Unresolved Tensions

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His emancipatory intentions notwithstanding, Karsch-Haack developed his ethnological and historical arguments within the essentialist schemes of binomic sexuality as developed in the Western tradition. Symptomatically, he assumes the existence of essentially different tasks and roles for men and women that are determined by their specific "sexual nature" [Geschlechtsnatur]. His most relevant treatises presuppose the binomial categories of male and female, as well as the resulting combination of men and women in heterosexual and homosexual relations.

In spite of such assumptions, however, Karsch-Haack contends throughout his work that nature has more needs and impulses than "human philosophy" could ever dream of. He was convinced that in the realm of the sexual, nature never leaves room for the simply "unnatural." Thus, the copiousness of "sexual intermediaries" [sexuelle Zwischenstufen] between the "normal" man and the "normal" woman should be understood as corresponding to the general design in nature, even as the very existence of such "intermediaries" questions and destabilizes the classificatory schemes commonly used in Western discourse.

Beginning in the 1960s increasing numbers of ethnographers have conducted research on glbtq issues, spurred by the premise that studies of diverse sexualities are crucial to understanding human behavior and culture.

The earliest etiologies--or theories of causation--of homosexuality date from European antiquity, but the search for a universal etiology has intensified as homosexual behavior has come under the scrutiny of science.

The term "homosexuality," coined in 1869, with "heterosexuality" as its opposite, has led to a binary concept that oversimplifies the complexity of human sexual behavior.

The relative popularity of the term "third sex" to refer to homosexuals is closely connected to its use by some of the most prominent representatives of the early homosexual rights movement in Germany.

Henry Havelock Ellis--British psychologist and writer--was one of the first modern thinkers to challenge Victorian taboos against the frank and objective discussion of sex.

The homosexuality of Frederick the Great of Prussia was an open secret during his reign, yet some historians have attempted to deny it or to diminish its significance.

German-born Magnus Hirschfeld deserves recognition as a significant theorist of sexuality and the most prominent advocate of homosexual emancipation of his time.

The carefully detailed case studies of nineteenth-century psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing shed light on the sexual habits of a wide spectrum of men and women.

The Scottish-German John Henry Mackay, who wrote in German, dedicated himself to the cause of gaining sympathetic recognition of man-boy love.

Paragraph 175 was the German law prohibiting sex between men; strengthened by the Nazis, it was the statue under which homosexuals were sent to concentration camps.

Nineteenth-Century German activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was both the first modern theorist of homosexuality and the first homosexual to "come out" publicly.