Christopher and His Kind Read online

  (They did meet again, many times, in many different places. When Christopher next saw Bubi he was in Berlin, about three years later. Christopher found it very odd to be able to chatter away to him in German—odd and a little saddening, because the collapse of their language barrier had buried the magic image of the German Boy. Bubi seemed an entirely different person, not at all vulnerable, amusingly sly. Christopher felt wonderfully at ease with him and absolutely uninfatuated.)

  * * *

  Christopher and Wystan stayed on an extra day in Amsterdam, before Christopher went back to England. They were both in the highest spirits. It was such a relief and happiness to be alone with each other. They took a trip through the canals and the harbor in a tourist launch, deep in an exchange of private jargon and jokes, barely conscious of their surroundings. On disembarking, all the passengers were asked to sign a guest book. Beside their two signatures, Wystan wrote a quotation from Ilya Ehrenburg’s poem about the Russian Revolution:

  Read about us and marvel!

  You did not live in our time—be sorry!

  * * *

  In August, Christopher left London for a remote seaside village where he had been engaged to tutor a small boy or at least keep him occupied during his school holidays. While Christopher was there, he had his first—and last—complete sex experience with a woman. After dark, in that tiny place, there was nothing social to do but play cards, get drunk, or make love. They were both drunk. She was five or six years older than he was, easygoing, stylish, humorous. She had been married. She liked sex but wasn’t in the least desperate to get it. He started kissing her without bothering about what it might lead to. When she responded, he was surprised and amused to find how easily he could relate his usual holds and movements to this unusual partner. He felt curiosity and the fun of playing a new game. He also felt a lust which was largely narcissistic; she had told him how attractive he was and now he was excited by himself making love to her. But plenty of heterosexuals would admit to feeling that way sometimes. What mattered was that he was genuinely aroused. After their orgasm, he urged her to come to his room, where they could take all their clothes off and continue indefinitely. She wouldn’t do this because she was now sobering up and getting worried that they might be caught together. Next day, she said, “I could tell that you’ve had a lot of women through your hands.”

  What did all this prove? That he had gained enormously in self-confidence. That sex, as sex, was becoming more natural to him—in the sense that swimming is natural when you know how to swim and the situation demands it. This he owed to Bubi.

  He asked himself: Do I now want to go to bed with more women and girls? Of course not, as long as I can have boys. Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them. Girls can be absolutely beautiful but never romantic. In fact, their utter lack of romance is what I find most likable about them. They’re so sensible.

  Couldn’t you get yourself excited by the shape of girls, too—if you worked hard at it? Perhaps. And couldn’t you invent another myth—to put girls into? Why the hell should I? Well, it would be a lot more convenient for you, if you did. Then you wouldn’t have all these problems. Society would accept you. You wouldn’t be out of step with nearly everybody else.

  It was at this point in his self-examination that Christopher would become suddenly, blindly furious. Damn Nearly Everybody. Girls are what the state and the church and the law and the press and the medical profession endorse, and command me to desire. My mother endorses them, too. She is silently brutishly willing me to get married and breed grandchildren for her. Her will is the will of Nearly Everybody, and in their will is my death. My will is to live according to my nature, and to find a place where I can be what I am … But I’ll admit this—even if my nature were like theirs, I should still have to fight them, in one way or another. If boys didn’t exist, I should have to invent them.

  Psychologists might find Christopher’s admission damaging to his case, and his violence highly suspicious. They might accuse him of repressed heterosexuality. Wystan sometimes half jokingly did this, telling Christopher that he was merely “a heter with good taste,” and expressing fears that he would sooner or later defect. Nearly fifty years have passed, since then; and Wystan’s fears have been proved groundless.

  * * *

  Wystan was now back in England. Soon he would start work as a schoolmaster. Bubi was somewhere in South America; he never wrote. Layard had left Berlin. On November 29, Christopher set out on his third visit to Germany that year. Only, this time, he wasn’t putting any limits on his stay. This might even become an immigration. When the German passport official asked him the purpose of his journey, he could have truthfully replied, “I’m looking for my homeland and I’ve come to find out if this is it.”

  * * *

  On the morning after his arrival, he went to call on Francis, who was now the only English-speaking person he knew in Berlin. Francis lived on a street called In den Zelten. It had a view across the Tiergarten park. As the huge house door boomed shut behind him, Christopher ran upstairs with his characteristic nervous haste to the second or third floor—I now forget which it was—and rang.

  The door of the apartment flew open and Francis appeared, tousled, furious, one hand clutching the folds of his crimson silk robe. Instantly he started screaming in German. Christopher understood the language better now; he knew that he was being told to go away and never come back or Francis would call the police. The screaming ended and the door was slammed in his face. He stood staring at it, too astonished to move. Then he shouted, “Francis—it’s me, Christopher!”

  The door reopened and Francis reappeared. “I say, how awful of me! I do apologize! I felt certain you must be the boy who came home with me last night. Just because I was drunk, he thought he could steal everything in the place. I caught him at it and threw him out … But you don’t even look like him … Why, I know you, don’t I?”

  “I was over here in the summer, looking for someone. You were so kind, taking me round the bars. As a matter of fact, I’ve just got back from England—”

  “Won’t you come in? I’m afraid this place is in an awful mess. I’m never up at the unearthly hour they want to clean it. Is this your first visit to Berlin?”

  “Well, no—I told you, I was here in the summer—”

  “Do forgive me, lovey—my mind’s a total blank before I’ve had lunch. I suppose you wouldn’t care to have lunch here, would you? Or is that more than you can face?”

  What Christopher was being asked to face was the ordeal of having lunch with the staff and some of the patients of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut fuer Sexual-Wissenschaft—Institute for Sexual Science—which occupied the adjoining building. A sister of Dr. Hirschfeld lived in this apartment and let out two of its rooms to Francis. It so happened that she had a third room which was vacant just then and which she charged less for, because it was small and dark. By the time lunch was over, Christopher had decided to move into it.

  TWO

  The building which was now occupied by the Hirschfeld Institute had belonged, at the turn of the century, to the famous violinist Joseph Joachim; its public rooms still had an atmosphere which Christopher somehow associated with Joachim’s hero, Brahms. Their furniture was classic, pillared, garlanded, their marble massive, their curtains solemnly sculpted, their engravings grave. Lunch was a meal of decorum and gracious smiles, presided over by a sweetly dignified lady with silver hair: a living guarantee that sex, in this sanctuary, was being treated with seriousness. How could it not be? Over the entrance to the Institute was an inscription in Latin which meant: Sacred to Love and to Sorrow.

  Dr. Hirschfeld seldom ate with them. He was represented by Karl Giese, his secretary and long-time lover. Also present were the doctors of the staff and the patients or guests, whichever you chose to call them, hiding their individual p
roblems behind silence or polite table chatter, according to their temperaments. I remember the shock with which Christopher first realized that one of the apparently female guests was a man. He had pictured transvestites as loud, screaming, willfully unnatural creatures. This one seemed as quietly natural as an animal and his disguise was accepted by everyone else as a matter of course. Christopher had been telling himself that he had rejected respectability and that he now regarded it with amused contempt. But the Hirschfeld kind of respectability disturbed his latent puritanism. During those early days, he found lunch at the Institute a bit uncanny.

  Christopher giggled nervously when Karl Giese and Francis took him through the Institute’s museum. Here were whips and chains and torture instruments designed for the practitioners of pleasure-pain; high-heeled, intricately decorated boots for the fetishists; lacy female undies which had been worn by ferociously masculine Prussian officers beneath their uniforms. Here were the lower halves of trouser legs with elastic bands to hold them in position between knee and ankle. In these and nothing else but an overcoat and a pair of shoes, you could walk the streets and seem fully clothed, giving a camera-quick exposure whenever a suitable viewer appeared.

  Here were fantasy pictures, drawn and painted by Hirschfeld’s patients. Scenes from the court of a priapic king who sprawled on a throne with his own phallus for a scepter and watched the grotesque matings of his courtiers. Strange sad bedroom scenes in which the faces of the copulators expressed only dismay and agony. And here was a gallery of photographs, ranging in subject matter from the sexual organs of quasi-hermaphrodites to famous homosexual couples—Wilde with Alfred Douglas, Whitman with Peter Doyle, Ludwig of Bavaria with Kainz, Edward Carpenter with George Merrill.

  Christopher giggled because he was embarrassed. He was embarrassed because, at last, he was being brought face to face with his tribe. Up to now, he had behaved as though the tribe didn’t exist and homosexuality were a private way of life discovered by himself and a few friends. He had always known, of course, that this wasn’t true. But now he was forced to admit kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs. And he didn’t like it. His first reaction was to blame the Institute. He said to himself: How can they take this stuff so seriously?

  Then, one afternoon, André Gide paid them a visit. He was taken on a tour of the premises personally conducted by Hirschfeld. Live exhibits were introduced, with such comments as: “Intergrade. Third Division.” One of these was a young man who opened his shirt with a modest smile to display two perfectly formed female breasts. Gide looked on, making a minimum of polite comment, judiciously fingering his chin. He was in full costume as the Great French Novelist, complete with cape. No doubt he thought Hirschfeld’s performance hopelessly crude and un-French. Christopher’s Gallophobia flared up. Sneering, culture-conceited frog! Suddenly he loved Hirschfeld—at whom he himself had been sneering, a moment before—the silly solemn old professor with his doggy mustache, thick peering spectacles, and clumsy German-Jewish boots … Nevertheless, they were all three of them on the same side, whether Christopher liked it or not. And later he would learn to honor them both, as heroic leaders of his tribe.

  * * *

  When Hirschfeld founded the Institute in 1919, he was just over fifty years old and notorious all over Western Europe as a leading expert on homosexuality. Thousands of members of the Third Sex, as he called it, looked up to him as their champion because, throughout his adult life, he had been campaigning for revision of Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. This paragraph dealt with the punishment of homosexual acts between men. (By not including lesbian acts, it expressed a basic contempt for women which has been shared by the lawmakers of many other nations.)

  When young, Hirschfeld had been a middle-of-the-road socialist. Now he was being drawn into alliance with the Communists. This was because the Soviet government, when it came into power in 1917, had declared that all forms of sexual intercourse between consenting individuals are a private matter, outside the law. The German Communist Party, of course, took the same stand. The emerging Nazi Party, on the other hand, was announcing that it would stamp out homosexuality because “Germany must be virile if we are to fight for survival.” Hitler denounced homosexuals, leftists, and Jews as traitors who had undermined Germany’s will to resist and caused the military defeat of 1918.

  Hirschfeld was a representative of all three groups. While lecturing in Munich in 1920, he was beaten up by Nazi-inspired members of his audience. Characteristically, he returned to Munich next year and got beaten up again; this time his skull was fractured and he was left for dead. But 1922 found him still unliquidated and in combat. He was even allowed to present the grievances of the Third Sex in a speech to some members of the Reichstag. To be sometimes treated with official respect, sometimes threatened with death; to be alternately praised and lampooned by the press; to be helped by those who would later lose their nerve and betray him—such was his nobly insecure position.

  The Institute was by no means exclusively concerned with homosexuality. It gave advice to couples about to marry, based on research into their hereditary backgrounds. It offered psychiatric treatment for impotence and other psychological problems. It had a clinic which dealt with a variety of cases, including venereal disease. And it studied sex in every manifestation.

  However, the existence of the Institute did enable Hirschfeld to carry on his campaign against Paragraph 175 much more effectively than before. It was a visible guarantee of his scientific respectability which reassured the timid and the conservative. It was a place of education for the public, its lawmakers, and its police. Hirschfeld could invite them to the sex museum and guide them through a succession of reactions—from incredulous disgust to understanding of the need for penal reform. Meanwhile, the Institute’s legal department advised men who were accused of sex crimes and represented them in court. Hirschfeld had won the right to give them asylum until their cases were heard. Some of the people Christopher met at lunch belonged to this category.

  (I have a memory of Christopher looking down from a room in the Institute and watching two obvious plainclothes detectives lurk under the trees which grow along the edge of the park. They hope that one of their wanted victims will be tempted to venture out of Hirschfeld’s sanctuary for a sniff of fresh air. Then, according to the rules of the police game, he can be grabbed and carried off to prison.)

  The year Christopher arrived at the Institute, Hirschfeld and his allies seemed about to win a victory. Earlier in 1929, the Reichstag Committee had finished drafting a penal-reform bill. According to this bill, consensual sex acts between adult males would no longer be crimes. The vote which decided this point had been close and it had only been won through the support of the Communists. The bill had been presented to the Reichstag and seemed likely to be passed into law. Then, in October, came the U.S. Stock Market crash, causing a period of panic and indecision in Europe which was unfavorable to reform of any kind. The Reichstag postponed discussion of the bill indefinitely.

  * * *

  Christopher’s room, like the two rooms occupied by Francis, was just inside the front door of the apartment. You and your visitors could come and go at any hour without ever running into the landlady; no doubt, she tactfully used a rear exit. She lived far away at the back, somewhere, within a clearing in a Black Forest of furniture. If sex-connected sounds did reach her now and then, she never complained. Perhaps she even approved of them, on principle. After all, she was Hirschfeld’s sister.

  Francis’s rooms had a view of the park. Christopher’s room looked down into an interior courtyard; that was why it was dark and cheap. On one wall of this courtyard, Hirschfeld had caused to be printed in Gothic lettering a stanza by Goethe:

  Seele des Menschen,

  Wie gleichst du dem Wasser!

  Schicksal des Menschen,

  Wie gleichst du dem Wind!

  Spirit of Man, how like thou art to water! Fate of Man, how like t
hou art to wind! Never before in his life had Christopher had a room with a view of a poem. In his present state of mind, he much preferred his view to Francis’s view of the Tiergarten trees. Just as changes in the light make trees look different, so Christopher’s varying moods made the poem speak in different tones of voice: joyful, cynical, tragic. But always, whatever his mood, it reminded him: You are in Germany. The featureless walls of the courtyard, the neutral puddles of rain water on its floor, the patch of international sky above it—all were made utterly German by the presence of these German words.

  Months later, when Christopher began giving English lessons, he would try to convey to his German pupils something of his own mystique about the German language. “A table doesn’t mean ‘ein Tisch’—when you’re learning a new word, you must never say to yourself it means. That’s altogether the wrong approach. What you must say to yourself is: Over there in England, they have a thing called a table. We may go to England and look at it and say, ‘That’s our Tisch.’ But it isn’t. The resemblance is only on the surface. The two things are essentially different, because they’ve been thought about differently by two nations with different cultures. If you can grasp the fact that that thing in England isn’t merely called a table, it really is a table, then you’ll begin to understand what the English themselves are like. They are the sort of people who are compelled by their nature to think about that thing as a table; being what they are, they couldn’t possibly call it anything else … Of course, if you cared to buy a table while you were in England and bring it back here, it would become ein Tisch. But not immediately. Germans would have to think about it as ein Tisch and call it ein Tisch for quite a long while, first.”