Christopher and His Kind Read Online Free

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    Here were fantasy pictures, drawn and painted by Hirschfeld’s patients. Scenes from the court of a priapic king who sprawled on a throne with his own phallus for a scepter and watched the grotesque matings of his courtiers. Strange sad bedroom scenes in which the faces of the copulators expressed only dismay and agony. And here was a gallery of photographs, ranging in subject matter from the sexual organs of quasi-hermaphrodites to famous homosexual couples—Wilde with Alfred Douglas, Whitman with Peter Doyle, Ludwig of Bavaria with Kainz, Edward Carpenter with George Merrill.
    Christopher giggled because he was embarrassed. He was embarrassed because, at last, he was being brought face to face with his tribe. Up to now, he had behaved as though the tribe didn’t exist and homosexuality were a private way of life discovered by himself and a few friends. He had always known, of course, that this wasn’t true. But now he was forced to admit kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs. And he didn’t like it. His first reaction was to blame the Institute. He said to himself: How can they take this stuff so seriously?
    Then, one afternoon, André Gide paid them a visit. He was taken on a tour of the premises personally conducted by Hirschfeld. Live exhibits were introduced, with such comments as: “Intergrade. Third Division.” One of these was a young man who opened his shirt with a modest smile to display two perfectly formed female breasts. Gide looked on, making a minimum of polite comment, judiciously fingering his chin. He was in full costume as the Great French Novelist, complete with cape. No doubt he thought Hirschfeld’s performance hopelessly crude and un-French. Christopher’s Gallophobia flared up. Sneering, culture-conceited frog! Suddenly he loved Hirschfeld—at whom he himself had been sneering, a moment before—the silly solemn old professor with his doggy mustache, thick peering spectacles, and clumsy German-Jewish boots … Nevertheless, they were all three of them on the same side, whether Christopher liked it or not. And later he would learn to honor them both, as heroic leaders of his tribe.
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    When Hirschfeld founded the Institute in 1919, he was just over fifty years old and notorious all over Western Europe as a leading expert on homosexuality. Thousands of members of the Third Sex, as he called it, looked up to him as their champion because, throughout his adult life, he had been campaigning for revision of Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. This paragraph dealt with the punishment of homosexual acts between men. (By not including lesbian acts, it expressed a basic contempt for women which has been shared by the lawmakers of many other nations.)
    When young, Hirschfeld had been a middle-of-the-road socialist. Now he was being drawn into alliance with the Communists. This was because the Soviet government, when it came into power in 1917, had declared that all forms of sexual intercourse between consenting individuals are a private matter, outside the law. The German Communist Party, of course, took the same stand. The emerging Nazi Party, on the other hand, was announcing that it would stamp out homosexuality because “Germany must be virile if we are to fight for survival.” Hitler denounced homosexuals, leftists, and Jews as traitors who had undermined Germany’s will to resist and caused the military defeat of 1918.
    Hirschfeld was a representative of all three groups. While lecturing in Munich in 1920, he was beaten up by Nazi-inspired members of his audience. Characteristically, he returned to Munich next year and got beaten up again; this time his skull was fractured and he was left for dead. But 1922 found him still unliquidated and in combat. He was even allowed to present the grievances of the Third Sex in a speech to some members