Poems
Poems in the book come from a variety of sources and places, like Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Bible, the Arab world, Japan, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, and 19th-century Germany, even including a few poems by the editor himself.
At the time of writing, no previous compilations existed, so finding out what to include required a lot of research. Compounding this was the fact that often, existing translations of the poems were either nonexistent or mangled by homophobic censoring (for example, replacement of male pronouns with female ones). Thus, von Kupffer had to translate many of the poems first, also enlisting the help of friends for languages which he could not handle.
In light of the difficulties, it must be observed that von Kupffer's selection has prevailed with most of the authors and poems he selected becoming a permanent part of the canon of gay poetry and also being included in later similar works.
Von Kupffer's argumentation in the preface
Perhaps of equal interest as the anthology itself may be the politically charged preface by von Kupffer, written in 1899 in Pompeii. In it, von Kupffer argues in favor of a homosexuality that is not just tolerated by society, but is an integral part of the social fabric, and with its (largely platonic) homosocial bonds between boys and men, as well as men and men, strengthens society in a way that heterosexual relationships on their own could never hope to do.
Von Kupffer also attacks the notion of a third sex, a concept he claims was invented by homosexual rights activists like Magnus Hirschfeld as a way to gain legal recognition for homosexuals and to repeal existing anti-sodomy laws. He is also strongly opposed to any revisionist history where historical figures like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar are depicted as gays, when he feels the modern notion of "gay" hinges on a feminized, third-sex model of male behavior that he contends did not apply at the time.
Von Kupffer goes on to criticize the "cult of the woman", which he claims comes from imperial France and the court of Louis XIV. He states that a social climate in which males and females are primarily encouraged to form bonds and male–male bonding is watched with suspicion is detrimental to society. The promotion of heterosexuality above everything else can, by his account, only lead to a comparatively lonely society, where social interactions and culture on a larger scale (as in the Greek poleis ) is mostly missing.
However, despite his argument that present-day men should, like the ideal Greek citizen of the past, be both decidedly masculine in their behavior but at the same time refined enough to entertain homoerotic or homosexual relationships, von Kupffer stresses that he is not a misogynist and that in fact, a lot of misogyny emanates from heterosexual men who subconsciously feel caged in by their marriages.
In many ways, this preface by von Kupffer remains relevant today, as the argument between von Kupffer and Hirschfeld mirrors later similar arguments, e.g. between Adolf Brand and Hirschfeld, or since the 1960s, between advocates of pederastic relationships and the mainstream gay liberation movement.
Publication history of the book
The book was published in an edition of 1000 copies by Adolf Brand, the pioneer activist for the acceptance of male homosexuality, but already at the end of 1900, the remaining books were bought by the publisher S. Dyck in Eberswalde, which is shown by the ticket on Brand's name on the title page. In 1903, the book was taken over by the gay-friendly publisher Max Spohr, who exchanged Brand's title page for one bearing his own name. For a short time, the book was even banned by the courts, but later reinstated due to a favorable deposition by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.
Only very few originals have survived the two world wars and it is therefore difficult to find them in libraries. In 1995, the Berlin publishing house Verlag Rosa Winkel published a facsimile edition (somewhat reduced in page size in comparison to the original) of the book owned by the Staatliche Bibliothek Passau, with an introduction by Marita Keilson-Lauritz.
Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist.
Societal attitudes towards same-sex relationships have varied over time and place, from requiring all males to engage in same-sex relationships to casual integration, through acceptance, to seeing the practice as a minor sin, repressing it through law enforcement and judicial mechanisms, and to proscribing it under penalty of death. In a 1976 study, Gwen Broude and Sarah Greene compared attitudes towards and frequency of homosexuality in the ethnographic studies available in the Standard cross-cultural sample. They found that out of 42 communities: homosexuality was accepted or ignored in 9; 5 communities had no concept of homosexuality; 11 considered it undesirable but did not set punishments, and 17 strongly disapproved and punished. Of 70 communities, homosexuality was reported to be absent or rare in frequency in 41, and present or not uncommon in 29.
Gustav Adolf Franz Brand was a German writer, egoist anarchist, and pioneering campaigner for the acceptance of male bisexuality and homosexuality.
In sociology, homosociality means same-sex relationships that are not of a romantic or sexual nature, such as friendship, mentorship, or others. Researchers who use the concept mainly do so to explain how men uphold men's dominance in society.
Straton of Sardis was a Greek poet and anthologist from the Lydian city of Sardis.
Homoeroticism is sexual attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female. The concept differs from the concept of homosexuality: it refers specifically to the desire itself, which can be temporary, whereas "homosexuality" implies a more permanent state of identity or sexual orientation. It is a much older concept than the 19th-century idea of homosexuality, and is depicted or manifested throughout the history of the visual arts and literature. It can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is "pertaining to or characterized by a tendency for erotic emotions to be centered on a person of the same sex; or pertaining to a homo-erotic person."
Terms used to describe homosexuality have gone through many changes since the emergence of the first terms in the mid-19th century. In English, some terms in widespread use have been sodomite, Achillean, Sapphic, Uranian, homophile, lesbian, gay, effeminate, queer, homoaffective, and same-sex attracted. Some of these words are specific to women, some to men, and some can be used of either. Gay people may also be identified under the umbrella terms LGBT.
Elisàr August Emanuel von Kupffer was a Baltic German artist, anthologist, poet, historian, translator, and playwright. He used the pseudonym "Elisarion" for most of his writings.
Greek love is a term originally used by classicists to describe the primarily homoerotic customs, practices, and attitudes of the ancient Greeks. It was frequently used as a euphemism for homosexuality and pederasty. The phrase is a product of the enormous impact of the reception of classical Greek culture on historical attitudes toward sexuality, and its influence on art and various intellectual movements.
'Greece' as the historical memory of a treasured past was romanticised and idealised as a time and a culture when love between males was not only tolerated but actually encouraged, and expressed as the high ideal of same-sex camaraderie. ... If tolerance and approval of male homosexuality had happened once—and in a culture so much admired and imitated by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—might it not be possible to replicate in modernity the antique homeland of the non-heteronormative?
This is a history of same-sex unions in cultures around the world. Various types of same-sex unions have existed, ranging from informal, unsanctioned, and temporary relationships to highly ritualized unions that have included marriage. State-recognized same-sex unions have recently become more widely accepted, with various countries recognizing same-sex marriages or other types of unions. A celebrated achievement in LGBT history occurred when Queen Beatrix signed a law making Netherlands the first country to legalize same-sex marriage.
Corydon is a book by André Gide consisting of four Socratic dialogues on homosexuality. The name of the book comes from Virgil's pederastic character Corydon. Parts of the text were separately privately printed from 1911 to 1920, and the whole book appeared in its French original in France in May 1924 and in the United States in 1950. It is available in an English translation (ISBN 0-252-07006-2) by the poet Richard Howard.
Ernst Burchard was a German physician, sexologist, and gay rights advocate and author. Burchard, who was gay, testified as an expert witness in several court cases involving prosecutions on grounds of Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexual practices.
Homoerotic poetry is a genre of poetry implicitly dealing with same-sex romantic or sexual interaction. The male-male erotic tradition encompasses poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, W. H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg. In the female-female tradition, authors may include those such as Sappho, "Michael Field", "Marie-Madeleine" and Maureen Duffy. Other poets wrote poems and letters with homoerotic overtones toward individuals, such as Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.
Pederasty or paederasty is a sexual relationship between an adult man and a pubescent or adolescent boy. The term pederasty is primarily used to refer to historical practices of certain cultures, particularly ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
Queer anarchism, or anarcha-queer, is an anarchist school of thought that advocates anarchism and social revolution as a means of queer liberation and abolition of hierarchies such as homophobia, lesbophobia, transmisogyny, biphobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and the gender binary. People who campaigned for LGBT rights both outside and inside the anarchist and LGBT movements include John Henry Mackay, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Adolf Brand and Daniel Guérin. Individualist anarchist Adolf Brand published Der Eigene from 1896 to 1932 in Berlin, the first sustained journal dedicated to gay issues.
The history of LGBT people in Iran spans thousands of years. Homosexuality has been viewed as a sin in Islam, and is outlawed in almost all Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. In pre-Islamic Iran, a tradition of homosexuality existed, however most were intolerant of pederasty and sexual activity between two men, especially the Zoroastrians. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, Iranians were “far from immoral relations with boys”. In fact, most were not tolerant of homosexuality until the invasion of the Ghaznavids and Seljuks.
Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960) was a German novelist and philosopher who, with Elisar von Kupffer, founded The Elisarion Community, a religious community, at Minusio, Switzerland, in 1926.
The first homosexual movement thrived in Germany from the late nineteenth century until 1933. The movement began in Germany because of a confluence of factors, including the criminalization of sex between men and the country's relatively lax censorship. German writers in the mid-nineteenth century coined the word homosexual and criticized its criminalization. In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the world's first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, whose aim was to use science to improve public tolerance of homosexuality and repeal Paragraph 175. During the German Empire, the movement was restricted to an educated elite, but it greatly expanded in the aftermath of World War I and the German Revolution.
Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (1970) is an anthology by Brian Reade, published by Coward-McCann.
The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse (1983) is an anthology of poetry dealing with "a history of the different ways in which homosexual people have been seen or have seen themselves", from classical antiquity to the contemporary period. It was compiled by Stephen Coote and published by Penguin Books.
