For the first time a pioneering work by an important researcher in gay studies, is available in English in its entirety, newly translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. A century before Stonewall and the rise of the modern gay and lesbian movement, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895), lawyer, classical scholar, and openly gay man, was boldly and publicly defending the rights of homosexuals. Between 1864 and 1880, he published a series of twelve tracts, which he collectively titled Forschungen uber das Ratherl der mann-mannlichen Liebe (Research on the Riddle of "Man-Manly" Love). Much more than a seminal work on the causes of homosexuality, Ulrichs' monumental study deeply influenced an entire generation of sex researchers, including Richard von Kraft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis. Now
In The Riddle of "Man-Manly" Love, (Prometheus Books, £85.00) Ulrichs surveyed literary, historical, physiological, and other data in his argument that homosexuality is not a disease or a sin, but perfectly natural, and that the strict line of differentiation between men and women has been overemphasized. Turning to the science of embryology, Ulrichs contended that male, as well as female, homosexuality results from a crossing of the male and female generative principles during the first crucial stages of foetal development. Thus homosexual men are essentially "male" in body, "female" in desire, crucially different from heterosexual men. Homosexuality (and with that, hermaphroditism and bisexuality) is the work of nature, hence innate and unavoidable.
Volume I contains the first six books (five of which Ulrichs published under a pseudonym) and Part One of the seventh. Here Ulrichs appeals for equal treatment of homosexuals in religion and law, and adduces cogent evidence that their drives are inborn. He discusses the various grades of male homosexuality, from most "feminine" in characteristics to the more "masculine".
In Volume II, covering books 7 to 12, Ulrichs offers several case studies, focusing on religious, social, and legal sanctions against gay men, and how intolerance leads to emotional dysfunctions, ruined lives, and suicide.
Ulrichs' is a voice in the desert finally breaking the silence, whose impassioned pleas for tolerance and increased understanding can still be heard today. While these two volumes may be read with pleasure and profit by all, The Riddle of "Man-Manly" Love will be of special interest to social and sex researchers and educators who are provided with a scholarly, exhaustive, and indispensable reference work on homosexuality from prehistory to the nineteenth century.
Translator Michael A. Lombardi-Nash, holds a doctorate from ONE Institute Graduate School of Homophile Studies in Los Angeles. He has taught gay and lesbian studies and has translated Magnus Hirschfeld's groundbreaking work Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress.
712 pages (Two volumes, Index, Bibliography)
ISBN 0-87975-866-X