Ah, November. It is the beginning of so much in the Coachella Valley. It marks the official start of what we call “the season” here in Palm Springs – a period of six months, more or less, of heaven on earth: highs in the mid-70s, rarely a cloud in the sky, maybe a raindrop or two come February or March, and the return of tourists and “snowbirds” (people who spend the summer months “back home” in places like Canada or Michigan, then escape those places when winter freezes them over). And to kick it all off, we celebrate Pride.
The more astute of you will note that “Pride month” and most Pride celebrations take place in June to commemorate the riots at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, that sparked the modern gay rights movement. There is only one reason we do not celebrate Palm Springs Pride at the start of summer: it’s too hot in June!
Stonewall was a seminal moment. Everyone who had ever experienced the sting of discrimination – be it being labelled with a rude name, separated from the loving embrace of family, fired or just not hired for a job one was otherwise qualified for, denied housing, or far worse (those who experienced violence and brutality) – found their voice at Stonewall. The patrons who stood their ground against police that night were not just saying “enough!” for themselves, they were saying it for a whole community of men and women; they were saying it for a three year old me; they were saying it for people yet unborn.
The idea of “gay liberation,” as Pride was originally called, is not a late 20th century invention, as those raging today against DEI or wokeness would have you believe. A century earlier, we find the intriguing character of Karl Maria Kertbeny (seen at left in this 1856 lithograph), a journalist and travel writer who wrote at least 25 books on various subjects.
He settled in Berlin in 1868, unmarried at 44. He claimed in his writings to be “normally sexed,” however, it is very likely that he was attracted to those of his own sex as his diaries contain references to a string of encounters with youths and men (“young barber lad” … “very much in love with the lad” … “I have done it”), and in them he notes his alarm and recurring fears following the arrest of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs with whom he corresponded (“Awful days!…Horrible nightmares. I have burnt all the dangerous letters.”).
It was in private correspondence to Ulrichs, an early sex-law reformer, that he coined several words we use today to describe the range of sexualities known to the human condition. In a letter, in German, on May 6, 1868, he uses the terms Monosexual, Homosexual, Heterosexual, and Heterogenit. It is the first known use of the homosexual and heterosexual categories.
Kertbeny did not define the terms, but we know from his other writings that “Monosexual” referred to masturbation, practiced by both sexes, “Heterogenit” referred to erotic acts of human beings with animals, “Homosexual” referred to erotic acts performed by men with men and women with women, and “Heterosexual” referred to erotic acts of men and women with each other, as did another of his new terms, “Normalsexualitat” or normal sexuality. Importantly, he used heterosexual and normal sexuality to describe the sexual satisfaction of the majority of the population; this emphasis on numbers as the foundation of what was considered normal marked a quantitative break with an older, qualitative, procreative (baby-making) standard of sexual propriety.
in which he invented the now commonplace terms homo- and hetero- sexual
After this, he began to write extensively on the issue of sexual minorities, motivated, he said, by an “instinctive drive to take issue with every injustice.” He had been deeply affected as a teenager by the suicide of a friend who was being blackmailed to keep his sexual inclinations private and chose to take his own life rather than face financial or reputational ruin. Kertbeny anonymously published a pamphlet in 1869 entitled Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code of 14 April 1851 and Its Reaffirmation as Paragraph 152 in the Proposed Penal Code for the North German Confederation. An Open and Professional Correspondence to His Excellency Dr. Leonhardt, Royal Prussian Minister of Justice. Catchy title, eh?
A second pamphlet on the same subject soon followed. He argued that the Prussian sodomy law violated the “rights of man.” He advanced the classic liberal argument that consensual sexual acts by adults in private should not be subject to criminal law. Prussia’s sodomy law, Paragraph 143, would later became Paragraph 175 of the penal code of the German Empire, and was used by the Nazis to imprison gays in Concentration Camps. It was not repealed until 1994 – um, not a typo boys and girls, it was not repealed until 1994! His argument considered the right of a government to intervene in private matters; Kertbeny wrote:
We should convince our opponents that exactly according to their legal notions they do not have anything to do with this inclination, let it be innate or voluntary, because the state does not have the right to intervene in what is happening between two consenting people aged over 14, excluding publicity [in private], not hurting the rights of any third party.
Kertbeny also made the argument that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable, a view which would later be called the “medical model.” This contradicted the dominant view up to that time, which was that men committed “sodomy” out of mere wickedness or sin. Many still hold that view today, spurred on in their bigoted ignorance by religious pronouncements. Karl Maria Kertbeny, like the Stonewall rioters to come after him, had had enough and was saying so: with his pamphlets, he publicly published his system for the classification of sexual types, as a replacement for the pejorative terms “sodomite” and “pederast” that were used in the German- and French- speaking world of his time.
After publishing his pamphlets, Kertbeny faded into obscurity. He did contribute a chapter on homosexuality in 1880 to Gustav Jäger’s book Discovery of the Soul, but Jäger’s publisher concluded it was too controversial and omitted it. Jäger used Kertbeny’s terminology elsewhere in his book. Six years later, the German sex researcher Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his Psychopathia Sexualis, borrowed the terms homosexual and heterosexual from Jäger. Krafft-Ebing’s work was so influential that these became the standard terms for differences in sexual orientation, still in use today.
Kertbeny did not live to see the wide acceptance of his terminology or his ideas. He died in Budapest in 1882 at the age of 58. Still, his influence was profound, and his existence is a powerful and undeniable counterpoint to the argument, put forth by many in the current administration and on the Right, that the push for LGBTQ+ rights is a recent phenomenon fueled by radical Lefties and deranged Democrats.
As a proud radical Lefty, deranged Democrat, and renowned homosexual I’m dedicating my observance of Pride this year to Karl Maria Kertbeny who was saying “enough!” one hundred years before Stonewall. Come out and be heard this weekend. If you’re a heterosexual, you’re welcome to join us… we don’t discriminate.