~magpie@TTBP



21 august 2022

Thought I'd actually start a feels blog lol.

I just finished the American Historical Association's summer reading event -- AHA Reads. I want to go over the three books that I read. This post will deal with the first book.

First book I read was The Seduction of Youth by Javier Vendrell. I want to discuss its main points and talk about what I perceive to be some concerns.

tw: pederasty, homophobia,

disclaimer: I am not an historian! Or a social scientists! Or knowledgeable about the world. Please discount heavily.

Summary

I'd read it as dealing with three broad issues:

  1. A moral panic surrounding the idea that adolescent sexuality is flexible, thus exposure to gay people, writing, or images would cause children to be gay.
  2. The emergence of a mass market gay culture in Weimar and its attempts to deal with (1).
  3. The failure of respectability politics to actually ensure the queer rights.

From my notes, I listed three actors.

  1. Adolf Brand and Der Eigene - Elitist (artistic), has a masculine model of homosexuality, flirts with the far right.
  2. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee - Elitist (scientific), has an inverted model of homosexuality, Social Democratic.
  3. Friedrich Radszuweit and the League for Human Rights - Popular, has a masculine model of homosexuality, nonpartisan, but seems to shift between centre righ to Left.

There's so much to explore even with that brief outline. For inverted, the idea is that gay men innately possess feminine traits and mutatis mutandis for gay women.

Part of the division between the groups (and society) is to what degree homoesexuality is viewed as innate.

Since there was a societal view of homosexuality as both defective and contagious, there was a push to prevent young boys from being seduced into homosexuality. And the magazines that each of the groups ran were understood as homosexual propaganda that could seduce youths into homosexuality.

The Radszuweit group seemed to favour a broader accomodationist view. Homosexuality should be normalised, acted upon in private, the age of consent should be higher for homosexual relations, and male prostitution should be banned.

The Hirschfeld group favoured a more inclusive view. Gay and lesbian people's gender inversion should be respected, the age of consent for same- and different-sex relations should be equalised, and male prostitution should be allowed.

Overall, the author seems to favour Hirschfeld over Radszuweit, viewing the latters position as incoherent and in the end ineffective.

But there is one interesting wrinkle. There was apparently a far degree of homoerotic literature (and photography) that focused on youths. While ages aren't given, these youths seem to be in their late teens to early twenties. In particular, there was an elitist tradition that romanticised 'Greek love' between older men and boys, which was apparently quite openly supported by the Brand group. This traditon also included the idea of 'pedagogical eros', which is pretty much what you imagine when you hear Greek love. Albeit not all pederasts conceived of themselves as homosexual. Ignoring the issue of inversion, some believed that there desires were 'chaste' in some sense. Others simply refused to associate with the movement.

But even though Radszuweit and those around him in principle opposed pederasty, in practice the magazine had stories of intergenerational relationships, and had relatively erotic images of teens and early twentysomethings. I think the author is unsure if this was a market demand issue or an issue of personal taste on the part of Radszuweit. (His partner was some twenty years younger.)

The title then is intentionally ambiguous. It is about fears of the seduction of youth by gay men, but also the desires of (some) gay men to seduce the youth.

Critique

But I find that part a bit weak because I don't have a good idea of how these desires compare to contemporaneous heterosexual desires. While not taking place in the same period, I know that the Sunday Sport used to run picture models of scantily-clad 15-year-old models with countdowns until their 16th birthday, when they could then legally be shown nude. Fortunately, the laws for child pornography were changed in 2003 to prohibit that. Wait. WTF. The UK only banned naked images of 16 year olds in 2003? Or the sexualisation of Britney Spears as a teen. Or Courtney Stodden for that matter.

Now let me be clear. The concern I have isn't to esculpate anyone. I just think there's some value in seeing if this interest in youth can be traced to some homoerotic tradition going back to Greek love or a broader set of community norms regarding erotic interests.

Part of the reason this interests me is that:

  1. There's one excerpt of a letter that mentions particular distaste at the idea of a teacher having sex with a student under 16.
  2. There's mention of Moll and Hirschfeld finding that sexual attraction to prepubescent boys and old men are quite uncommon, albeit attraction to people in late teens or early twenties is common.

Basically, I want to know what the demographics of this are like. Both for the heterosexual and non-heterosexual community.

I also wish the author was a bit clearer about his position. Sometimes I'll read his tone as condemnatory, but other times his tone seems relatively sympathetic. Not trying to be overly sensitive, but this work clearly has a moral core insofar as it supports liberation, so it'd be nice to know how the author conceives of this as a moral problem.

It would also be nice to know how the youths felt. I think this might be a result of a lack of sources, but there's much about youth as object either of sexual desire or concern but not much of youth as subject or actor.

Unrelated to the above, much is made of Radszuweit running his magazine as a business, but it isn't clear to me if he conceptualised his actions as such, or the author is using that phrasing to pick out how the author believes it differed from other groups.

Final thoughts

I'd recommend. Despite the big concern noted above, it has a really interesting overview of queer groups under Weimar. It's interesting to read about theories of sexual undifferentiation being mainstream. There's an obvious parallel between the seduction moral panic in Weimar, the seduction panic in the US, and the social contagion panic regarding trans rights now. It'd be interesting to see how those panics comparatively developed. It's also interesting to see the odd hiatuses. Although again sometimes it's not clear if that's the text or the times. E.g. The focus on pederasty seems to be on conversion rather than lack of consent.

The text inspired me to check out Gay Berlin, Gay New York, and Queer Budapest along with Marhoefer's work. Not sure I'll get to it any time soon.

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