Was Teenage Roman Emperor Elagabalus A Trans Woman?

 

A museum is to relabel its display about a Roman emperor after concluding that he was in fact a trans woman.

North Hertfordshire Museum will now refer to emperor Elagabalus with the female pronouns of she and her. It comes after classical texts claim the emperor once said "call me not Lord, for I am a Lady". A museum spokesperson said it was "only polite and respectful to be sensitive to identifying pronouns for people in the past".

The museum has one coin of Elagabalus, which is often displayed amongst other LGBTQ+ items in its collection. It said it consulted LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall to ensure "displays, publicity and talks are as up-to-date and inclusive as possible".  Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, better known as Elagabalus, ruled the Roman empire for just four years from 218AD to his assassination, aged 18, in 222AD. He became an increasingly controversial figure over his short reign, developing a reputation for sexual promiscuity. Cassius Dio, a senator and contemporary of Elagabalus, writes in his historical chronicles that the emperor was married five times - four times to women, and once to Hiercoles, a former slave and chariot driver. In this final marriage, Dio writes that the emperor "was bestowed in marriage and was termed wife, mistress and queen".

The debate over Elagabalus's gender identity is long-standing and often splits academics. Dr Shushma Malik, a Cambridge university classics professor, told the BBC: "The historians we use to try and understand the life of Elagabalus are extremely hostile towards him, and therefore cannot be taken at face value. We don't have any direct evidence from Elagabalus himself of his own words. "There are many examples in Roman literature of times where effeminate language and words were used as a way of criticising or weakening a political figure. "References to Elagabalus wearing makeup, wigs and removing body hair may have been written in order to undermine the unpopular emperor." Dr Malik added that whilst Romans were aware of gender fluidity, and there are examples of pronouns being changed in literature, it "was usually used in reference to myth and religion, rather than to describe living people". However, councillor Keith Hoskins, executive member for Enterprise and Arts at North Herts Council, said texts such as Dio's provide evidence "that Elagabalus most definitely preferred the 'she' pronoun and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times, as we believe is standard practice elsewhere". "We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing," he added.

Museum reclassifies Roman emperor as trans woman. By Yasmin Rufo. BBC, November 21, 2023.

The North Hertfordshire Museum in the United Kingdom has reclassified a Roman emperor as a transgender woman and will refer to the ruler with she/her pronouns. The institution cited Ancient Roman writings claiming that Elagabalus, who held power between 218 and 222 CE before being assassinated at the age of 18, wore women’s clothing and preferred to be called “lady.”

 
While the official classification is new, scholars have long discussed Elagabalus’s sexual and gender identity, and the British Museum’s biography of the emperor states that she sought a gender-affirming surgery and frequently wore women’s garments. Depictions of the ruler in recent centuries have emphasized her feminine qualities, beauty, and opulence.

Elagabalus, who was born and lived in Syria before assuming the Roman throne at age 14, was also described as being sexually promiscuous. Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that she had five wives, the last of whom was a man, and that she was “termed wife, mistress, and queen.” Some scholars have pointed out that Elagabalus’s contemporaries may have intentionally written discrediting text about the leader, who was ultimately overthrown and assassinated by high-ranking political leaders.

Zachary Herz, a Classics scholar and Elagabalus expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told Hyperallergic that he struggles with the concept of retrospectively assigning identity, adding that these texts were “almost certainly meant to discredit [Elagabalus]” and that the authors of these accounts were working for the statesman who overthrew Elagabalus in a coup. Although none of Elagabalus’s own writing survived, coins and portrait busts issued under the emperor’s reign are still around today. “The people making these coins and statues would have had a strong incentive to depict Elagabalus the way he wanted to be seen, so you can use these media to see what Elagabalus wanted to look like,” Herz said. “It happens that these coins and statues all depict Elagabalus as male, right down to the sad teenage-boy mustache.”

“On the other hand, if a trans person today reads about Elagabalus and feels less alone it’s hard to begrudge them that,” Herz continued. “My own personal take is that Elagabalus doesn’t show us ‘trans people in antiquity’ but does show us other ways of doing sex, gender, and sexuality.”

The North Herfordshire Museum owns one coin featuring Elagabalus’s face. A spokesperson for the institution told the BBC that it is “only polite and respectful to be sensitive to identifying pronouns for people in the past.”

UK Museum Reclassifies Roman Emperor as Trans Woman. By Elaine Velie. Hyperallergic, November 22, 2023. 

Elagabalus ruled as Roman emperor for just four years before being murdered in AD 222. He was still a teenager when he died. Despite his short reign, Elagabalus is counted among the most infamous of Roman emperors, often listed alongside Caligula and Nero.

His indiscretions, recorded by the Roman chroniclers, include: marrying a vestal virgin, the most chaste of Roman priestesses, twice; dressing up as a female prostitute and selling his body to other men; allowing himself to be penetrated (and by the bigger the penis the better); marrying a man, the charioteer Hierocles; and declaring himself not to be an emperor at all, but an empress: “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady”.

Based on this quote, North Hertfordshire Museum has reclassified Elagabalus as a transgender woman, and will now use the pronouns she/her. The museum has a single coin depicting Elagabalus, which is sometimes displayed along with other LGBTQ+ artefacts from their collection.

When writing about ancient subjects, from emperors to slaves, the first question historians have to ask is: how do we know what we do? Most of our written sources are fragmentary, incomplete and rarely contemporary, amounting to little more than gossip or hearsay at best, malign propaganda at worst. It’s rare that we have a figure’s own words to guide us.

Elagabalus is no exception. For Elagabalus, our principle source is the Roman historian Cassius Dio. A senator and politician before turning his hand to history, Dio was not only a contemporary of the emperor, but part of his regime.

However, Dio wrote his Roman history under the patronage of Elagabalus’ cousin, Severus Alexander. He took the throne following Elagabalus’s assassination. It was therefore in Dio’s interest to paint his patron’s predecessor in a bad light.

Sexual slurs and the Romans

Sexual slurs were always among the first insults thrown by Roman authors. Julius Caesar was accused of being penetrated by the Bithynian king so many times it earned him the nickname “the Queen of Bithynia”.

It was rumoured that both Mark Antony and Augustus had prostituted themselves for political gain earlier in their careers. And Nero was said to have worn the bridal veil to marry a man.

The Romans were no stranger to same-sex relationships, however. It would have been more unusual for a Roman emperor not to have slept with men. Roman sexual identities were complex constructs, revolving around notions such as status and power.

The gender of a person’s sexual partner did not come into it. Instead, sexual orientation was informed by sexual role: were they the dominant or passive partner?

To be the dominant partner, in business, politics and war as much as in the bedroom, was at the root of what made a Roman man a man. The Latin word we translate as “man”, vir, is the root of the modern word “virile”, and to the Romans there was nothing more manly than virility. To penetrate – whether men, women, or both – was seen as manly, and therefore as Roman.

 

Conversely, for a Roman man to be passive, to be penetrated, was seen as unmanly. The Romans thought such an act of penetration stripped a man of his virility, making him less than a man – akin to a woman or, even worse, a slave.

A man who enjoyed being penetrated was sometimes called a cinaedus, and in Latin literature cinaedi are often described as taking on the role of the woman in more than the bedroom, both dressing and acting effeminately. The implication is always that the way they dressed, acted and had sex was somehow subversive – distinctly un-Roman.

The word cinaedus appears in Latin literature almost exclusively as an insult — and it’s this literary role that is ascribed to Caesar, Mark Antony, Nero and Elagabalus. The power of the insult stems not from saying that these men had sex with men, but that they were penetrated by men.

It’s worth noting that these rules of Roman sexuality only applied to freeborn adult, male Roman citizens. They did not apply to women, slaves, freedmen, foreigners or even beardless youths. These people were all considered fair game to a virile Roman man, as uncomfortable a concept as that might be to us today.

Was Elagabalus transgender?

While the Romans clearly engaged in acts that we today consider gay or straight sex, they would not recognise the sexual orientations we associate with them. The ancient Romans did not share the same conceptions of sexuality that we do.

Many men’s sexual behaviour was what we would now term bisexual. Some lived in a manner we might describe as gender non-conforming. The concept of a person being transgender was not unknown. But an ancient Roman would not have self-identified as any of those things.

We cannot retroactively apply such modern, western identities to the inhabitants of the past and we must be careful not to misgender or misidentify them – especially if our only evidence for how they might have identified comes from hostile writers.

In attempting to fact check the sexual slurs and propaganda from the biographical facts, there is a danger that we lose sight of the fact that ancient Romans did recognise a huge variety of sexual orientations and gender identities – just as we do today. To attempt to crudely ascribe modern labels to ancient figures such as Elagabalus is not only to strip them of their agency, but also to oversimplify what is a wonderfully, fabulously broad and nuanced subject.

Museum classifies Roman emperor as trans – but modern labels oversimplify ancient gender identities. By Andrew Kenrick. The Conversation., November 28, 2023.

There are legendary dinner parties, and then there are the stories told about those thrown by the Roman emperor Elagabalus. The teenage ruler, who managed just four years as emperor before being assassinated at the age of 18 in AD222, would serve bizarre dishes like camels’ heels or flamingos’ brains to guests, stage themed nights when all the food was blue or green, or release lions or bears to roam among the diners.

On one famous occasion, according to a Roman historian, those present at a dinner were suffocated to death under an enormous quantity of rose petals; another saw guests seated on slowly deflating whoopee cushions – their first recorded use in western history.

 But did he really do all those things? Or perhaps we should be asking – did she? The obscure young emperor made headlines this week when it was reported that North Hertfordshire Museum in Hitchin has changed the pronouns it uses with reference to a coin of Elegabalus in its collection, and would now refer to the emperor as a trans woman using “she” and “her”.

It’s not such a stretch as it may sound. As well as throwing wild parties, Elagabalus was also said to have openly flouted contemporary gender roles. The emperor is said to have also dressed as a female sex worker, “married” a male slave and acted as his “wife”, asked to be referred to as “lady” rather than “lord” and even, according to one account, begged to have a surgical vagina made by a physician.

The stories led Keith Hoskins, executive member for arts at North Herts council, to say in a statement: “Elagabalus most definitely preferred the she pronoun, and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times … It is only polite and respectful.

“We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing.”

But do we know that? Thanks to a growing awareness of more complex ideas of gender in history, and a desire to reject historical prejudices, Elagabalus has been reclaimed in recent decades as a genderqueer icon.

However, many historians disagree that the evidence is as unambiguous as the museum says. Mary Beard, formerly professor of classics at Cambridge University, directed followers on X to her latest book, titled Emperor of Rome, which opens with a lengthy discussion of the “tall stories” told about Elagabalus.

The accounts of sexual unconventionality (and extravagant cruelty) largely originate with hostile historians who wanted to win the favour of Elegabalus’s successor, Severus Alexander, and so portrayed the emperor in the worst light possible, she says. “How seriously should we treat them? Not very is the usual answer,” Beard writes, calling the stories “untruths and flagrant exaggerations”.

The Romans may not have shared current understandings of trans identity, but several of the contested accounts about Elagabalus feel remarkably modern, points out Zachary Herz, assistant professor of classics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who has written about how we should approach the story of Elagabalus in the context of queer theory.

Asserting that Elagabalus requested female pronouns is an “astonishingly close translation” of a story written by the third-century historian Cassius Dio, says Herz. “Elagabalus is literally saying, ‘Don’t call me this word that ends in the masculine ending, call me this word that ends in the feminine.’ So it’s unbelievably close to correcting someone’s pronouns.”

The problem, as he sees it, is that “I just don’t think it really happened.” “The quote-unquote biographies” written under Elagabalus’s successor are “hit pieces”, he says. “I would be inclined to read [them] as basically fictional.”

 Martijn Icks, a lecturer in classics at the university of Amsterdam and author of a book about Elagabalus’s life and posthumous reputation, agrees that the stories about the emperor should be taken with “a large pinch of salt”. The same “effeminacy narrative” that has made Elagabalus a queer icon “was meant to character assassinate the Emperor, to show that he was completely unsuitable to occupy this position,” he says, adding that other so-called “bad emperors” including Nero and Caligula were described in very similar terms.

Racial prejudice also played a part, says Icks: before coming to Rome to rule it, Elagabalus was a priest in an obscure cult in Syria that venerated a black stone meteorite – a culture that would have been deeply strange to the Romans.

“And the stereotype that Romans had of Syrians … is that they were very effeminate and not real men like the Romans were.”

Some facts about Elagabalus’s biography can be asserted with confidence, says Herz, but in truth, comparatively few. And so while he says he considers it “perfectly justifiable” if his students use “they/them” to refer to the emperor (“if we don’t know a person’s gender, it’s a perfectly polite thing to use”), he believes “he” and “him” more accurately reflect the emperor’s own wishes.

“We don’t know what Elagabalus was like. We don’t know how Elagabalus saw himself. But we have portraits and coins that all look male, that portray him with male facial hair, male features and in garments that would have been understood as male within Elagabalus’s culture – including the coin that the museum has at the centre of its display.”

While “there is a long history of people who have been expected to be good at being a man or being a woman and have had a hard time with that”, says Herz, “I worry that when we tell our students they should care about Elagabalus because she’s trans or because they’re non-binary – because they fit a modern category that our students use for themselves – we’re depriving them of the richness of history.”

 

Was Roman emperor Elagabalus really trans – and does it really matter? By  Esther Addley.  The Guardian, November 24, 2023.

His reputation has suffered at the pens of historians for centuries – a suspected revisionist attempt to hide the fact that a powerful Roman Emperor was among the first persons in history to seek a sex reassignment surgery. Emperor Elagabalus (or Heliogabalus) came from a prominent Arab family in present-day Syria, where he served as head priest of the sun god Helios. He came to power at fourteen years old, and according to historical records, Elagabalus quickly developed a reputation for extreme eccentricity, decadence, zealotry, and sexual promiscuity. Those biases have persisted through history up until the present day.

An 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, wrote that Elagabalus “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.” Germany’s leading historian of Ancient Rome, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, said that “the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others” because of his “unspeakably disgusting life.” An example of a modern historian’s assessment is Adrian Goldsworthy’s view that: “Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but […] incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had.” Only archaeologist Warwick Ball describes Elagabalus as “innovative” and “a tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice.”

When Elagabalus was alive, a Roman statesman who kept close tabs on the lives of his emperors. In his writings, Cassius Dio notably referred to Elagabalus by feminine pronouns and states that the emperor wanted to marry a former male slave and charioteer named Hierocles. Dio stated that Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles’s mistress, wife, and queen. Officially, Elagabalus was married five times (and twice to the same woman) all before he was 18, although there were rumours he also married a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna.

During his reign, women were first allowed into the senate, and his mother and grandmother both received senatorial titles. They’re found on many coins and inscriptions, a rare honor for Roman women. This establishment of a “women’s senate” would be considered by his contemporaries as one of the many examples of Elagabalus’s “moral corruption”.

According to Dio, the Emperor wore makeup and wigs and preferred to be addresses as “lady” instead of “lord”. It was also recorded that Elgabalus offered significant payments to any doctor who could give him the equivalent of a woman’s genitalia by means of a surgical incision. It is this detail that convinces some scholars to see Elagabalus as an early transgender figure.

In Ancient Rome, cross-dressing was practiced during Saturnalia, an ancient pagan festival, but was forbidden outside that rite, suggesting that by making such practices unacceptable outside that rite, gender identities had been firmly established. Romans also imposed it as a punishment, ordering deserters to wear female clothes for three days before execution.

Modern Historian Eric Varner notes, “Elagabalus is also alleged to have appeared as Venus and to have epilated his entire body. Recurrent charges of effeminacy were levelled against him, and a painted portrait was sent to the capital prior to the young emperor’s arrival in order to accustom the inhabitants of Rome to his exotic appearance”.

Further historical accounts claim that Elagabalus was an avid prankster. At banquets he would reportedly serve peas with gold, lentils with onyx, beans with amber, as well as sprinkling pearls in lieu of pepper, and at the end of the feast, he would bring out lions and leopards, panicking the invitees, who were unaware they were tamed. The origin of the whoopee cushion is said to be traced back to the Roman emperor, who regularly pulled the practical joke at his aristocratic dinner parties. Elagabalus was a teenager, after all.

His eccentricities (namely his relationship with Hierocles) lost Elagabalus his support from the soldiers of the Praetorian Guard. According to Augustan history, the hard-partying emperor lost the support of his courtiers too, who grew weary of his decadence, zealotry, and sexual promiscuity. Dio also claimed that Elagabalus prostituted himself in taverns and brothels. Allegedly, when finances of the Roman Empire were in dire straits, he proposed to prostitute himself for an insanely high price.

Eventually, Elagabalus’s grandmother, Julia Maesa, decided that he and his mother were to be replaced by her other grandson, a then fifteen-year-old Severus Alexander. Elagabalus and Alexander ruled together for about a year until Elagabalus realised the Praetorian Guard preferred his cousin over him. At this realization, Elagabalus supposedly organised several attempts to assassinate Alexander after the Senate refused to strip his cousin of his title. The Praetorians then mutinied and killed Elagabalus instead. After slaughtering his minions and tearing out their vital organs, they then fell upon Elagabalus as he hid cowering in a latrine. They dragged his body through the streets by a hook and attempted to stuff it into a sewer. When it proved too big, they threw him into the River Tiber.

 This was a teenage boy, struggling with hormones, discovering his sexuality, thrown into a lifestyle which offered him everything he wanted – complete power and wealth, with no hint of the consequences for acting upon his desires – and then given the ultimate punishment for taking it.

After Elagabalus’s assassination, his supporters (including Hierocles) were killed or deposed; his religious edicts were reversed; women were re-barred from attending Senate meetings and he was erased from the public record. In fact, one of his larger than life statues (portraying Elagabalus as Hercules) was re-carved with Alexander’s heteronormative face. This practice is commonly referred to as damnatio memoriae, and it’s reserved for those who were disgraced. It also might have scrubbed one of the first transgendered icons from the record.

Such a vast propaganda campaign was set up to besmirch Elagabalus following his death, that it’s hard to know what is and isn’t true about him. The only surviving evidence we have of his brief life was written by people with ample motivation to discredit and villify him. Was Elagabalus an awful emperor, or had Ancient Rome already become a vehemently transphobic and homophobic society? In his book, Transcending Gender: Assimilation, Identity, and Roman Imperial Portraits, Eric R. Varner says that it was directly after Elagabalus requested the sex reassignment surgery that he was deposed, implying that the assassination could have likely been one of the earliest recorded hate crimes in history, disguised as the coup of an incompetent emperor. Similarly condemned emperors like Domitian, Commodus were all criticised for receptive homosexual behavior, prostitution, feminine interest in exotic clothing, and excessive attention to hair care. It’s also just as likely however, that Elagabalus wasn’t trans, and that his enemies were exploiting roman ideas of gender to suggest that Elagabalus was so terrible at his job that he couldn’t possibly be of the male gender. For these reasons of historical uncertainty, we were unsure of the appropriate pronouns for this article.

Though the term transgender might be somewhat recent to the English language, transgendered people were present in society as early as Ancient Egypt, which had noted third gender categories. In the 3000 year-old Egyptian story, Tale of Two Brothers, Bata removes his penis and tells his wife “I am a woman just like you”; one modern scholar called him temporarily “transgendered”. Mut, Sekhmet and other goddesses are sometimes represented androgynously, with erect penises. Sumerian and Akkadian texts from 4500 years ago document transgender or transvestite priests known as gala and by other names, and in Ancient Rome too, there were galli priests who wore feminine clothes, referred to themselves as women, often castrated themselves, and have been seen as early transgender figures.

Elagabalus is ranked by history among the worst and most degenerate emperors – (or empresses) – but as Out History notes, “Her reported atrocities and crimes however almost entirely fall under the categories of upsetting the gender, cultural and religious norms of Roman society”. What good the teenage ruler did is no doubt buried in academic slander, but might it be time for Elagabalus’s story to be retold from a new perspective? It’s about time Hollywood made a new sword-and-sandals biopic. Someone get Ridley Scott on the phone.

History Conveniently Forgot to Tell us about the Transgender Roman Emperor.  By Mary Kay McBrayer.  Messy Nessy   ,July 26, 2021. 

For LGBTQIA+ history month, recent Ancient History graduate Ollie Burns explores the life of one individual who may confuse what we know about gender non-conformity in the ancient world.

*Although the histories written in antiquity refer to Elagabalus unanimously as ‘he/him’, examination of these sources suggest very strongly that the emperor did not identify as a male, and so for the purpose of this article I have used the pronouns ‘they/them’.

 Elagabalus is not an emperor whose name is particularly well-known outside of academic circles, yet their reign and life is one of the most fascinating cases from Rome’s Imperial period. Elagabalus was born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus in 204 AD, most likely in the Roman province of Syria. Their father was an equestrian, who would later be admitted into the Roman Senate, and their mother, Julia Soaemias, was the cousin of Emperor Caracalla (r. 198 – 217). As part of the Syrian nobility, Elagabalus’ family held hereditary rights to the priesthood of the sun god Elagabal, whom Elagabalus served as high priest. This is where the name ‘Elagabalus’ derives. After the assassination of Caracalla in 217, the Praetorian Prefect Macrinus took imperial power, so as relatives of Caracalla, Elagabalus and their family were exiled. However Macrinus’ reign was highly unstable, and by 218 he had been executed. Consequently, Elgabalus was elevated to the Imperial throne at just 14 years old, and the Senate accepted that they be recognised as Caracalla’s son, boosting the legitimacy of their rule.

Elagabalus’ reign was short and controversial. They installed Elagabal as the new head of the Roman pantheon, displacing Jupiter. The idea of a foreign god being worshipped ahead of Jupiter was shocking to much of the Roman population. They took this even further when they ordered the removal of Rome’s most sacred relics (such as The Fire of Vesta) and had them placed at the Elagabalium, an enormous temple dedicated to Elagabal built on the Palatine Hill. This essentially made it impossible for Romans to worship any god without also honouring Elagabal. Further religious controversy was stirred up when Elagabalus married Aquilia Severa, a Vestal Virgin; Roman law very strictly stated that all Vestal’s had to remain chaste, and any found to have engaged in sexual intercourse were liable to be buried alive, so to many, this marriage was unacceptable. This brings us on to the subject of Elagabalus’ sexuality and gender identity.

Based on the sources we have, it is difficult to ascertain Elagabalus’ sexual orientation for certain; it is reported by Cassius Dio that Elagabalus married five times, and that they had numerous extra-marital sexual encounters with other women. The following is a passage from Book 80 of Dio’s Roman History:

‘’ He married many women, and had intercourse with even more without any legal sanction; yet it was not that he had any need of them himself, but simply that he wanted to imitate their actions when he should lie with his lovers and wanted to get accomplices in his wantonness by associating with them indiscriminately. He used his body both for doing and allowing many strange things, which no one could endure to tell or hear of; but his most conspicuous acts, which it would be impossible to conceal, were the following. He would go to the taverns by night, wearing a wig, and there ply the trade of a female huckster. He frequented the notorious brothels, drove out the prostitutes, and played the prostitute himself. Finally, he set aside a room in the palace and there committed his indecencies, always standing nude at the door of the room, as the harlots do, and shaking the curtain which hung from gold rings, while in a soft and melting voice he solicited the passers-by.”

This particular extract suggests that while Elagabalus married and indeed had sex with women, this was only so that they could learn how women acted, in order to replicate this with male partners, which would imply that they were homosexual. In terms of gender identity, Elagabalus’ habit of playing a female prostitute to solicit men shows a rejection of traditional Roman male identity, wherein men (especially those of rank) were seen as weak and effeminate if they allowed themselves to be penetrated by other men. Elagabalus was also known to have married a man, the charioteer and former slave Hierocles, and they loved being referred to as Hierocles’ wife or mistress. The emperor is also reported to have frequently worn wigs and makeup, preferred to be called ‘domina’ (lady) over ‘dominus’ (lord), and even offered vast sums of money to any physician who could give them a vagina. In one particular anecdote, Dio wrote that Elagabalus asked one of the Praetorian Prefects what the most painful method of removing their male genitals would be, and offered the man money to do it. It is because of reportings such as these that Elagabalus is believed by some modern historians to have been transgender, as it seems clear that they preferred being seen as a woman, and even sought to physically become one, however the extent to which Dio’s writings can be trusted is also a cause for debate. Dio wrote most of his Roman History after Elagabalus was already dead and disgraced, and it is common in Roman histories to see unpopular emperors slandered and have aspects of their reign negatively exaggerated to fit the current regime’s status quo. To that end, Elagabalus is referred to as ‘A tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice’ by historian Warwick Ball.

Elagabalus’s religious policies and general eccentricities severely alienated the Praetorian Guard. Fearing a coup, Elagabalus’ grandmother arranged for her other grandson and Elagabalus’ cousin, Severus Alexander to take imperial power in 222. The Praetorian Guard murdered Elagabalus and their mother, decapitated their bodies, and threw them in the River Tiber. Elagabalus was just 18.

LGBTQIA+ History Month – Elagabalus, The Trans Emperor of Rome? – Ollie Burns. By Abigail Hudson. University of Birmingham blog, February 18, 2021.

This week’s entry: Elagabalus

What it’s about: Someone who’s been singled out as the most colorful and controversial of all of the Roman emperors, which is really saying something. Only 14 when he took the throne, Elagabalus was unprepared to rule, “probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had,” in the opinion of historian Adrian Goldsworthy. He seems to have spent most of his brief reign challenging Rome’s sexual mores, or as onetime member of Parliament Edward Gibbon put it, he “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.”

Biggest controversy: Whatever Elagabalus’ failings as chief executive, it’s always the sex scandals that grab the headlines, even 1,800 years later. The historical record isn’t always clear, given a lot of the material here is salacious gossip. But it seems Elagabalus married and divorced five women in as many years. One of those, Annia Aurelia Faustina, was a descendent of the original Marcus Aurelius, and was conveniently single after Elagabalus had her husband executed. Another wife, Aquilia Severa, was a Vestal Virgin. Marrying someone who had taken a holy vow of chastity was a shocking breach of tradition, but Elagabalus claimed the union would produce “godlike children.” And those are just the women he married. Elagabalus also had a long-term relationship with his chariot driver, Hierocles, who Elagabalus called his husband, and at least one source has him marrying a male athlete named Aurelius Zoticus.

Elagabalus was also a prostitute, working in taverns, brothels, and even the palace. He bragged that he out-earned other prostitutes, and according to later Roman historian Cassius Dio, “he had numerous agents who sought out those who could best please him by their foulness.” In and out of the brothel, Elagabalus would “paint his eyes, depilate his body hair and wear wigs” to appear more feminine, and preferred to be called a lady and not a lord. Cassius Dio wrote that “Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles’ mistress, wife, and queen.” He also “offered vast sums to any physician who could provide him with a vagina,” which may have made Elagabalus the first person on record as seeking out gender-reassignment surgery.

(A note on pronouns: While it’s possible Elagabalus was a trans woman, we only have speculation based on centuries-old gossip to go on, so absent stronger evidence one way or the other, we’ll continue to use the emperor’s assigned-at-birth gender, as the Wikipedia article does.)

Strangest fact: His name wasn’t Elagabalus. Like the Pope, the emperor often assumed a new name upon taking the throne; Elagabalus’ was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. His given name was likely Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, although the historical record doesn’t seem sure. The name Elagabalus came from a Syrian sun god who was folded into the Roman pantheon. Our emperor was a priest of Elagabalus as a child, and as emperor replaced Jupiter with Elagabalus as the head of the pantheon of gods (to much consternation from the Roman faithful), and presided over religious ceremonies in his honor. Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus was only referred to as Elagabalus after his death, most likely to differentiate him from Caracalla, three emperors previous, who also went by those same four names.

Thing we were happiest to learn: Women’s rights took a small step forward under Elagabalus. Powerful women in Rome could usually only assert power indirectly, and Elagabalus was put in power through his grandmother’s influence. When Caracalla was assassinated, he was replaced by the head of the Praetorian Guard, Marcus Opellius Macrinus, but Caracallas’ aunt (and Elagabalus’ grandmother), Julia Maesa, convinced the army’s Third Legion to revolt and put her grandson on the throne at age 14. Once in power, Elagabalus gave senatorial titles to both his mother and grandmother (women had previously never been allowed in the Senate chamber), and both can be found on Roman coins, rare for women in any era of Rome.

Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Elagabalus’ reign didn’t last. After less than five scandalous years, Elagabalus had exhausted the patience of the real power behind the throne. The Praetorian Guard disapproved of his sexual antics, particularly his relationship with his chariot-driver husband Hierocles, while Maesa realized her grandson had no popular support and hung both him and her daughter out to dry.

Maesa pushed Elagabalus to appoint his cousin, Severus Alexander, as his heir and co-consul. Elagabalus quickly realized the Praetorians preferred Alexander, and after several failed assassination attempts, Elagabalus had to be content to strip his cousin of his titles and revoke his citizenship. The Praetorian Guard demanded to see the two cousins in their camp. When they, along with Elagabalus’ mother, appeared, the Praetorians cheered Alexander and ignored the emperor. Enraged, Elagabalus ordered the arrest and execution of the insubordinate soldiers. Instead, the guards killed him and his mother. We return to Cassius Dio: “[T]heir heads were cut off and their bodies, after being stripped naked, were first dragged all over the city, and then the mother’s body was cast aside somewhere or other, while his was thrown into the Tiber.” Hierocles and several of Elagabalus’ other associates were killed soon after.

 

Also noteworthy: Some more recent historians question the narrative of Elagabalus as an oversexed incompetent. After his death, Elagabalus suffered damnatio memoriae—his name was erased from public records, and statues of him were re-carved to resemble Severus Alexander. As a result, much of what was written about Elagabalus came from his enemies, and has therefore come under question. Martijn Icks’ 2008 book Images Of Elagabalus argues that it was Elagabalus upending the Roman religion, not his sexual exploits, that turned the Roman elites against him. Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado’s The Emperor Elagabalus: Fact Or Fiction? from the same year suggests he was merely a pawn in his grandmother’s power struggles, and the more salacious stories were part of a campaign of character assassination, which quickly followed his more literal assassination.

Further down the Wormhole: We mention Cassius Dio several times, because as historians go, he’s the closest thing we have to a primary source on Elagabalus. Cassius Dio was his contemporary, and while he wasn’t in Rome during much of the young emperor’s reign, he had easy access to eyewitness accounts. He also served as consul under Severus Alexander, so his accounts may contain a bit of bias, but in general, Dio is a terrific source, as his book Roman History spans nearly a thousand years, starting with the arrival of Aeneas in Italy. A hero of the Trojan War (second cousin to Hector and Paris) mentioned in The Iliad, Aeneas is a revered figure in both Greek and Roman mythology.

While Aeneas may have been an historical figure, most of the stories about him are mythological—Aphrodite and Apollo frequently intervene on his behalf, and Poseidon rescues him after an assault by Achilles. The Iliad’s main character, and the greatest of Greece’s warriors, Achilles also blurs myth and history, and as with Aeneas, myth wins out, as Achilles is most famous for his heel—his only vulnerable spot, after being dipped in the River Styx and granted magical invulnerability. The Iliad refers to Achilles as “the brightest star in the sky.” That star would be Sirius, visible from almost everywhere in the world, apart from the very northernmost latitudes. We’ll beat the summer heat by visiting the list of northernmost settlements next week.

This teenage Roman emperor may have been the earliest recorded trans woman. By Mike Vago. The A.V. Club, June 28, 2020. 

Elagabalus’ name is not quite as notorious as that of Nero and Caligula, or even Commodus, recently featured as the villain in Russell Crowe’s Gladiator. Like the three emperors mentioned above, Elagabalus has consistently been ranked among the worst and most depraved holders of the Imperial honor. Her reported atrocities and crimes however almost entirely fall under the categories of upsetting the gender, cultural and religious norms of Roman society. In this biography I will briefly narrate her life and evaluate what her contemporaries found so shocking about her. I will also show how examining her life and career can teach us much about the intersections of cultural conflict in ancient times and the lavish amount of attention transgender phenomenon have received since at least as long as history was recorded.

Name and Pronouns

First a note on name and pronouns: Historical sources uniformly refer to Elagabalus with male pronouns. The emperor is best known under this title (which is grammatically masculine) and she was assigned male at birth. I have decided to use female pronouns because, based on the evidence, this choice is just as valid as male pronouns. The three extant sources from antiquity, while they do contradict each other, still broadly concur that the sovereign did have very strong manifestations of cross-gender behavior. Telling aspects such as the story related by Dio Cassius that Elagabalus offered half the empire to the surgeon that would correct her genitalia seem to go far beyond merely scandalizing an effeminate monarch and more towards showing the desperation a transgender person might well feel in an age long before any methods were found to modify her body according to her desires.

Background

Elagabalus was born in the year 203 AD, and her brief reign occurred in the years 218-222 at the end of which she was killed. Well known through the ages, Elagabalus lived a very short but tumultuous life. Related to the family of Septimius Severus, Elagabalus was born into the highest level of privilege in Ancient Rome.

Elagabalus was inducted to the hereditary priesthood of the solar deity El Gabal, who was worshipped in her native city as the supreme deity. In a different approach to the Greeks and Romans who erected statues of their deities in their temples, El Gabal was worshiped in the form of a meteoric black stone. Elaborate ceremonies would mark this stone’s entry and brief residence in Rome.

Septimius Severus was a Roman general of North African origin who wrested the supreme power after the period of chaos that ensued from Commodus’ death (the son of one of the last of the “Five Good Emperors,” Marcus Aurelius). While Severus restored order to Rome, his stern and highly militaristic dictatorship undermined traditional Roman institutions (such as the Senate). Severus’ son, Caracalla was a ruthless tyrant, succeeding his father along with his brother Geta. The cleverly ruthless Caracalla killed the equally ruthless but clumsier Geta. Caracalla continued the militaristic dictatorship of Septimius Severus but was known for more erratic behavior. His most famous legal act was the widening of Roman citizenship to include virtually all free inhabitants of the Empire. This act helped further weaken the Roman tradition by weakening cultural and social distinctions. While this act seems appealing to modern sensibilities, it seems to have simply been a brazen ploy to increase tax revenues. Caracalla was killed by his soldiers in a plot, and the usurper Marcrinus (of commoner descent) took the throne for a brief period. The emergence of the military as the only legitimate source of power and the weakening of Roman tradition both became especially present in the Severan era and help us understand the context of Elagabalus’ brief reign.

Marcrinus’ welcome was quickly worn out when he attempted to reform the pay of the Roman legions to assist the solvency of the Empire. His attempted fiscal reforms angered the soldiers who, after overthrowing Caracalla, now missed that Emperor’s generous ways. The atmosphere all over Rome became very tense. Enter Julia Mamaea, the sister-in-law of Septimius Severus. She claimed that Elagabalus, the young child-priest, was the illegitimate son of Caracalla and this claim cemented that young person’s rise to the throne.

What makes Elagabalus rise to fame and power unusual was that the soldiers who had a chance to see her were entranced by her beauty as she danced ceremonies to El Gabal. All the ancient authors describe her sensuous robes that she wore while performing priestly duties. The fact that young boys could be sexually objectified and sexualized as much as women in the Classical world no doubt adds to Elagabalus’ ability to woo soldiers by dancing in luxurious robes and elaborate makeup rather than gain their respect with military feats in armor and sword.

Skilled generals and soldiers supported Elagabalus so Marcrinus’ forces were quickly defeated and the way was cleared for Elagabalus to reign.

Reign

The young Empress (for that is what she wanted to call herself) wasn’t used to the exercise of power. All the ancient sources agree that she made irresponsible appointments to the highest offices of government and religion. Herodian and the Historia Augusta salaciously assert that Elagabalus was in the habit of appointing ministers on account of the length of their penises.

The reign witnessed many actions that caused shock and offense to conservative Romans. Elagabalus married a vestal virgin, claiming, according to Herodian, that the priestly marriage would create divine children. Vestals’ chastity was very important to Roman religious practice and the punishment for violating chastity used to be execution by live burial. This marriage was thus an unprecedented violation akin to desecrating the Eucharist for observant Roman Catholics. Furthermore Elagabalus arranged a marriage between her deity El Gabal and Urania the goddess most worshiped in Carthage, which was the most ancient and hated enemy of Rome. In order to participate in her administration and gain Imperial favor, senators and other Roman dignitaries were forced to dress in un-Roman ways and to participate in elaborate sacrifices and other ceremonies.

The topic of Elagabalus’ genitalia comes up frequently. One way Greeks and Romans distinguished themselves from the near Eastern civilizations was that they did not practice and abhorred circumcision. The ancient sources claim that Elagabalus was circumcised as part of the requirements for the priestly profession and the later Historia Augusta even claims that her penis was infibulated (meaning that the head of the penis was divided in two.) Castration, according to Dio Cassius, was one of Elagabalus’ fondest desires, not out of religion but out of “effeminacy.” This last statement seems to very strongly indicate a condition that would today be called transsexualism.

The only symbols of Elagabalus reign that survive are precious metal coins and a very few examples of statuary. Many of the coins do indeed show the religious changes: displaying the meteoric stone of El Gabal and calling for that deity’s blessings. The statuary on the other hand shows a young man with hair cut in classic Roman style and thus seems designed to placate those of traditional feelings as it showed the young ruler as being similar in appearance to Caracalla and other Roman emperors. Some historians use this lack of archeological evidence to claim that Elagabalus cross gender behavior was greatly exaggerated or even simply made up to smear her. I think it is just as plausible that the fact that only gender normative visual records of Elagabalus survive shows that her sexual and gender variance was disapproved of and often hidden and can lead one to suppose that only images more respectable to Ancient Roman values were preserved, while evidence of cross gender behavior was effaced.

As Elagabalus’ standing decreased in the eyes of powerful Romans, she was forced to adopt her cousin Severus Alexander as a “son” and successor. Alexander was only four years younger! Meticulous care was taken to ensure that this boy was not corrupted by his eccentric cousin and was instead carefully reared according to the most conservative Greco-Roman values. Understanding quickly that Alexander was a threat, Elagabalus sought to remove him but the ploy failed and when coming to appear before the camp of the Praetorian guards, Elagabalus was murdered along with her mother. Their mutilated bodies were carried through the streets and then thrown into the Tiber as if to wash away the upset that came upon the Roman world.

Legacy

After Elagabalus’ reign, women were never allowed to enter the building where the Senate was convened. Her establishment of a “women’s senate” was considered one of the many examples of Elagabalus’ depravity. The fact that women like her grandmother, mother, and aunt wielded significant power and influence was also condemned by writers with deep patriarchal values. Care was taken to erase Elagabalus from the historical record like other Roman emperors that were considered tyrants in a process called damnatio memoriae. Elagabalus was used by subsequent historians, Roman and post-Roman, as an example of one of the worst rulers ever.

Transgender behavior existed in Rome before and after Elagabalus. Transgender practice was tolerated and even sometimes respected by the Roman populace when it was practiced by the male-born priestesses of Cybele, known as the Gallae. These women would celebrate a taurobolium which (originally meant to be the castration of a bull) was a castration ceremony where someone formally defined as male would lose their genitalia, bleed like in menstruation or childbirth, and then subsequently wear women’s clothing and go by female names. Like other cultural practices this was a highly ritualistic and mystical understanding of gender identity. Rome was a vast empire and culturally diverse empire and in some respects it can be said a marketplace of religions existed. A male-born person with strong cross gender identification could potentially seek out the local Gallae temple to Cybele and have herself castrated, both to please her goddess and also perhaps to fix a deep inadequate feeling toward her own anatomy.

 

The Gallae however, existed somewhat on the periphery of Roman society. While Roman polytheism greatly revered the Goddess Cybele as a very important goddess, her worship was not considered Roman and was not integrated with traditional Roman practice. For a brief span that didn’t exceed four years, however, a radical transgender and religious experiment was imposed on the Roman world by a passionate young person known as Elagabalus. It is a mistake to suppose that Elagabalus had goals akin to contemporary understandings of feminism and gender theory: Elagabalus was a product of her own time and place and the social structures in force at the time ensured her rise to power. Transgender people and phenomena have always existed but for once a person of strong gender variance caused a deep upset in an ancient culture.

 

Part of : Challenging Gender Boundaries: A Trans Biography Project by Students of Catherine Jacquet. A collection of biographies written by the students in Catherine Jacquet's Fall 2012 class at the University of Illinois, Chicago. The class was titled "Gender Non-Conformity in Historical Perspective."

A Brief Biography of Elagabalus: the transgender ruler of Rome. By Alexis Mijatovic.OutHistory, 2012. 

Lesbian Magazines in Weimar Berlin

 

Berlin in the 1920s was ablaze with sexual and gender freedom. Magazines at newsstands boasted covers featuring people who were transgender and clad scantily. Their headlines touted stories on “Homosexual Women and the Upcoming Legislative Elections,” and offered, on occasion, homoerotic fiction inside its pages.

Publications like Die Freundin (The Girlfriend); Frauenliebe (Women Love, which later became Garçonne); and Das 3. Geschlecht (The Third Sex, which included writers who might identify as transgender today), found dedicated audiences who read their takes on culture and nightlife as well as the social and political issues of the day. The relaxed censorship rules under the Weimar Republic enabled gay women writers to establish themselves professionally while also giving them an opportunity to legitimize an identity that only a few years later would be under threat.

 “Reading stories about other queer women was such a powerful way that women came to terms with their own queerness,” Laurie Marhoefer, a professor of history at the University of Washington, told me. “That was super important for women more than for men because men would just have more opportunities to find other queer people.” Marhoefer, who first learned of these publications as a graduate student in Berlin in the 2000s, is part of a growing group of academics focusing on this oft-forgotten moment in German history.

Such research is part of a wider interest in the Weimar Republic, bolstered by recent TV shows like Transparent (which drew connections between the 1920s and modern-day queer identity) and the gritty Babylon Berlin, whose characters include a female sex worker who spends her days as a detective. Benjamin Tallis described the appeal of these depictions in New Perspectives: “The visceral thrill of watching 1920s Berlin as a creative, decadent socio-cultural mecca, beset by suffering, and haunted by myriad ghosts yet alive with possibility, is tempered by the knowledge of the political abyss that awaits.”

Although these fictional tales tend to romanticize this interwar period, the primary source documents that miraculously survived the period of the Third Reich and subsequent and repressive Cold War years provide a richer and more complicated picture.

There were some twenty-five to thirty queer publications in Berlin between 1919 and 1933, most of which published around eight pages of articles on a bi-weekly basis. Of these, at least six were specifically oriented toward lesbians. What made them unique is the space they made for queer women, who had traditionally been marginalized on account of both gender and sexuality, to grapple with their role in a rapidly changing society. (The concept of the “new,” albeit straight, woman in the Weimar Republic has been researched broadly, including by Rüdiger Graf in Central European History, who writes that it reflected a crisis of masculinity following defeat in the First World War as well fears over the country’s future when women were putting off getting married and having children.)

In these interwar years in Germany, queer and transgender identity became more accepted, in large part thanks to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish doctor whose Institut für Sexualwissenschaft focused on issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. At the same time, women in Germany were making strides toward greater independence and equity; they gained the right to vote in 1918, and feminist organizations like Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine cultivated space for women in public spheres, encouraging their advancement in politics. As Sara Ann Sewell writes in the journal Central European History, the German Communist Party created the Red Women and Girls’ League in 1925 to attract more women and working-class people, particularly through organizing factory workers.

More generally, German women were becoming increasingly empowered. Queer people—including women—rallied around the abolishment of contemporary sodomy laws. This struggle “created a wider climate of publication, activism, and social organization that was much more embracing of different types of queer and trans lives,” according to Katie Sutton, an associate professor of German and gender studies at the Australian National University.

Like Marhoefer, Sutton came upon the Weimar-era lesbian publications in Berlin and was surprised that there wasn’t more engagement with these magazines or with the queer history of the Weimar Republic more broadly on the part of academics in the English-speaking world. Exceptions included the notable work of historian Claudia Schoppmann and her 1996 Days of Masquerade and Heike Schader’s 2004 Virile, Vamps, und wilde Veilchen (Virility, Vamps, and Wild Violets). The latter focused on the queer tropes that proliferated in lesbian magazine fiction of the time, and their creation, according to Sutton, of “codes of lesbian desire and lesbian eroticism” through color, flora, smells, and body parts, notably mouths, lips, hands, and breasts.

For its part, magazine fiction of the time challenged some of the restrictions of class and race in its love stories. A 1932 issue of Die Freundin, for instance, includes a story about a relationship between the German Töpsdrill and the Moroccan Benorina. Exoticizing of the “other” was common; Sutton points to another piece of fiction published in Ledige Frauen (Single Women) in 1928 about Helga, a German coffee importer, who falls for Nuela, a servant from Java. Notwithstanding the white, sometimes racist perspectives of the narrators, such stories offered compelling renderings of women-centered utopias.

Outside of fantasy, these publications also created a space for readers to assert themselves in the real world through personal ads and event listings. There included cream puff eating contests, ladies and trans balls, and lake excursions on paddle steamers. In fact, aspects of lesbian culture also seeped into the mainstream, particularly when it came to fashion, with a rise in the popularity of short haircuts, straight skirts, and pantsuits. There was little difference between the imagery in mainstream fashion magazines and the masculinized aesthetic eroticized in the queer ones. The “hint of queerness” in the mainstream, Sutton said, was “sexy and fascinating, but also a bit scary and potentially off putting.” A popular element in lesbian publications, the monocle was similarly charged, and, Sutton says, “a queerly coded, quite masculine symbol of owning the gaze.”

Such sartorial choices were in keeping with debates in the lesbian magazines of the time around the “extent that masculinity might be seen as hierarchically superior to that of the feminine lesbian women,” according to Sutton. Moreover, these debates foreshadowed the butch/femme debates of the 1980s and 1990s and the border wars of the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Style was particularly significant for trans women and men who in the Weimar Republic defined themselves with a variety of terms: both as transvestites and masculine women who wore men’s clothes but identified as women. Trans people were given space in both their own magazines and even in some of the lesbian ones, highlighting a sense of cross-identity camaraderie. Die Freundin had a regular trans supplement highlighting these voices.

 In a 1929 issue, a writer named Elly R criticized the treatment of trans people in mainstream media, referencing sensational coverage of men wearing their wives’ wedding dresses. “Everywhere in nature we find transitional forms, in the physical and chemical bodies, in the plants and the animals,” she wrote. “Everywhere one form passes into another, and everywhere there is a connection. Nowhere in nature is there a delimited, fixed type. Is it only in man that this transition should be missing? As there is no fixed form in nature, a strict separation between the sexes is also impossible.”

These magazines were resilient, a testament to the strength of the communities they served. Still, they faced challenges. The 1926 Harmful Publications Act was intended to impose moral censorship on the widespread pulp literature sold at kiosks and newsstands, including the queer publications, which often featured nude photographs.

The Catholic and Protestant Churches as well as public morality organizations and conservative politicians led the fight against what they called “trash and filth literature.” As Klaus Petersen explains in a German Studies Review article, the list of materials, which included at least seventy works on sexology and “filth literature,” could still be sold, just not to those under age eighteen. While “the instrument was blunt and [its] impact minimal,” the restriction was boosted by members of religious and youth groups that checked up on newsstands to see what material was visible or advertised to children. (This is not a far cry from the Nazi book burnings that would occur just a few years later.) But the law also spurred a counter-campaign by writers, publishers, intellectuals, and leftist political activists who objected to these limitations, as Petersen explains.

“This coalition of protest groups against infringements of the freedom of expression considered the Index a simplistic and entirely ineffective means to avoid an honest discussion of the fast change in social attitudes and moral values and campaigned against it as an unconstitutional instrument of suppression.”

Despite their relative progressivism, these publications also represented a rather narrow, bourgeois segment of the German population. Even if women had greater access to education and publishing opportunities, the women who enjoyed this greater access were largely urban elites. Little if no space was given to proletarian struggles. “Middle-class values of respectability and citizenship shaped the political agenda, with contributors drawing on the powerful language of national inclusion in formulating their demands of legal and social acceptance,” wrote Sutton in an article in German Studies Review.

It’s also important to note that whatever sexual liberation the LGBTQ+ community enjoyed was at the discretion of the state, whose goal was to control its members. This was seen in the Transvestitenscheine (“transvestite certificates”) handed out by the German police to protect against the arrest of those cross-dressing in public. Between 1908-1933, dozens of such passes were distributed. They also guarded against arrests for sodomy law violations and played a role in a 1927 battle over legalizing prostitution, largely aimed at preventing the spread of venereal diseases.

That said, the plight of sex workers was largely excluded from consideration in the publications in question, and mentions of their readers’ privilege were few and far between. Still, a 1929 Die Freunden article cautioned readers: “Don’t go to your entertainments while thousands of our sisters mourn their lives in gloomy despair.”

More notably, these magazines gave precious little foresight into what was to come in Germany: the attempted extermination of all who did not fit the Aryan ideal. That, of course, included lesbians, some of whom perhaps took steps to save their own skin. Ruth Roellig, who wrote for Frauenliebe and published Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin’s Lesbian Women) in 1928, a first-of-its-kind travel guide to queer Berlin, published a second book in 1937. Soldaten, Tod, Tänzerin (Soldiers, Death, Dancer), an anti-Semitic screed, proved to be Roellig’s last book, though she lived until 1969. Selli Engler, a lesbian editor who founded the magazine Die BIF – Blätter Idealer Frauenfreundschaften (Papers on Ideal Women Friendships), wrote Heil Hitler, a play she sent directly to the führer.

As feminist and queer activism grew in Germany in the 1970s, so too did interest in the Weimar period. In 1973, Homosexual Action West Berlin began to collect flyers, posters, and press releases in an effort to create a comprehensive archive of lesbian history. The group eventually morphed into Spinnboden, Europe’s largest and oldest lesbian archive, with more than 50 thousand items in its holdings, magazines among them. Katja Koblitz, who runs the archive, says the existence of these lesbian periodicals is invaluable.

“These magazines were in one part a sign of the blossoming and of the richness of the lesbian subculture in these days,” she said. “Reading these magazines was a form of reassurance: Here we are, we exist.”

Publishing Queer Berlin. By  Hannah Steinkopf-Frank.   JSTOR Daily, June 7, 2023.

 

Each year, Lesbian Visibility Day on April 26 gives prominence to an often unseen minority. In Weimar Berlin, before the Nazis seized power, writer Ruth Roellig put same-sex female desire on the map for the first time.

It was 1928 and Berlin was undergoing a revolution. Poverty, insecurity and political polarization were everywhere. Yet at the same time, the German capital was enjoying a taste of freedom that had once seemed utopian. The storm of fascism had not arrived yet, and women and sexual minorities were eager to claim their place in society.

"The Weimar Republic was, especially in Berlin, in eruption," Sabine Balke, managing director of the Digital German Women's Archive, told DW. "Everything was possible."

Or so it seemed. Even though female emancipation was making day-to-day strides, crossdressers could still be arrested on the streets, and homosexual relations were criminalized.

Lesbians, often considered the most invisible group within what we today call the LGBTQ community, also had a glimpse of how the world could be if its rules were different. What we know about that today is to a great extent due to the work of a woman who drew the map of same-sex female love and desire in that era.

Heady times

Ruth Roellig (1878-1969) began writing just after finishing school. Hers was a male, straight world, yet she soon managed to publish fiction and travel journals. But it was the Weimar Republic and the relative press freedom that came with it that paved the way for some of her most remarkable works, at least from a contemporary perspective.

"For lesbians, the more relaxed censorship under the Republic was important. Many new lesbian magazines appeared," historian Laurie Marhoefer told DW. Garçonne, Die Freundin or Frauenliebe were some of the publications that gave homosexual and bisexual women a place not just to tell their own stories but also to discover safe spaces and leisure activities that did not force them to hide their sexual orientation.

 "One could go to the clubs and meet similar people, other lesbian women, to dance, to make music," Balke says. It was the time when cabaret queen Claire Waldoff's - also openly homosexual - rebel voice was played in the radios all over the country.

Pioneering work and historic document

Through her articles in Frauenliebe, Roellig became a prominent figure in the lesbian scene of Weimar Berlin. Publishing those pieces also meant outing herself, but it did not seem to be a great danger at the time. As it often does, progress must have felt irreversible.

Nonetheless, it wasn't until 1928 that her greatest contribution to the lesbian history in Germany was published. In Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin's Lesbian Women), she extensively depicted the German capital's network of bars, cafés and clubs aimed at this public. It was much more than a pioneering queer city guide.

"It's very important because it's evidence of what was there," Sabine Balke underlines. Also the head of Spinnboden, Berlin's lesbian archive, Balke is aware of the historical importance of such a document: "In the 70s, when women started to fight for a more open sexuality or against the abortion ban, they did not know that there had been something similar in the 1920s."

The backlash

The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 also meant the end of this brief period of sexual emancipation. The magazines and venues that in the previous decade had become so important for sexual minorities were shut down. Roellig's life also changed forever. "She had exposed herself," says Balke. "She could not write as a lesbian woman anymore. She had to quickly make sure that everything disappeared."

Yet it was not the end of her writing career. Ruth Roellig did publish another novel in 1937: Soldaten, Tod, Tänzerin ("Soldiers, Death, Dancer"). With its anti-Semitic content, this book left a disturbing legacy. Within a few years, around six million Jews would be killed in the Holocaust. Roellig never wrote again.

Historian Laurie Marhoefer insists on the need to underline the controversial part of this pioneer in lesbian activism: "Every time we mention her, we also have to consider this part of her legacy. She was no 'bystander' in the Nazi period."

No black and white

Balke agrees, but also thinks it's important to go beyond that. "It was a question of survival. That's why we today cannot just say: She was a Nazi." After having openly maintained a lifestyle hated by the regime, Ruth Roellig was in complete danger. "But it could also be that she found that all right and was genuinely anti-Semitic," she adds.

"I think this shows us that people do not have only one story, and that they're not only good, or only bad" – a concept that, as Balke points out, Hannah Arendt underscored in her work.

 Whether Roellig was truly anti-Semitic or not is a question we cannot answer nowadays, Balke believes: "It's very hard to judge." By the time she died in Berlin, in 1969, she no longer held openly anti-Semitic views nor was she openly lesbian. What remain are her books and articles, the controversial legacy of the woman who made lesbians visible in Berlin decades before the Stonewall riots and the first gay pride marches.

At the time, however, Roellig was probably unaware of the importance of Berlins lesbische Frauen, Balke believes. The book was lost for many years and re-edited in the 1970s under the title Lila Nächte (Purple Nights). And for Balke, thanks to that book, "Ruth Roellig lives in our history."

 The woman who gave birth to lesbian Berlin. By Enrique Anarte. Deutsche Welle,  April 26, 2019. 

I came across these magazines when researching the topic of my most recent written assessment. By now, I have carried an intense fascination with the sexual socio-political climate of the Weimar Republic for a couple of years. On the course ‘Reassembling Modernism: Artists’ Networks in Europe 1909-1960’ as an undergraduate, I was introduced to Weimar culture when we examined the Neue Frau in the Berlin of the 1920s. It was a text by Maria Makela entitled ‘New women, new men, new objectivity’, however, that truly peaked my interest in the subject.

This year, I revisited the Neue Frau and explored her myth and ideological potential whilst considering her as a phenomenon of cosmopolitanism—in relation to class, gender and violence in the city. Makela’s essay was my starting point, and these magazines gave me an example of how the Neue Frau’s multi-faceted identity was utilised to develop a progressive symbol of gender subversion. The Neue Frau/neue frauen is the German adaptation of the New Woman. The New Woman was a female figure, a new gender type, who emerged in modern society towards the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a popularised construct in the first half of the twentieth century.
 
 

The Neue Frau was a fashionable woman who adopted traditionally heteronormative, ‘masculine’ traits within her dress identity to disassociate herself from the pre-WWI woman. Her image epitomised modern femininity, but it also effectively mirrored how interwar Germany perceived itself to be under cultural threat from the masculinisation of a ‘New’ generation of emancipated women. In the pages of queer publications, however, the Neue Frau’s image was represented without ridicule or cynicism. It was interesting to reconfigure my own perception of her image after months of aligning it with the caricatured parody that male, Neue Sachlichkeit artists had painted her to be.

In the case of the women depicted in Liebende Frauen (1927-1930), the tensions felt nationwide between opposing genders are made redundant. At the time of the1929/30 issue, Liebende Frauen was one of two lesbian magazines in Berlin; the other, the more widely-known Die Freundin (The Girlfriend: Journal for Ideal Friendship between Women) had been in circulation since 1924. Art historian Heike Schader notes that Liebende Frauen is most likely a reprint of the magazine Frauenliebe (Women Love); which in turn was renamed Garçonne in 1930.

In the above image, a cover dated 1929, the female subject sports a bubikopf—a haircut strongly associated with the Neue Frau, which translates directly to ‘boy’s head’ and was reconfigured into numerous variations, such as the shortened and smoothed ‘Eton crop’, similar to that of Louise Brooks’ Lulu in Pandora’s Box. The overlapping strings of pearl necklaces that decorate her neck, the draped cut of her neckline and way in which her face is coquettishly turned from the camera’s gaze tells the reader that this Neue Frau, like Brooks’ Lulu—will not apologise for claiming her own sexuality. This cover presents allure and a conscious play on the provocation of desires, celebrating the figure of the New Woman by virtue of her dress and demeanour.

These covers are truly wonderful examples of how the New Woman, specifically the homosexual New Woman, found alternative means of how her image could be disseminated in popular culture via ways less damaging to her personhood. Each cover is a portal into an important history for women, and they each contribute to the Neue Frau as a social construct: one that was repeatedly well-documented until the Weimar Republic’s fall. 

To see more of these wonderful covers, go to the Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv und Bibliothek, Berlin’s online archives: www.meta-katalog.eu

Additionally, there are lots of many interesting texts covering the Neue Frau’s image, such as:
Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture by Katherina von Ankum
Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation by Ute Frevert
Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses in German Culture, 1918-1933 by Mila Ganeva
The New Woman International by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco
Visions of the “Neue Frau”: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany by Marsha Meskimmon
The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany by Katie Sutton
 
Sources
Maria Makela, “New Women, New Men, New Objectivity” in New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933
Heike Schader, ‘Liebende Frauen’
Katie Sutton, ‘The Masculinisation of Woman’ in The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany
 
In her image: the documentation of the Neue Frau in German Weimar-era lesbian magazines. By Kathryn Reed. The Courtauld,  February 26, 2019. 

Before World War I, Berlin was known for its large male homosexual subculture. After the war, however, the sudden emergence of a visible lesbian subculture was unprecedented and remarkable because, previously, lesbianism had been thought to be rare. The development of modern mass culture coincided with the rise of homosexual subculture, facilitating the formation of lesbian identities. However, as will be suggested first, these identities also had their roots in medical discourse and the homosexual emancipation movement, which looked to medical research to support its demands for homosexual rights. Also, lesbian clubs and nightclubs, as well as lesbian magazines, were closely linked to the homosexual emancipation movement, and they were the sites which brought women together and which facilitated lesbian identification. Therefore, this paper will explore the production of these identities by examining the subcultural network and, in particular, the lesbian magazine Die Freundin, as a mass cultural publication in which science, mass culture, and subculture intersected. This will highlight the constructed, unstable and ambiguous nature of Weimar lesbian identities, which were varied and overlapping.

Scholars of sexual cultures and gender relations in Germany have tended to overlook Weimar lesbian identities, confining their interest to the subculture itself, rather than to the role it played in the development and elaboration of homosexual identities more generally. For example, in relation to lesbians, the works of Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson, Ilse Kokula, Adele Meyer and Claudia Schoppmann have provided valuable documentation of the Imperial, Weimar and Nazi periods. More specifically, both Richard Dyer and Ruby Rich have examined homosexual cinema in Weimar,while Katharina Vogel and Petra Schlierkamp have documented the history of the lesbian magazines Die Freundin and Garçonne respectively. One recent scholar, Christiane von Langerke, has investigated the numerous historical designations for lesbians in order to prevent these women from being subsumed under the male-identified label of ‘homosexual.’  All of this work is invaluable as a foundation for further scholarship.

However, as Patrice Petro’s study of female spectatorship and textual practice in Weimar Germany has powerfully illustrated, gender is of paramount importance to representation and ways of looking. That is, Petro has shown “the existence of a female spectator, and the function of representation for mobilizing her desires and unconscious fantasies.” Like the women’s magazines in Petro’s study, lesbian magazines such as Die Freundin made a direct address to women, articulating their desires and offering them ‘modern’ new conceptions – and choices – for gender roles, sexuality, relationships and, hence, possibilities for identification.

This suggests that a study which builds on the inroads made by Gudrun Schwarz and Geertje Mak, and specifically considers the nature and production of lesbian sexual identities, is needed. Both von Lengerke and Faderman have illuminated the changes and continuities of woman-centred relationships across time, but such an approach has a tendency to imply an essential lesbian identity, which is constant and, despite the variations they discuss, well-defined. For example, Faderman encapsulates lesbian behaviour under a single rubric of “romantic friendships” that spans countries and centuries. In contrast, this paper will situate lesbianism within a specific historical and cultural context. In the same way that Denise Riley has disrupted the idea of ‘woman’ as a discrete category,[ this paper will highlight the constructed and unstable nature of Weimar lesbian identities.

In the late nineteenth century, as scientists increasingly turned their attention to sexuality, a growing body of medical literature was produced. In 1886, Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book, Psycopathia Sexualis, asserted that homosexuality was an abnormal congenital manifestation. The physicians Magnus Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch both expanded on this discourse, arguing that true homosexuals were biologically predisposed to members of the same sex. Conversely, they believed that pseudohomosexuals – usually women – were the creation of external circumstances, such as the absence of male sexual partners in prisons and schools.

As European sexologists described and explained other sexual ‘anomalies,’ the list of medical identifications grew. As one Weimar transvestite explained, “when sexual science began to concern itself with the sexual orientation of humans, it searched for words with which to designate the different variations. That is how names like sadist, masochist, fetishist, exhibitionist, bisexual, transvestite, homosexual, and so on originated.” Similarly, the labels for lesbians expanded to include ‘masculine lesbian,’ ‘feminine lesbian,’ ‘transvestite,’ ‘Mannweib’ (literally, ‘Man-Woman’ but suggesting a masculine woman), ‘Männin’ (‘Butch’), and ‘gleichgeschlechtlichliebende Frau’ (‘same-sex loving woman’). The variety of names for women suggests the instability of lesbian identity and the expansion of the discourse.

Medical ‘science’ was integral to conceptions of sexuality and underpinned the homosexual emancipation movement. Hirschfeld in particular argued that since homosexuality was inborn, it was natural and should not be persecuted, and in 1897 he founded Germany’s first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. After the First World War, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin (1919) and, in 1923, the League for Human Rights, a group dedicated to homosexual emancipation.

At the same time, the manifold growth of mass culture, particularly in Berlin, brought homosexuals together and facilitated identification. There were mutually reinforcing relationships between the organized homosexual rights movement, the large number of public leisure and entertainment venues (like clubs and nightclubs), and the extensive publications of the homosexual press. Indeed, one reader of Die Freundin, a male transvestite, stated that after he read the books of Iwan Bloch and Otto Weininger, as well as others, he had the greatest longing to go to Berlin and spend time with people who were his like.

 A 1931 Berlin travel guide highlighting the city’s sexual attractions claimed that there were at least 160 bars and clubs for male and female homosexuals. With the (temporary) abolition of censorship, films dealing directly with male and female homosexuality were shown in Berlin’s 300 cinemas. A large quantity of lesbian popular fiction, newspapers, and magazines also appeared. The German Friendship Association added community-building activities to this entertainment scene, and to the political activities of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, by holding dances and weekly meetings and publishing a weekly newspaper, Die Freundschaft.

The first guide to the homosexual club scene, Ruth Roellig’s Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin’s Lesbian Women), was published in 1928 with a foreword by Magnus Hirschfeld. This guide purported to educate and enlighten homosexuals and the public,but it also served to alert and connect women to the wider lesbian community. One woman recalled that Berlin’s Toppkeller Club was “so exciting that women from all walks of life came, even actresses. It was always so crowded, and on Fridays you could hardly get in at all.”

One of the most popular ladies’ clubs was the Damenklub Violetta, led by Lotte Hahm, a well-known figure in the homosexual rights movement .The Violetta hosted many dances, such as the “Calling-Card Ladies’ Ball” (Damenball mit Saalpost) and the “Dance Roulette” (Roulette-Tanz), and also auto tours of the Spreewald and fashion shows for masculine women and transvestites. One of the most popular activities was the “Moonlight Steamship Party” (Mondschein-Dampferpartie), in which a ship carried passengers from Spittelmarkt to Mugelsee, where they disembarked at the Inselhotel, enjoyed orchestra, cabaret, and tombola, and danced until 5 or 6 a.m., after which they returned to the ship for a quick sunrise photograph before sailing back.

Such clubs could also be found in other German-speaking cities, including Zurich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Breslau, and the League for Human Rights encouraged women across Germany, Switzerland and Austria to start and join clubs in their own towns and regions. This helped to expand the subculture and the homosexual rights movement itself.

In creating a sense of community through common experience, clubs informally politicized lesbians, linking the social scene to the homosexual rights movement. For instance, at Violetta, women sang “Das Lila-Lied” (The Purple Song), which declared lesbians’ difference and eventual liberation.Lotte Hahm also reminded women that “Not only dance and social events can bring you equality, but rather struggle is also necessary.”

Lesbian magazines, of which there were at least five, were available at newsstands or by subscription, and together they circulated to more than one million readers across the German-speaking countries. The magazines’ centrality in facilitating the growth of subculture and identification can be illustrated by examining the most popular publication, Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), which appeared monthly, and later weekly, with some interruptions from 1924 to March 1933.

Die Freundin was closely affiliated with the League for Human Rights through the group’s chairman, Friedrich Radszuweit, who also published the magazine. Given this overlap of the publisher’s interests, it is not surprising that through its editorials, Die Freundin politicized homosexuals by highlighting the League’s concerns, such as the repeal of Paragraph 175, the law criminalizing male homosexuality. Die Freundin accepted only advertisements from members of the League for Human Rights, and it exhorted its readers to patronize only those clubs sanctioned by the publication. The need for club owners to hold League memberships also undoubtedly benefited the homosexual rights movement by increasing the organization’s size.

Die Freundin also played a significant role in fostering the growth of the subculture by publicizing homosexual films, clubs, nightclubs and books available from the Berlin publishing house Radszuweit, which published both non-fiction, including medical books on sexuality,and fictional works, such as Grete von Urbanitzki’s Der wilde Garten (The Wild Garden), Anne Elisabeth Weirauch’s trilogy Der Skorpion, the German translation of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (Quell der Einsamkeit) and even novels that presented a less flattering image of lesbians, such as Alfred Döblin’s Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (The Two Girlfriends and their Murder by Poisoning). These kinds of publications facilitated lesbian self-identification. As one lonely and isolated woman living in a small town explained, she “had only one joy..., the book The Scorpion. I love it. With it, I feel that I belong to you, that no one can tear the innate feeling of happiness out of the heart.”

Clearly, physical and psychological isolation were major problems for both lesbians and transvestites. Personal advertisements helped overcome this, bringing together readers from as far away as Amsterdam. “Nuremberg. Lonely woman seeks same, educated but modern thinking girlfriend.”

In the impersonal city, Die Freundin could also be used to signal one’s identity to others ‘in the know.’ Several articles in the magazine depicted scenarios in which women reading or purchasing the magazine met like-minded women who had noted their choice of reading material. For example, one story told how a transvestite reading Die Freundin in a café attracted the notice of another woman. Another story began with two strangers meeting accidentally at the newspaper vendor where they had both just purchased Die Freundin.

Through Die Freundin lesbians discovered other women who “yearned for a great love,” but who, as the fictional character Lotte explained, “could not like any man.” Lesbians found both capable and career-minded women who reflected their own aspirations, as well as women who embodied the ‘feminine’ ideals to the extent that they were comfortable only in the company of other women. If women felt comfortable in men’s clothing, or if they embraced the modern styles, they also found like-minded women in the magazine – and the magazine gave them a name. One lesbian, Charlotte Falk, explained, “Through my indifference, through the style of my clothes, which are sporty but completely normal, my shoes, I... became a Mannweib... I had absolutely no idea that so many women love as I do...”

If the small advertisement section of Die Freundin provided a way for women (and men) in even the remotest German-speaking towns to find and make contact with one another and to psychologically, if not literally, expand their community, the readers of Die Freundin also developed a real sense of fellowship. A letter sent to Die Freundin about another reader’s contribution on the issue of cross-dressing and marriage began warmly with “Dear sister Willina!” and closed with “It would be a great pleasure for me to hear more from you and also from your wife herself. Warmest greetings. Your Georgette.”

 Yet it was not only a sense of fellowship that facilitated identification. Die Freundin’s representations and image were instrumental in the production of sexual identities. However, few articles in Die Freundin programmatically outlined female homosexual identities. Instead, they were elaborated implicitly through its fiction, non-fiction and/or medical articles.

In a classification scheme that invoked the heterosexual gender paradigm, lesbians were often differentiated as either ‘virile’ or ‘feminine.’ As with their heterosexual counterparts, these traits were thought to be manifested both physically and psychologically.The feminine woman was “echt weiblich” (“genuinely feminine”). She was dependent and had a clingy character, but was also a very skilled “housewife,” whereas the ‘virile’ woman had no affinity for housework, was independent and career-minded. This kind of male-female complementarity was seen and reinforced at the Klub Monbijou in the Bell-Dance, in which only the ‘young lads’ or ‘Bubis’ would hold bells, which they used to ring for their ‘gals’ or ‘Mädis.’

However, in the magazine’s fiction, the virile ‘type’ tended to be more common, probably owing to the notion that lesbianism was an inverted sexuality in which a woman was masculinized. For example, one novel serialized in Die Freundin described the lesbian Olga as a cigar-smoker and as having dreams in which she rode horses in the dark of night . In addition:

    “She felt herself to be a man and believed that she felt better in such surroundings. Even her rooms appeared to be furnished according to a rather masculine taste. She had a drawing room with an escritoire. She possessed a smoking room and a gaming room. Her bedroom gave the impression of being austere and cold. One found no vanity table or attractive Biedermeier armchair of the kind that women usually love. The walls were decorated with female figures, portraits, nude studies – the only objects to lend the rooms a certain warmth.”

Lesbian and transvestite “marriages” also reflected male-female role division, and most male transvestites seemed to accept and regard housework as a logical extension of their gender role. Indeed, an affinity for either a masculine or a feminine profession seemed to validate what was believed to be one’s “true” gender.

Visible manifestations of lesbian sexual identities were also to be found on the covers of Die Freundin. Most often, the images featured women as objects of sexual desire, which, indeed, they were. Very early on, readers expressed their sexual longings by requesting more nude photos. Over time these depictions expanded to include exotic ‘orientals’ , ‘natural’ women , New Women , masculine women (who were usually celebrities), and transvestites . Although photographs of bare-breasted women were the norm and many images were reused – not just once or twice, but many times over the years – the array of representations suggests that the lesbian community was comprised of a great variety of women and that over time lesbian identities became increasingly complex.

Other representations, particularly those associated with “modern” women, also interested Die Freundin’s readers. For instance, the incidence of smoking among women around the world was discussed in the article “Rauchende Frauen” (“Smoking Women”).] There were also articles on a possible tax on the Bubikopf (pageboy hairstyle) and on the British Lords’ opinions of short hair. Meinungsaustausch Fragen (“Exchange-of-opinion Questions”) even asked for readers’ views on the Bubikopf.  In one response, Irene von Behlau came out strongly in support of the Bubikopf and urged all lesbian women to embrace the fashion.

As this accounting suggests, readers actively participated in shaping their own identities. They sent Die Freundin literary contributions, as well as their personal experiences, insights and opinions on “Questions of the Day” (“Tagesfragen”) and “Fashion Questions” (“Modefragen”). Regarding the latter, a transvestite named Ellen van Derk complained that men who did not want to shave their beards should not wear women’s clothing and that, moreover, too many transvestites wore jewellery with artificial pearls.

I will return to the issue of transvestites, but what should be clear at this point is that lesbians were not part of a singular, discrete, uniform category, whose identity was the expression of a singular and innately fixed disposition. As will be shown below, their identities were varied, ambiguous and contested. Clearly, one reader was aware of the constructed nature of sexual identities when s/he asserted that “the norm is not something given by nature, but rather is determined by us, created from our own minds.”

Lesbians reappropriated and rearticulated their identities from medical and popular discourses and countered the dominant discourses that labelled them “sick” and “unnatural.” For example, Die Freundin’s editors asserted homosexual morality by pointing to heterosexual depravity as the cause of the high incidence of children and youth infected with venereal disease by their fathers or through prostitution.

Lesbians also referred to the philosopher and theorist Otto Weininger’s unfortunately but indicatively influential book Sex and Character and invoked the existence of a sexual continuum to assert that their sexuality (which was linked to gender) was a natural variation, a transitional form (“Übergangsform”) found between the masculine and feminine poles of gender. Contributors to Die Freundin argued that: “Nowhere in nature does a fixed and demarcated type exist... Just as there is no firmly delimited form in nature, a strict distinction between the sexes can be ruled out.”The concept of ‘natural variation’ confirmed lesbians’ belief that their identity was an essential trait rather than an acquired vice. They refuted accusations of degeneracy by arguing that homosexuals had existed throughout history, from Sappho, to Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Die Freundin’s inclusion of male and heterosexual transvestites, along with lesbian transvestites, who really combined two identities, complicates the question of lesbian identification. Pictures and regular articles about male transvestites reinforced the message that the community of “Girlfriends” was not limited to the female sex but also included those with female “natures.” Even after the Human Rights League created a special magazine for them, transvestites continued to read, write to, and advertise in Die Freundin, suggesting their identification with lesbians.

Geertje Mak has shown that within the discourse of sexual science elaborated by Magnus Hirschfeld in Die Transvestiten (Transvestites) (1910), a man’s internal drive to wear female clothes was considered a natural sexual variation that did not automatically make him a homosexual. Mak argues that women were not included in this concept of transvestitism and, as a consequence, their sexuality remained linked to their gender, defining them as “inverted.” However, the editors of Die Freundin applied the concept of natural sexual variation broadly to both males and females. This explains why the line between transvestitism and lesbianism was so unclear. The magazine actually offered two competing discourses: the concept of the “inverted, masculine woman”  and the notion of “sexual variation in nature” . While much of the magazine’s fiction and photographs offered up images of ‘masculine’ women such as “Charly and Boy,” it did this alongside of articles that insisted that: “There are only bisexual variations.”

The ambiguity was compounded by the fact that the definition of a transvestite seems itself to have been in a state of flux. The term ‘the third sex’ was used by Hirschfeld until about 1910 to denote all homosexuals, but after the war, Radszuweit Publishing Company used it in the book Das 3. Geschlecht (The Third Sex) to refer specifically to transvestites. Still, men and women moved fluidly back and forth between the two identities of ‘transvestite’ and ‘lesbian.’ The ambiguity – indeed, the overlap – of lesbian and transvestite identities is illustrated by one reader of Die Freundin, Hans Irmgard Markus, who wrote that where she lived she had few opportunities to meet a girlfriend and that she had been forced by her uncle to marry a man. Gradually, however, Markus achieved her husband’s conversion into a woman, by inducing him to dress in women’s clothing and perform housework. She, on the other hand, had assumed a male role, dressing as a man and becoming a city councillor. In this way, Markus testified, their relationship became “like one that usually occurs between girlfriends.” Yet this configuration, which was in effect a simple reversal of heterosexual gender roles, indicates the ambiguities in a system that tried to transcend the traditional gender paradigm (one that fixed sexuality and behaviour to gender), but which was nevertheless beholden to it.

In theory, what constituted a ‘true’ lesbian was a congenital disposition, but Die Freundin also implicitly made the distinction that, unlike pseudo-homosexuals, true lesbians were indifferent to, or had an aversion to, men. One story, “How Hannelore Fell in Love with a Man,” vigorously illustrates this belief. This short story describes a romantic tryst that occurred one afternoon between Hannelore and a ‘man’ whom she met by chance at a café. The author emphasizes the confusion felt by Hannelore, whose indifference and distaste for men was normally so great that even taking a seat near one was to be avoided. When eventually the new boyfriend removed ‘his’ male disguise to reveal that ‘he’ was, in fact, a woman, the message was clear: true lesbians are only ever attracted to other women. Moreover, the story suggests that this attraction was such a strongly ingrained biological affinity that it transcended the deceptive outward appearance of male clothing.

Bisexuality, on the other hand, was another matter. Despite its characterization in Die Freundin as a variation of transvestitism, it was largely treated as a form of pseudo-homosexuality. Indeed, after a reader complained to the publication that one could not speak freely in it on the topic of bisexuality without encountering disapproval, another reader pointedly replied that a person could not serve two masters and that such women, i.e. bisexuals, were not true homosexuals.

More delicately, Roellig labelled prostitutes “a special category” because she believed they only entered homosexual relationships to try to find happiness and salvage what remained of their humanity. Although congenital homosexuality was in doubt in the case of prostitutes, as with bisexuality, having sexual relationships with men called the authenticity of a homosexual identity into question.

 The question of prostitution also reflects the mutability of lesbian identification. In 1924 considerable concern was expressed in Die Freundin over the problem of Mädchenhandel (white female slavery)  Over time, however, this changed. Editorials defensively asserted the moral rectitude of homosexuals and distanced lesbians from prostitution, thereby suggesting once again the shifting nature of sexual identities.

In conclusion, the homosexual cultural network, exemplified by Die Freundin, was the site at which science, subculture, and mass culture intersected to produce new and constantly shifting identities. The variety of often conflicting discourses present within the subculture also produced overlapping and sometimes contradictory identities. Nevertheless, if the behaviours and desires of women (and men) did not conform to gender norms , homosexual subculture linked them to a new community and new possibilities for identification. As one reader stated: “As so often [happens] in the world, it was through chance that I came into the possession of Die Freundin and Das 3. Geschlecht. It was through them that I received valuable enlightenment about my own nature and also learned that I am not, by any means, unique in the world.”

 

“I feel that I belong to you”: Subculture, Die Freundin and Lesbian Identities in Weimar Germany. By Angeles Espinaco-Virseda.  York University, April 1, 2004.

Under the Nazi regime, there was no official law or policy prohibiting sexual relations between women. Nonetheless, beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime harassed and destroyed lesbian communities and networks that had developed during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). This created a climate of restriction and fear for many lesbians.

Lesbians under the Nazi Regime.  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.