Arts and Letters by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White [EDMUND WHITE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2012-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

And all this a decade before Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp,” in which she spoke of camp as an effort to rescue failed glamour.

There were many reasons Isherwood’s gay spirit was more evolved than anyone else’s. He’d always been a rebel—against the family, the Church of England, Cambridge, war. Then he provided a link with the first gay movement, the one led by Magnus Hirschfield and crushed by the Nazis. The Auden–Isherwood years in Berlin were between October 1928, when a twenty-one-year-old Auden arrived in the German capital, and early in 1933, when the Nazis came to power and Isherwood left the city and returned to England. This was a period which corresponded to the beginning of the international economic depression, to a pitched battle, often in the streets of Berlin, between Nazis and Communists, to a marked increase in the visibility of homosexuality in Berlin—and to an efflorescence of the arts, including painting, musical theater, literature and film. 1929, for instance, was the year of Marlene Dietrich’s first film, The Blue Angel—the most expensive film made up to that point in Germany.

I have long contended—or rather, speculated— that if Isherwood was able to write with A Single Man in 1964 the first truly liberated gay novel in English, one which gives no etiology of the main character’s homosexuality, which shows him as functioning normally or at least not miserably and in an integrated world of straight and gay friends—if Isherwood was able to make this leap forward in consciousness, we must attribute it to three things: his residence in a California beach community just after World War II, his class confidence and the liberal atmosphere of his circle during his Oxford years, and finally his contacts in the late ’20s and early ’30s with the first gay liberation movement in Berlin.

In Christopher and His Kind Isherwood wrote succinctly, “Berlin meant boys.” And elsewhere he has said: “Wasn’t Berlin’s famous ‘decadence’ largely a commercial ‘line’ which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris? Paris had long since cornered the straight-girl market, so what was left for Berlin to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?”

Auden and Isherwood both made pilgrimages to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sex Institute—which made them giggle initially with its displays of high-heeled boots for fetishists, its lace panties for big-crotched Prussian officers, its garter belts and whips, its lower trouser legs cut off at the knee and suspended from elastic bands so that flashers could throw open their raincoats and expose their naked genitalia and buttocks in a split second…. Nevertheless Isherwood manfully admitted he felt “a kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs.” Eventually Isherwood even lived in a building belonging to the Sex Institute.

Magnus Hirschfeld was a Jew born in 1868 in Kolberg. After studying medicine and traveling in the United States and North Africa, he set up a practice in Berlin in the Charlottenburg district. When one of his homosexual patients committed suicide the night before he was supposed to marry, Hirschfeld decided to study sexuality.

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