

2. In 1946 he found that, as the only one of her family, a daughter of one of his former Jewish customers had survived the Buchenwald concentration camp and had returned to Bochum. When we visited her, we found that she had married another camp survivor, and that his 17-year-old nephew, still another survivor of the same camp, was living with them. My father explained the situation to my sister and me, 8 and 10 years old at the time, and we fully understood, but we were more interested in something else: The new Jewish family invited us to a good meal and repeated such invitations in the following months and years. These were the “hunger years” in Germany, and we children therefore always looked forward to another visit. For us, each of these meals was a feast, as it must have been for them after the horrible years of their suffering and deprivation. (As Holocaust survivors they had different rationing cards.) Soon, the young nephew succeeded in immigrating to New York. From there, he sent us children a CARE package including, among many nourishing goodies, a Woody Woodpecker comic. Without understanding it, I read it over and over and decided right then that someday, somehow, I would also go to America. I especially remember one spring afternoon. It must have been May 14, 1948, because we were celebrating the founding of Israel with coffee and cake. The cake had all all-white sugar coating decorated with blue butter cream forming a star of David, and there were also little paper flags with the same design. This was the first time I saw Israel’s national flag, and without understanding the full implications of the event, I was fascinated. (Later, I found out that May 14 was also the date of Magnus Hirschfeld’s birth and death.)

3. These long forgotten memories are now coming back to me as I write. However, there is one episode from that time that I have always kept in mind. It was a lesson for life my father taught me in a single sentence: One day, I must have been 10 or 11 years old, he showed me a sizeable, illustrated Nazi propaganda book from the 1930s which he had found in the rubble of one of our city’s bombed-out houses. The volume had a large fold-out of several pages. It showed thousands of people at a Nazi rally in front of a wall of swastika flags. My father pointed to this photo and said: “Take a good look at these people and remember that they were all against it!” I immediately understood. He was talking about the stupidity, gullibility, and hypocrisy of the masses. He was also talking about our policemen, train conductors, and store owners, indeed about our teachers and our neighbors. Even as a child, I myself remembered how many of them had been fanatical supporters of Hitler and now claimed to have been secret opponents. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the dangers of blind obedience to authority and of unquestioned general assumptions. I also saw that adults lie, and lie with conviction, not only to others, but also to themselves. Thus, even before I entered my teens, I became skeptical and critical of “the will of the people” and of every social and political “established order”.

My Academic Background

I became a sexologist in my middle thirties more or less by accident. Originally, I had begun studying theater history, German and English literature at the universities of Cologne and Freiburg Br. I financed my studies first by working in various factory jobs during academic vacations, later as a janitor in some large wooden library shack for students, and eventually as an actor and director in a private professional theater. After this difficult beginning, I eventually succeeded in winning some scholarships, and this enabled me to continue studying at the universities of Glasgow, Heidelberg, and at Cornell.

1. From Heidelberg to the USA
My scholarship in Heidelberg included the membership in a newly formed “Doktorandenkolleg” (seminar for doctoral candidates). It had about a dozen graduate students from various disciplines (history, medicine, physics, mathematics, philology). We met once a week to discuss important books ranging from medieval theology (Nicolaus Cusanus) and the German enlightenment (Wilhelm von Humboldt) to modern philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger) and the critique of ideologies (Hans Kelsen). All in all, I participated in this group for three years, both before my studies at Cornell University and after my return. The guest leaders of this seminar changed several times and included important scholars, such as Jürgen Habermas, Ernst Topitsch, and Dieter Henrich. All in all, as a participant in this interdisciplinary group, I learned more than in my regular studies.

2. Cornell (1963-1964)
At Cornell University I profited from the vast knowledge of my mentor Eric A. Blackall (1914-1989). Among other things, he had translated the libretto of Alban Berg’s “Wozzek” into English and, as a young student in Vienna 1938 during the “Anschluss”, had saved the library and papers of Arthur Schnitzler from the Nazis. His specialty was the “classic”German literature around 1800. However, during my stay, he also offered an instructive seminar about the works of Richard Wagner, which I greatly enjoyed. Other enlightening experiences for me were two seminars in the English department, one about Victorian poetry, and the other about Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. It introduced me to the forerunners, competitors, and successors of Shakespeare and thus provided the necessary context for a thorough understanding one of the most glorious epochs of theater history.

Cornell’s foreign students came from all over the world. In my student dorm (Cascadilla Hall), I lived door to door with students from the Soviet Union. They were upset when we saw Kubrick’s latest movie „Dr. Strangelove“, as they were quite unprepared for this kind of biting political satire. But they were utterly shocked and frightened when, in early November, President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. For days, we all followed the live TV news reports in our common room.

As to cultural events, I remember, above all, a concert on campus given by the then still relatively unknown Bob Dylan. But Cornell students also showed their own productions in the University Theater. For one of them, Goldoni‘s „The Mistress of the Inn” (La Locandiera), I designed the sets and costumes. In addition, the student film club regularly showed old Hollywood movies, and these introduced me to the great comic actors of the 1930’s and 1940’s of whom I had never heard before - the Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, and especially the incomparable W. C. Fields. The current TV shows (still in black and white) featured the lovable, amusing series with Jack Benny (The Jack Benny Program). Later, I saw reruns of the hilariously funny shows with Sid Caesar (Your Show of Shows), Jackie Gleason (The Honeymooners) and Lucille Ball (I love Lucy). I was also lucky enough to see the great Jewish stand-up comedians of the older generation: Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, Shelley Berman and Alan King – all of them masters of their trade. This introduction to American humor and it various traditions helped me greatly in understanding American culture. Throughout, I remained a faithful fan of the American grotesque comedy shows - later in color - from Danny Kaye to the unforgettable Carol Burnett and the distinguished looking, but always hilarious Harvey Korman. I also enjoyed the TV appearances of Jerry Lewis. Of course, not all television humor was rooted in Jewish traditions. There were also wonderful black comedians from Redd Foxx to Flip Wilson, Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. Very often I watched Johnny Carson, a real “pro”, who dominated “late night television” during the entire time of my stay in the US. I greatly admired Dean Martin, the most relaxed of all performers, with his occasional guest Foster Brooks. Most impressive were later the strange, daring, and baffling presentations of Andy Kaufman and the breathtaking solo peformances of the “avant-garde” comedians Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams. American television changed a great deal over the years, reflecting the larger social changes in the country. For me, its humor remained an important key to understanding the complex “New World” I lived in for so many years. I left Cornell in the summer of 1964 with an M.A. degree.

When I returned to my English department in Heidelberg with my degree from Cornell, I was given a position as “wissenschaftlicher Assistent” (roughly equivalent to an assistant professor) and started to write my dissertation about the plays of the then still living novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. (1) Two years later, I received a Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) in American literature.

3. Yale (1966-1968)
At the same time, I won a 2-year scholarship from Yale University, took leave of my job and worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in American Studies at Yale with my mentor Norman Holmes Pearson, a true “gentleman of the old school”. In spite of a severe physical handicap, he was a man of „real class“. Once or twice a month we met in his old-fashioned, cozy office, talked about my work, my plans for the future, and about all sorts of other subjects. He also took me along as his guest to the famous campus restaurant "Mory's", which was otherwise closed to visiting scholars like me. When he had foreign visitors, he introduced me to them, and thus we often enjoyed animated discussions. He had a fascinating life history and was well connected in the American “establishment”. Occasionally, he spoke about details of his formerly secret past that had been revealed in some recent publications.

Pearson was also financially quite comfortable. One day, when he and his wife had invited me to tea, he surprised and amazed me by taking a „Shakespeare Folio“ from his book cabinet. (He also owned several Quartos.) Other examples: The license plate of his large luxury car did not show any numbers, but instead his full name. When, right at the beginning, my stipend turned out to be too low, he saw to it that it was immediately raised and gave me a personal check for the time already passed: “This is not a loan!”. His unexpected early death shocked me. I still think about him often with deep gratitude.

At that time, Yale was an all-male school, i.e. without female students and hardly any female professors (I met only one). Indeed, the Ivy League football games in our stadium offered male cheerleaders - an unusual, very interesting sight - now gone forever. The “downside” was an “uptight”, stuffy, pretentious and boring, emphatically masculine atmosphere on campus. On the other hand, the university offered many memorable cultural events, for example symphony concerts, opera arias with Renata Tebaldi, Shakespeare’s sonnets recited by John Gielgud, meetings with authors like Robert Lowell, Joseph Heller, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, who had received his Ph.D. in American Studies under Norman H. Pearson and always wore a white three-piece suit. There was another evening with the boxer Muhammad Ali, whom I could see (and almost touch) up very close – a hero radiating strength and good health. I also saw the actor Paul Newman up close: He looked even better in private than in his films. Of course, I also used every opportunity to see not only the latest Hollywood movies, but also many old ones. I especially remember one of them: "Wonder Bar" (1934) with Al Jolson singing in blackface. For me as a European “postdoc” in American Studies it was a revelation that prompted me to do some additional research. Thus, I learned a great deal about the old minstrel shows, and indeed about the original stage figure of “Jim Crow” as part of American cultural history. The university theater under its director Robert Brustein featured stars like Irene Worth, Stacy Keach, and Kenneth Haig. Some young students also tried acting, and later some of them had respectable careers in Hollywood. For example: I saw the stunningly handsome undergraduate Perry King playing a leading role in the student production of Thomas Dekker’s “The Shoemaker’s Holiday”. It was practically foreordained that he should go to California and lend his good looks to the movies. Henry Winkler, a drama student, became a television star as “the Fonz” in the popular series “Happy Days”. He was also successful as a producer. The most popular professor on campus was a specialist for the ancient Greek classics - Eric Segal, author of the bestselling novel „Love Story“, which also became a successful film. Another bestselling author was the Yale law professor Charles A. Reich with „The Greening of America“. He suddenly resigned from his position and moved to California close to San Francisco as a „free spirit“ and gay activist.

Since a train ride from New Haven to New York takes only about two hours, I often used the opportunity to enjoy the cultural events in Manhattan. I usually stayed a couple of nights at the YMCA and visited museums, theaters, and the two recently opened opera houses at Lincoln Center. At the MET, I saw a visually and musically overwhelming production of „Die Frau ohne Schatten“ by Richard Strauss, conducted by Karl Böhm, and Wagner’s “Die Walküre”, conducted by Herbert von Karajan and with Régine Crespin as Brünnhilde. Most importantly, I saw and heard Wieland Wagner’s unforgettable production of his grandfather’s “Lohengrin” with the vocally ideal Sandor Konya in the title role. (I had seen an earlier version of the same production in Berlin with the tenor Jess Thomas). At the NYCO, Beverly Sills became an overnight sensation in Handel‘s „Giulio Cesare in Egitto“. All of these performances are still available on CDs, and I still enjoy listening to them today. In those years, I also saw all important plays and musicals, for example the first performance of “Hello Dolly” with Carol Channing, after a play by Thonton Wilder (after Nestroy). While at Cornell, I had already seen the original production of Albee’s “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in New York with Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill – a triumph of acting, much more intense, gripping, and shattering than Taylor and Burton in the later film. During my 4 years on the East Coast, I also had the chance to attend all important ballet performances - from the NY City Ballet and Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater to Merce Cunningham and his company. (Many years later in Germany I met his partner John Cage at the house of a mutual friend.)

Sometime during my stay at Yale I gave a lecture on some literary topic at Brown University in Providence, RI, another member of the Ivy League. I have forgotten the subject and the date, but I remember clearly the special atmosphere enlivening the campus. It was a bright, warm summer day of an art festival, because I had the thrill of seeing and hearing an open-air concert by the legendary Dizzy Gillespie and his band. At the edge of a large lawn Allen Ginsberg sat under a tree with a group of his admirers. I simply joined them and was welcome.

In the course of my American studies, which went quite well, I became interested in American-Japanese cultural relations and succeeded in obtaining another scholarship and moved on to the UC Berkeley.

At this point, I’d like to mention a special experience, which I had the privilege of enjoying twice: For us foreign students, Cornell had organized personal meetings with important personalities in Washington DC (members of the administration, senators, members of the House of Representatives etc.), and Yale did the same. Thus, I was fortunate enough to be present a second time when the most liberal justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980), received us at the US Supreme Court. He talked to us for about one hour, improvising in a relaxed, humorous manner, answering all our questions directly, clearly, and without hesitation. He was, in every way, an “authentic” human being, independent, unafraid, highly intelligent, and, in his language, “close to the common people”. During my lifetime, very few men have impressed me as much as he did. He was, in thought and in speech, a truly free man - the very best American culture can produce. I never saw anyone like him in Europe.

4. UC Berkeley (1968-1969)
At Berkeley I joined the department of Japanese and Korean Studies. Its director, the multilingual Robert Bellah, became my new mentor. Like Norman H. Pearson, he also had a fascinating life history. However, in many respects it was almost the opposite. He had started at Harvard, where, as a student, he had become a member of the Communist Party. He was bitterly disappointed when the university supported the communist “witch hunts” of the notorious Senator McCarthy.

Bellah was one of the most important cultural historians of his time, and, in this sense, he was himself an „establishment figure“, but his attitude toward the political and academic establishment remained cool and reserved. In any case, in California he had found a position commensurate with his enormous talents and merits. In our personal meetings, he was always serene and generous, once again a “man of real class“, just as Norman H. Pearson.

In Berkeley, I signed up for a basic Japanese language course and made Japanese friends. I also took advantage of the famous Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Moreover, the city has a fascinating Japanese district (Nihonmachi) with Japanese restaurants, shops, a large Japanese bookstore, and a theater. There, I was lucky enough to catch two extraordinary performances of the „Grand Kabuki“ from Tokyo. (I had already seen Bunraku and Noh elsewhere.) Because of the enormous costs of bringing the company and its marvelous sets and costumes across the Pacific, the visit was never repeated.

But back to the strictly academic: If everything had worked out according to plan, I would have written about authors like Lafcadio Hearn and John Luther Long, who were the first to introduce Japanese topics to American readers. (The latter wrote a Japanese story, which was made into a play by Belasco, which was turned into an opera by Puccini. See below.) In this context, it would also have been appropriate to investigate the influence of European „Japonism“and generally of „exoticism“ on American culture. Bellah was a competent guide in all of these areas. Soon enough I had collected the necessary amount of material that would enable me to pursue my interests in several promising directions. For example: In the later 19th century, European and American theaters both created and catered to a certain “Japan fashion” by turning to Japanese topics or using “exotic” Japanese settings . (As early as 1885 the satirical operetta „The Mikado“ by Gilbert and Sullivan had its première in London, and in 1896 , in the same city, the musical comedy „The Geisha“ by Sidney Jones was a great success, almost immediately repeated in New York. Two years later, in 1898, Mascagni presented his „Iris”, a first „Japanese” opera in Italy.) I was especially interested in the American David Belasco, author of two plays that inspired Puccini to turn them into operas: „Madame Butterfly“ (1904) and „The Girl of the Golden West“ (1910). Belasco was an important figure in the history of the theater. Exploring his cultural background in San Francisco and later in New York would have been an interesting challenge. It could have yielded fresh insights into the interplay of technology, art, and commerce in the US before the First World War. However, things turned out very differently.

5. Return to Heidelberg
Having collected a large amount of material, I returned to Heidelberg after an absence of almost three years in order to write my “Habilitationsschrift” (a kind of second, more comprehensive dissertation, required in Germany for a career as a full professor).

However, to my total shock and surprise, my jealous colleagues had taken advantage of my absence and some administrative rule changes for a clever intrigue: They had succeeded in making my job disappear and thereby eliminating me as a competitor. As a result, at the age of 33, I suddenly found myself unemployed, uninsured, and penniless. After all, living on scholarships, one cannot build up a savings account. For me, this sudden end of my well-planned and smoothly running career was a truly traumatic experience. After all, British, American, and German sponsors had, over the years, invested tens of thousands of pounds, dollars, and DMs in my academic future, and now it was all for naught. The German university system proved too inflexible to offer me a ready alternative. Having no money at all, I needed immediate employment, but, at that time, there simply were no suitable positions available at any university in Germany. I felt abandoned and betrayed by a system I had blindly trusted. Living in my hometown Bochum with my widowed mother, who received only a very small pension, I was devastated and did not know what to do next. (As I write this, it suddenly dawns on me for the first time that, because of the Nazis, my father had also suddenly lost his job and his income at the same age of 33.)

6. Return to Yale (1969-1970)
In this desperate situation I received another surprise: Unexpectedly and anonymously, someone sent me the exact amount of DM 1,100. - i.e. the price of an airline ticket back to the US. (To this day, I do not know the identity of the sender.) Having no choice, I flew back and presented myself again at Yale. My old, generous mentor Norman H. Pearson was horrified and disgusted when he heard my story. Without hesitation, he welcomed me back for another year in his American Studies program under the condition that I should now pay my living expenses out of my own pocket. My campus privileges, including two daily meals, were, once again, paid by Yale.

Fortunately, I had a boyhood friend from Bochum, Werner Mark Linz, who had immigrated to the US, married, and started to run a new publishing company in New York. He gave me an advance for some minor, purely commercial projects that I could easily manage from my home in New Haven. They became so successful, that I could soon pay back the advance and forget my financial problems. I also began to visit him and his family in Rye NY for long weekends or even several weeks at a time. Often together with his wife, we visited museums and shows in Manhattan. It was a practice we continued over many years, even after my move to California.

In the meantime, Yale had, for the first time in its history, admitted female students ("coeds"). Their arrival in the fall of 1969 produced a revolutionary and very beneficial change in the atmosphere on campus. The former ostentatious masculinity with its typical pretensions, inhibitions and general stuffiness, was, almost overnight, replaced by a relaxed, easy-going friendliness. Indeed, paradoxically, the transformation of campus life was so radical that some formerly “closeted” students spontaneously founded a Gay Alliance at Yale (GAY), which organized social gatherings on campus.

The new group also organized well-attended all-male dances. Of course, just a few months before, Manhattan had seen the now famous “Stonewall riots”, a successful customers’ revolt against police harassment of a “gay” bar, and this was probably also a factor in the new assertiveness. There was one disadvantage, however: Yale’s fantastic, large all-male “gym”, where we were used to the sights of complete nudity, now had to be shared with the new female students. Earlier, we were handed our towels when we entered the huge building, put our clothes in a locker, and roamed around the hallways and elevators in the nude. We wore clothing only as a particular sport required it (I myself wore shorts for some group gymnastics, and so did the others in teams sports etc.). However, we always swam nude in the Olympic-size swimming pool. Indeed, when entering the pool area, one had to walk with spread legs over a special contraption that sprayed water on one’s crotch, giving it an extra washing. (Obviously, this “crotch sprayer” would have made no sense for men wearing swimming trunks.) Nudity was also the rule in the large, common showers, steam baths, their connected resting areas and massage rooms. Now, all of a sudden, in most parts of the gym, we had to wear boxer shorts or swimming trunks. (Cornell, coeducational from the start, had two gyms, one for females, and the other for males. Both could be used in complete nudity.) Still, after a while, we “Yale males” had all accepted the change as a minor inconvenience.

During this, my third year at Yale, I accidentally came across a German news report about a new and very unusual German book – an “encyclopedia of sex” for young people, containing brief articles on subjects from “Abtreibung” (abortion) to “Zygote”. It was illustrated with wonderful, very explicit photographs. The text had been written by the physician Martin Goldstein (1927-2012) who, under the pseudonym Dr. Sommer, ran a popular sexual advice column in a German youth magazine. The esthetically appealing photographs had been taken by the American photographer Will McBride (1931-2015) who also lived in Germany. When I obtained a copy of this work and showed it to my publisher friend Werner Linz, he was enthusiastic and quite eager to produce an American edition.

However, upon closer inspection, it turned out that a direct translation would make no sense in the US. The cultural differences between the two sides of the Atlantic were simply too great. Indeed, as we learned from this concrete example, the concepts of human sexuality are, to a very great extent, shaped by socio-cultural forces. In other words: The same “facts” are of greatly varying importance and take on different meanings in different cultural contexts. This is especially true when it comes to the sexual lives of young people. For me, this was a startling insight that triggered a general interest in the subject matter and eventually led me to a career as a sexologist. In short: Both my German-born friend and I realized that, for an American edition, the book would have to be rewritten. Indeed, even some of the photos had to be reshot, because they showed the typically uncircumcised penises of German males, while, as I had learned in the “gyms” of Cornell and Yale, most American males are circumcised. So, in order to make an American publication possible, we obtained the permission of the original authors for a substantial change. I myself rewrote the entire text and added my name as a co-author to the new edition. I also gave it a new title: “The Sex Book”. (2)

Before I left Yale at the end of the school year, I handed in the completed manuscript, and when the book finally appeared in the following year, it caused a sensation. It was, in the same week, reviewed very favorably in both “Time” and “Newsweek” and soon became a bestseller. I was invited to radio and TV shows, “schlepping the book” up and down the North-East Coast (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh), even to the Mid-West (Cleveland, Chicago), and almost made it to Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”. I was invited to his studio, then still in Manhattan, where I found a number of other potential guests waiting. After a preliminary interview with his sidekick Ed McMahon I was ready to go on, but in the last minute they apparently found someone even more interesting. No matter, the book kept selling very well indeed. Eventually, it went through several additional paper-bound editions of different sizes. From that time on, I no longer had any financial problems. Needless to say, the other two authors in Germany also profited very handsomely and had no regrets at all about having trusted my judgment and allowed me to go ahead as I had seen fit. Many years later, I was able to visit Dr. Goldstein in his home in Düsseldorf for a cozy afternoon talking about our old publication and our latest experiences in Germany.

7. Return to UC Berkeley (1970-1971)
From Yale I once more moved to Berkeley where I rejoined my former mentor Robert Bellah, this time paying my own way. My interest in Japanese-American cultural relations now extened to the sexual sphere, especially after I visited a newly opened Erotic Art Museum in San Francisco and its “Kronhausen collection”. It contained some original Japanese erotic scrolls by great artists like Hokusai and others. Bellah encouraged me to follow my instincts and assured me of his continued support.

With my second postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley I returned to the place of an earlier, life-changing experience: In 1967, I had traveled from Yale across the US to California for its now legendary “summer of love”. As a “seasonal hippie”, I had lived with many others in a large “Hippie House” and participated in all their activities, including the famous concerts in San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. (I had also attended a live concert of Janis Joplin in Palo Alto.) Without going into details here, I can say that this summer had a profound and lasting effect on my thinking and general outlook. The “flower children” rejected the stifling conformity of the preceding decades and their stereotypical sex roles, performance pressure and social inequality. Instead, they led unassuming, undemanding, modest, relaxed, tolerant lives under the motto “live and let live” or, as they themselves put it: “Do your own thing!” and “If it feels good, do it!” Following Timothy Leary’s advice: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, they smoked “grass”, took LSD and cultivated a non-aggressive privacy while, at the same time, remaining open to a wider, like-minded community. Indeed, they created this steadily growing community by their very existence. Their passive, peaceful attitude was enough to attract ever more followers. It was the awakening of a whole generation, not a fad, but a movement. Observing it “live” on location, I discovered an unsuspected side of the US. This “other America” revealed an enormous untapped creative potential boiling just below its surface and behind the “official” established image. “Psychedelic” art and music, colorful, loose-fitting clothes and long hair, large peaceful gatherings (“be-ins”), subversive new books and pamphlets, uninhibited cartoons, “underground” papers like the “Berkeley Barb” with an explicit advice column about drugs, sex, and sexually transmitted diseases (“Dr. HIPpocrates”) as well as personal ads for sexual contact – all of this signaled coming social changes. Indeed, as it eventually turned out, the “hippie revolution” had far-reaching consequences for the entire country. Some knowledgeable writers now even claim that it was the true source of our present electronic revolution. (3)

Of course, this was also a time of increasing mass protests, especially against the war in Vietnam. The Berkeley “free speech movement” of 1964-1965 had laid the groundwork for all sorts of “civil disobedience” and protest rallies. The war increased and intensified student demonstrations all over the country. During my second stay in Berkeley (or “Berserkeley”, as it was called in the press), I found myself in a highly charged general atmosphere. The whiff of tear gas hung in the air as I went to the library, where the then governor Ronald Reagan had posted National Guardsmen with open bayonets at the entrance and that of all other campus buildings.

Within a few years, the “hippie scene” had changed drastically. In addition to “grass” and LSD, other, “harder” drugs had become popular. The murderous “Manson family” had revealed a dangerous underbelly of the formerly peaceful subculture. The growing anti-war protests had led to the destructive violence of the “Weather underground” and to overreactions of the government, culminating in the shooting of unarmed students by the National Guard at Kent State University in 1970. (In 1969, a student protester had been killed by the police in Berkeley.) It was a violent decade. A much discussed dictum at the time was that of the black American radical activist H. Rap Brown: “Violence is as American as cherry pie”. The killing of civil rights workers in Mississippi (1964) and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (1968) formed an unsettling contrast to the peaceful aspirations of the young. Indeed, the whole country felt increasing unrest on many sides. As a foreign student on his first visit to the US, I had been shocked by the murder of John F. Kennedy (1963) and had heard Bob Dylan’s premonition at his Cornell concert without really understanding it, but now it was visibly becoming true: “The times they are a-changin'.”

These years saw three important mass movements demanding change. Their slogans were “Black Power”, “Women’s Power”, and “Gay Power”. In each of these cases, the word “power”, far from describing a reality, expressed a wish and a goal that needed a new liberating impetus. “Black liberation” had a long history dating back to the 19^th century, but even in the later 20th century the African-American community was still very far from being liberated. For a characterization of that time, it may be enough to mention the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, the riots in many black ghettos, and the rise of the “Black Panthers” and other radical groups. Living in Berkeley and wishing to learn more, I attended a fund-raising party of the Black Panthers in the home of a wealthy “white” patron in hills of nearby Oakland. (4) In the meantime, like countless others, I eagerly devoured the bestselling books “Soul on Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver and the sexologically interesting “Autobiography of Malcom X”, who had been murdered by black Muslim fanatics in 1965. Naturally, I also used every opportunity to discuss the issues with my black friends. And I really did learn a lot in a very short time.

The feminist movement also dated back to the 19^th century, but the liberation of women was still very far from complete. However, the founding of the The National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 marked the beginning of a new, intensified struggle. The admission of female students to Yale in 1969 that I had witnessed firsthand, was a small indication that things were actually starting to change. This change was accelerated by nation-wide discussions of popular bestsellers like Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), Kate Millet’s “Sexual Politics” (1970), Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch”, (1970), and Susan Brownmiller‘s “Against Our Will” (1975).

Even the “gay liberation movement” dated back to the previous century, i.e. at least to 1897, when Magnus Hirschfeld and others founded the first “gay rights group”, the “Wissenschaftlichhumanitäres Komité” in Germany. But “gay liberation” was new to the US, where it had started in the 1950s with the founding of the Mattachine Society, an organization fighting for homosexual civil rights. My later San Francisco colleague Phyllis Lyon, together with her life partner Del Martin, had founded the first lesbian organization, The Daughters of Bilitis, in 1955. The “Stonewall Riots” in 1969, resulting from a police raid on a “gay” bar in New York, triggered steadily growing “gay rights” demonstrations all over the country. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed the diagnosis “homosexuality” from its handbook. Thus, practically overnight, millions of formerly mentally sick “homosexuals” found themselves to be healthy again. It was the greatest and fastest mass cure in medical history (but no one received a Nobel Prize for it). Soon San Francisco became the “gay capital of the world”, and I had the opportunity to observe it all at close range.

A Textbook of Human Sexuality
This was the national mood and general political atmosphere in which I began a new, independent life. The enormous success of “The Sex Book” prompted my publisher friend to give me a very substantial advance for a new book of my own choosing. Since he did not impose any deadline, I was financially secure for years and free to live wherever I wanted. I chose Hawai’i and moved to Waikiki Beach in Honolulu.

At that time, Waikiki had not yet become the high-rise concrete jungle it is today. Indeed, along the beach there were still rows of one-story wooden houses on stilts. I rented one of them and began a relaxing open-ended vacation. After a few months of swimming, tanning and slowing down, I had absorbed enough of the “Polynesian spirit” to become curious about the local history and culture. I therefore began to read about Hawaiian history and to collect historical recordings of Hawaiian music. I also explored the city and its neighborhoods. To my surprise, I discovered that Honolulu had a university, and to my even greater surprise, its Department of Social Work offered a Master’s degree in “Human Sexuality”.

This was the first time I encountered the study of “sex” as an academic field in its own right. The program had an interdisciplinary faculty: Harvey Gochros and David Shore (social work), Ron Pion (gynecology), Vincent de Feo (anatomy) and Milton Diamond (biology), who is still on my scientific advisory board today. It was a lively, innovative group that invited me to their classes. Trying to make myself useful, I wrote two chapters for new books by Gochros and Shore - one about the historical roots of sexual oppression, and the other about youth and sex in Western societies. When I met their intelligent and highly motivated students, I noticed, however, that they had to manage without a textbook.

Since I was captivated by the whole idea of “studying sex”, and since there was no textbook on human sexuality, I decided to fill this gap and to write one myself. After all, I was financially independent and had time on my hands, so why shouldn’t I try? And obviously, there is no better way to learn about a subject than to write a textbook for it.

Once I had made the decision, I returned to the “mainland” and rented an apartment, first on Nob Hill, later on Cathedral Hill, in San Francisco. There, I had the convenience of using two great libraries for my research – the city’s public library and the university library at UC Berkeley. At a new Erotic Art Museum I also met the film-maker and photographer Laird Sutton, who agreed to provide new photo illustrations for my planned book. At the same time, I kept in close contact with my Hawaiian colleagues and spent every year several weeks or even months in Honolulu.

In 1974 I met my partner Gene in San Francisco, with whom I have been living ever since (we are now looking back at over 42 happy years together). From that time on, he joined me in Waikiki every year. As a teacher, he had a summer vacation of 3 months, and thus, for several years, Honolulu remained our “summer home”. As the romantic old wooden houses were demolished, we stayed in various grand beach hotels.

Living in Honolulu, we also made friends outside the academic environment and regularly attended the Sunday brunches at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. We also took catamaran sailing trips around Oahu, and, needless to say, explored the other Hawaiian islands, especially the “big island” Hawai’i with its black beaches and Maui with its old whaling harbor Lahaina and its moon-like landscape around its dead volcanoes. And there was another plus: My membership in the San Francisco Press Club entitled us to all privileges at the Outrigger Canoe Club right on Waikiki Beach. I short, my new life as a self-employed writer turned out to be very agreeable indeed. And it was with deep gratitude that I now remembered my envious colleagues in Heidelberg, who had driven me out of their snakepit and put me on the pleasant path to this perfect paradise.

When my book was finally ready for publication, I discovered, however, that two Stanford professors had beaten me to the finish line and had written the very first textbook on human sexuality. (5) Apparently, Stanford had also begun to teach the relevant courses. Thus, my own textbook was only the second. On the other hand, it had a definite advantage over its competition: Because of its carefully planned special design and style, it turned out to be attractive to book clubs and also sold well in regular bookstores. As a result, my “Sex Atlas” was commercially just as successful as my “Sex Book” had been. Moreover, it was translated into three other languages. But my greatest satisfaction derived from something else: When the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) celebrated its 35 anniversary, it named my textbook among the influential publications of the preceding 35 years, along with the books by Susan Brownmiller, Betty Friedan, John Boswell, Michel Foucault and Masters & Johnson.

In the meantime, the Erotic Art Museum had returned its collection to Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen and had developed into a sexological graduate school – The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (IASHS). In 1977, I was invited to join this unique, innovative initiative as a full professor and was given an additional doctorate (Ed.D), with my textbook being counted as a dissertation. Among many other things, my employment there had the advantage of giving me ample time for vacations. Indeed, I spent my entire summers away from it, first in Hawai’i, and later in Europe. And Gene always accompanied me.

The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco
The Institute’s founder and president was Ted McIlvenna, a theologian, Methodist minister and social activist, whose life-enhancing tolerance of all non-destructive sexual expression was grounded in his Christian faith. The Institute was housed in a centrally located, unobtrusive, deliberately unmarked building that had formerly been a large automobile repair shop and garage. This had been converted to a two-story interior, complete with an auditorium, a library, film studio, several staff offices, a common meeting room for students and faculty, and a “relaxation room” with a “hot tub”. The Institute had only a limited accreditation (not recognized in Europe). However, during the 11 years of my affiliation, I learned more about human sexuality there than in all universities before and after.

The faculty consisted - in addition to myself - of two additional Methodist ministers (one of them Laird Sutton, whom I had met earlier), two psychiatrists, two psychologists, four gynecologists (two of them were also osteopaths and professors at medical schools), a lawyer, and two pioneering feminists: Phyllis Lyon, who, with her partner Del Martin, had founded the first American lesbian organization “Daughters of Bilitis” in 1955, and Maggi Rubenstein, a pioneer of the bisexual movement.

The academic dean was Wardell B. Pomeroy, formerly the closest collaborator of Alfred C. Kinsey and co-author of the “Kinsey Reports” of 1948 and 1953. Almost every day I spent many hours with him talking about every possible angle of human sexual behavior. From him I learned more about it than from anyone else.

In addition to its regular faculty, the Institute had prominent guest lecturers, some of whom returned several times: The researchers Frank A. Beach, John Money, Milton Diamond, James W. Prescott, Vern Bullough, Norma McCoy, Gorm Wagner, Robert Francoeur, Sally Binford, Fred Whitam, Fang-fu Ruan and Beverly Whipple, the therapists Albert Ellis, Richard Green, William H. Masters, David McWhirter and Andrew Mattison, Joan und Dwight Dixon, Lonnie Barbach, Bernie Zilbergeld, Bernard Apfelbaum, Jack Annon, Fritz Klein, Gina Ogden, Leah Schaefer, William Hartman and Marilyn Fithian, well-known authors like Gore Vidal, John Rechy, Edward M. Brecher, Alex Comfort, and Robert Rimmer, the sociologists Ira Reiss, Martin S. Weinberg, John Gagnon and William Simon, the great advocate of sexual health education Mary S. Calderone, the educators Sol Gordon, Lester A. Kirkendall, William A. Granzig, John De Cecco, Michael Carrera and Roger Libby, the Sheriff of San Francisco, Richard Hongisto, the feminists Betty Dodson and Margo St. James and many others.

Actually, anyone in the US who had anything important to say about human sexuality sooner or later lectured at our Institute, which became informally known in the US as the “Harvard of sexology”. Never before and nowhere else had there ever been such a gathering of sexological experts. However, we never advanced or advocated a particular point of view or sexual ideology. The life experiences and ideas of our guests were simply too different from each other. Both our faculty and our students had to form their own opinions.

Wardell Pomeroy (on the right) and I teaching a joint seminar in our auditorium

We also had many less prominent guest lecturers talking about their own lives or the sexual aspects of their work. Among these were political activists, “swingers”, sadomasochists, transvestites and transsexuals, fetishists, police officers from the “vice squad”, correctional officers, male and female prostitutes, lawyers, owners of “sex shops”, “pornographers”, artists, collectors, publishers, and journalists. Our Institute invited them, because we believed that our students needed to be exposed to the great variety of sexual realities, including those that are usually hidden from view.

We followed this general philosophy not only as a matter of principle, but also as an obligation towards our very special audience: We accepted only students who already possessed an academic degree or some professional experience or certification. Strictly speaking, therefore, the school was an institute of continuing education (the word “Advanced” in its title hinted at this.)

Our typical students were fully employed physicians, psychologists, family therapists, nurses, educators, and social workers. Over the years, we even had several Catholic priests, whose tuition was paid by their churches or monasteries. They all came to our Institute for the purpose of obtaining an additional qualification that would help them in their duties.

Under the circumstances, we worked with a system of trimesters, each lasting four months. During three of these four months, the students attended to their usual work in their home towns, while doing their research projects in their free time and sending in their weekly book reports. All teaching on location in San Francisco was concentrated in the fourth month, when their presence was required for the lecture series and various seminars.

Unfortunately, once I had returned to Germany in 1988 and, one year later, had decided to stay there, I lost contact to the Institute, because new challenges in Germany and China took up all of my time. Grateful as I was to my former workplace, I remained - without pay - on the list of faculty, as did other colleagues who had also left for other positions. Occasionally, I even answered requests from new students, but, on the whole, I no longer followed the developments in San Francisco. I did pay a brief visit around my 70^th birthday, but, at that time, because of an academic vacation, I did not find any students there. Only the top administrators were present. For me especially, it was a very sentimental reunion, because, as it turned out, most of my former colleagues had died, and others, like me, had moved on to other places. Even many of our prominent guest lecturers were no longer among the living and had joined “the truly silent majority”. Thus, it was inevitable that we few remaining “old war horses” became nostalgic and talked mostly about our past “days of glory”.

Now, once again many years later, I hear from some of my own former doctoral students that, in the course of time, the Institute had undergone substantial changes. Indeed, as I understand it, its building has been sold to be replaced by a new high-rise of luxury apartments. It seems, therefore, that the Institute has lost its San Francisco location. I have not been able to ascertain if, where, and in which form it will continue to exist. When I worked there, however, it was unique and far ahead of its time.

Without going into details, I can summarize some unique features of our Institute this way:

1. The “Kinsey interview”
All of our students were individually and confidentially interviewed by Wardell B. Pomeroy with the same technique he had used many years earlier for the “Kinsey Reports”. Pomeroy and Kinsey together had conducted 90% of these interviews (each ca. 45%). For many students this experience created, for the first time, an awareness of their own behavior patterns and thus had a liberating effect. I also had myself interviewed and can confirm that it was very helpful to me in understanding my own sexual history. Pomeroy also taught a seminar about his questioning technique and, with the consent of the woman, whose sex history he was taking, made a model video showing an actual, true-to-life interview. Finally, he published a book explaining the rationale behind it and the recording sytem, which Kinsey had designed as an unbreakable code. He had considered this necessary at the time in order to protect himself against possible hostile investigations and intrusions. It also made it impossible for outsiders to misuse his data.

When the interview was conducted properly, the entire sexual life of an individual, with all of its details, fit on a single recording sheet. There were only two exceptions: For the sex histories of prostitutes and of those with very extensive homosexual experiences Kinsey and Pomeroy (and later Gebhard) used an additional sheet.

2. SAR
The Institute had developed a special series of exercises for our students, showing them the whole spectrum of human sexuality without making them upset about unfamiliar behaviors. This particular combination of instruction and guided relaxation we called “Sexual Attitude Restructuring” (SAR). It soon became popular in many other American teaching programs, where it was usually presented under other names.

3. Documentary Films
Our film-maker Laid Sutton was the first who made documentary films about actual human sexual behavior. His goal was a kind of cinema verité, i.e. films showing ordinary people during sexual activity, without a script and without direction of any kind. During the shooting, the film crew remained silent and as unobtrusive as possible. In those days, this was a revolutionary concept. For the first time, film audiences could see, for example, an older couple having sexual intercourse or a younger couple with one of the partners, a paraplegic, being paralyzed from the neck down. For many viewers, including physicians, these films were a revelation, and thus they were soon bought by medical schools all over the country for the training of their own staff. After all, it was a time when many seriously wounded young soldiers returned from the battlefields in Vietnam and their doctors had no idea about their sexual needs and remaining capacities. Eventually, some universities followed our example and made their own documentary films.

4. Video documentation of our classes
All of our lectures, including all guest lectures, and many of our seminars were videotaped. The videos were available to our students both on location in San Francisco and at home, because, if requested, the Institute also mailed them to their postal addresses. Thus, the lectures could be studied and restudied at the viewer’s convenience. And we did this at a time long before the internet even existed. This is another indication of how far ahead we were of the traditional universities. Naturally, over the years, this collection of videos grew to an enormous size. In their totality, they made our institute the most completely documented institution of higher learning in the world. At the same time, it provided an invaluable record of the American “sexual revolution” in the 1970s and 1980s. It is to be hoped that this unique resource can somehow be preserved. Eventually, it should be made available to cultural historians and others interested in the liberation movements of the later 20^th century and in the general social atmosphere that nourished them.

5. Visitors and Visits
Our Institute also had many interesting visitors, most of them American educators, artists, collectors, journalists, activists, and businessmen unknown outside academic circles. However, I remember especially the publisher David Goodstein (The Advocate) and the gay activist Bruce Voeller, who both died much too early. However, we also had visitors from other countries: Fernando Bianco (Venezuela), Edward Brongersma (Netherlands), Gorm Wagner (Denmark), Lars Gösta Dahlöf (Sweden), Jacques Waynberg (France), Martin Speich, Vincent Griesser, Willy Pasini, and André Haynal (Switzerland), and Reinhard Wille and Wolf Eicher (Germany). After moving from Nob Hill to Cathedral Hill , I lived close to Paul Hardman, an activist on behalf of American „gay veterans“. I visited him often in his beautiful „Victorian“ house, where he published his paper California Voice, and where I met Dianne Feinstein, who later, under tragic circumstances, became Mayor of San Francisco and eventually US Senator from California. With Wardell Pomeroy I visited Sam Steward (Phil Andros) who lived in nearby Berkeley. He was one of the most fascinating men I ever met. (Among his many prominent sexual partners had been Lord Alfred Douglas, Rudolph Valentino, and Thornton Wilder, the hero of my doctoral dissertation.) Very important for me was my friendship with the psychologist Paul A. Walker, who also died too young. He was a specialist in transsexualism (gender dysphoria). At one of his parties I met Christine Jorgensen, where she was „holding court“ like a princess. After all, in some sense, she was indeed a „star“ and living legend. I had met the pioneering sex researcher and therapist William H. Masters in 1981 at the World Congress of Sexology in Jerusalem, where we had walked the Via Dolorosa together. Later I visited him twice at his institute in St. Louis. Clarence A. Tripp (1919-2003), the psychologist, author and early collaborator of Alfred Kinsey’s, invited me to stay with him for a week in his home with a spectacular view of the Hudson River and its Tappan Zee Bridge. (This visit later made it possible for me to get in touch with the mysterious Dr. X.

New York City offered me the chance for three important visits: In mid-town Manhattan, Bob Guccione, the editor of the magazine „Penthouse“, invited me to his well-guarded townhouse, and on the Lower East Side I visited John Gagnon in his spacious loft. Most importantly, however, I met Harry Benjamin, an ardent opera fan like myself. As a young man in Berlin, he had seen and heard Enrico Caruso on the stage (as Radames in “Aida”). At a Berlin opera ball, he had danced with Geraldine Farrar, who had started her career in that city, but then moved to New York’s Metropolitan Opera. There, she was much admired not only for her singing, but perhaps even more for her beauty. Once Benjamin had finally settled in New York in 1915, he was able to witness her many triumphs at the MET (for example as the first ”Butterfly”), and of course, he also followed Enrico Caruso’s career on the same stage. Eventually, one of the greatest opera stars of all time became his patient - the “blonde bombshell” Maria Jeritza, the first “Ariadne” of Richard Strauss and Puccini’s favorite “Tosca”. Benjamin gave me his correspondence with Hirschfeld as well as other historical materials in the hope that, one day, I would be able to find a safe place for them in Berlin. And indeed, today they are housed in the Haeberle-Hirschfeld-Archive of Humboldt University. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, I conducted an interview with him for a German journal of sexual medicine.

In 1980, the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) invited me to speak at their annual conference in Washington DC. I chose a subject then still hardly discussed by sexologists – the „Stigmata of Degeneration: Prisoner Markings in Nazi Concentration Camps”. For this, I also prepared two large display boards and donated one of them to the Holocaust Memorial Council, which sent me a letter of thanks. The lecture was later published in the Journal of Homosexuality.

At that time I also indirectly renewed an older connection: In addition to my work at our Institute in San Francisco, I taught a class on human sexuality at the UC Berkeley Extension. This was something I really enjoyed. My students were enthusiastic and wrote very flattering evaluations. I gratefully continued the class for several semesters until increasing travels and other duties began to interfere and, to my immense regret, forced me to discontinue.

In those days I often flew to New York, where I still worked as a part-time editor for my friend Werner M. Linz. One day, an older German immigrant visited me in my office and introduced himself as Richard Plant, a former private secretary of Klaus Mann (the openly gay son of Thomas Mann). Plant wanted to write a book on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals and offer it to us for publication. Needless to say, I strongly urged him to do so and to keep in touch, because I felt that such a publication was long overdue and would also be commercially successful. Unfortunately, we never heard from him again. However, his proposal lingered in my mind, and I finally decided to use whatever material was available at the time for a journal article “Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star - The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany. It appeared in 1981 and was eventually included in an anthology “Hidden from History”. Plant‘s book was published five years later by another company: The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, New York 1986.

At this point I would like to leap ahead for a brief summary of a memorable episode: Sometime in the early 1990’s, when I was already working in Berlin, my old publisher friend Werner Linz invited me for a few weeks to his home in Rye, N.Y. Once there, I used the opportunity for a “sentimental journey” back to Yale. In the meantime, of course, the professors I had known were no longer available. Most of them had died, others retired, and my contemporary fellow students and researchers had found positions in other universities. Nevertheless, I felt a need to return at least once to the place that had been so important for my career. Moreover, I wanted to meet the younger cultural historian John Boswell, whose books had greatly impressed me. He had just been appointed head of the Yale history department, and thus I found him in the middle of his move to a new office. He was an impressive, somewhat idiosyncratic, but very likable person. His all-too-early death was a great loss to everyone interested in the history of homosexuality. We talked at great length about his various studies and his plans for the future. We also discussed the general situation of the university, which had begun to fortify itself against intrusions from the impoverished, deteriorating city of New Haven. On campus, the formerly open, picturesque passage ways and inner courtyards were now closed with huge iron gates that could be opened only with personal keys. At the Hall of Graduate Studies, where, for three years, I had eaten my daily meals, I found something new posted near the entrance - a weekly crime report, the „Yale Police Log“, which listed the break-ins, burglaries, thefts, and assaults of the preceding seven days. The whole situation was depressing. Boswell, being relatively young, had never known the idyllic conditions that I had enjoyed a quarter-century earlier. At that time, and in the same rooms, I had often visited the Berlin-born historian Hajo Holborn, who had been very helpful to me as a supporter and advisor.

World Congress of Sexology in Jerusalem
Writing my textbook, I had begun to realize that sexology as a scientific enterprise in its own right had originated in Berlin, where it’s most important protagonists had been Jewish physicians: Iwan Bloch, Albert Moll, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Max Marcuse . They had edited the first sexological journals, published the first sexological standard works, founded the first sexological societies, and organized the first sexological congresses. Hirschfeld had even established the first Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) in Berlin 1919. However, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they immediately started to destroy all traces of the new science, forcing its pioneers into exile and burning their books. Iwan Bloch had already died in 1922. Max Marcuse fled to Palestine. (He died in 1963 as a citizen of Israel). Hirschfeld’s institute was plundered and closed. His founder, back from a lecture and research trip around the world, but unable to return home, died in France in 1935. Moll, who disdained, indeed hated, both Freud and Hirschfeld, remained in Berlin and, in 1936, even succeeded in having his memoirs published: Ein Leben als Arzt der Seele (“A Life as a Physician of the Soul”). Nevertheless, he soon suffered the same indignities and discriminations as all other Jews in Germany. He lost his medical license and escaped his transportation to one of the death camps only by dying of natural causes in 1939 in Berlin on the same day as Sigmund Freud in London.

This early, tragic history of our field was largely forgotten even in Germany, and practically unknown in the US. Because of my German background, however, I had learned at least some basic facts about it and was eager to share them with interested colleagues at the World Congress of Sexology in Jerusalem 1981. My presentation was very well received and later published in the congress proceedings.

In advance of the congress, the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR) had organized a meeting for its members in Haifa, which I eagerly attended, because I wanted to seize the opportunity to travel around Israel in search of historical materials. Yohanan Meroz, the former Ambassador of Israel in Germany and son of Max Marcuse, had given me several promising addresses. And, indeed, I found such materials and delivered them to the Kinsey Institute when I became one of its paid research associates.

Traveling by bus, I visited a number of elderly German immigrants (“Jeckes”) who had escaped Nazi persecution by moving to what was then called Palestine. For example, in Jerusalem I met a photographer, a charming, unmarried old lady, who had taken Max Marcuse’s portraits and now lived very happily in a simple flat. In a Kibbutz near the Lebanese border, I visited an 80-year old woman, who, as an enthusiastic Zionist, had left Freiburg Br. - of all places - as early as 1929. Obviously, we had a lot to talk about the developments in the Black Forest since then. She invited me to a typical German afternoon coffee with cake and whipped cream. Thus, we had a wonderful time sitting in front of her ample library shelves with the collected works of Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. She still clung to the socialist ideals of her youth and bitterly criticized the Likud and Menachem Begin, who was about to win the next election. In Haifa I met an elderly Jewish couple that had barely escaped from Berlin, but were still proud of their German background. In Tel Aviv I lost my way and asked passers-by in English for the next taxi stand. However, I only met with blank stares. I then repeated my question in German and was immediately given the right answer. In the meantime, of course, the old “Jeckes” have died, the German influence has waned, and Israel has acquired a very different character.

For me, my contribution to the congress brought two important rewards: Both the president of Israel, Yitzhak Navon (1921-2015), and the most prominent American sex researcher and therapist William A. Masters (1915-2001) sent me letters of thanks. I did not have another opportunity to return to Israel, but in the following years I was lucky enough to visit Masters and his institute twice in St. Louis.

Here something very personal:
In the early 70s a new fashion came to San Francisco - as well as to Honolulu - the “Sunday brunch”, i.e. a combination of breakfast and lunch. Since I was used to writing at night and getting up late in the morning, I found this to be a wonderful innovation and immediately took advantage of it. The two best and most elegant brunch restaurants were the Crown Room at the Fairmont Hotel and the Garden Court at the Palace Hotel. Living on Nob Hill very near the Fairmont Hotel, my partner Gene and I soon became - and remained - regular customers. Whenever possible, we invited friends and visitors to join us.

A few years later, I moved to Cathedral Hill. From there, we took the cable car at its terminal California Street/Van Ness Avenue and, after an exciting ride, were delivered right at the door of the Fairmont - always a delightful experience in itself. Occasionally, we also went to the historical „Garden Court“ at the Palace Hotel on Market Street. These several hundred unforgettable Sundays - always in very good company - are among my most cherished memories.

At the Kinsey Institute
Later In the same year 1981, my colleague Wardell B. Pomeroy took me along for a special event at Indiana University in Bloomington: The “Institute of Sex Research” added the name of its founder to its title and would now be officially called “Kinsey Institute of Sex Research”. The occasion was the 25^th anniversary of Kinsey’s death. (After two more name changes, it is now simply called “Kinsey Institute”.) The simple, but moving ceremony was attended by the co-authors of the original “Kinsey Reports” of 1948 and 1953: Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard, who had followed Kinsey as the institute’s director and was still in charge. Also present were the old Institute photographer Bill Dellenback and Kinsey’s widow with her now adult children. It was a harmonious, nostalgic gathering which I remember fondly. However, soon something else captivated my attention:

Walking around the institute’s library, I discovered rows and rows of bookshelves with old German sexological publications. As it turned out, however, Kinsey had not known German, and had, for his “Reports”, used just a few short excerpts in translation. Nevertheless, he had managed to collect practically the entire literature written before 1933 by our German sexological pioneers – books, journals, pamphlets, posters, newspaper articles, letters, and more. Just a few months before, I myself had used my limited knowledge of this early phase of sexology for my presentation in Jerusalem, but I had never realized how vast its accomplishments had been and how many authors had contributed to them. Apparently Kinsey, although unable to read his own collection, had known that it would be important for others. Therefore, from the very beginning, he had tried to establish his library as a very broad, serious and lasting basis for sexuality studies of all kinds. Standing in front of this unexpected treasure, I was overwhelmed and deeply impressed by Kinsey’s foresight, thoroughness and seriousness as a researcher. From that moment on I saw him in a new light as a truly great scientists and a model professor in the best academic tradition.

When I talked with Paul Gebhard about this, he confirmed my impression and added that, no staff member had ever read the German section of the library. He therefore decided, right on the spot, to give me a salaried position as a research associate at the Kinsey Institute. I also did not hesitate and immediately made copies of the most important German documents I found. These I took back home with me and, from then on for several years, I regularly commuted to Bloomington, making ever more copies and working on them in San Francisco, where I continued my job at our training Institute. Beginning at that time, half of my salary was paid by Indiana University.

Looking more closely at my German material, I soon realized that 1983 would mark a triple anniversary:
- 75 years after the publication of the first sexological journal (Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft 1908),
- 70 years after the founding of the first sexological societies (1. Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft und Eugenik and 2. Internationale Gesellschaft für Sexualforschung, both 1913), and
- 50 years after the plundering and closing of the first sexological institute by the Nazis (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1933)

1. A traveling exhibition
The year 1983 would also be the date of the next World Congress of Sexology, to be organized in Washington DC – a marvelous potential showcase for the historical treasures of the Kinsey Institute. I therefore suggested to Paul Gebhard that we should produce an exhibition with the title “The Birth of Sexology in Berlin 1908-1933”. He agreed under the condition that I would obtain the necessary funding. And indeed, I was successful in getting financial support from Austrian and German official sources, among them the Goethe Institute. Thus, I was able to produce a “traveling exhibition” of 50 large display boards showing photographs and key documents from the Kinsey collection about the pioneering phase of sexology. In addition, I prepared an illustrated brochure showing most of the same material. It was freely distributed to all congress participants. (A later German edition was sold in bookstores.) It must have been later in the same year that I also presented a summary of my findings at the annual meeting of the History of Science Society in Philadelphia PA.

In Washington DC, I was assigned a 60-minute opening speech on the subject, and the manuscript was then printed in the congress proceedings, which I edited with my medical colleague Taylor Segraves. Together with my exhibition, it was a “double whammy” and a great success. More importantly, in the following years, my exhibition travelled to other countries – Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the crown colony Hong Kong, and China. Everywhere it was shown, it produced favorable reviews in the press, including the newspapers in China. I finally donated it to my Chinese colleague Liu Dalin for his museums in Shanghai and other Chinese cities.

In Germany, my exhibition was shown in Hamburg, Kiel, Oldenburg, and Marburg, but in Berlin itself nobody was interested. Thus, it never had a chance to inform and educate the universities, the opinion makers, and a wider audience in that city. In a sadly ironic twist, a few years later Berlin once again became the German capital, but to this day, there is still no one who understands or appreciates the intentions of its sexological pioneers. As I eventually found out to my surprise, dismay and exasperation, in Berlin there is no interest whatsoever in rebuilding anything like Hirschfeld’s multidisciplinary and globally oriented institute. Instead, the in Berlin formerly comprehensive effort has broken up into fragments. Sub-disciplines like sexual medicine, gender studies, homosexuality studies, and sex education now jealously guard their independence. Instead of striving for a common “centralized standpoint”, as Iwan Bloch had called it, they now prefer to farm their own separate little acres. As a result, they are losing their collective “punch” and are, slowly but surely, drifting into scientific and social insignificance. Unfortunately, this trend has now also reached the United States. Kinsey himself had carefully avoided any close connection to medical institutions. His research had always tried to cover all aspects of sexual behavior. Later, in anticipation of possible centrifugal tendencies, the institute expressly tried to forestall these by changing its name to “Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction”. However, this preemptive measure proved to be futile: Today, Indiana University, like many other universities, also has in an independent Department of Gender Studies. The unified approach used by the great German pioneers and their worthy American successor Kinsey is increasing being lost.

Considering its glorious past, the situation of sexology in Germany is especially depressing: In the public mind, Hirschfeld’s role in the establishment of a new, multidisciplinary science has been reduced to little more than that of a former German “gay activist”. Hirschfeld, the innovator, motivator and fearless reformer in many fields, author of books and articles on many different subjects, journal editor, congress organizer, educator and lecturer, fighter for women’s rights, defender of all sexual minorities, film initiator and collaborator, institute founder, library builder, museum director, always curious collector of erotica and ethnological artifacts, master organizer and internationally well-connected world traveler, remains largely unknown in the country of his birth.

2. An essay on “obscene” photographs
My next project was inspired by an exhibition in the City Museum of Munich, Germany. This was the world’s first show of nude photography through the ages, starting with some of the earliest daguerreotypes. I wanted to offer historical photos from the Kinsey Institute for parts of this very large show, but in the end, very regrettably, could not do so. Nevertheless, the museum’s director, Christoph Stölzl, encouraged me to write an essay - in German - for the event under the title “The Forbidden Nude – ‘obscene’ photographs from 1850 – 1950”. Originally, I had also planned to use Kinsey’s collected photos for this essay, but, to my great disappointment, and at the last minute, had to replace them with comparable free samples from a French collection. The text was published in the large, illustrated volume accompanying the exhibition. Both the exhibition with its extensive media coverage and the book with its repeated editions were very successful. (6) For the Kinsey Institute it was a great missed opportunity.

3. An unwritten book
In view of the ample holdings of the Kinsey Institute’s library, I developed the ambition to write a comprehensive history of sexology. No such study existed at the time, and all necessary material was available in Bloomington, waiting to be used. However, I soon realized that such a substantial undertaking would be a full-time job for which I would need additional financial support over several years. I therefore applied to a number of American and European foundations for funding. Unfortunately, their responses were as negative as they were predictable: The Americans replied that my planned work was devoted to exploring German literary sources and that, for this reason, only German funding was appropriate. The Germans, in turn, pointed out that I intended to use the holdings of an American library and that, for this reason, only American funding could be considered. As a result, I received no funding at all. Quite obviously, neither side understood my project or even bothered to take a careful look at my application. I am now convinced that their reviewers simply did not have the necessary knowledge, patience, and intellectual competence to make an appropriate, informed decision.

No one, on either side of the Atlantic, cared a whit that there were only very few survivors left, who could be interviewed about the pioneering phase of sexology. Soon thereafter, they also had died. Anyway, in the end I was never given the chance to put me whole energy into this major project. To this day, there is no comprehensive history of sexology, and it is highly unlikely that it will be written soon. (7) There is, however, a solid first partial overview published in 1994 by Vern Bullough. Before his death in 2006, he gave the copyright to me, and I therefore made it available in my Archive’s online library: „Science in the Bedroom“ (also in Spanish: „Ciencia en la alcoba“) And, over the years, I myself was able to make the occasional contributions now included in this book (see Content).

It was clear to me, however, that a serious historical study of sexology had to begin at least with the “age of enlightenment“ in Europe, especially in France and the United Kingdom. The Déclaration universelle des droits de l'homme of 1789 and the Code pénal of 1791 for the first time removed all religious influences from the criminal law (reconfirmed in Napoléon‘s code of 1810). Because of Napoléon’s conquests, this new criminal code soon also began to apply in other parts of Europe. Thus, for example, male homosexual contact was no longer punishable, even in some parts of Germany (Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Hannover). This, in turn, influenced the German public discussion of the issue. Further early French historical sources were the works of Rousseau, de Sade, and Olympe de Gouges, a feminist who demanded equal rights for women, and who, in 1793, was executed by guillotine. Later important writings were those of the psychiatrist Bénedict A. Morel, the physician and public health pioneer A. J. B Parent - du Châtelet , the writer Rémy de Gourmont (The Natural Philosphy of Love), the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and eventually Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault. All of these names are merely hints at the larger “real story” behind them.

Even more interesting was the older English literature - from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus and Francis Place to the Malthusian League and Robert Drysdale. This would have required an investigation of the role played by censorship in the development of our science. (Even today sex research is not really free, but that is a subject of another study.) Another important author in this context was the philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose many writings, and especially his work On Liberty, written with the substantial, if unacknowledged contribution of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, emphasized the importance of individual freedom. The interaction between the forces of sexual liberation and sexual repression in 19^th and 20^th century Britain would have needed special attention. (By the way, here we’ll find Marx and Engels in the reactionary camp.)

It goes without saying that I would have put my whole study into the context of two revolutions, which both had begun in England: 1. The industrial revolution with its enormous social and sexual consequences, and 2. The scientific revolution started by Charles Darwin’s biological study of 1859 “The Origin of Species”, in which he described and offered proof of the process of evolution. For decades, this epochal work led to heated controversies, misunderstandings, and false interpretations. One of them was the theory of „social Darwinism“. This ideology misinterpreted the principle of the „survival of the fittest“ (i.e. of the best adapted) as the „survival of the strongest“, which, from the standpoint of biology, is utter nonsense, of course. As we all know, the large, strong dinosaurs did not survive the then small and weak mammals, which were able to adapt to the changed climatic conditions. Nevertheless, the nonsense of social Darwinism continued to haunt political and economic discussions well into the 20^th century, especially outside of England. One example was a new, pseudoscientific racism, which no longer used religious or simply xenophobic arguments, but invented various “inferior” races, including an alleged Jewish race that supposedly threatened the health and order of society.

Another example was the theory and practice of “eugenics”, i.e. the will to improve the human race by selective breeding: The “good and strong” members of society should be encouraged to have many children, and the “bad and weak” should be prevented from having any. The desired result would be a “superior”, i.e. physically and mentally “improved” population. Following this doctrine, many countries, including some states in the USA, introduced various drastic measures, such as the forced sterilization of „inferior“ population groups. Nazi Germany even organized a so-called „euthanasia program“ for the systematic murder of “life unworthy of life“. All of this has, in the meantime, greatly discredited the eugenics movement. In its early days, however, it had been supported by many prominent sexologist, at least in its general tendency, if not in every practical detail. Indeed, in some ways, the arguments about the meaning, justification and „proper“ application of eugenics continue to this day. However, the subject is too complicated for an adequate discussion here. After all, governments have also often created „positive“ eugenic incentives, such as the promotion of contraception, legalizing abortions, facilitating access to the treatment of sexually transmitted infections, financial support for couples contributing to a rising birth rate, or official invitations to immigrants from certain countries. Here again, one can perceive and discuss positive and negative aspects, but this is not the place for it. Today, eugenic questions are being raised again with regard to donor insemination, prenatal diagnosis, embryo selection, gene manipulation, and cloning.

The cultural history of the United Kingdom offers numerous, embarrassing examples of sexual ignorance, prudery, and hypocrisy. Well-known homosexual victims were Oscar Wilde in the 19th and Alan Turing in the 20^th century. As far as the social attitudes toward homosexuals are concerned, the writings of John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster and Radclyffe Hall were milestones on the way to greater tolerance.

The books of the most important British author on sexual questions, Havelock Ellis, could not be sold in his own country. His „Studies in the Psychology of Sex“ had to be published in the USA, but even there were legally accessible only to physicians. Eventually, however, Norman Haire, a friend of Hirschfeld’s, managed to gain some influence as a reformer in the United Kingdom. Haire closely collaborated with the feminist Dora Russell, who, together with her husband, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, consistently and very energetically demanded sexual reform. A highlight of their collaboration was the congress of the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) .

The cultural history of the US also provides interesting examples of a sexually repressive ideology - the anti-masturbation campaigns of Graham and Kellogg , the originators of „Graham Crackers“ und „Kellogg’s Corn Flakes“. These “health foods” supposedly dampened the sex drive and thereby reduced the dangers of masturbation. On the other hand, the 19th century also saw the birth of the American women’s movement, which, in the 20^th century, became very important for the progress of our science. Unfortunately, the general population suffered the devastating effects of Anthony Comstock’s crusade against “obscenity”. He and his allies in the US congress established a regular “reign of terror” aimed at preventing any kind of sexual information and education. Indeed, their negative influence could still be felt in the 1950s, when congress pressured the Rockefeller Foundation to end its support of Kinsey’s research. It must be acknowledged, however, that the sexologically interested Rockefellers had already been sabotaged for years by the “scientific establishment”. (8) On the other hand, there also had been independent American sexological pioneers, such as the physiologist and educator Winfield Scott Hall (1861-1942) the gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson (1861-1950), and Margaret Sanger the tireless fighter for contraception. Another name deserving to be mentioned is that of Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), who published the popular periodical „Sexology - The Magazine of Sex Science“ (1933-1967). This small, cheap magazine tried to describe and explain the latest serious research and often found qualified original authors. For example, from August 1949 to August 1951 it published, in installments, René Guyon‘s otherwise unavailable study „The Sexual Problem in the Historical Period“. Finally, one should not forget the largest educational bestseller before WW II: „Ideal Marriage“, written by the Dutch gynecologist T. H. van de Velde. Although listed in the Catholic „index of forbidden books”, it was, for several decades, the most widely read sexological book in both the US and Europe.

(By the way, the English word „sexology“ appeared as early as 1867 in the title of an American book by Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard: “Sexology as the Philosophy of Life: Implying Social Organization and Government”. However, the text does not use the term in our modern sense of „sex research“, but refers to a mysterious fundamental life force similar to the Chinese Yin and Yang. The whole book is a philosophical-moralistic pamphlet aimed at “improving the world” by persuading people to submit to the postulated supreme, true ordering principle of nature. It is unclear whether the author actually coined the word “sexology” herself or whether she borrowed it from another, still unknown writer. However, I am sure I would have found out.)

Summing up: The developments in Great Britain and the USA had a very special character of their own: They were torn between a libertarian pioneer spirit and the heritage of Puritanism. Here, I can only hint at this. In any case, I would have written my historical study in English and thus would have reached many readers who, even now, know nothing of this history. As for the “true” ancestors of our science, nothing definite can be said. After all, the „golden age of Islam“ (ca. 800 -1300 A.D.) had already produced a voluminous sexological literature in the Middle East and even in Europe, i.e. in Andalusia (al-Andalus). At the same time, we know that, in the 10^th century, religious fanatics had destroyed the most important books of the great library in Muslim Cordoba – another example of the never-ending attempts at censorship. It is therefore not easy to write a complete history of rational thought about sex. Over the centuries, there were a great many attempts at sexual “enlightenment” around the world, and their influences waxed and waned with changes in the larger political landscape. An important pioneer, for example was the Italian physician and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza. In any case, we can state as a fact that, in 1906, the highly educated, multilingual Iwan Bloch gathered many of these intellectual strands together to form a unified new research effort under the name „Sexualwissenschaft“ (sexual science). Nevertheless, in the end, I would probably have chosen Wilhelm von Humboldt as the first representative of modern sexology, not only because of his unconventional personal sex life, but especially because of his inspired idea to see the history human sexuality in all of its forms as a “History of Dependency in the Human Race” (Geschichte der Abhängigkeit im Menschengeschlechte). Here, Humboldt played still another of his many important roles in the history of ideas - this one still unrecognized by the university bearing his name and that of his brother Alexander. (His sex life was very different, but also atypical.)

Practical Sexual Medicine
Beginning in 1981, I was regularly invited to the annual conferences of a newly founded German Gesellschaft für praktische Sexualmedizin (Society for Practical Sexual Medicine). These conferences in Heidelberg were devoted to the continuing sexological education of physicians. Since I had been active in this area for several years in San Francisco, I was able to make some helpful contributions, which were published in the society’s proceedings. In addition, I was accepted as a full member in spite of the fact that I had no medical training.

At these meetings in Heidelberg, I had the good fortune of meeting some interesting and interested medical sexologists: Hans Lehfeldt (1899-1993), an early pioneer of contraception, who had escaped the Nazis and settled in New York, Jan Raboch, the director of the Institute of Sexology at Charles University in Prague, the Hungarian Imre Aszódi from the Academy of Sciences in Miskolc, and most importantly, the professors Wolf Eicher and Reinhard Wille from the medical schools of Munich and Kiel. Both also visited me at our Institute in San Francisco and were duly impressed with our training methods. In Heidelberg I also first met the endocrinologist Günter Dörner from (East-) Berlin. Although he himself was “straight”, he considered himself an advocate for “gay rights” and therefore invited me to join him in the city’s “gay parade” which happened to be held during our conference. This meeting bore unexpected fruit in 1990, when we were able to organize a double congress in the reunited Berlin.

Visiting Professor in Germany, the US, and Switzerland

1. Kiel (1983-1984)
Following the sexological world congress in Washington DC, Reinhard Wille took the initiative to have me invited as a visiting professor by the medical school of the University of Kiel in Northern Germany. We used this opportunity to show my historical exhibition at the city’s public library, where it remained during the entire semester and attracted many visitors. I also had brought a number of unpublished original materials about Ludwig Levy-Lenz, one of Hirschfeld’s collaborators, but no medical student was interested in using it for a dissertation. On the other hand, a famous German writer, whom I had met some years ago, introduced me to a fascinating scholar, who lived not far from Kiel. He had amassed a truly awesome collection: The world’s largest library of illustrated pornographic books, housed in two buildings in two different cities. All of these books were of the highest quality and together were certainly worth many millions of dollars. Some were unique works, entirely written and illustrated by hand, others were special, limited printed editions with graphics by world-famous artists, and still others were large-format, leather-bound volumes of the most exquisite quality, produced exclusively for the aristocracy of the ancien régime before the French Revolution. Since the collection could not be insured, its only protection was the fact that no one else knew about it and its locations. The collector very generously allowed Prof. Wille and me a closer inspection and answered our many questions. We sexologists immediately realized that we were presented here with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a sensational research project. The highly educated collector had no objection, but it soon became clear that the financial and organizational hurdles for such a project were too high. Thus, with deeply felt regret, we had to abandon our plan. I am now afraid that, after so many years, the collector is no longer alive and his library has been sold piece by piece to other collectors.

2. San Francisco (1984)
In the summer of the following year 1984, I was offered another opportunity make myself useful: The biologist Bernard Goldstein had, over many years, built up a very successful undergraduate class teaching “Human Sexuality” at San Francisco State University. Since he was promoted to a high administrative position in the Californian university system, he asked me to take over this class. The head of the biology department, Crellin Pauling, agreed and, for this purpose, offered me the title “distinguished visiting professor” because of my textbook. It was a challenge, because the “human sexuality class” already had over 600 students and was by far the largest on campus. Since regular classrooms were too small, it had to be taught in the university’s McKenna Theater (for an interior view, click here). During my sexology lectures, it was always filled to capacity. Thus, two times a week, I found myself with a mobile microphone in my hand walking up and down the enormous stage, showing slides and films, and introducing unusual personalities who had previously appeared at our much smaller training Institute. The very attentive students were captivated by the various lesbian, gay, and bisexual activists, transvestites, transsexuals, fetishists, and sadomasochists who appeared live with me and honestly answered all questions from the audience. At the end of the semester, a written exam (multiple choice questions) had to be taken and graded. To my great satisfaction, I saw that the students had indeed learned a lot, and some of them even achieved perfect scores. Also, as was already customary in American universities at that time, my own performance was evaluated by the students and received a ringing endorsement. Naturally, I would very much have enjoyed teaching this class, but his was impossible, because, for the next semester, I had already been scheduled to join the Medical School of the University of Geneva as a professeur invité.

3. Geneva (1984-1985)
The University of Geneva had established an innovative “Unité de gynécologie psychosomatique et sexologie“. Its pioneers, André Haynal and Willy Pasini, had visited our Institute in San Francisco and wanted me to teach some seminars in the spirit of our American training methods. For me, this was easy enough and, in essence, a pleasant routine. I had already written an article about the sexological tradition in French-speaking Switzerland, and this served as a good introduction. I also used the opportunity to conduct some research on the Swiss psychiatrist and sexological pioneer Auguste Forel and visited his grandson Armand Forel in nearby Nyon.

However, after a few short weeks, things took an unexpected, radical turn: I was told that the university hospital had already 17 AIDS patients and was expecting more. In the meantime, the hospital administration had heard about the already dramatic situation in San Francisco and the city’s heroic efforts to get it under control. Since I had just arrived from there, I was asked to lecture about this for a small, select group of clinic directors. I pointed out that I was not a physician and could not possibly say anything about the medical aspects of the disease. I offered instead to speak about San Francisco’s model prevention efforts, which I knew quite well. This was gratefully accepted. Therefore, I sent for some slides from our training institute and, with their help, explained the various prevention programs. Thus, I was able to show them a broad range of “official” material aimed at the gay community, fetishists, sadomasochists, drug users, prostitutes, and various ethnic minorities. The cornerstone of all AIDS prevention in San Francisco was the new concept of “safe sex”, developed by an organization of gay physicians, the “Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights” (BAPHR). Unavoidably, their “Safe Sex Guidelines” and the various official campaigns for their implementation in various risk groups went into details of sexual behavior that were well known to most people in “the world’s gay capital” San Francisco, but apparently quite unfamiliar to my audience of eminent physicians. Indeed, they became increasingly uncomfortable with the drastic specifics in both the texts and the illustrations. As I continued showing pictures of cards, flyers, brochures, and posters that were widely distributed in my Californian home city, my audience fell into shocked silence and, at the end of my presentation, they all left the room without saying a word.

AIDS
News of this “scandal” apparently soon got around. Within a week, I received an invitation to repeat my lecture in Basel, and this, in turn, led to new invitations, and so on. Eventually, I had to give up my regular work altogether and take my slide show “on the road”. In the following months, I found myself speaking to ever larger audiences in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. (In universities, I usually spoke in their “Auditorium Maximum”.) At the same time, I was asked by journal and newspaper editors to write about AIDS prevention, and I answered these requests as best I could. I do not remember all details of this turbulent period of my life, but cannot forget one especially illuminating episode: At one point, an Italian medical quarterly had asked me to write an article about AIDS prevention. (9) As a result, I was invited to speak about it in Rome, Modena, and Milan. At the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Rome I spoke to a sophisticated group of physicians, who appreciated the irony of someone pleading for condom use in these particular “Catholic surroundings”. At the University of Modena, the audience became somewhat restless, but remained polite. In Milan, however, my presentation ended in a total debacle.

My lecture at the university had been announced in the Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s leading newspapers, and attracted a large audience. Since I had been told that most HIV infections in Milan at the time were found among intravenous drug users, I had brought an instructional film from our San Francisco Institute showing a drug-using “straight” couple using condoms for sexual intercourse. My host, the well-known psychiatrist Carlo Lorenzo Cazzullo (1915-2010) introduced me with some warm welcoming words. I began with a general introduction into the topic and then asked for a discussion following the film I was about to show. In its first few minutes, one saw the couple going to the drug store together, buying some condoms and then trying to apply them at home. However, before any of the following sexual contacts could be shown, a clearly outraged Professor Cazzullo stopped the performance, declared the immediate end of whole presentation, and without further explanation or apology, abruptly left the auditorium together with his staff. Then some technical assistant silently and unceremoniously handed me my video cassette. I was stunned, and so was the audience. After a brief moment of hesitation, everybody walked to the exits. In this perplexing and confusing situation, some young university physicians walked up to me and invited me to join them at a quiet, open-air wine restaurant. I gratefully accepted, and in the pleasant, relaxing atmosphere of a wonderful summer evening, they gave me an explanation: Prof. Cazzullo was an ardent Catholic who strictly followed Vatican doctrine. Therefore, he had no use for the kind of prevention I had been trying to demonstrate. Unfortunately, as they also told me, he was the official in charge of AIDS prevention not only in Milan, but in all of Lombardy. For me, this episode was a valuable lesson about the ideological and political difficulties involved in protecting public health.

The photo shows me in the early 80s

Anyway, I kept writing about AIDS prevention and related topics for readers in Germany, because the country’s established sexologists had nothing to offer that would have helped health officials in dealing with the growing crisis. On the contrary, in a special issue of a widely-read popular magazine, my German colleagues played down the danger and denounced San Francisco’s gay “Safe Sex” initiative as repressive: “Safe-Sex' is an expression of US-American moral imperialism“. (10) This kind of irresponsible nonsense was shocking to me. No wonder, the German authorities welcomed my spontaneous support of their sensible policies. Indeed, some prominent politicians asked me to join them in “live“ TV talk shows, where we argued for the adoption of the programs that had proven their worth in San Francisco. Back home in California, I followed the latest developments: As people learned more about HIV transmission, the motto “Safe Sex” was eventually replaced by the more cautious “Safer Sex”. In addition to the gay medical organization BAPHR, a number of new programs attracted international attention – the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, which developed ever more specific educational materials and policy recommendations, a “Stop AIDS Project”, which encouraged anonymous private group discussion of “safe” and ”unsafe” sexual practices, Shanti, which found and trained volunteers to care for the sick, and a model AIDS ward in San Francisco’s General Hospital run by the much admired Dr. Paul Volberding. Like everyone else living in our city, I was proud of its courage and resourcefulness in the face of a tragedy that was killing more and more of our friends, colleagues, and neighbors. I felt obliged to gather more information and therefore twice visited the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta GA, where I interviewed leading researchers. Most importantly, I stayed in close contact with two highly competent and widely respected personalities in the fight against AIDS – the brilliant epidemiologist Don Francis, and the director of the San Francisco Department of Health, Mervyn Silverman, later president of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). With Dr. Silverman’s help and encouragement, I also visited successful AIDS programs in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, learning a great deal. Dr. Silverman later accompanied me to Berlin, where the Senator for Health and Social Issues, Ulf Fink, had organized the world’s first AIDS congress dealing with the social aspects of the new epidemic. I published my own lecture at this congress later in one of my anthologies. (11)

President of the DGSS
In 1986 I had been asked by its founder Rolf Gindorf (1939-2016) to accept the presidency of a German sexological society, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung (DGSS). In the following years, we edited a number of publications and organized 9 international congresses in Germany: 3 in Düsseldorf, 5 in Berlin , and 1 in Lüneburg. (12)

I was still living in the US at the time, but believed that I should seize the opportunity to learn more about the German situation in our field. What I found there, however, was hardly inspiring – a self-satisfied provincial spirit in a few cliquish groups, each of them jealously guarding its own little turf. None had any interest in international cooperation.

In any case, even outside the DGSS I continued to argue tirelessly and very publicly for the adoption of San Francisco’s AIDS prevention policies in Germany. At the same time, my well-established German sexological colleagues maintained their ill-informed, uncooperative, unproductive attitude and even began to attack me personally as unqualified and incompetent. Still, the German health authorities, on both the state and the federal levels, appreciated my unpaid voluntary activities, and, in the course of events, made me several job offers. After all, none of my German detractors had a comparable academic record: A total of five years study and research at three “top” American universities (Cornell, Yale, UC Berkeley), several years as a research associate at the Kinsey Institute, member of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR), author of a textbook available in four languages and other scientific publications in six languages, visiting professor in three countries (Germany, USA, Switzerland) etc.

However, I was not really interested in returning to Germany, and everybody who knows San Francisco will understand why. It was not only our innovative training institute, my colleagues and my friends, but my whole happy life in this, the most beautiful city in the world, that kept me enthralled. I loved its particular climate of eternal spring, its ethnic variety, its wonderful restaurants and beautiful parks, its exciting theaters and museums, and magnificent opera house. (13) Thus, leaving my American home was very difficult for me, because, like countless others, “I Ieft my heart in San Francisco”, as Tony Bennett still keeps singing today. Most of all, I loved the San Francisco Bay with its neighboring towns, its bridges and ferries and the fresh air from the Pacific. A few years earlier, I had moved from Nob Hill to Cathedral Hill, closer to our institute. Our unusual new apartment building - a round tower with views in every direction - had won an architectural prize. We lived in a segment with a great view of downtown - kitchen, living room with balcony, plus two bedrooms and two bathrooms. A swimming pool plus sauna and fitness room were available 24 hours per day right on the premises. Nothing in Germany could possibly compare with this.

On the other hand, there was perhaps some small chance of creating a wider awareness of our sexological heritage and of bringing “the science of sex” back to its birthplace Berlin.

Nevertheless, I did not really feel called upon to undertake such an uncertain mission and remained undecided. It was not until 1988 that I began to think seriously about a German offer. It concerned a position in what was then “West-Berlin” at the Bundesgesundheitsamt (Federal Health Office) that would allow me to work as a sexologist in one of its many sub-units. I flew to Berlin for more information and was told that the position would encourage my own initiatives and would help me to realize my long-term plans. I was therefore very happy to sign on, and thus, after 23 years in the US, decided to return to Germany.

Return to Germany
When I arrived in Berlin a few months later, I found that the original plans had changed. I was now to join a newly created AIDS Center as “Director of Information and Documentation”. My work would consist of collaborating with other official agencies, producing educational materials, answering inquiries, and building up a special research library. Since much scientific AIDS information was already available in digital form on disks, this was not an overwhelming challenge. It also had very little to do with my own area of expertise. Disappointed, I therefore spoke with some “higher-ups” in the chain of command and articulated my doubts. They advised me to accept the position anyway in order to “get a foot in the door” and assured me that, over time, I would achieve my goal of running my own separate sexology unit. (They proved to be right, but it took six years to come true.)

Coincidentally, around this time I received a letter written by a certain professor Liu Dalin in Shanghai, who asked me if I would like to cooperate in China’s first nation-wide survey of sexual behavior. I did not know why and how he found my name and address, but for me his request was a welcome opportunity to branch out and become active in my own field again.

Keeping up the correspondence, I learned more about this ambitious project: It was an entirely private initiative by several respected researchers with the financial support of various manufacturers interested in the results. I was expected to help with the design and wording of the questionnaires and with the training of the main investigators and evaluators. The goal was to find out as much as possible about the sexual behavior of specially targeted groups: Married couples, adolescents, prisoners, and members of the military. Even among last two of these groups one had found key personnel willing to cooperate, which struck me as highly unusual. Naturally, I was very much interested in joining this unprecedented effort, but I also had serious misgivings, since I neither spoke nor read Chinese. In China, I would depend entirely on interpreters and translators.

1. My first visit to China
I discussed this with the president of the Federal Health Office, who knew about my sexological ambitions. He encouraged me to take the chance and fly to China on “official business”. (All my subsequent trips were paid either by myself or by my Chinese hosts.) Thus, in late May 1989, I arrived in Shanghai and was met at the airport by Prof. Liu with a car and a driver. On the way to my destination, I gained a first impression of the large city. It seemed dirty and run down, reminding me of East-Berlin. There were very few cars on the road. Instead, one saw hundreds women and men on bicycles, all of them wearing the same dark blue clothes. Soon we arrived at a large College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where I was shown to my simple, small room.

Tired as I was from the long flight, I found little sleep, however, because all through the night students kept banging on pots and pans, protesting against something I did not know about. Only the following morning did I learn that a dramatic new situation had arisen in the entire country. Apparently, a great deal of frustration had been building up, which now led to demonstrations and strikes in many cities. The television stations showed live discussions between government officials and protesting students. Of course, I did not understand a word, but was told by my colleagues that China suddenly found itself in a state of crisis. Indeed, as we tried to reach our meeting rooms at the Academy of Social Sciences, we found that the public transportation system had come to halt. The streets were full of demonstrators carrying banners and placards and singing the Chinese text of the old communist anthem the ”International” (“Arise ye workers from your slumbers…). The Academy, like all universities in Shanghai, was closed.

Nevertheless, in spite of the unexpected difficulties, were able to improvise and complete our program. We did secure the rooms we needed, I gave my introductory lecture with the help of an interpreter, and we reviewed, corrected, and amended a first draft of the proposed questionnaire. We also conducted the necessary training sessions for the leading staff. The survey would eventually employ ca. 40 major and ca. 1000 minor contributors in more than a dozen different locations around the country. On one of the following days I was also able to deliver a more substantial lecture at Jiao Tong University about the history of sexology and its traditional link to China established by Magnus Hirschfeld during his extended visit in 1931 when he met his last disciple, the Chinese medical student Li Shiu Tong. I then continued describing the current role of sexology in the USA and Europe. In the afternoon, I conducted a seminar about the indispensable role of sexologists in the prevention of AIDS, which led to a lively, extended discussion. Later in the week, I also visited several institutions important for the success of our survey, such as the Center for Family Planning, the Zhejiang Social Science Academy in Hangzhou, a famous city not far from Shanghai, and the Shanghai Import & Export Commodity Inspection Bureau, which maintained a close relationship to our Federal Health Office in Berlin.

My most memorable meeting, however, took place in Shanghai’s model prison for violent juvenile offenders, who had been sentenced for crimes like armed robbery, assault and battery, or rape. The prison director, a high-ranking police officer, was a very polite, well-educated and thoughtful professional. He was eager to support our survey by allowing our staff to hand out our questionnaires to his inmates, have them filled out anonymously and collect them again without his control or interference. He gave me an extended tour of the facilities and let me meet with young prisoners. The prison itself was a model institution in every way. It maintained extensive work benches and middle-sized manufacturing areas: The mostly uneducated and previously undisciplined male teenagers were given the opportunity to learn a trade - from sewing to gardening, plumbing, and carpentry. For those with artistic talent, the prison offered training in a variety of arts and crafts - music, jewellery design, pottery, calligraphy, painting and stonemasonry. Some of the inmates proudly showed me their impressive works. They were also able to use various modern sports facilities, and the prison soccer team regularly played against “regular“ youth teams on the outside. In short, this enlightened penitentiary was a special showcase. Its clearly demonstrated goal was not so much punishment as resocialization. I am certain it was quite untypical, not only for China.

All in all, I felt that my first visit to China had been a success. It gave me the feeling of having been helpful in spite of unforeseen, serious difficulties. When I left the People’s Republic after one week, the demonstrations and strikes were still continuing. During a stop-over in Hong Kong, I saw even there demonstrations supporting the students and workers “on the mainland”. The situation remained unresolved at the time I returned to Berlin. There, I immediately had to prepare my next “official trip” - to the 5^th International AIDS Conference in Montréal, Canada. It was only after my arrival at that conference on June 3, that I saw a live telecast in my hotel room showing the suppression of the protests in Beijing. I very sadly concluded that, under the new circumstances, our planned survey would never be conducted, and that my visit in China had been in vain. However, as it eventually turned out, I had underestimated the determination of my Chinese colleagues.

After the Canadian conference I returned to Berlin, biding my time. Just in case, however, I rented only some furnished rooms and kept my apartment in San Francisco and my options open. I also spent all of my vacations there. I still considered it my first and only “real” residence to which I would return if things should go awry with my German job. But in October of the same year 1989, two events made me decide to stay permanently: There was a serious earthquake in San Francisco, and in Berlin the infamous “wall” was breached overnight and stayed open. This was a double hint of fate I simply could not ignore. Now, once again, I was in the right place at the right time and could hardly believe my good luck. As soon as I had made my decision, the federal Ministry of Health in Bonn, which had the oversight over the Federal Health Office and the AIDS Center, changed my temporary position to that of a permanent federal civil servant (Bundesbeamter). At the same time, it confirmed my academic status with the German title “Professor” in a respective official document.

2. The first Sexology Conference in Asia
In May 1990, I received an invitation to a sexological conference in Hong Kong. Its organizer was Man Lun Ng, a co-author of our national Chinese sex survey. He was very eager to show my historical exhibition “The Birth of Sexology in Berlin 1908-1933”. The Goethe Institute, one of its sponsors, readily obliged and, in addition, paid my traveling expenses. Together with other foreign speakers, I stayed in one of the charming guest houses close to the campus. The university provided speakers from various disciplines. Especially interesting was a major lecture demanding more research into the economics of human sexual behavior. Unfortunately, this remains a neglected topic to this day. I was given the honor of delivering both the opening and the closing lectures, the former about the history and current world-wide situation of sexology, the latter about AIDS as a sexological problem. The excellent organization and structure of the conference allowed for fruitful discussions and exchanges, which led to the founding of a new “Asian Federation for Sexology” (AFS). My friend Milton Diamond and I were chosen as international advisors of this organization, later renamed “Asia Oceania Federation for Sexology” (AOFS). It then included the entire Pacific region as well as Australia and New Zealand. It continued biennial congresses in various Far Eastern countries.

While in Hong Kong, I felt obliged to embark on a very special quest: Hirschfeld‘s last disciple and heir, Li Shiu Tong, was born in Hong Kong in 1907, but, for the last several decades, no sexologist had been able to find him. Since he was still very young when his mentor died, there was a remote possibility that he was still alive and had returned to the city of his birth. I therefore gave several newspaper and radio interviews about this, hoping to find him or at least somebody who knew or had known him. Unfortunately all these efforts proved to be in vain. Many years later it turned out that he had indeed still been alive in 1990. However, it was only years later that Ralf Dose of the Berlin Magnus Hirschfeld Society discovered Li Shiu Tong’s last residence - in Vancouver, Canada of all places. He had died there in 1993.

3. The first congress on “Bisexualities”
The opening of the Berlin Wall gave me the opportunity to visit Günter Dörner in East Berlin, whom I had met a few years before in Heidelberg at one of the annual meetings of the Gesellschaft für praktische Sexualmedizin, where I was a regular invited speaker. Dörner, like me a member of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR), had been asked to host its next annual meeting in 1990. However, as we learned to our surprise, the meeting had suddenly been moved to Sigtuna in Sweden. (We never found out the reason.) When I talked to the disappointed Dörner, I made a suggestion that would turn the loss into a gain and would benefit us both: A double international congress celebrating the new freedom of movement in our city. The first part would be organized by him at the medical school (Charité) in East Berlin. I myself would organize the second part on “Bisexualities” somewhere in West Berlin. The whole event would take place in mid-July, immediately following the IASR meeting in Sigtuna, enabling its American members to stop over in Berlin on their way home. I was sure the whole package would attract many interested colleagues. At the same time, we would be making a powerful symbolic statement. Dörner agreed, and we started to work, each on his own part of the planned congress.

It any case, as president of my own sexological society (the DGSS), I had to organize its biennial congress in 1990. The challenge was to find a cost-free appropriate location, because, unlike Dörner at his university, we did not have facilities of our own in Berlin. Neither did the modest financial circumstances of our then relatively small society allow us to move to a hotel worthy of the occasion.

Fortunately, in the meantime, the former German Health Minister, Rita Süssmuth, who still remembered my support of her AIDS policies, had become President of the Bundestag, the German Parliament. She gracefully allowed me to use its then second location, the Reichstag in Berlin for my “Western” part of the congress. It was the last congress in the prestigious building before the British architect Norman Foster undertook its renovation and partial new construction. Thereafter, the Reichstag once again became the only home of the German parliament, as it had been before 1933. This particular congress venue had a special historical significance for us sexologists, because right here Albert Moll had been able to open his International Congress for Sex Research in 1926. Also, the Reichstag was only a stone’s throw away from the public park where Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute für Sexualwissenschaft had once stood.

As I had expected, our double congress was a great success. Dörner’s strictly medical program at Humboldt University’s medical school, the Charité, offered prominent German and international speakers, among them members of the International Academy, discussing controversial issues in a spirit of collegiality. At the Reichstag, we were able to present new papers on the subject of “Bisexualities”, a subject that had gained relevance in the AIDS crisis, but had long been neglected by researchers. We had chosen this plural for our congress title, because, in preparing the program, we had become aware that we were dealing here, as so often in studying human sexuality, with a matter of degree, i.e. with a large spectrum of behaviors.

All of us enjoyed the unusually relaxed atmosphere of our meeting, and we also learned a great deal from its different presentations and the ensuing discussions. The most important papers were later published in book form in both German and English. My own contribution is available here (English) and here (German). Our congress participants greatly appreciated the fact that, after more than 64 years, sexologists had once again returned to the place of a former triumph. It was another belated victory over Nazi barbarism. Some colleagues also used the occasion to visit the nearby former location of Hirschfeld’s institute. It had been destroyed in allied bombing raids, and the property was now part of a public park surrounding a modern large Congress Hall. (Ten years later, I would organize another combined congress there – the largest sexological gathering ever in Berlin.)

Considering Hirschfeld’s enormous importance for the development of sexology, I felt that something special should be done to keep his memory alive. Indeed, our congress in Berlin seemed the perfect occasion for a lasting symbolic gesture. I therefore designed a golden Hirschfeld Medal, which would be awarded every two years to international sex researchers and sexual reformers at our DGSS congresses. The first two medals were given to the Berlin-born Austrian author Ernest Borneman, who had fled from the Nazis to England and later Canada, and to the Jewish physician and reformer Herman Musaph, who had survived the Nazi occupation of his native Netherlands by constantly moving from one hiding place to another.

4. The Hirschfeld Medal
On the occasion of our „Bisexualities Congress“ in 1990, I designed a „Hirschfeld Medal“, (shown here are front and back). Bearing Hirschfeld’s image and his motto “Per scientiam ad justitiam” (“Through science to justice”), the DGSS awarded the medal to internationally renowned colleagues for contributions to sexual science and sexual reform. In the following years, our medal recipients for sexual science were, among others, John P. De Cecco, Liu Dalin, Jonathan Ned Katz, Milton Diamond, Martin S. Weinberg, and Richard Green. For sexual reform, we awarded the medal a. o. to Imre Aszódi, Ruth Westheimer, Maj-Briht Bergström-Walan, William A. Granzig, and Oswalt Kolle.

5. My second Visit to China
In September 1992 I followed a second invitation to China, where I conducted seminars at universities in Beijing and Nanjing. In Beijing, my Chinese colleagues showed my all important historical sites, including the summer palace outside the city. Because of some unexpected complications with my Chinese airline reservations, I had to take the then 18 hr. overnight train ride to Nanjing, where my hosts had impatiently waited for two days. However, once I had arrived, I was put up in one of the university’s charming guest houses, and my presentation was very well received. Naturally, I was also given a guided tour of the city and the impressive Sun Yatsen memorial.

In Shanghai, I attended the first sexological conference in China at Jiao-Tong-University. As the only non-Chinese opening speaker, I was able to introduce my exhibition about the “Birth of Sexology in Berlin”, which the German Goethe Institute had forwarded from Hong Kong.

My colleague Liu Dalin offered a small exhibition of his own – parts of his collection of Chinese sexual culture from antiquity to the present. Both exhibitions were open to the public and well received. We congress participants, on the other hand, were invited to visit several private sexological initiatives in the city. This included a meeting with the editors of the large daily newspaper Wen Hui, who offered a one-year training program in sex education for teachers. For a fee, the trainees, who lived all over the country, received study materials by mail and then travelled to Shanghai for a final examination. At the time of our visit, the program had already issued over 1000 diplomas for sex education. We also visited some private companies that had sponsored our sex survey. Among them was a manufacturer of sterile menstruation pads – an important novelty in China, where the customary non-sterile pads often led to infections.

Part of the conference were two board meetings and a general assembly of the Asian Federation of Sexology that had been founded two years earlier in Hong Kong. Once again, I was appointed its international advisor.

The most important event of the congress, however, was something else: In spite of enormous difficulties, the nation-wide survey of sexual behavior in China had been completed, and the large bound volume with its many statistics had just appeared in print. It also contained my substantial foreword in Chinese, translated from an English text I had written a few years before. Naturally, I was as surprised as I was pleased. My English foreword is now included in this book.

I remember that, on my way back from China, I stopped over in Sicily, because the European Federation of Sexology (EFS) held its first congress in Taormina. One year before, I had been a founding member of this long overdue organization and had been appointed its Secretary General. In the following years, we organized biennial congresses in different European cities. I myself attended the meetings in Copenhagen (1994), Marseille (1996), Lisbon (1998), Berlin (2000), Brighton (2004), Prague (2006), Rome (2008), Porto (2010) and Madrid (2012). In addition, I presented a paper on the sexological training of health professionals at a congress of the Nordic Association for Clinical Sexology (NACS) in Reykjavik (1995).

Visiting Professor at Humboldt University
A few weeks after my return from China, in October 1992, I was appointed visiting professor (Gastprofessor) for sexology (“Sexualwissenschaft”) at Humboldt University. This was the first time a university in Berlin used the term explicitly in an official contract. After an initial payment, I continued without pay in my capacity as a federal civil servant in what was called “eine unbezahlte genehmigte Nebentätigkeit” (unpaid permitted side activity). Since the university did not have a department of sexology, my lectures and seminars were listed under “studium generale”. Even so, they attracted students from all three universities in Berlin (Humboldt Universität, Freie Universität, and Technische Universität), and thus my classrooms were always filled to capacity. Some students even had to be turned away.

At that time, the university’s technical equipment was still very poor, and therefore I had to manage with simple transparencies or write on old-fashioned blackboards. However, soon after my appointment, a German publisher asked me for my lecture notes, and eventually they formed the basis of an illustrated paperback in a well-known popular science series. (“dtv Atlas”). The book was later translated into three other languages. (14)

In addition to my general class “Introduction to Sexology”, I conducted seminars, for example one with the elderly, well-known Berlin transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, or a seminar with the film-maker Rosa von Praunheim in preparation of his biographical film about Magnus Hirschfeld. (“Der Einstein des Sex” 1999) Another seminar dealt with the findings of our congress on “Bisexualities”.

As president of the DGSS, and with the help of my HU colleague Prof. Karl-Friedrich Wessel, I organized an international sexological congress at Humboldt University under the title “Sexualities, Law, and Ethics”. This occasion marked the 100^th anniversary of Hirschfeld’s doctoral examination. We therefore had the respective original documents copied and distributed them in a special folder to our participants. We awarded our Hirschfeld Medals to Liu Dalin (Shanghai) and John de Cecco (San Francisco).

In the summer semester of 1993, the university asked me to deliver one of their “public lectures”, which were regularly printed in a special series. I seized the opportunity to speak on May 14^th (both Hirschfeld’s birthday and day of death). My subject was “Berlin und die internationale Sexualwissenschaft” (Berlin and International Sexology).

In this lecture, I recapitulated Berlin’s pioneering role in the birth of this new “science of sex”, its astonishing progress before 1933, and its current international situation with its new institutes, organizations, journals, and congresses. In particular, I stressed the importance of the paradigm shift from “sexual sickness” to “sexual health”, confirmed by the demand of the WHO for teaching “human sexuality” as a separate field. I also described the successful new teaching programs all over the world, which already followed the WHO recommendations. I concluded by outlining the necessary contours of a possible new Institute for Sexology in Berlin. Obviously, it would be able to justify its rebirth and future existence only if it took note of the latest developments elsewhere. This meant, above all, that it had to create its own curriculum for sexuality studies and offer academic degrees for its successful completion. In the end, however, all of this was ignored by the university’s decision makers. I am certain none of them ever read my prominently published lecture.

Around that time, Gene completed his 25^th year as a teacher. In recognition of his service, the California school authorities gave him one year of paid “sabbatical leave”. He used it to visit a number of German and other European schools and to write a report about them for his superiors. However, since we were already living together in Berlin, he also gladly became my “research assistant”, i.e. an unpaid volunteer, who helped me with my work. In that capacity, he later also joined me at sexological congresses in China and in visits to other countries.

Once I had decided to stay in Berlin, we had found a centrally located apartment in Berlin’s West, quite near the Kurfürstendamm. It overlooked a pleasant square with a fountain and many trees, the Fasanenplatz. Under our windows, a quiet, tree-lined side street (Schaperstrasse) allowed an unobstructed view of the Berlin Festival Theater and, in the distance, a park (Gerhart-Hauptmann-Anlage). Wherever we looked, we saw the top of trees. In short: We lived in a quiet, green oasis in the middle of this large, bustling city. Soon we had most of our Asian furniture sent over from San Francisco. And we bought new garden furniture and special candle lights for our balcony, where, in the following years, we were to spend so many long, warm and pleasant summer evenings. After his early retirement, Gene sold his house in Modesto CA and came to join me permanently in Berlin.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, in early 1994, my appointment as visiting professor at Humboldt University was cancelled by some university administrator. I myself was never directly informed of this, but was told about it by university colleagues. Even stranger: The announcements of my lectures and seminars for the next semester had already been printed in the university catalogue. The far-fetched reasons given had no substance and were contradicted by the facts, since my lectures and seminars were very popular with the students. Also, as can be seen above, my academic record during this time was internationally well appreciated. After all, our Chinese sex survey has been published, I had been an invited speaker at several Chinese universities, and I had shown my exhibition on the “Birth of Sexology” in Shanghai. The publications resulting from our congress on “Bisexualities” and from my class “Introduction to Sexology” were already in the hands of their publishers. I also had brought an international congress to the university, and, of course, I had been teaching without pay.

The Archive for Sexology
Actually, apart from its underhanded, unprofessional, and boorish manner of execution, I did not find the cancellation entirely unwelcome. Just around that time, in March 1994, my employer, the federal Robert Koch Institute, encouraged me to start a project I had long been hoping for - an Archive for Sexology, i.e. a resource center for scientific information on sexual health. (In the meantime, both the Federal Health Office and the AIDS Center, had been dissolved.)

1. In Berlin Spandau

Using my own private library and collections, we began to catalogue and describe the exiting holdings and to add new relevant publications. From the very beginning, we attracted scholars and students, since our Archive was open to the public during the usual working hours. I also used this opportunity to help in preparing an English edition of our Chinese sex survey. Since Man Lun Ng, my colleague from Hong Kong and another co-author, spoke and read both Chinese and English, we were able to work very well together and to produce an authentic new version. It was an arduous, time-consuming task, but it proved very much worth our while, because it made our work in China better known in the Western world. In spite of the official personal snub by Humboldt University, I also once again organized a sexological congress there with the help of my already-mentioned HU colleague Karl-Friedrich Wessel. It took place during the summer semester in the university’s “Senate Hall” under the title “The Meaning and Uses of Sexology”. Our Hirschfeld Medals were awarded to Liu Dalin for sex research and the American educator Ruth Westheimer for sex reform.

During the second year of our new Archive, and with the help of an assistant, I was able to publish a brochure entitled „Sexology in Europe“. It appeared as an official publication of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). Soon thereafter, we amended and enlarged it for a world-wide Online-Directory.

2. The first exhibition of Chinese erotica in Europe

In the spring of 1995, my colleague Liu Dalin offered to send part of his collection of Chinese “sexual culture” to Berlin, if I could find a suitable space. Fortunately, the centrally located German “State Library” (Staatsbibliothek) was willing to act as a host. Together, we also found a number of prominent sponsors.

In time, 200 objects in carefully packed crates arrived from China for the first (and only) exhibition of this kind in Europe. It covered more than 5000 years of Chinese cultural history in 10 sections: prehistoric fertility cults, forms of marriage through the ages, human reproduction, sexuality and everyday life, sexual education, erotic techniques, the oppression of women, sexuality and religion, erotic art, and sexual medicine. During its seven-weeks run, the exhibition attracted over 20 000 visitors and found a great deal of favorable media coverage. After that, the objects were packed up again and shipped back to China.

Liu Dalin and I also seized the opportunity to write an illustrated book together in German, which covered the exhibition and more. We had even found a publisher in Berlin willing to produce the book. However, in the very last minute, a new management cancelled the contract, paying us a handsome penalty sum. We then decided to publish the book ourselves on my Archive web site under the title “Die Harmonie von Yin und Yang“. However, because of our “open access” policy, we could not show the many interesting, sexually explicit images online. With great regret we therefore used photos of only a few “harmless” objects.

Here are some of our private photos taken at our exhibition:

In the following years, Prof. Liu’s collection grew to an enormous size, and thus he was able to open several museums in China displaying various parts of it - in Wuhan, Shanghai und eventually in Tongli, a small, charming city with protected landmark status ca. 80 km South of Shanghai. The museum in Shanghai was located in the new, luxurious district of Pudong and was quite easy to reach. It was very popular, but a competing new, much larger museum in Tongli presented a dramatic quality jump. I had the opportunity of visiting it twice and to sign an agreement of cooperation with my esteemed colleagues. The city of Tongli itself is a favorite with Chinese tourists. Situated near a large lake with an island occupied by old Buddhist monastery, it offers picturesque canals downtown, which are framed by traditional architecture with its tea houses and restaurants. During my last visit, several new luxury hotels were being built on the shores of the lake. In the meantime, the museums in Tongli and Shanghai have been closed. However, Prof. Liu is now planning to present his still growing collection not only in Wuhan, but also in several new, large museums near the sacred mountain Maoshan and on the tropical island of Hainan, now a favorite honeymoon destination of Chinese newlyweds.

3. Moving the Archive to the center of Berlin

In the spring of 1996 we were able to move the Archive for Sexology to the old center of Berlin. My employer, the federal Robert Koch Institute, owned a freshly renovated building on the campus of Humboldt University’s medical school, the Charité. Our Archive occupied its entire ground floor. The upper floors were temporarily rented to the „German Arthritis Research Center” (Deutsches Rheuma-Forschungszentrum DRFZ), which was waiting for the completion of its own, new building nearby. For us, this move meant an enormous step forward and opened up entirely new perspectives. A special government support program for the young unemployed allowed me every year to find up to a dozen enthusiastic women and men, whose salaries were paid by the city and state of Berlin, and who catalogued our growing library and collections. Some of them also possessed impressive computer skills. They convinced me to use the internet as the essential medium of the future. Indeed, the Robert Koch Institute had already begun to join other federal institutions in making its own research freely available online. Within this larger context, we therefore created our own sexological “open access” site in German and English. With our multiple work stations in several large and small rooms, and with the latest computer equipment, we were certainly well prepared for such a task.

Also in 1996 I attended the 4th International Conference on Bisexuality (ICB) at Berlin’s Free University , an event organized by activist academicians. These regular conferences had started one year after our purely scientific congress on „Bisexualities“ of 1990. I knew the original initiator Fritz Klein quite well, since head repeatedly lectured at our Institute in San Francisco, and I had met the conference host, Gert Mattenklott, even earlier at Yale, where he also had done some research. However, he did not tell me about his own bisexuality until many years later, when we had both moved to Berlin. And my friend Oswalt Kolle, who attended the conference as well, used this occasion to speak of his own bisexual experiences for the first time. (In the meantime, all three men have died.)

4. 100 Years of Gay Liberation

The year 1997 marked another anniversary: In 1897 Magnus Hirschfeld and others had founded the “Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komité“ (Scientific Humanitarian Committee), an organization defending the rights of homosexuals and demanding the decriminalization of consensual male homosexual behavior. We used this occasion to organize another congress at Humboldt University under the motto “100 Years of Gay Liberation”. It was a very fruitful international meeting with speakers not only from Germany, but also from Argentina, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Norway, Sweden, and the USA. Our Hirschfeld Medals were awarded to Jonathan Ned Katz (for sex research) and to Maj-Briht Bergström-Walan (for sex reform). We had our concluding congress dinner catered as a self-service buffet in our Archive on the Charité campus and thus, for the first time, we had a truly “full house”. All of our guests, freely wandering from room to room, were surprised and delighted to see such an impressive sexological resource in the very center of Berlin. Indeed, many of them saw here the inception of a new institute for sexology and were looking forward to its continuing expansion.

The summer of 1997 also saw a large exhibition on the same subject, when the Berlin Academy of Arts presented an international collection of historical documents under the title “Good Bye to Berlin -100 Years of the Gay Movement ”. Since our Archive possessed the only complete set in Germany of Hirschfeld’s essential Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Stages, 25 vols.), we gladly lent it to the exhibition. A few years later, I wrote the introduction to a new edition of this yearbook. In addition, my Chinese colleague Liu Dalin and I presented papers in the accompanying lecture series. Unfortunately, the Academy missed the unique opportunity to digitalize the exhibition with its many important documents. Eventually, they were simply returned to their owners in different countries.

5. Foreign visitors
Our centrally located Archive soon began to attract groups of foreign visitors. In the summer of 1997, for example, we were visited by the San Francisco gay politician Tom Ammiano. Naturally, we talked at great length about San Francisco, but then about my new work in Germany. He showed himself impressed by our attempt to revive Berlin’s sexological tradition.

In the following year, we were able to organize a “German-Chinese Conference on Sexual Health”. Co-organizers were my colleague Prof. Liu Dalin (Shanghai Sex Sociology Research Center) and Prof. Karl-Friedrich Wessel (Institute for Human Ontogenetics at Humboldt University). The conference was held in both the university’s Senate Hall and in the rooms of our nearby Archive. This was followed by a week of informal workshops and seminars. The 38 Chinese participants (physicians of modern and traditional medicine, sociologists, educators, cultural historians and public administrators) came from different regions in China.

Also in 1998, we received an American student group from the School for International Training in Amsterdam and their director Prof. Virginia Fleck. They participated in a program "Sexuality, Gender & Identity" and therefore visited various sexological institutions in Europe.

In the following year, we were visited by a group of students from the School of Policy Studies at the University of Bristol (with Prof. Tom Davis). They came from different countries: the UK, Cambodia, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland and the USA. Again, they were interested in our online offer, but also in the history of sexology in Berlin. We showed them much of the printed material in our library about the sexological pioneers in Berlin, the destruction of their work by the Nazis, the rebirth of sexology in the US, and the current international situation. Needles to say, we also demonstrated our multilingual online Archive. Again, the visitors were impressed as became evident in their animated discussions. And this remained true of the many following groups not documented in photographs.

6. World Congress of Sexology in Hong Kong
In 1999 Hong Kong was the host city of the “World Congress of Sexology”. As the second opening speaker, I was given 60 minutes to present my work under the title "Sexology and the Internet - A Live Demonstration". For this purpose, our Archive web site was projected on a very large screen, so that the congress participants could easily follow my searches. As I had expected, my audience was surprised and astonished to discover how much sexological information was already available in the internet, and how easily it could be found with the help of our online Archive.

The actual opening speech was given by Prof. Wu Jieping, who remained present during my presentation and, as I discovered later, was apparently quite intrigued by it. But it was his lecture that truly fascinated the audience, especially us “Westerners”. As we well knew, Prof. Wu was the greatest Chinese authority on sexual medicine and the founder of the Chinese Sexological Society. More importantly, at that time he was also the Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. In that role he was possibly the fourth most powerful man in China. His words, therefore, carried special weight.

He began by reminding us that Chinese sexological writings dated back several thousand years, and that the summary of their teachings amounted to the advice to enjoy sex as a means of promoting the health of both women and men: “A good sex life leads to good health, and these two together lead to an enjoyable old age.” He also stressed the essential role of prevention: “The best doctor prevents diseases; he who cures them is only the second best.” For this reason, he very strongly advocated general sex education, a demand that had been repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, raised by the late Zhou Enlai, one of his prominent patients. Finally, in order to drive his message home, Prof. Wu showed us some very explicit slides of “classic” Chinese erotica, for example one called “playing the flute and drinking from the jade fountain” (i.e. a couple engaging in mutual oral intercourse). Very similar material had, of course, been part of our Berlin exhibition “5000 Years of Sexual Culture in China” 1995.

Prof. Wu’s speech was greeted with thunderous applause, especially from us European and American participants. After all, we were well aware of the fact that none of our politicians could have dared to offer a similar message with similar illustrations.

A few days later, we opening speakers were invited to tea at Hong Kong’s “Government House”, the former residence of the British colonial governor. Since the new "Chief Executive" Tung Chee-hwa was unavailable, this wife, Betty Tung, acted as a charming, very attentive host. She formerly apologized for having missed Prof. Wu’s lecture “because of her carelessness and stupidity” and thus defused what could have escalated into a diplomatic problem.

Indeed, we were witnessing here a struggle between traditional and reformist Chinese policies with regard to sex. Prof. Wu signaled a new reformist agenda, while his traditional colleagues in the People’s Republic still resisted his proposed reforms. However, in Hong Kong he had spoken as a representative of the central government and, in this role, could not be ignored. This was belatedly recognized by the local authorities, hence Mrs. Tung’s apology. His lecture, therefore, had been a well-calculated attempt at outflanking his conservative opponents. As it turned out, as long as he was alive, Prof. Wu continued to use his considerable influence to promote national sex education, thus honoring the unfulfilled wish of his former patient Zhou Enlai.

Today, Prof. Wu’s great achievements in many fields are not in dispute, but his demand for comprehensive national sex education has not been met, although there has been some progress. Wu Jieping wanted to revive unjustly forgotten Chinese traditions and combine them with the findings modern medical research. In the long run, this may still become true.

7. Traveling inside China
Following the Hong Kong congress, I accepted invitations to speak in several Chinese cities. My travel expenses and those of my partner were paid by our various local hosts. Thus, from August 22 to September 29, we travelled by train, bus, airplane and private automobile to Beijing, Tianjin, Jinan, Hefei, Fuyang, Nanjing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. This gave us the opportunity to see many modern new buildings, roads, and bridges along with carefully restored ancient villages and city neighborhoods. We also visited many famous historical sites, for example in Beijing the former Imperial Palace (Forbidden City), the Altar of Heaven, the Great Wall and the nearby Ming Tombs, In Tianjin the old, carefully restored historical center, the new TV tower and the new, very large city park with the mausoleum of the apparently very popular Zhou Enlai and his wife Deng Yingchao. (To me, this new, very large, informative project seemed designed as a counterweight to the worship of Mao Zedong.) We also went to the top of the sacred Taishan Mountain and visited the memorial of Sun Yatsen in Nanjing. We marveled at the transformation of Shanghai, now the most modern and exciting citiy in the world. My colleague Prof. Liu Dalin had just opened a new museum on Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s best known shopping street. Our arrival coincided with the closing of this street to all traffic and its official designation as a pedestrian zone. The colorful lights of its large department stores and restaurants, its little squares with benches, its large television screen for “public viewing” – all of this made an overwhelming impression. Even more exciting was the restored and brilliantly illuminated “Bund” with a new, broad promenade. It offered a breath-taking view of the Huangpu River with its colorful, illuminated ships and of the new ultra-modern district of Pudong with the glittering TV tower “Pearl of the Orient”. (We took an elevator inside the tower for a spectacular view.) Finally, we enjoyed the legendary beauty of the famous West Lake near Hangzhou. (I had been there 10 years before, but in the meantime the whole area with its many temples and pagodas had been “cleaned up” and restored to its former glory as a UNESCO World Heritage site.)

In Beijing I visited the head office of the China Family Planning Association, an organization with over 80 million members. Its vice president and general director, Liu Hanbin, received me very warmly and expressed the strong wish for cooperation. He returned my visit one year later by coming to Berlin with a small delegation.

As for the substance of my presentations, depending on the wishes of my hosts in different cities, I covered three main areas:

- Sexual dysfunctions and their treatment,
- STD prevention as a social and political issue,
- the history and future of human sexual rights.

In Tianjin our host, Prof. Cui Yitai, asked me to give a lecture at the university on „Sexual Rights and Sexual Health“. Speaking for 150 minutes, I once again used my Archive web site for the purpose of illustration. I began with the American “Declaration of Independence” of 1776 ("pursuit of happiness"), continued with the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights“ of 1789 during the French Revolution, and the UN “Declaration of Human Rights” of 1948. I also mentioned René Guyon’s critique of this declaration and ended with the “Declaration of Sexual Rights“ that had just been passed by the World Congress of Sexology in Hong Kong. Considering the subject matter, my lecture could have been controversial, but, to my surprise, was very well received. This was probably due to my emphasis on the role of feminism in the historical process I described - the gradual emancipation of women from patriarchal oppression. After all, there were many women in the audience who occupied influential academic and administrative positions.

In Hefei, the capital of the Province Anhui, I gave a lecture at the new psychiatric clinic about sexual dysfunctions and their treatment. The clinic was well equipped with the latest advances in electronic gadgetry. Therefore, it was very easy for me and any other speaker, to access the internet and to project it onto a large screen. With equal ease, one could also switch from slides to transparencies, films or videos.

In Jinan we were first invited to a full-day excursion to the holy Taishan Mountain, a famous site for Chinese tourists. On the following day I spoke before the leadership of two biotech companies about the treatment of sexual dysfunctions in the US and Europe. However, they were especially interested in hearing about sexually transmitted infections (STIs) - a subject I was pleased to cover as well. As it turned out, my audience was surprisingly well informed about AIDS, but had never before heard of Herpes genitalis, HPV and Hepatitis B. In that respect, it was a useful presentation.

In Fuyang I gave a lecture for the new clinic of andrology and was appointed Honorary Professor at the People’s Hospital (teaching hospital of the Bengbu Medical College).

In Nanjing I lectured for 3 hours on „Sexology in the Internet“ at the College for Population Programme Management, which is closely collaborating with other international institutions and organizations. For practical technical reasons, I used a CD ROM of our Archive web site. This presentation was very well received and produced a lively discussion. The College asked me for additional CD ROMs for their own teaching. Among the participants was Prof. Chu from the University of Nanjing, who had been my host in 1992 and had visited our Archive in the previous year.

In Shanghai I visited the first museum of my friend Liu Dalin, located on the city’s main shopping street Nanjing Road.

In Hangzhou I spoke about AIDS prevention to a group of ca. 100 female and male physicians at the Zhejiang Sanitary and Anti-Epidemic Station. This was a government-supported institution with over 400 employees similar to the Robert Koch Institute. Once again, I demonstrated our electronic Archive as a major resource of sexual health information. This was followed by a lively discussion about the anonymity of AIDS testing, which I very strongly recommended, especially with respect to heterosexual vs. homosexual infection. I pointed out that otherwise they would probably be misled about the paths of transmission. Most physicians in my audience disagreed with me. Apparently, at that time, their practice was very different.

The following year, Liu Hanbin and a small delegation of the China Family Planning Association returned my visit in Beijing and visited our Archive in Berlin. We spent several days together, discussing possible areas of cooperation and, in return to their gracious hospitality in China, visiting important sights in the city.

The largest sexology congress in Berlin
In the same year 2000 I was able to organize the largest sexology congress ever held in Berlin. This became possible, because I was a co-founder and the general secretary of the European Federation of Sexology (EFS) as well as the president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung (DGSS). In this double capacity, and with the help of my Archive staff, I managed to use the architecturally outstanding congress hall Haus der Kulturen der Welt for the occasion.

I was especially pleased to receive a warm greeting and endorsement of our congress from Prof. Wu Jieping, who remembered my presentation in Hong Kong. This gave the entire event a global image and provided some additional international recognition.

Most importantly, this particular venue was of special historical significance for us sexologist, because it was very close to the former site of Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexology. The whole area was now a public park bordering a canal which regularly carries various sightseeing boats. In short, it was both the most pleasant and most practical congress site for our international guests. Since many of these came from the poorer countries of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, we offered a special arrangement: Since the congress hall offered sufficient space in its many large rooms, all lunches and dinners were included in the modest congress fee and were served on location, so that all congress participants, regardless of their financial situation, could stay together throughout the day. (The breakfasts were included in their hotel accommodations.) All our guests very much appreciated our low congress fee and our “egalitarian” lunch and dinner policy. They especially enjoyed our dinner cruise, starting at our congress hall and sailing to the large lake at Tegel. Our concluding gala dinner and dance was held at a nearby 5-star hotel, where two bands provided entertainment and dance music – a traditional Klezmer ensemble, and a small modern orchestra. With over 350 participants coming from 34 countries and all five continents, it was the largest and most successful sexology congress ever held in Berlin. Considering the developments since, it is highly unlikely that anything like it can ever be repeated in Germany.

My personal congress highlight was a symposium I organized in honor of three sexological pioneers from Berlin: Bernhard Schapiro, Felix Theilhaber und Max Marcuse. For this occasion, their sons had arrived from Israel: Rafael Schapiro (Shavey Zion), Adin Talbar (Jerusalem) and the former Ambassador of Israel in Bonn, Yohanan Meroz (Jerusalem). They gave very moving accounts of the experiences of their fathers in Nazi Germany, their escape and their lives in exile.

My Archive at Humboldt University
In 2001 I reached my retirement age. At the same time, the Robert Koch Institute decided to restrict its future activities to those originally pursued by the late Robert Koch himself (1843-1910), i.e. bacteriology and virology. All other research was to be wound down. This concerned several departments, including my Archive for Sexology. Therefore, I would not have a successor.

My superiors, who appreciated the work I had already done, suggested that I should move my Archive to Humboldt University. Its president at the time, Prof. Jürgen Mlynek, gladly and immediately accepted this move and offered me and my staff ample space in a large office highrise located in the Eastern city district of Berlin-Pankow. The building hosted several university departments and had a restaurant on the ground floor. Our online Archive ran on the university’s server under its new name “Magnus Hischfeld Archive for Sexology”. Beyond this generous offer, however, the university provided no support. Thus, it remained my personal, private property, and I paid for it myself.

At our new address we simply continued our work as before, received foreign visitors, and expanded our free online offer by adding new texts in additional languages. The number of our online visitors kept climbing, and soon we were running the university’s most popular web site.

In spite of our high international visibility, however, there was no university department or institute willing and capable of taking over our Archive, continuing and expanding it. Neither “Gender Studies” nor “Education” nor “Psychology” nor “Rehabilitation Science” nor “Sexual Medicine” nor “Social Medicine” nor the new “Institute for Internet and Society” ever showed any interest.

In January 2003 I took a great leap forward and offered the world’s first “open access” online course. However, neither the university nor the press nor the general public took notice of this pioneering offer, the prototype of what later came to be called Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Indeed, the ensuing years saw a steady expansion of such courses, first in the US and then in other countries as well. They revolutionized academic teaching and have, in the meantime, turned into a world-wide multi-million dollar business. We ourselves added more courses and thus created a complete curriculum on sexual health, now available in seven languages. Here is the entrance page of our first course:

Welcome to our course

Basic Human Sexual Anatomy & Physiology

1. Description of Course

2. How to use it

One year later, I donated the “printed part” of my Archive, i.e. my library and collections, to the library of Humboldt University. Its far-sighted director Milan Bulaty was glad to accept it and made it available in different locations until in 2009 it found a permanent place in a new, architecturally outstanding, centrally located main building.

The university’s main library is located right next to the train station „Friedrichstrasse” in the center of Berlin, close to the Staatsbibliothek (State Library), the Staatsoper (State Opera), and the German Historical Museum. Thus, my library and collections, the Haeberle-Hirschfeld Archive, now owned by the university, is very easily accessible to researchers. It is housed on the 6^th floor of the main building in the division of rare books. Many German and foreign researchers, even from as far as Japan, have already used it, some of them repeatedly.

In sheer volume, the HH Archive cannot compete with the library of the American Kinsey institute, which, because of its remote location, is much more difficult to reach. On the other hand, our German Archive is located in the center of Berlin in the heart of Europe. It contains many rare sexological books from the period before 1933 plus several collections of various relevant materials. Most of these have not yet been catalogued and still remain inaccessible, among them the library of the legendary Dr. X and all of his papers. They are waiting to be studied by qualified researchers. All in all, the HH Archive is a valuable resource that will allow interested scholars to reconstruct much of the early phase of sexology as it was founded, developed, promoted and, after 1933, utterly destroyed in Berlin. It also contains documents showing why sexology, as envisioned by its founders, could not be re-established at the place of its birth. In the meantime, several German and foreign colleagues have donated their own books and collections, thus making the HH Archive even more valuable. Twice a year, I myself visit Berlin and donate new books, journal issues, and other materials to the steadily expanding collection. I can only urge my sexological colleagues to do likewise and to donate at least their own publications and relevant photos or films to this Archive. There is no better place for them. (15)

In the summer of 2006 we were suddenly told that our Archive could no longer remain in Berlin-Pankow. The entire building would be razed, and we would have to move. Fortunately, at this time our work had progressed to a point where we no longer needed all that office space. My library and collections were already in the possession of Humboldt University, and my electronic Magnus-Hirschfeld Archive could be run and expanded from my private home. For this purpose, I kept my long-time programmer Thomas Haase and, just as before, kept paying him out of my own pocket.

Dr. X
In 1998 I succeeded in locating Dr. X, a legendary figure in sexological circles. He lived in Palermo, Sicily, and I immediately decided to visit him there. He was 85 at the time, told me the fascinating story of his life, showed me his papers and his library and eventually returned my visit by coming to Berlin.

We spent several days discussing ways to preserve his - and my own - legacy, and he finally decided to leave all of his papers to me, including several hundred letters sent from various parts of the globe. (July 26, 1999: “I leave my records and correspondence for scientific purposes to Prof. Haeberle personally”.) He also donated his library to me as well as his porn collection. (The latter provides additional insights into his sexual tastes.) As it turned out, he had some “sentimental” connection to Berlin: Before WW II, as a foreign student, he had studied medicine in Berlin, when the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police) had suddenly arrested him as a spy. He then spent the war years in various prisons, camps, and penal battalions. In 1945, as a prisoner in Vienna, he was finally sentenced to death, but was saved and freed “just in time” by the Russian army. After the war, he became an internationally successful businessman, corresponded with Alfred Kinsey, and, following his suggestions, started keeping a diary about his sexual activities. He traveled all over the world and spoke 5 languages fluently. His papers reveal him as one of the most interesting men of his time. We stayed in touch by mail and telephone until his death in 2005 at the age of 92. Then, at my own considerable cost, I had his entire, very voluminous correspondence of over 50 years retyped and digitalized. Now I have it available on a single disk. Unfortunately, today I myself can no longer muster the energy to make a thorough study of his papers. They are waiting to be explored by a team of qualified researchers. I am certain, however, that they will overturn many still unquestioned assumptions about sexual orientation. (16)

In Beijing’s Great Hall of the People
in October 2004, the Chinese Sexological Society, founded by Prof. Wu Jieping, celebrated its 10^th anniversary. At his initiative, I was invited to give the opening lecture in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People – a very great honor. (The actual anniversary congress was held in a hotel.) My partner and I were paid the travel expenses for a first-class flight to and from Beijing. Once we had arrived on location, I was given 80 minutes time, during which I spoke about the future of sexology and demonstrated my first “open access” online courses.

The text of my lecture was projected on a very large screen and simultaneously translated. The same was done during the demonstration of my courses. The whole presentation was a great success and eventually led to the translation of my entire curriculum of six courses into Chinese in both simplified and traditional script.

Unfortunately, it proved impossible to take photos inside the auditorium. However, Prof. Wu Jieping himself was present and agreed to pose for a “class photo” in a special room reserved for such purposes. The photo shows him sitting in the front row, next to him and behind him a select group of several hundred of our congress participants. My partner and I are also sitting in the front on the right. The group also included many of my former hosts during my earlier visits to China. The congress participants came from all regions of the country. The enormously large meeting also gave me the welcome opportunity to meet with three members of my scientific advisory board – Man Lun Ng (Hong Kong), Fang-fu Ruan (Taiwan), and William Granzig (USA). For me it was, all in all, the most useful and most inspiring congress I ever attended.

Travel to other countries

In April 2005 my old friend and publisher Werner M. Linz invited me and my partner to come to Cairo for the celebration of his 70th birthday. He had rented a big apartment for us in his neighborhood (Zamalek), where we could stay for a month. In the meantime, he had become director of the American University in Cairo Press, which he had turned into one of the most important publishing houses in the Near East. We visited his offices and met his enthusiastic co-workers, who invited us to join them for a wonderful outdoor afternoon with their families. We also explored the most important sites in Cairo, including the Egyptian Museum with its overwhelming number of priceless treasures. And I took the opportunity to visit Heba Kotb, Egypt’s first sex therapist. Quite apparently, her practice was booming, since I saw many couples in the waiting room of her office. However, we talked mostly about her experiences in the US and about Bill Granzig, a mutual friend and member of my advisory board.

My old publisher buddy had made many new friends in Egypt. One of them was Zahi Hawass, the supreme chief of all Egyptian antiquities. With his help and permission, Werner, Gene and I were able to visit all of the most impressive monuments and tombs from Giza to Assuan and Abu Simbel, including many that were closed to the general public. Everywhere we went, we were greatly impressed, but on one occasion Werner, who was already well familiar with the sites, took me aside and led me to a recently excavated tomb some 50 feet deep under the sandy surface. (It was not accessible to tourists, but our special permits allowed us to enter.) We climbed down several ladders and then, in a small burial chamber, saw, behind glass, the perfectly preserved (not mummified) corpse of a young man, nude except for a loin cloth. He was perhaps 18-20 years old when he died a few thousand years ago, but looked as if he had just fallen asleep. Only the color of his smooth skin had turned blue, but his muscles had not shrunk at all. Legs, arms, shoulders, chest, and head had retained their perfect form. I was stunned and deeply moved by this sight. There was no description or explanation of who he was and why he was buried here. Werner was the first to climb back up, leaving me alone for a few minutes sharing a very narrow space with this ancient, youthful body. He had died young and thus had avoided most of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. And thereafter he had escaped the ravages of time until I saw him. It made me shudder in awe. I had never seen anything like it and, to this day, keep wondering about this mystery.

At the same time I tried to learn something about Hirschfeld’s stay in Cairo toward the end of his trip around the world.

At the University I had the opportunity to talk with Prof. M.S. Akabawi, the Associate Vice President for Computing and Professor of Information Systems. Our discussion quickly turned to the subject of “open access” and its consequences for teaching and learning. We came to the same conclusion: In the long run, it will be impossible to restrict scientific knowledge to privileged groups or to sell it as merchandise. On the other hand, universities will be able to attract large numbers of distance students with freely accessible online courses. This will be especially true of students from developing countries. Many of these will also gladly pay tuition and fees if they can obtain a diploma or degree that way. Thus, even “free” courses will have no trouble being financed and making money for the providers.

The university’s very helpful archivists Stephen Urgola then started an extensive search for possible references to Magnus Hirschfeld, who had lived in Cairo and taught at the American University during the winter of 1931-32. Unfortunately, the university documents from this period were very scanty. We did find an old university catalogue of the respective academic year. However, since Hirschfeld did not arrive in Egypt until after it had been printed, his name is nowhere mentioned. Still, we did discover that, starting in 1925, the university had already conducted its own, very popular sex education courses.

***

In the meantime, my „open access“ online curriculum of 6 courses had become well known in other countries. Thus, in December 2005, I received an invitation from Bulgaria and presented a lecture (in English) at the University of Sofia: “World-wide Sexual Health – The Growing Role of the Internet”. I then gave a live demonstration of my courses. I repeated this presentation at the private International Healthcare and Health Insurance Institute, also in Sofia. In both cases I found an enthusiastic audience and a great eagerness to take advantage of my offer. However, in the end the necessary translation into Bulgarian did not materialize. The financial and social situation of my Bulgarian colleagues was, and remained, simply too precarious.

In March 2006 I celebrated my 70th birthday and, on this occasion, was invited to present my online courses at the Goethe-Institute in Atlanta, GA. The presentation was announced under the title „Transatlantic Knowledge Transfer – The Growing Role of the Internet“. I also had the opportunity to introduce a “German Gay Film Series”, which started with the Hirschfeld-inspired silent movie of 1919 „Anders als die Andern“ (Different from the Others).

Following this, I visited two members of my Advisory Board, J. Linn and F. J. Tombrello, in Birmingham AL. We spent several days discussing the development of my electronic Archive and the future of scientific publications in general. The photo shows us in one of the libraries of the University of Alabama Medical School, where Dr. Linn was the Executive Director of Medical Publications.

From Alabama I flew to California and returned for a brief visit to my former work place, the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (see above).

In October of that year, I was visited by Prof. Liu Dalin and Dr. Hu Hongxia, the founders and directors of the China Sex Museum. Once again, my Archive and the Museum exchanged valuable gifts and signed a new, more comprehensive agreement of co-operation. This agreement confirmed and intensified the exchange between our two institutions, allowing the mutual non-commercial use of its electronic resources and other materials. We also agreed to regular mutual visits in the future.

In the following year 2007 I received another Chinese invitation: The Shu-Te-University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, asked me to give the opening lecture at a conference on female health. I seized the opportunity to meet with the three Chinese colleagues who had been involved with the translation of my courses: In Hong Kong, I had a long discussion with Prof. Ng, a co-author of our national Chinese sex survey of 1992. The main translator of my courses, Prof. Peng Xiaohui of Huazhong-Normal-University in Wuhan, traveled to Tongli for this occasion, where we could have intensive talks at the museum of my friend Prof. Liu. In Kaohsiung I met Prof. Ruan Fang-fu again, an old friend and, like Prof. Ng, a member of my advisory board. I was also pleasantly surprised to see another acquaintance again: Prof. Edwin H. Yen of the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipeh. He had visited me in Berlin a few years before. My opening lecture “A Brief History of Female Sexuality“was well received, and in the following week I conducted a few seminars at the university, which celebrated its 10^th anniversary that year.

In addition, in my capacity as an honorary professor, I gave two workshops at the University of Hong Kong and – together with my colleagues and friends Prof. Liu Dalin and Dr. Hu Hongxia a few lectures in Wuxi und Wujiang, People’s Republic.

As already mentioned, over the years we received many visitors from all around the world. Here is a superficial list: Individuals and groups from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, the P. R. of China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Nicaragua, North Korea, Norway, the Philippines, Romania, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the USA. All of these visitors congratulated us on our achievements, and some later helped us by adding to our online libraries and by translating my courses.

One of these visits, however, had an unexpected consequence: Prof. Li Yinhe of the Academy of Sciences in Beijing is the most respected, most popular and enlightened sexological writer in China today. Among many other things, she has published an honest, very moving autobiography describing her marriage to and love for her transsexual husband, who had formerly been a woman. To this day, she maintains an internet blog with over 20 million readers. When she visited me in Berlin, she offered to recommend my Chinese online courses to the readers of her blog. Flattered and overjoyed, I thanked her profusely, unaware of the implications: No sooner had she written her recommendation, when tens of thousands of her followers simultaneously clicked on the link to my Archive. As a result, the server of Humboldt University broke down. The technical staff blamed this on a cyber attack and therefore immediately closed our online Archive. Only many weeks later, when the Chinese readers had given up in frustration, did our offer become accessible again. This episode made clear to me that our university, just like all the others in Germany, was technically unprepared for a global role. (At that time, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig were running an “open access” e-learning course at Stanford University with 160 000 distance students from around the globe.)

In spite of such occasional setbacks, I managed to stay in close touch with my colleagues in China. This did not remain restricted to the exchange of lecture invitations and publications, however. Indeed, over the years, Chinese friends have presented me with many fascinating gifts, which are now part of the my collections in the “Haeberle-Hirschfeld Archive, where they are still waiting to be catalogued. There is, for example, an old bronze statuette of an “erotic Buddha”, as the Chinese call it , i.e. Buddha (male) and Shakti (female) in the “yab yum” position, i.e. in sexual union. There is also a large, very thick volume telling the history of medicine from antiquity to today in hundreds of postage stamps from all around the world. And we have a special coin collection commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. The following illustrations show two other examples:

***

In April 2008 the EFS congress in Rome invited me to give a lecture about eLearning: „Sexology in the Internet - Our New Frontier. (An Italian translation of my first course and of several more courses into Portuguese had already been delivered at the time.) The congress gave me the opportunity to meet and thank the translation initiators Prof. Salvatore Caruso (Catania) and Prof. Antonio Pacheco Palha (Porto). Unfortunately, over the next few years, the Italian project was not pursued any further. Only the Portuguese translation of all six courses was eventually completed.

In June of the same year, my academic life took an ironic turn: On the same day, the Wilhelm von Humboldt Foundation presented both Günter Dörner and me with an award “for our lifetime achievements”. It was an honor we owed to Klaus M. Beier, who, in the meantime, had solidified his position as director of Berlin’s only sexological institute. During the award ceremony at the medical school (Charité), Dörner and I expressed our appreciation in separate speeches, recapitulating our very different goals, methods, and experiences. Both of our (German) speeches were later published in Beier’s journal „Sexuologie“, (vol. 15, No. 3-4, pp. 121-127). I used the opportunity for an appeal to my sexological colleagues under the title „Das Bildungsideal Wilhelm von Humboldts in der globalen Informationsgesellschaft“. It implored not only the sexologists, but all universities everywhere to make their research freely accessible in the internet. However, in Germany this call remained unanswered.

In the following year 2009, Lars-Gösta Dahlöf, the president of the WAS world congress in Göteborg, invited me to present a „Hirschfeld Lecture“, i. e. a critical evaluation of Magnus Hirschfeld‘s legacy and its possible meaning for our own future as sexologists. I arrived at the conclusion that, even in his own time, Hirschfeld had already tried to gain world-wide influence, and that our present process of globalization gives us an opportunity to continue his work on a scale he could not have anticipated and, indeed, that this opportunity is now an obligation. I then mentioned the efforts we sexologists have already undertaken, and I finally urged my colleagues to take advantage of all possibilities offered by the internet and to join the cause of “open access”. Sometime later, I added a documentation “Berlin remembers Magnus Hirschfeld“ to my online library about the belated rediscovery of Hirschfeld’s work in Berlin after WW II.

One fine summer afternoon, our Archive received a very distinguished visitor - Dr. Giuseppe Vita, the CEO of the Schering AG, one of Germany’s largest pharmaceutical companies. (In the meantime, it has become part of the even larger company Bayer.) He took his time for a guided tour of our offices and to learn more about the history and potential future of sexology in Berlin. Very curious and quite impressed by our efforts, he wished us every possible success. Indeed, with the help of his public relationship office, Gert J. Wlasich, Schering had already supported all our DGSS congresses in Berlin since 1990 by donating useful material to our participants (high quality bags, note pads, pens etc.) Needless to say, Schering also supported our combined DGSS/EFS congress in 2000. (17)

In November 2010 my Czech colleagues invited me to come to Prague, because, in the meantime, they had completed the Czech translation of my courses. I was given the chance to demonstrate them in two lectures: 1. At the Czech Sexological Society, which awarded me an honorary membership, and 2. for students of Prof. Petr Weiss at the university’s department of psychology. In addition, I returned to the Institute of Sexology, where I met its director Prof. Zvěřina (a member of my advisory board,) and Dr. Antoni Brzek, whom I had visited exactly ten years before. This time, it was a special occasion for me, because the Institute also translated an article written in German by Prof. Josef Hynie for one of my earlier publications. (18) Hynie was the director of the world’s first still existing Institute of Sexology, which traces its beginning to a decree of 1921. In his article, he described his goals and his career, including his repeated studies at Hirschfeld’s institute in Berlin.

In the following spring I received an unusual request: The Thalia Theater in Hamburg planned a combined performance of both parts of Goethe’s “Faust” as a co-production with the Salzburg Festival. In preparation of this gigantic task, several prominent professors from different disciplines (economics, cultural history, philosophy, and physics) had also been invited. I myself was asked to address the sexological aspects of the play. I spoke from a podium on the rehearsal stage to the director, the actors, musicians, and technical staff. After my lecture, I answered questions and joined in a lively discussion. All lectures were videotaped and parts of them used in the later performances. Excerpts were also printed in the theater programs for Hamburg and Salzburg. To my surprise, the production eventually even came to Berlin and was shown in the large festival theater across the street from our apartment building. Before traveling to Hamburg, however, I had my text printed and bound, together with 10 new caricatures. Thus, I was able to present both the director Nicolas Stemann and his “Dramaturg” Benjamin von Blomberg with a copy of the slim volume. (19) Sometime later, I added the lecture to my online library with 5 “harmless” samples of my caricatures. The other five were too “erotic” for an “open access” web site. (20)

When the online version of my lecture on “Faust” was well received, I felt encouraged to add some of my older brief satirical variations on ancient Greek myths.

I had written these many years ago when I had first become familiar with the Richard Strauss operas “Ariadne auf Naxos”, “Daphne”, and “Die Liebe der Danae”. I myself had no great artistic ambitions, but felt tempted to respond to these masterworks with some modest, capricious efforts of my own. I simply gave the classic tales a modern, “enlightened” twist and thus “demythologized” them for my own amusement. At any rate, I always enjoyed the occasional opportunities to write something outside my sexological routine and to make drawings in different styles. Since my neo-mythological texts are written in German, I just add here a few of my accompanying illustrations:

***

A few months later I had a truly exceptional experience: The World Congress for Sexual Health in Glasgow 2011 marked the end not only of one of my more productive years, but of a whole, important phase of my professional life: I had the opportunity to see the student dorm again where I had lived exactly 50 years before together with Scottish and other students from all around the world. It had been a crucial time in my academic development, and suddenly I remembered some of my experiences: The impenetrable winter smog (now gone forever, thanks to an environmental clean-up), the local television programs celebrating Scottish culture, my visits to Edinburgh and some coastal villages, a marvelous “Christmas pantomime” with the famous Scottish tenor Kenneth McKellar, the traditional, overwhelming New Year’s concert of Handel’s “Messiah”, my visits with fellow students to local pubs with their early closing hours. And I also remembered another, very peculiar, but, as it seemed, obligatory tradition: There were many all-male, alcoholic birthday parties inside the dorm where an invited young “bard” recited -obscene poems and the participants were getting drunk while loudly singing utterly bawdy songs – all of this came back flooding back into my memory. In the meantime, the dorm had been combined with the house next door and was now being run as a „hostel‘, i.e. as low-priced tourist hotel. My feelings during this „homecoming“ are difficult to describe – a sense of deep gratitude and an even deeper amazement at the course of my life in the preceding half-century. With ever new surprises and unexpected turns it had led me more than halfway around the globe – to Hawai’i in the West and to China in the East. Indeed, as a poor student in Scotland, I could not possibly have imagined what eventually had become of me.

I could not help but recall Calderon‘s philosophically profound drama „La vida es sueño“ (Life is a Dream). This Spanish classic deliberately blurs the distinction between reality and illusion in order to convey a moral lesson: A potentially violent crown prince is brought up in solitary confinement, where a tutor visits and instructs him in all relevant fields of knowledge. Once the prisoner has learned enough, he is subjected to a test: He is drugged into unconsciousness and brought to the royal court. As he awakens, he is greeted as the new ruler, but when he loses his temper and begins to abuse his power, he is drugged again and returned to his prison. He is then told that he had only been dreaming about a freedom he had never really possessed. Finally, against the will of his captors and in a sober state, he is freed again in the course of a rebellion. However, now he surprises everyone by showing self-restraint and magnanimity. His experience had taught him that life itself may be nothing more than a dream, and that he must always behave responsibly.

Unlike the irascible protagonist of the play, I had always been peaceful, but there were nevertheless certain parallels. Both for him and for me, inconspicuous beginnings finally led to a fulfillment of our true mission: In the first act we both had lived in oppressive conditions (he was locked up in a tower; I was trapped in a financially hopeless situation). In the second act we both were shocked when unexpected freedom was followed by a sudden reversal of fortune (he was first released and then imprisoned again; I had started a promising academic career, but then lost my job and was thrown back into poverty). Finally, however, in the third act, both of us found our destiny (he did become a good and merciful king; I became a sexologist – whether good or bad is for others to decide).

This comparison, involuntary and whimsical as it was, raised an unavoidable serious question for me: At the end of the play, the prince had become wise. But what about me? Had I also learned something from my experiences? II was now 75 years old and had officially retired ten years before. Wasn’t this the time for a general review of my work, my plans, hopes, failures, and accomplishments?

Summary
The last few travel photos (from China, Taiwan, Prague, Hamburg, and Glasgow) already give some hints at the guiding motives of my professional activities, such as their global orientation, my cooperation with foreign colleagues, my interest in cultural history, and my frequent participation in international congresses.

Looking now at my old regular Archive Telegrams/Archive News, personal notes and photos, I realize that, in the course of time, I had been invited to lecture in many different foreign cities: Philadelphia PA (1983), Shanghai (1989 and 1992), Beijing (1990 and 1999), Nanjing (1990 and 1999), Hong Kong (1990, 1999, and 2007), Budapest and Miskolc (1990), Paris (1993), Rome (1996), Tianjin (1999), Hefei (1999), Jinan (1999), Fuyang (1999), Hangzhou (1999), Barcelona (2000), La Laguna, Teneriffa (2000, 2001, and 2002), Fort Lauderdale FL (2001), Sofia (2005), Atlanta GA, (2006), Wuxi und Wujiang in China (2007), Kaohsiung in Taiwan (2007), Prague (2010), and Hamburg (2011). (This list does not include my many lectures in the 1980s on AIDS prevention in Swiss, Italian, Austrian, and German cities.) I had also traveled extensively in China and Egypt. In addition. I had attended sexological congresses in Copenhagen (1982), Vienna (1983), Caracas (1989), Taormina (1992), Reykjavic (1995), Rotterdam (1996), Marseille (1996), Valencia (1997), Sirmione (1998), Lisbon (1998), St. Louis, MO (1999), Dubrovnik (2001), Lüneburg (2002) Brighton (2004), Helsinki (2004), Prague (2006), Rome (2006), Göteborg (2009), Porto (2010), Glasgow (2011), Estoril (2012), Madrid (2012), and again in Helsinki (2013). I do not remember the exact dates, but after the opening of the Berlin wall, I had also lectured at the universities of Jena and Greifswald and had been an invited speaker at large congresses of sexual medicine in Hamburg and Vienna. Beginning in 2003, I used all of these occasions to introduce and demonstrate my online sexual health curriculum.

In their accumulation, these activities attracted international attention: Over the years, my online Archive received awards from Chinese, American, German, and Turkish institutions, organizations and foundations. The most important signs of recognition, however, were the gold medals of the most influential international sexological societies.

While I redoubled my electronic efforts, various new editions of my textbook continued to sell in large quantities. And this in spite of the fact that my online Archive made its full text available in English, German, Dutch, and Turkish, and that it had become outdated in some sections. As a matter of fact, even older editions are still being sold today through the internet.

At any rate, with the beginning of the new millennium, I was able to take a significant step forward, even after the end of my official career: Within a decade, I greatly expanded my steadily growing Archive and divided it into two parts: A print archive, which I donated to Humboldt University under the name Haeberle-Hirschfeld-Archiv, and an electronic archive, called Archive for Sexology, which I keep running from my home on a private server at my own expense. This “open access” online Archive now provides sexual health information in 15 languages. In particular, it contains three special offers:

1. My own sexological dictionary (English) and German).

2. A sexological encyclopedia, originally edited by my Californian colleague Vern Bullough.

Shortly before his death, he conferred the editorship to me. I am now offering a freely accessible digitalized version on my web site. In its original printed form, it had been the first and only work of its kind. I am now continuing it according to his wishes. It still has no competition.

3. The world’s first „open access" Online-Curriculum
As already mentioned, in January 2003 I succeeded in creating something entirely new: The world’s first „open access“ online course. Thus, I became the inventor and earliest pioneer of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Unfortunately, no German institution, including Humboldt University, ever showed the slightest interest in this revolutionary innovation. Over and over again, I wrote to the university administration, offering to demonstrate and explain it – to no avail. This was all the more strange, since, at the same time, the university accepted a huge donation from Google to set up a new „Institute for Internet and Society“, (popularly called “Google Institute”). Its faculty was not interested either, even when I sent them a critical memorandum about the far-reaching implications of global online education. They just could not be bothered. I was sometimes reminded of Hamlet’s complaint about “the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th' unworthy takes”. What a contrast to Prof. Wu Jieping and my colleagues in China! There, my courses are even now being used to train large numbers of sex educators every year.

The German media also refused to take notice of my work, no matter how much I tried to attract their attention. More than 10 years later, the newspapers finally wrote for the first time about MOOCs as a surprising development started by some Americans in Silicon Valley in 2006 or 2007. (Wikipedia also contains this erroneous information.)

I wrote my sexual health curriculum of 6 courses for interested readers all around the globe, but especially for students in developing countries. Therefore, it does not require any previous knowledge, but explains everything “from the ground up”. In this respect, it represents the modern form of a textbook. Indeed, compared to a traditional textbook, it offers considerable advantages: If printed, the text with its many internal and external links would produce a heavy, very expensive volume of several thousand pages – an impossibility in the college book trade. Furthermore, in its electronic form, it is easily updated. Finally, it can be studied everywhere and at all times not only on PCs, but also on tablets and smart phones. In short, no printed textbook can compete with an electronic one. It is therefore easy to predict that the textbooks which are now still in use will not have much of a future. Sooner or later, they will be replaced by online courses. This and other developments are part of the present electronic revolution, which will produce many other radical changes in higher learning.

As it now turned out, my many lectures in foreign countries and my participation in international congresses had paid off: Colleagues from all over the world sent me books and articles for which they had the copyright, and which I could therefore make available in my “open access” online libraries. Other colleagues spontaneously and enthusiastically started working on the translation of my courses: They asked their students to translate shorter or longer sections for credit. (Some produced a translation of a whole course and had it accepted as their Master’s thesis.) Obviously, with this global cooperation, we had created a model for the future. It was a “win-win situation” for everyone involved: The students received their academic credit, the professors obtained the courses in the language of their country, and I myself could, once again, enlarge my online offer. It was a very welcome gift - something I did not have to pay for out of my own pocket.

In early 2012 I received a polite letter from the university administration, informing me that it had “neither the expertise nor the resources” to do justice to my online Archive. I was therefore asked to find a new provider by the middle of the following year. Under the circumstances, this was undoubtedly a fair request, since it gave me 18 months to organize the necessary move. Anyway, at the time, I had every reason to be contented: As everyone could see at the end of 2012, the Archive had registered, for that single year, over 100 million “hits” and over 4 million “visits” from over 200 countries. In the month of December alone, we had counted over 9 million “hits” and over 380 000 “visits” - more than Hirschfeld’s Institute had seen in all fourteen years of its existence (1919-1933). Unfortunately, no one in Germany took notice or drew the logical conclusion. The world view of my compatriots was still that of the “Gutenberg age”

In the summer of 2013 I answered the university’s request by moving my online Archive to a private server. I designed a new logo and removed the name Magnus Hirschfeld from the title. (It is hardly known in non-Western countries). At the same time, however, the content I was able to offer continued to grow.

Unfortunately, because of our move, we immediately lost 90% of our visitors. Apparently, university servers are automatically preferred by search engines like Bing and Google. Before, when searching for “sexology”, we had always been first in over 1,5 million listings; now we were moved all the way down and could hardly be found at all. Our content could not possibly be the reason for this, because, to this day, we have no competition in either quality or quantity. Our online Archive is still by far the largest and the best in our field. Nevertheless, the search engines are now listing hundreds of sites ahead of us that offer only a tiny fraction of our content. Some of them are also clearly frivolous. (The Chinese search engine Baidu is still listing us near the top for searches in Chinese, but for searches in English it uses the content of Google.) Quite obviously then, the Western search engines do not serve the interests of their users, and it is unclear to me whose interests they actually serve. Therefore, for me and our still faithful readers, the present search algorithms remain „a riddle, wrapped up in a mystery, inside an enigma”. Under the circumstances, I cannot say at this time, what will eventually become of my online Archive.

The Future of Sex Research?
The fast growing world-wide popularity of MOOCs shows us that a new epoch has dawned for academic teaching and learning. It is high time for us sexologists to prove our worth under these new conditions. However, since the original idea of a unified approach to sex research as conceived by Bloch, Hirschfeld and Kinsey has largely been lost, it has now become much more difficult to find financial support or even public attention for it. Current sex research no longer follows a “grand design”, but is practically reduced to special studies in the natural sciences, conducted in traditional university departments. Such studies look at problems in the biology of evolution, in physiology, endocrinology, neurology, and genetics. The findings are not yet definite, remain disputed among the respective specialists, and, so far, have not produced a new view of human sexuality. This may very well change sooner or later, as many of us hope. In addition, there is a flow of historical and psychological studies in “gender” and “homosexuality.” Occasionally, there are also very enlightening sociological studies which deepen our understanding without revolutionizing it.

Unfortunately, even the undisputed factual knowledge about sex is still largely unknown to the general public, especially in countries outside the US and Europe. At the same time, our mass media have become “sexualized” to an extent that was unimaginable in my youth. Prime-time television dramas contain now not only formerly forbidden “four-letter words”, but also explicit scenes of ”straight“ and “gay“copulation. The most popular German newspaper prints photos of nude women formerly restricted to “men’s magazines”. It also recommends that men should masturbate every day as a preventive measure against prostate cancer (“Bild “, February 13, 2017). Bestselling books describe sadomasochistic fantasies, telephone books advertise brothels, printed and electronic media contain personal ads for casual sex contacts, advice columns discuss the most intimate sexual details, large public posters recommend the use of condoms, etc.. In addition, everyone of any age now has practically unlimited free online access to all forms of pornography. (Only the viewing and possession of ”child pornography“ remains prohibited.) Is this progress? No matter: All of it is dominated by commercial considerations. ”Sex sells“ is the merciless motto, which taints all efforts to educate the world about human sexuality. Thus, even the most “progressive” message finds itself firmly embedded in its medium’s larger context of “making money”. Indeed, upon a closer look, the profit motive seems to be the driving force behind much of our present “sexual liberation.” Both good and bad go hand in hand, and one is therefore tempted to speak of a “dialectic of sexual enlightenment.”

But let us first emphasize the positive: The increasing commercialization of sex is, at the same time, an important factor in its liberalization. As more and more women and men can openly declare their sexual interests, they can also be targeted as “legitimate” customers. The profit motive is therefore also a driving force for sexual tolerance. This increased tolerance has, in the meantime, contributed to a more relaxed public attitude toward nonconformity and has thus made life easier for many sexual minorities. And “normal” citizens have also benefitted: Unmarried couples and their children are finding social acceptance, teenagers are silently permitted to have active sex lives, if a couple is childless because of the male partner’s infertility, it can turn to artificial insemination by an anonymous donor, etc. Even same-sex marriages or registered partnerships have found surprisingly little lasting resistance. In short: Many formerly condemned - and therefore hidden - variations in human sexual behavior are no longer secret and are being accepted as socially harmless. However, this commendable acceptance now has an ugly companion: Surveillance. An ever-increasing surveillance of all internet traffic helps businesses to discover more potential customers and thus to increase their profits. In this sense, we are now living in an increasingly “open society.”

How far this openness will eventually go, is anyone’s guess. There is no doubt, however, that the already almost ubiquitous ads will become even more frequent, insistent and bothersome. At the same time, the surveillance of ever more people could help the advertisers understand how varied human sexual behavior is (and always has been), and how little of it is really harmful to society. This could create additional business opportunities and thus lead to a further increase in tolerance.

However, the outcome could also be very different: The new electronic media - and with them their commercial masters - are steadily gaining access to more and more aspects of our personal lives, and this, in the end, could have some very unwelcome consequences. Just by seeking information in the internet for shopping or travel or by participating in social networks we and countless others voluntarily provide uncontrolled private companies with a constantly growing collection of our personal data. These companies, on their part, sell all of these collections, representing millions of individuals, as “big data” to interested parties. After all, their commercial value is obvious: Accumulated over a longer period of time, they produce an ever more complete picture of our financial status, our life styles, preferences, and antipathies (“likes” and “dislikes”). Most internet users do not realize (or do not care) that, as they become active online, their individual characteristics are being recorded by some unseen collector: addresses, birth dates, levels of education, job history, marital status, number and ages of their children, preferred clothing, literary and musical tastes, shopping habits, circles of friends, travels by automobile, bus, train, and airplane, preferred vacation spots, leisure activities, hobbies etc. Indeed, very often people also unknowingly reveal their health data to this hidden collector - doctor’s and pharmacy visits, types of medication, hospital stays, eating habits, regular, occasional, or lacking physical exercise, in some cases even blood pressure, pulse rate and much more. Over time, all of these bits of information are being recorded, added up and used to establish an ever more refined and complete profile of each user’s personality, and that, by now, includes all of us. We ourselves do not get paid for our input, but we are, in fact, creating our own virtual “doubles,” which are constantly busy making money for other people. Indeed, without realizing it, we are turning ourselves into merchandise.

At the same time, our Western societies are fast approaching the age of total surveillance. Its present far-reaching, but not yet total extent is often experienced as annoying, but still tolerable, because, so far, it serves only commercial, seemingly harmless ends. We become aware of it mostly through “personalized” advertising without thinking much about how the advertisers found out what we might be inclined to buy. And we do not yet resent it too much that unknown others are reaping enormous profits with our personal data. The fact is, however, that, with every passing day, this constant data collection is making the collectors richer and more powerful, and that means that they are becoming harder to control.

Sooner or later, this worrisome development will raise very serious questions about its economic and political implications. These questions are unavoidable, even disregarding the surveillance by secret agencies and criminal hackers. However, I cannot discuss this fundamentally important, very complex question here. Instead, I restrict myself to the limited subject of my own field: What does all of this mean for the present and future sex research?

First of all, we should remember not only the advantages, but also the dangers of privately funded research. It is only natural and entirely legitimate that large pharmaceutical companies should try to use neurological and hormonal research for their own business purposes, even when it is first conducted by others. (Here, the development of the contraceptive pill is a classic model.) It is also a fact that private companies have made important contributions to the healing of diseases and to the preservation of human and animal health. However, the matter becomes dubious, when supposedly non-commercial universities are forced to acquire outside financial support and thus become dependent on private, profit-oriented donors while, at the same time, reducing or abandoning research projects of their own. It becomes even more dubious when, for example, outside financial interests bolster the questionable trend toward a ”medicalization of sexual problems“ by creating products for alleged sexual dysfunctions. When such products are then promoted with million-dollar campaigns, sexologists will find it difficult to find a hearing for their critical scientific arguments. Anyway, it is obvious that an overriding profit motive is bound to distort any research. It is likely to overemphasize partial findings and to suppress “inconvenient” doubts. This will prevent a thorough understanding of the phenomena under investigation. In the end, only “suitable“ results will determine the discussion and the general state of knowledge.

Even more problematic is the future of research into human sexual behavior where we can expect an ever-dwindling influence of qualified sexologists. It is, of course, unavoidable that our sexual interests become subject to market analyses: Social networks and various ”dating sites“ offer the first clues to the data collectors, and these clues are gradually amended by our other personal data. Without going into much detail, let me simply cite the relatively harmless example of an American online porn provider: In 2013, this company analyzed the masturbation habits of its US customers according to their geographic location, favorite themes, and viewing time per session (average: 10 minutes). The results “ were presented in the form of graphic charts and were both surprising and instructive. When the film Fifty Shades of Grey was widely discussed, the same company released new and very detailed charts showing the suddenly increased demand for various sadomasochistic practices. Especially interesting and very well worth studying is Pornhub’s annual report of 2016, which covers the entire globe and registers a total of 23 billion visits to its sites. It covers many countries in detail.

These charts can also serve as early examples of something we might call “automated sex research”: A company owning our personal data may simply leave it to its computers to generate all sorts of findings about our most intimate fantasies and activities and illustrate them with colorful curves, columns, and pie charts. This kind of instant, “push-button research” may, in the future, offer nearly endless possibilities. It will be able to cover all sorts of groups and subgroups in whole continents or even in the entire world. After all, the amount of intimate personal data available to commercial companies is steadily growing. The consumption of online pornography alone has been shown to be quite extensive and can be assumed to spread to ever more countries. The smart phone seems to be a major factor in this development.

And here is another problem: In 2015, internet hackers succeeded in penetrating an online service for extramarital affairs and stealing the personal data of 37 million users (names, passwords, addresses, credit card and phone numbers) and making some of them public. This lead to resignations, divorces, and suicides of customers. This incidence had many interesting ramifications too complex to be discussed here. In any case, it shows very clearly that even very intimate details can be traced back to individual users.

Another problem has recently become apparent when, for political reasons, social media began to spread “fake news”. Indeed, as serious scientists are well aware, powerful special interest groups have, for some time, also been peddling various kinds of “fake science”, for example denying climate change or - to talk about our own field - promoting “conversion therapy” (from homo- to heterosexuality) or warning against “sex, pornography, and masturbation addiction”. These pseudoscientific, but otherwise sophisticated web sites take great pains to appear “serious” and trustworthy.

Still another problem is the proliferation of “open access” academic journals. Some of these are themselves “fake” and have no standing in the scientific community. Some of them are merely predatory. They accept all submissions, charge their authors publication fees and simply pocket the money. Some have also been shown to accept deliberately nonsensical articles as long as they get paid. Many young scholars, under pressure to publish, cannot always tell the legitimate from the fraudulent. In the end, the confidence in all academic publishing will be undermined. Therefore, we all have reason to worry about the future. Who, if anyone, will eventually be accepted as the final arbiter in these matters? As an American journalist quite aptly put it: “In the internet we are now all connected, and nobody is in charge.” Or are there invisible and unsuspected powers behind the scenes, which are in charge?

Examples like these give us some hints as to what may become possible in the future. It is even conceivable that marvelous, unprecedented perspectives could open up for sex researchers. Still, the question remains: Will they be allowed to conduct the research? Unfortunately, the answer is uncertain, because the exclusive owners of the new sexual data have no motive to share them with anyone. They have total control over what can be done with them by whom and und what conditions. Why should they let others profit from their most precious, income-producing possessions? Or, to put it another way: Considering the new, extreme imbalance of power in this field, how can science still play a corrective role? Will scientists still find the strength - and the financial resources - to form a counterweight to the interests of big business? Will future sex research ever amount to more than market research? Will the data owners eventually become immune to any form of criticism and control? Will their power be used to establish an all-penetrating, profit-oriented dictatorship? And will this lead to the “ultimate sexual oppression”? Will George Orwell be proven right after all? Will “Big Brother” and his “Big Data” end up confirming that in the internet “Freedom is Slavery”?

The foreseeable second end of German sexology
During my academic career, Germany had four university institutes devoted to sexology. In the meantime, the institute in Frankfurt/M has been closed, the one in Hamburg is now a sub-section of psychiatry, and this has lately also become true of the institute in Kiel. In my view, the only still remaining independent sexological institute in Berlin does not have much of a future either. Indeed, I very much fear that it will also be closed after the retirement of its present director. In the best-case scenario, it will then become part of some traditional medical department. In the worst case, it will simply be shut down, and the still available academic positions will go to traditional medical specialists. Finally, and fifth, there is a „Fachhochschule“ (University of Applied Sciences) in Merseburg, Saxony, which offers - late by several decades - an M.A. degree program in “applied sexology” plus a continuing education program in “Sexology - Sexual Health and Sexual Counseling”, which can also lead to an M.A.. However, since these programs are offered only in German and do not involve any wider international cooperation, their importance is likely to remain limited. In the end, their global impact will remain as negligible as that of the four university institutes mentioned above. These, being part of medical schools, never had a real chance to broaden their perspectives. They did produce several surveys of the sexual behavior of students and manual workers as well as a study of male homosexual behavior. The current institute in Berlin runs a model prevention program for pedophiles, helping them to avoid sexual contact with children. However, in the final analysis, all of these medical institutes had, ex officio, one overriding concern - the well-being of their patients. Non-clinical research, i.e. studies of sexual behavior that was neither sick nor criminal remained rare. Finally, it should be mentioned that, from 1972-1990, the former German Democratic Republic (DDR) maintained a Central Institute for Youth Research (Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung) in Leipzig. Among other things, it also collected data on the sexual behavior of young people. It was closed after the reunification of Germany.

All of this notwithstanding, over the years I received many tokens of recognition from colleagues in sexual medicine. I always accepted these gratefully and was pleasantly surprised that I - without any medical training of my own - had been able to make an occasional contribution (invited speaker to medical congresses, contributor to medical journals, and visiting professor at medical schools.) Nevertheless, on the whole, the field of sexual medicine remained within its own self-drawn borders and did very little to become active in other sexological fields.

This, among other things, explains the multiple failures of my contemporary German colleagues:

1. Missed paradigm shift
The greatest failure was to ignore the paradigm shift initiated by the World Health Organization (WHO), which, in the early 1970s had shifted its focus from sexual sickness to sexual health. In 1975, it published its report Education and Treatment in Human Sexuality – The Training of Health Professionals, which was based on a meeting held in Geneva one year earlier. It contained two important statements.

The first was a definition of sexual health:

1. „Sexual health is the integration of the somatic, emotional, intellectual, and social aspects of sexual being, in ways that are positively enriching and that enhance personality, communication, and love. Fundamental to this concept are the right to sexual information and the right to pleasure.”

The second was the proposal to make human sexuality a special academic field in the training of health professionals:

2. “In the long run, it was felt that, depending on local conditions, human sexuality should be encouraged to develop as an autonomous discipline in the education and training of health professionals”.

Thus, both the early Master’s program in Hawai’i and my early decision to write a textbook for it found themselves vindicated. The same was true of our institute in San Francisco, which, from its inception, had followed the new WHO recommendations. By joining the institute’s faculty, I eventually had the chance to meet every single colleague who had signed the document: Coenraad von Emde Boas, Preben Hertoft, John Bancroft, Romano Forleo, Jan Raboch, Willy Pasini, Georges Abraham, John Money, Paul Gebhard, Mary Calderone and Harold Lief. I could not help noticing, however, that there were no German signatures. In Germany, the WHO report and its recommendations were simply ignored.

2. No "autonomous discipline"
Since the German sexologists refused to take note of the WHO recommendations for a special academic field “human sexuality”, they also failed to develop a respective curriculum with its own certificates, diplomas or degrees. However, as it turned out in the long run, such a curriculum would have been the best guarantee for the survival of their sexological institutes. Without it, they had no durable basis in the university structure and thus could all the more easily be closed or incorporated into medical departments. As I have pointed out on many occasions: “A sexology institute founded as part of a medical school is a stillborn child in a dead-end street.” Whenever the founder or director of such an institute reaches retirement age, the school will seize the new vacancy, because it always urgently needs an additional psychiatrist, or gynecologist, cardiologist, oncologist, neurologist etc. etc. Thus, the sexology institute will suddenly become expendable, and its tenured directorship will be taken over by a traditional medical specialist. (In a variation of this development, the medical school decides to save money and simply abolishes the sexology institute together with its faculty positions. Its “useful” - i.e. financially profitable - work is then reassigned to professors already employed.) This pattern is well known among sexologists and has been observed in many countries in all too many cases. Outside of Germany, however, sexology has recently begun to escape this trap: Today, there are sexual health curricula leading to advanced academic degrees in many countries - Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, the USA, and Venezuela. (21) Most of these programs are not offered by medical schools, but operate within the wider boundaries of more general university departments, such as a Family Institute, a Center for Sexology and Sexuality Studies, a Department of Sexuality Studies, an Academy for Sexology, a Graduate School of Human Sexuality, or a large, multidisciplinary Faculty of Health Sciences.

3. No textbook
This failure followed inescapably from the others. Where there is no sexual health curriculum, there is also no need for a textbook on sexual health. Instead, there were several excellent textbooks of sexual medicine – proof enough that Germany had very competent authors in this particular field. However, they never produced a more comprehensive overview as recommended by the WHO. As a result, my own textbook in German translation (“The Sex Atlas”) was and remained the only one that addressed to a wider readership of educators, psychologists, counselors, social workers etc. who had an interest in acquiring at least some basic knowledge of human sexual behavior. Unavoidably, over the years, it became outdated in several sections, and I therefore turned much of it into a series of e-learning courses. They are now complete in seven languages and freely accessible on my Archive web site.

4. Ignored sex education
In the 1970s, “Sexualkunde”(sex education) became a regular subject taught in German schools. This would have been a perfect opportunity for German sexologists to join forces with the education departments of their own universities and to develop a common curriculum. At the same time, they could have become involved in the training of teachers and thus secured a more broadly based and thus more secure position within academia. Even now, no traditional university in Germany offers an appropriate program. Instead, the job is left to the Fachhochschule in Merseburg and some outside institutions and organizations, such as Planned Parenthood (in Germany: Pro Familia) and the “Federal Center for Health Education” (Bundeszentrale für gesundheitliche Aufklärung (BzgA). In 2001, the WHO and the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO, in cooperation with the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS), published a report containing several detailed sex education curricula for different settings: Promotion of Sexual Health - Recommendations for Action. The established German sexologists paid no attention.

5. Refusal to conduct a national survey
In the mid-1980s, the German government offered several million D-Marks for the first truly scientific national survey of sexual behavior. (I myself was still living in the US and therefore could not apply.) There is no question that my established German colleagues were fully qualified to conduct such a survey. However, they refused with the argument that this would amount to „state-sponsored espionage“, something their conscience would not allow them to do. In other words, they said: “The state does pay us civil servants as sex researchers, but if it wants us to conduct actual sex research, it is going too far”. In actual fact, however, the state had no intention of exercising undue influence or to use the survey findings for sinister purposes. It was just looking for reliable data on which to base its AIDS prevention programs. My German sexological colleagues, however, were not interested in such data. They did not want to know the sexual behavior of their compatriots. In the end, the government found no qualified takers, and the millions could not be spent for the intended purpose. However, new national sex surveys were conducted in the USA and Great Britain. (22) Tempora mutantur! Today, in the age of increasing, nearly total surveillance, uncontrolled private companies like Google, Facebook, and other social networks are gathering more intimate personal data from more people than this harmless, anonymous sex survey could possibly have collected. In hindsight, the groundless fears of the then leading German sexologists now look almost touchingly naïve.

6. Total failure in the AIDS crisis
Since the German sexologists had missed the WHO paradigm shift from sickness to health, i.e. from therapy to prevention, they proved to be utterly helpless in the face of the AIDS crisis. They had never seriously studied the psychosocial and political implications of STD prevention and were therefore unable to offer constructive advice. On the contrary, they condemned the „safe sex“ recommendations developed by gay physicians in San Francisco as repressive. Under the circumstances, the German health authorities welcomed my spontaneous, unsolicited, and unpaid public support, since I lived in San Francisco and knew its successful prevention strategies firsthand. In the end, this led to my return to Germany.

7. Absence from international congresses
By and large, the German sexologists stayed away from the large international congresses of the World Association for Sexual Health (WAS) and the European Association for Sexology (EFS). Some attended the meetings of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR), of which I was also a member and frequent participant, but our small gatherings could not offer the new impulses and insights of the larger congresses. These presented new speakers from many countries and many different disciplines. There were eager, open-minded young people from all over the world, who were just entering our field, and this helped us older specialists to broaden our views. In other words, the large congresses provided an excellent preparation for our present “internet age” and its ever-widening global reach. I found it especially hard to understand why my German colleagues refused to attend the WAS congress 1987 in Heidelberg and the EFS congress 2000 in Berlin. Indeed, in 1990, they had already ostentatiously snubbed our Bisexualities congress in Berlin. Apparently, for them, the word “international” encompassed only to the German-speaking countries Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. They did not aspire to a global role and preferred the coziness of their provincialism and gladly remained among themselves.

8. Failure to use the Internet
About 20 years ago, the internet, by then already an older invention, began to find steadily increasing numbers of users all around the globe. Today, it is growing at an exponential rate. The German federal Robert Koch-Institut (RKI), where I worked at the time, soon used the internet to make its health information freely available to the largest possible audience. This was a logical step, since the German taxpayer was funding our research and was therefore entitled to be informed of the results. When I had the chance to start an Archive for Sexology in 1994, I quasi-automatically adopted this policy. In the larger context of the Robert Koch Institute, we created our own “open access” web site, at first in German, later also in English. Very soon, we had a large and growing number of visitors.

The German universities, also funded by taxpayer money, did not share this view, however. They felt no obligation to make their work freely accessible to the general public. For many years, they offered nothing but their “electronic business cards”, and these only in German. They showed, for example, their university seal, or an organization chart of their administration, a list of its departments and their teaching staff, a description of their libraries, and sometimes even a catalogue of the current semester. But they never offered any scientific content. In short: The readers in Portugal, Peru or Pakistan gained nothing from these German internet offers, and, for the most part, this is still true today.

American universities, from the beginning, have followed a different path: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) very early on began to offer free online access to the materials of its courses. Today, it offers material for over 2000 courses under the name OpenCourseWare in 7 languages: Chinese (2x),Thai, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Persian (Farsi), and Korean. The offer is now reaching over 2 million visitors each month from all over the world. Encouraged by this success, the MIT cooperated with Harvard University in developing a comprehensive program of “open access” online courses under the name edX. In the meantime, this program has been joined by many other universities and research institutes in Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, India, Japan, Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and even Germany. The courses are freely accessible to anyone, but can also be studied for academic „credit“, if the user pays tuition. The same goes for a similar large program called Coursera.

As the actual inventor and earliest pioneer of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), I naturally feel vindicated. The MIT, Harvard, and the others had realized, albeit a little later than I, that academic researchers have a moral obligation to share their knowledge with the world, and that the internet has given them the means to do it. This is especially important for the millions of highly intelligent, highly motivated potential students in the developing countries, where universities and libraries are inaccessible for geographic or financial reasons. The success or failure of these young people will be felt by all of us in the US and Europe. .

The MIT and Harvard have, at the same time, understood that freely accessible courses can produce considerable income. This, too, is an often underestimated aspect of the internet. In a newspaper interview I have once described this paradox this way: „In the future, only those who give their knowledge away will be paid for it.” Therefore, I was extremely disappointed that I could not find a host for my online Archive in Berlin. No one in this city was interested in this truly global project and potential source of profit. Thus, my most innovative contribution remained unacknowledged and unused in my own country.

So far, the majority of German sexologists have not used the enormous potential of the internet. My own multilingual, globally oriented online Archive has not inspired any of them to try something similar. At the very least, they could have made their own old publications freely available, just as I have done, to say nothing about new e-learning courses. It must be admitted, however, that most of their books and papers are written in German, and that their academic output in other languages is rather meager. Their colleagues on other continents hardly know their publications and thus have no motive to translate any of them into other languages, or to send them their own foreign language material for an online library.

In the early 20^th century, the sexological pioneers in Berlin had cultivated a multidisciplinary and international, indeed, global outlook. Not so the present German heirs to their legacy. They are now leaving the future of their field to the Canadians, Chinese, Indians, Australians, and Americans (both North and South). In 1933, the Nazi government had brought a sudden, violent end to the first, glorious phase of German sexology. Its now looming second end will not be dramatic at all, but silent and slow – a finale morendo, as it gradually suffocates on its own provincialism. It will simply wither away and die “not with a bang, but a whimper”.

Concluding remarks
Now, as I look back at my own career and realize that, for me, "forevermore is shorter than before", I have to admit to some minor regrets: On several occasions, I should have paid closer attention and should have acted more quickly when certain opportunities presented themselves. If I had been more alert in one case, and if I had followed through in another case, and if I had taken the time necessary to understand a third case, I could have done more to advance the cause to which I was committed. However, on the whole, I forgive myself. After all, who among us can say that, in the course of his life, he has achieved a perfect score? In retrospect, my few sins of omission count for little in view of my overall achievement, limited as it is.

Having become a sexologist more or less by accident - and as an outsider in a foreign country at that - I had to find my own way. It took me from a small private graduate school in the US through several large American and European universities to a German federal research institute. After my retirement from government service 16 years ago, I continued my work, running a private, self-financed „one-man show“. As I mentioned at the very beginning of the present text, I am still offering the world’s largest internet resource in sexual health: The Archive for Sexology. Here, in conclusion, is a summary table:

My Archive offers
freely accessible scientific information on sexual health in 15 languages.
This includes online libraries in 4 languages:
Deutsch, English, Spanish (1,2,3) und Hungarian.

My online curriculum „Sexual Health“ of 6 courses (6 semesters) is complete in 7 languages:
English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (in simplified and traditional writing),
Russian, Czech and Hungarian.
Parts of this curriculum are available in other languages.

In addition, I offer 23 short and long Videos on YouTube dealing with various sexological topics. So far, they have registered over 400 000 viewers.

Quite obviously, this offer would not have come into existence without the enthusiastic, unpaid cooperation of many of my foreign colleagues. It can thus serve as a model of global academic cooperation in the electronic age. I could never have offered my Archive in so many different languages without the idealism and far-sighted international orientation of these wonderful colleagues. Their contributions are invaluable, and it goes without saying that I am very grateful to all of them. At the same time, some of my American colleagues have sent me donations for the continuation of my project. Indeed, in the meantime, I have become totally dependent on such donations and fervently hope that others in other countries will soon follow their example.

As a private person, I cannot give academic credit for the study of my online curriculum. Only universities can do that, and, as already mentioned, they do this in China. What others do elsewhere with the various translation of my courses I can only guess. As I mentioned above, the number of visitors to my online Archive has decreased dramatically since its move to a private server. Even so, we still have many users in many parts of the world (the leading dozen in descending statistical frequency): China, the US, Germany, India, the Philippines, Hungary, Great Britain, Spain, Czechia, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

At the same time, I am well aware of the economic and political problems associated with the increasing, world-wide use of MOOCs. As early as 2014, I wrote about them on my web site: „Higher Education for Lower Expectations? … “. As I argue in this paper, e-learning on a large scale may have very negative unforeseen consequences. Unfortunately, to this day there is no discussion about this among the traditional German sexologists. However, in December 2013 the Russian business journal “Expert” asked me for an interview about “open access” and its future implications for academic teaching and learning. For an English translation click here.

Just to repeat the most self-evident point: The creators of e-learning courses eventually render themselves „redundant“, as the British so aptly put it. Once the courses have been completed and have become available in the internet, its original creators are no longer needed. At best, they can still play a role as advisors or supervisors of updates, but the actual administration and application of their courses can easily be turned over to teaching assistants or „monitors“ with much lower salaries. Indeed, over time, growing financial pressures will lead to the elimination of many well-paying teaching jobs and even of entire university departments. This all the more, since most universities will not be able to match the quality of Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Stanford, the MIT and similar “top” institutions. As a consequence, many “average” universities will cut their staff and, for their own teaching, rely on the programs offered by their unbeatable competition. In the final analysis, this can lead to the closing of whole universities, especially in developing countries. But even this is by no means the end of the now inescapable development. One day the „monitors“ will also become redundant, as „artificial intelligence“ allows computers to take over their work. At that time, the MOOCs will be running in full “automatic mode“, and all tests and final exams will be administered by machines.

These and similar future implications of the present electronic revolution should be discussed by my German fellow sexologists, but, so far, I see no evidence of this. Our universities simply continue in their traditional manner with overcrowded classrooms and unavailable literature (at the library, the first borrower gets the only copy and keeps it). However, the internet has long rendered these problems superfluous. No matter, the German academics prefer to keep living in their “ World of Yesterday“ – increasingly uncomfortable, but also unshakeable in their sense of false security. In this context, I gave another interview two years ago for a British blog, once again challenging my sexological colleagues to learn from the history of their own field, to adopt a global perspective, and to follow my example by making their work freely accessible all around the world.

I have no illusions about the importance of my work or, for that matter, of sexology in general. In the large context of current world problems, there are many issues more pressing than studying sexual behavior and promoting sexual health. Even so, in the years when I was able to profit from a social and intellectual upheaval in the US, we sexologists, with our publications, organizations, and congresses, directly and indirectly contributed to improving the lives of many women and men. Some of this also carried over into other countries and even now continues to have beneficial effects. Moreover, those turbulent days in the US laid the groundwork for the electronic revolution, which is only now reaching a wider public and is about to change the world in formerly unthinkable, radical ways. As a side effect, it now allows us sexologists, the „fratres minores“ of the established academics, to be useful again by making our knowledge available around the globe in the internet.

However, I do not want to judge any scientific activity by its usefulness for practical applications. Even the tiniest bit of knowledge that helps us in understanding the world is justification enough. Certainly: Without my accidental sexological insights, my own life would have not have turned out as happy as it did. But is happiness something useful that can be planned in advance?

As for my own contribution, I have done what I could under the circumstances as I found them. At the same time, I have always taken the initiative and never waited for others to tell me what to do. Indeed, with official encouragement and support, I remained a “free agent” even in government service. Therefore, I have always enjoyed my work. Today I can say that my modest sexological efforts have rewarded me with a pleasantly varied and truly fulfilling life. I am not proud, but contented. Have I accomplished enough? And will any of it be of lasting value? Sometime in the future, these questions will have to be answered by others, if they should still feel so inclined.

EJH, Freiburg im Breisgau, March 2017

Notes

1. Haeberle, E. J., Das szenische Werk Thornton Wilders, Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, Heidelberg 1967

2. Haeberle, E. J., The Sex Book (with Martin Goldstein and Will McBride), Herder & Herder, New York 1971

3. Stewart Brand: We owe it all to the hippies, in TIME, Special Issue Spring 1995, Volume 145, No. 12

4. Tom Wolfe, who, under the guidance of Norman H. Pearson, had received his Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale, wrote a satirical report about such a party in New York: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970)

5. Katchadourian A. Herant und Lunde T. Donald, Fundamentals of Human Sexuality, Holt Rinehart Winston, New York 1972

6. Haeberle, E. J., Der verbotene Akt – „Unzüchtige“ Fotos von 1850 - 1950, in: Das Aktfoto: Geschichte, Ideologie, Ästhetik, M. Köhler, Gisela Barche, eds., C. J. Bucher, München 1985, pp. 240 – 252 .

7. So far, the following relevant studies have been published:

a.) Annemarie und Werner Leibbrand, Formen des Eros. Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte der Liebe, 2 vols. Karl Alber Verlag, Freiburg/München 1972

b.) Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 5 Bde., 1984-1998,] einschl. "The Education of the Senses" (1984), "The Tender Passion" (1986), "The Cultivation of Hatred" (1993), "The Naked Heart" (1995), and "Pleasure Wars" (1998). Various American and British publishers.

c.) Michel Foucault: Histoire de la sexualité / Sexualität und Wahrheit: Vol. 1: La volonté de savoir. Gallimard, Paris 1976, Vol. 2: L’usage des plaisirs. Gallimard, Paris 1984 Vol. 3: Le souci de soi. Gallimard, Paris 1984

d.) Volkmar Sigusch: Geschichte der Sexualwissenschaft, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008

e.) Vern Bullough, „Science in the Bedroom”. In Spanish translation: „Ciencia en la alcoba“

f.) My short history of sexology is available in my Online Archive under the title “A Brief History of Sexology”. In addition , there is my Chronology and some details about several of our our sexological pioneers.

8. Bullough, V. L.: The Rockefellers and Sex Research. In: The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 21, No. 2, Mai 1985, S. 113-125.

9. Erwin J. Haeberle, -, “Prevenzione AIDS: Il punto di vista sessuologico”, in: Quaderni di sessuologia e scienze psico-biologiche, I, 1, 1986

10. Volkmar Sigusch, Hg.: Operation Aids: das Geschäft mit der Angst. Sexualforscher geben Auskunft, Konkret Sexualität, Nr. 7, 1986

11. Erwin J. Haeberle, AIDS-Vorsorge und die Sozialwissenschaften, in: AIDS geht jeden an: Ergebnisse der Internationalen AIDS-Tagung im November 1986 in Berlin, ed: Der Senator für Gesundheit und Soziales, Berlin 1987, pp. 59 - 73, Reprinted in: Sexualität in unserer Gesellschaft, Bd. II, R. Gindorf, E.J. Haeberle eds., Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1989, pp. 85 – 108

12. As president of the DGSS , together with Rolf Gindorf, I organized the following congresses:

1. „Die Sexualität des Menschen: ein sozialer Tatbestand?“ (Düsseldorf 1984)
2. „Sexualitäten in unserer Gesellschaft“ (Düsseldorf 1986)
3. „Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik / Schwerpunkt: AIDS“ (Düsseldorf 1988, unter der Schirmherrschaft der Bundesministerin für Jugend, Familie, Frauen und Gesundheit)
4. „Bisexualitäten / Bisexualities“ (Berlin 1990, als III. Internationale Berliner Konferenz für Sexualwissenschaft, unter der Schirmherrschaft des Minsters für Gesundheit [DDR] und des Senators für Wissenschaft und Forschung [West-Berlin])
5. „Sexualität, Recht und Ethik“ (Berlin 1992, als IV. Internationale Berliner Konferenz für Sexualwissenschaft, unter der Schirmherrschaft des Berliner Senators für Wissenschaft und Forschung)
6. „Vom Sinn und Nutzen der Sexualwissenschaft“ (Berlin 1994, als V. Internationale Berliner Konferenz für Sexualwissenschaft)
7. „100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung“ (Berlin 1997, als VI. Internationale Berliner Konferenz für Sexualwissenschaft)
8. „For a Millennium of Sexual Health“ (Berlin 2000, zusammen mit dem 5. Kongress der European Federation of Sexology (EFS)
9. „Sexualitäten im 3. Jahrtausend: Neuere Entwicklungen in der Sexualforschung“ (Lüneburg 2002)

With Rolf Gindorf I edited the following publications:

1. Erwin J. Haeberle, (mit Rolf Gindorf) Die menschliche Sexualität - ein sozialer Tatbestand?, Schriftenreihe sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung, Bd.I, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1985

2. --, (mit Rolf Gindorf) Sexualitäten in unserer Gesellschaft, Schriftenreihe sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung, Bd. II, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1989

3. --, Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik, Schriftenreihe sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung, ed. mit Rolf Gindorf, Walter de Gruyter, Bd. III, 1992, pp. 434

4.--, (ed. mit R. Gindorf), Sexualwissenschaft heute: Ein erster Überblick, Düsseldorf, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung, 1992, pp. 71

5.--, (ed. mit R. Gindorf), Bisexualitäten: Ideologie und Praxis des Sexualkontaktes mit beiden Geschlechtern, Stuttgart, Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1994, pp. 359

6. -, (ed. mit R. Gindorf), Bisexualities: The Ideology and Practice of Sexual Contact with both Men and Women, New York, Continuum, 1997, pp. 288

13. San Francisco has long been a city of opera and opera stars. On April 17, 1906, the night before the great quake and fire, Enrico Caruso had sung there the role of Don José in „Carmen“. The next morning, clad only in pyjama and bathrobe, he wandered around the smoking rubble and swore never to sing in the city again, a solemn promise he kept. In 1910. as San Francisco was being rebuilt, the equally famous Luisa Tetrazzini gave a free open-air concert on Market Street. The present opera house opened in 1932 with Claudia Muzio and Dino Borgioli in „Tosca“. During our time in San Francisco we had subscription tickets and thus saw and heard the following stars, many of them repeatedly and in different roles: Birgit Nilsson in „Tristan und Isolde“ (with Jess Thomas). Magda Olivero in “Tosca”.,Joan Sutherland in “Norma”(with Marilyn Horne), “Semiramide” (again with Marilyn Horne), “Esclarmonde”, “Merry Widow”. Beverly Sills in “Thais”, “I Puritani”, “Manon”. Leontine Price in “Aida”, “La Forza del Destino”, “Ariadne auf Naxos”, Renata Scotto in “Il Trovatore”, “Madama Butterfly”, “La Gioconda”, “Werther” (with Alfredo Kraus). Kiri Te Kanawa in “Rosenkavalier”, “Arabella“, “Le Nozze di Figaro”, “Otello”. Luciano Pavarotti in “Aida”, “La Bohème”, “Turandot”, “La Gioconda”, Placido Domingo in “Otello”, “La Fanciulla del West”, “Carmen”, “Samson et Dalila”, “L’Africaine”, “Hérodiade”. Peter Hofmann in „Lohengrin“, „Walküre“. Samuel Ramey in „Nozze di Figaro,“„Don Giovanni“, „La Sonnambula”, „Mefistofele“. Here is a list of the stars we experienced live on the stage: Soprano: Sutherland, Sills, Caballé, Scotto, Freni, Crespin, Te Kanawa, Nilsson, Silja, Olivero, Jones, Marton, Rysanek, Cotrubas, Riciarelli, Fleming, Tomova-Sintow, Popp, Millo, Battle, Benackova, Lorengar, Vishnevskaya, Miricioiu, Margaret Price, Leontyne Price. Mezzo: Horne, Cosotto, Verett, Fassbänder, von Stade, Obraztsova, Schwarz, Troyanos, Zajick, Tociska. Tenor: Pavarotti, Domingo, Bergonzi, Carreras, Kraus, Aragall, King, Merritt, Ochman, Bonisolli, Shikoff, Dvorsky, Burrows, Lima, Araiza, Chauvet, Tappy, Jess Thomas, Peter Hofmann. Baritone: Adam, Wixell, Evans, Prey, Capucilli, Pons, Bruson, Manuguerra, Bruscantini, Shimell, Stewart, Diaz. Bass: Siepi, Ramey, Ghiaurov, Ridderbusch, Moll, Morris, Montarsolo, Tozzi, Lloyd, Furlanetto, Talvela, Nesterenko, Plishka.

14. Erwin J. Haeberle, dtv-Atlas Sexualität, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, München 2005

15. Haeberle-Hirschfeld Archiv, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

16. About Dr. X (in German). See also here. Also see: Martin Bauml Duberman “About time - exploring the gay past”, New York 1986. The book contains articles about “Mr.X” in “New York Native 1981-83”.

17. Erwin J. Haeberle, Berlin remembers Magnus Hirschfeld.

18. Josef Hynie, Zur Geschichte der Sexualforschung in der Tschechoslowakei, in: "Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik" (hg. von Rolf Gindorf und Erwin J. Haeberle), Berlin 1992, S. 91-117, In German. See here

19. Erwin J. Haeberle, Goethes „Faust“ sexualwissenschaftlich betrachtet.

20. Erwin J. Haeberle, Goethes „Faust“ sexologisch-ironisch betrachtet

21. World-wide Directory, Sexological Training Programs

22. The most important of these was the American survey:

Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels: The Social Organization of Sexuality, University of Chicago Press 1994.

The British and French surveys were not conducted by sexologists and therefore had serious methodological shortcomings:

K. Wellings , J. Field , A. M. Johnson: Sexual Behaviour in Britain: The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, Penguin Books, 1994, und D. Acheson, Anne M. Johnson, J. Wadsworth and J. Field: Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, Blackwell 1994.

The French survey of a small, totally inadequate sample, conducted partly by telephone and partly by personal interview by untrained interviewers, was practically worthless: Analysis of sexual behaviour in France (ACSF). A comparison between two modes of investigation: telephone survey and face-to-face survey. ASCF principal investigators and their associates. In: AIDS, Official Journal of the International AIDS Society, March 1992

Curriculum vitae
http://www.sexarchive.info/Entrance_Page/About_Us/Staff/staff.html

Publications
http://www.sexarchive.info/publications.htm