Twins! Homosexuality and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This essay traces the development of ideas about male-male desire in nineteenth-century German-speaking central Europe, from a model based on ancient Greece, whereby all men might occasionally have sexual desires for a beautiful youth, through medical models that naturalized, but pathologized, homosexual desire, to a model based on a racialized understanding of Jewishness, whereby homosexual men belonged to a specific, biologically identifiable minority.

“Twins! Homosexuality and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Masculinity, Senses, Spirit, ed. by Katherine Faull (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011) 131-51.