Thirty-two years before Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex, popular French novelist Willy published The Third Sex, a vivid description of the world of European homosexuals in France, Italy, and Germany during the late 1920s. Stepping directly into the heart of gay men's culture, Willy follows homosexual nightlife into music halls, nightclubs, casinos, bars, and saunas. While he finds plenty of drug and alcohol abuse, he also discovers homosexual publishers, scientific societies, group rivalries, and opinions—both medical and political—about the nature of homosexuality itself. Lawrence R. Schehr's introduction provides context and translator's notes for this first-ever English edition.
Thirty-two years before Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex, popular French novelist Willy published The Third Sex, a vivid description of the world of European homosexuals in France, Italy, and Germany during the late 1920s. Stepping directly into the heart of gay men's culture, Willy follows homosexual nightlife into music halls, nightclubs, casinos, bars, and saunas. While he finds plenty of drug and alcohol abuse, he also discovers homosexual publishers, scientific societies, group rivalries, and opinions—both medical and political—about the nature of homosexuality itself. Lawrence R. Schehr's introduction provides context and translator's notes for this first-ever English edition.
The Third Sex
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Overview
Thirty-two years before Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex, popular French novelist Willy published The Third Sex, a vivid description of the world of European homosexuals in France, Italy, and Germany during the late 1920s. Stepping directly into the heart of gay men's culture, Willy follows homosexual nightlife into music halls, nightclubs, casinos, bars, and saunas. While he finds plenty of drug and alcohol abuse, he also discovers homosexual publishers, scientific societies, group rivalries, and opinions—both medical and political—about the nature of homosexuality itself. Lawrence R. Schehr's introduction provides context and translator's notes for this first-ever English edition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252032165 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 08/13/2007 |
| Pages: | 152 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
THE THIRD SEX
By Willy
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03216-5
Chapter One
IntroductionLouis Estève
Recently, I found the following statement whose banality leads to troubling concern. It was written by one of our fellow authors, whom Willy will undoubtedly relegate to the category of pompous critics of moral values: "There are eras of veritable social hermaphroditism in history during which men become effeminate and women become manly. When these fusions against nature are produced, it is always to upset the normal order of life. The female absorbs the male, until there are no longer any males or females present, but some unknown sort of neuter individuals."
I think it is a disciple of Galen who speaks to us solemnly of the sexus medius, or interjectus. Our medieval chronicles tell of the memorable deeds of people from the Auvergne "who are neither men nor women." Nowadays, Carpenter and Leland have initiated us into arcane psychophysics, one about the intermediate sex, the other about the alternate sex. I'll skip over many other theoreticians of digamy.
What should we in fact understand by the slightly enigmatic words the third sex? Von Valzogen is the one who can lay claim to having invented theexpression, but he created it merely to buttress his considerations about economic anthropogenesis. According to him, the evolution of the means of existence will certainly create a "heterogynous" human race in the near future, similar to insect colonies.
Mr. C. Spiess is from a completely different school: this curious mythosophist has just recently reminded us of that, while discussing my Énigme de l'androgyne [Enigma of the Androgyne] in the Free Tribunal of Women and at the University of the Parthenon. For him, the third sex symbolizes a notion of advanced anthropology, based on his theory of sexuality, which would be psychological before being anatomical.
For Willy, as for Mr. Georges-Anquetil, moreover, who uses the expression with cutting relevance on an important page of Satan conduit le bal [Satan Leads the Dance], third sex takes on, quite simply, the meaning of gallant ephebism, with a nuanced degradation, more ironic in one case, sharper in the other, that stigmatizes and deprecates these intermasculine "gallantries" with good reason: are they not one of the factors that insidiously cause the breakdown of the psychosocial structure of our civilization? "More and more," the latter author tells us, "sapphism and pederasty are spreading with cynical brazenness in public and penetrate the once austere and severely protected homes of the upper middle classes" (op. cit., p. 23).
Numerous sociologists and specialists in mental pathology have already revealed the most prominent acts of inversion. But, whether abusively moralizing or too learned, their writing has not attracted the attention of the public at large. It is thus undoubtedly up to the first author of the Claudine series to dare to take on this dangerous subject, the work of popularization-in the good sense-having become a pressing necessity. He has accomplished this with complete truthfulness, without deviating one bit-castigans ridendo mores-from the very personal facetious humor and ironic irreverence that are among the most important reasons for his worldwide popularity.
The "panoramic" view, so to speak, that he gives us in this book, of pederastic wanderings among so many peoples and in so many climates, the sparkling anecdotes with which he seasons the studies he invites us to examine, the erudition, so far from any pedantry, with which he adorns his chat as an instructor of erotic sociology: everything, including his skillful plays on words (for which he has the knack), makes him-and more appropriately than his predecessors whose uneasiness had already sounded the alarm about the increasing tide of homosexuality-the true Dr. Cabanès of pederasty.
* * *
As far as my modest contribution to this synthesis of ethical erotopathology, as I was already wont to call it in 1903, is concerned-a synthesis finally realized today-I had noted the intense fascination that this "androgynous love" had on our generation of madly novelistic neuropaths. And I drew the attention of my newly formed intellectual clientele to the dangerous democratization of the "noble vice" that we would shortly be seeing. Everything led me to predict it, and the event has only confirmed my clairvoyance too well.
Eighteen years later, in April 1922, in the first issue of Bon Plaisir, limiting myself this time to the aesthetico-ideological realm, I indicated the "pandemic androgynomania" that was sneaky at first and then soon quite daring and that was slowly invading all our popular literary genres: travel narratives, personal stories, lyric poetry, tales, novels, and even drama-all the way up to serious ontology, which now has its champions of ephebolatrous nuance.
The following year, in Aberrations de l'amour romantique [Aberrations of Romantic Love], I was set on showing how masculine erotic inversion (a symptom, I think, of an ultranovelistic conception of life,* nostalgic for its thousand-year-old origin, for this conception has indisputably a Platonic origin), without mentioning J.-J. Rousseau, who had barely indicated it, had progressively insinuated itself in our imaginative literature during the nineteenth century. Argued in an ever more emotional fashion, from Balzac through Flaubert, the cause was won around 1900. And with some melancholy, I stated that the opinion-already held, if truth be told, about other divergences of amorous immoralism-was rather accomplished by pernicious diffusion through writing of the worst unilateral debauchery to welcome them with bemused indulgence, if not to say a complicitous grin!
Truly, how can one resist marvelous suggestions made in masterpieces of the novel of inversion? Doesn't the showy andromania of Jean Lombard's L'Agonie [The Agony] have something truly dizzying about it? And the Scandinavian Ganymede of Escal-Vigor is fascinating, as are, by the way, those of his ilk, the "velvet rogues," so precious to their common spiritual father, Georges Eeckhoud! In order to make us ever more fanatical, Mr. G. Polti revives pre-Homeric Greek love in front of our very eyes, with Herakles as the magnificent hero. Mr. L. Lumet sets about raising up the very palpitating eclogue in a seminary by putting it in a tragic light in his Cahiers d'un congréganiste [Notes from a Congreganist]. Let's skip over Luc and L'Élu [The Chosen One] by M. A. Essebac, given that Willy doesn't like them. But who could deny the heady perfume emitted by the black flowers of the Vice mortel [Deadly Vice] by the late Jules Hoche? And as for the surgical Androgyne of Mr. A. Couvreur, isn't it too morphologically "successful" not to be
... monstre éclos, exquis et surhumain, Au ciel supérieur des formes plus subtiles, Susciter le désir de l'impossible hymen?
And as for La Fille manquée [The Would-be Girl], by Mr. Han Ryner, people explain the devastation of its bizarre grace far too much! And what a setting of bewitching neopaganism did Mr. J. Rodes use in his Adolescents! And no less attractive is Les Adolescents passionnés [Passionate Adolescents] of Albert Nortal, an erotomaniac of imposing appearance and great culture, who should be better known. Willy himself has given us his troubling pair of novels, L'Ersatz d'Amour and Le Naufragé.
I have commented on all these novels and others from the perspective of erocratism in short monographs. Above all, caring about psychological elucidation and the improvement of moral health, in spite of the pleasure I had in underlining their peerless beauty, I took to heart the need to mark the most ephemeral signs of personal complacency by their authors, relative to the aberration that was too masterfully valued.
In this critical enterprise, where a preliminary, intrepid diagnosis sometimes is called for relative to orthopedia and, in any case, the affective prophylaxis of our young intellectuals, I was most encouraged by meeting M. Georges-Anquetil, already one of the most well-equipped allies for this antipederastic crusade, to which I would like to attract all those of goodwill.
This incisive pamphleteer traces the invading perversion back "to the lamentable deformation of the aesthetic sense [in matters of love] that characterizes innovators" (op. cit., p. 290). Moreover, not fearing to touch this wound with the red-hot steel of his epigrams, he incriminates those participating in the scandal of the quasi-official consecration of the leaders in the field of corydonian literature: "Honor to whom honor is due. Given the rising importance of pederasty, it would have been extraordinary for literature not to feel it. Thus, as this was not the case, Marcel Proust won the Goncourt Prize. Throughout his work, he writes an apology for Sodom and Gomorrah. At his recent funeral, where the head of state was represented, some proclaimed him the best writer of our time!"
* * *
Our indignation as censors may bring a smile to the lips of the informed reader. Even in arts and letters, he thinks, pedomania is far from being something new. If one is to believe Péladan, the well-known mystagogue, androgynous prestige more or less openly never stopped inspiring all sorts of aesthetic flights. According to him, "From one age to another, from master to master," masterpieces are nothing more than a long line of homages, albeit sometimes unconscious ones, to the "angelic" beauty of beings of indeterminate sex (as far as the morphological traits, called "secondary" by scientists, are concerned) in whom the exalted magus sees the incarnation of an erotic superhumanity.
The relevant objection of my well-informed reader necessitates a short digression on my part.
Certainly, I am quick to agree, the origin of epheberasty is lost in the darkness of our prehistory. Orcism aside, of all erotic perversions-I think I have demonstrated this in my previously mentioned book-this is the oldest, having probably preceded its Sapphic counterpart and even incest, at least as far as the latter is concerned, as a foundational social institution. Its literary expression must also be, if I may speak this way, one of the most venerable. To show that, it is necessary only to look at that apologetic papyrus from the time of the earliest pharaohs, which Mr. André Lorulot, the erudite specialist in documentary erotology, has brought to our attention.
Given that we must admit the strong vitality of this singular inclination (if not always as of sensory covetousness, at least the one that Mr. L. Dugas characterizes thusly in his Amitié antique [Ancient Friendship]: "Strange affection, upsetting and confused-novelistic-more the exaltation of the soul than the intoxication of the senses"), except for discussing its deep cause, we must guarantee it the benefits of the philosophical examination to which all the enduring foibles of our species have the right.
Oh, its etiology has given life to the most fantastic theories followed by heated controversies: a rapid glance at the most significant should suffice us here. Let us start with the metaphysicians. From Plato to Péladan, the mystics of thought, undoubtedly too sensitive to the ambiguous charm of some young disciples, have not been able to resist the desire to seek the dazzling justification of their amorous heterodoxy from the great beyond. That is the typical case for the father of idealism, who has remained, by the way, the eponymous prophet of pederastic affection. We know the inspired commentary he offered on the case of the speakers in the Symposium, with his famous myth of the androgyne-archetype. Sudden ephebophilic passions come from a sort of obscure recognition or hyperconscious paramnesia, which arises between two human beings who were once joined in a single being at the heart of a distinguished world.
But enough vague hypotheses-let us allow biologists to speak. Dr. Montandon, the inventor of dichotomous hologenesis, would undoubtedly explain to us that this more or less utopian state of androgyny-of which there are certain human examples with ambiguous sexuality, who, in their adolescent freshness, too easily provoke nostalgia in us-would be the great regressive step toward the conditions of the foundational functions of life. For other authors, rather than being a question of anatomy of the object, homosexual tendency is a question of physiology-especially endocrine-in the subject given to falling for manly marvels.
Culturists also have to put their two cents in. The Androgyne! Since the time of the uncouth Dorian leaders, who were ambitious about matters of human selection, the androgyne has been the enigmatic mirage of all the hotheads and so-called prophets of anthropoculture! In a recent article in Lien Médical, I had the chance to show how, in the eyes of Mr. G. Hébert, morphological degenerescence, especially muscular, of civilized women was responsible for andromania. Commenting on my article, a compatriot and disciple of Schopenhauer has just taken my thesis back to Platonic theories by means of a gloss that is quite Germanic in inspiration: given the Genius of the Species, the human male, having better kept his initial form, is the object of more favorable glances than his Edenic companion. In each of us, when androgynous love blossoms, it expresses the symbolic wish of the race to persist in its formal splendor without any loss. Raised by the male at puberty-a true flower that is potentially the hermaphrodite of the race-"tangible paradigm of the complete human race," this is a "feeling of eugenic emulation-that is worthy of consideration by the wise man."
As far as Mr. A. Gide's Corydon is concerned, it is the de-intellectualization of the sense of smell that would have "made the male lose his appetite for the female."
More well founded (for before becoming a deliberate infraction of natural and social laws, pederasty is, above all, a deviation that goes back to the mysteries of psychogenesis), psychologists' explanations can be more easily believed, in general, by those with full minds. I remind readers in passing that the doctrine of Mr. Spiess, uniting psychism and sexuality, would occupy an intermediate theoretical position between various other explanatory systems.
One should recognize a merit among fervent partisans of uranism: leaning on their prodromal appeals, they have introduced the very plausible notion of a graduated sexuality, whose existence would justify the contrast between instinctive dominance and body type in some individuals.
Depending on whether it is a question of rough degenerates or refined progenerates, given the fertile distinction Dr. Voivenel has taught us, psychiatrists concerned about moralism prefer to consider pederasts by their character: either as catastrophists of lust whose gross covetousness scorns sexual differentiation or as asthenics of desire-sexual aboulics, says Professor Janet. The latter, sometimes deliberately, but most often, without being conscious of it, would feel the need for bracing infractions: what better stimulus is there for instincts freed of rational control than the transgression of collective moral statutes? Agreeing with Mr. Lorulot, I adhere to this thesis, for it is in harmony with the romantic-imperialist psychology taught by my master, Mr. E. Seillière.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Translator's Introduction....................viiIntroduction by Louis Estève....................1
Preface....................11
1. Looking across the Borders....................15
2. A Bit of Psychology....................32
3. Some Leaders....................41
4. The Tour for the "Curious"....................56
5. Varied Opinions....................70
6. Androgynous Literature....................81
Epilogue....................95
Notes....................99
Bibliography....................131
Index....................133