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.

The Codpiece in Art and Fashion

Early in the eighteenth century, visitors to the Tower of London could gaze upon a painted wooden statue of Henry VIII, the English king who’d died some two hundred years before. Royally robed, sceptre in hand, the likeness befitted Henry’s reputation for extravagance, right down to its lascivious secret mechanism: “If you press a spot on the floor with your feet,” one observer wrote, “you will see something surprising with regard to this figure, but I will not say more.” I will: it was the king’s codpiece, sallying forth in full regalia.

Henry VIII remains the poster boy for codpieces, those profane protuberances that drew eyes crotchward in the sixteenth century. A suit of the king’s armor, boasting a bulbous codpiece weighing more than two and a half pounds, is still on display at the Tower; women used to stick pins in its sumptuous red-velvet lining to ward off barrenness. And who could blame them? Sure, Henry sired notoriously few healthy children, but, in a famous portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, he exudes the lusty mystery of a wellborn stud, his codpiece swollen with the stuff of life. He and his appendage feature prominently in “Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art,” by the English critic Michael Glover. “Has heaven ever before conjured so broad a pair of shoulders?” Glover writes, of Henry’s portrait. “Do you know of any other monarch who is as wide as he is long?”

Good questions, both, but any study of the codpiece begins with simpler ones: Why did it exist at all, and why did men elect to wear it? Theories abound. The historian Grace Vicary has argued that codpieces were, in a sense, the P.P.E. of their day, born as a means of containing a disease—in this case syphilis, which was then sweeping through Europe. Treating the French pox, as it was known, called for “a whole galaxy of herbs, minerals, syrups, and decoctions,” Vicary writes, applied directly in “a variety of messy unguents and poultices.” If you wanted to protect your fancy wardrobe from stains, the reasoning goes, you would do well to isolate the whole package in an oversized box. Plus, Renaissance men carried a lot of junk on their belts—this was the era that gave us the “swashbuckler,” after all—and a bit of padding around the crotch would help insulate them “from bumps and friction.”

With time, codpieces transcended their functional origins, much as the surgical mask has yielded to the cloth Baby Yoda one. For the men of the fifteenth century, conditions for phallic peacocking were optimal: theirs was an age without pants, when only snug stockings and long gowns hid their “privy Members and Buttockes.” By 1450, doublets had become immodestly short. The codpiece, in its early form, was a baggy cloth gusset laced to the stockings, but, in the course of the next century, rising on a tide of ostentation, it bulged and distended. In Italy and Spain, and soon across Europe, padding and stays came into vogue. A kind of circumferential arms race led to boxy, generously portioned tubes that simpered from the waistlines of princes and peons alike.

Thus the codpiece, designed for discretion, became instead a rigid contrivance. Historians have compared it to “a permanent erection,” noting that it was “so voluminous it could serve as a pocket.” And indeed it did, offering convenient storage for one’s hankie or a stray orange, in addition to “ballads, bottles, napkins, pistols, hair, and even a looking glass,” as the scholar Will Fisher has written. With great size comes great decorative responsibility, and men of means rose to the occasion. They brocaded, damasked, bejewelled, embroidered, tasseled, tinseled, and otherwise ornamented their codpieces until they became like walking Christmas trees. Puberty was no prerequisite: boys as young as seven could engorge themselves with silk and satin. On the battlefield, a codpiece signalled martial swagger; in the royal court, procreative swagger; and, everywhere else, swagger at large.

And yet none of this presses on the question of motive. Glover looks for clues in the litany of codpieces jutting from Renaissance paintings, leading a perceptive tour of the nether regions. If nothing else, he’s an inspired describer of groins in their finery. Of Alonso Sánchez Coello’s “Portrait of Alessandro Farnese,” he notices that the young noble’s codpiece mimics “the puffing out of his breeches, which sag from his elegant pinched-in waist like two gently slumping puddings.” Surveying Titian’s “Emperor Charles V with a Dog,” Glover probes the hound’s “questing muzzle,” which veers “sniffing-close” to its master’s codpiece in what can only be “an allusion to the emperor’s virility.” And in Luca Signorelli’s unruly fresco “The End of the World,” Glover sees, amid the “writhing, gesticulating soldiers,” “overripe fruit hanging from the bough of the groin, poised and displayed for quick picking.”

Too often, though, Glover reaches for that overripe fruit, as when he writes, “It seems you just can’t keep a good codpiece down.” When he exclaims that “only a mere letter” separates the French word for codpiece, braguette, from baguette—“that faux cod-phallus, crispy and hard on the surface yet so yielding at its center”—he seems guilty of the same “self-puffery” he mocks. “It was as normal to wear a codpiece,” he writes, “as it is to wear, say, a padded bra in our own day. And yet, and yet, we still wonder about it.” True, but throughout “Thrust,” Glover treats the codpiece more as an object of ridicule than of curiosity. The epitome of embellished manhood, it contributed, he writes, “to a fabricated, fictionalized version of the male body.” Be that as it may, a generation of men lived and died in these things—owned them, stored them, sat pridefully for portraits in them. Even if the phenomenon was solely a crisis of machismo, isn’t there more to learn about it from the art history at the heart of his study?

Fisher has proposed that the codpiece embodies duelling visions of masculinity. Before the Renaissance, a man’s identity was predicated on his ability to have children, ideally lots of them. The codpiece had one stockinged foot in that world—“cod” was slang for the scrotum, not the penis—and the other in a racy alternative that valued “sexual conquest” more than reproduction. Seen in this light, codpiece-wearing men were essentially performing their performance anxiety; Marjorie Garber has called the codpiece “the thinking man’s (or woman’s) bauble, the ultimate detachable part.”

Whatever the case, by the close of the sixteenth century, the codpiece had become a canker-blossom on the male form, and it declined as suddenly as it had ascended. As early as the fifteen-eighties, Michel de Montaigne had written off the accessory as “empty and useless,” puzzling, “What was the meaning of that ridiculous part of the breeches worn by our fathers?” Fashion took a decidedly feminine direction; soon ruffs adorned necks and upperstocks plumped from midriffs. Some mourned the senescence of tumescence. Barton Holyday longed for the days of “that Cod-piece-ago, when the innocency of men did not blush to shew all that Nature gaue them.” (He seems to have elided the fact that codpieces were mostly empty space.) Since their peak, they’ve popped up only in passing. In the nineteen-sixties, Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party, used the profits from his prison memoir to design a pair of pants with a large, “sock-like codpiece” built in. “We’ve been castrated in clothing,” Cleaver told the press, “and my pants open up new vistas. I’m against penis binding.” He’s not alone: in the past year, codpieces have appeared on the runway from Thom Browne and Gucci, the latter available in leather.

If a revival is coming—if our thirst for personal protective equipment cannot be slaked with masks, gloves, and shields alone—we would do well to learn from our forebears. To my eye, the finest painting featured in “Thrust” is Brueghel the Elder’s “The Wedding Dance,” from 1566, in which a jumble of tipsy peasants make merry at a homespun reception. Foregrounded, of course, are what Glover aptly calls “no-holds-barred codpieces,” worn by commoners “thoroughly unashamed of themselves . . . exulting in the sheer beastliness of men.” He’s right: the codpiece has never looked more natural. Even if Brueghel intended to warn against bawdiness, he captured the fashion as a way of life rather than as a flagrant absurdity. These men are being, not seeming. Did any of them ever glimpse his crotch and worry, even for a fraction of a second, that he looked ridiculous? Did he fear that history would judge him harshly? As he ran the last lace through its eyelet, did he think anything at all? These and other facts are forever hidden from us, tucked away in the proud codpiece of the past.

A Brief History of the Codpiece, the Personal Protection for Renaissance Equipment

By Dan Piepenbring. The New Yorker , May 23, 2020. 

In these plaguey days, how eager should we be to examine the remains of a 16th-century codpiece firsthand?

Furthermore, how much full-strength, anti-bacterial hand-wash would we need to slather and squander in the panic-stricken, immediate aftermath of any serious, one-on-one act of visual-cum-tactile scrutiny?

Would there be fetid remnants of some ill-definable ancient pungency still remotely alive in the air? A certain suspiciously greasy slitheriness about the surface of the once costly fabric of the thing, now badly faded?

These questions hang mock-menacingly in the fresh south London air that I am still so fortunate (fingers crossed) to be breathing. Luckily, I have been spared all this potential misery, thanks to a deft seamstress and former ballerina called Anne-Marie Norton…

According to Anne-Marie, the ‘remains’ of a codpiece known to have been worn by Don Grazia de Medici in 1562 are preserved at the Pitti Palace in Florence. She learnt of this while delving into the history of the making of codpieces at my request.

Gucci’s Alessandro Michele revived the accessory for his spring/summer 2019 show: rendered in leather and snakeskin, worn harness-like and evoking Robert Mapplethorpe; in shiny diamante, hanging like a glitter ball; and framed like a seashell clutching the symbolic pearl.

The American designer Thom Browne also featured them in his spring/summer 2020 show, which nodded to deconstructed sportswear. His models wore them over pleated tutus and bell-shaped suit-dresses, accessorised with papier-mache-looking football helmets, broken umbrellas and headbands in the red, white and blue of the US flag.

Last autumn I published Thrust (David Zwirner Books, 2019), a little treatise that attempts to be, as the subtitle states, “A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art.”

The codpiece, a gross object of fleeting allure, went down almost as fast as it came up — living and dying as a thing of high fashion and indispensable male accoutrement in the 16th century — and for only about 50 years of that century, at that.

In the book, I discuss paintings by the likes of Titian, Moroni, Coello, Parmigianino, Giorgione, and others who recorded these great priapic occasions, when men of the church, aristocrats, kings, and emperors galore strapped them on as never before (or since) in a veritable orgy of tremendously eye-catching uprearingness.

What I did not do in that book, however, was to say much about the actual making of the codpiece, its materiality you might say, if were you endeavoring to earn a meager living as a culturally high-toned lecturer in fine art and fashion.

To be perfectly honest, I had not up to that point dandled or fondled a Renaissance codpiece in my very own hands. I had not even considered overmuch its actual fabrication — exactly how it was made and from what, and what it really looked like at the back…

I still have not.

Examined one of that vintage, that is.

In fact, thanks to dear Anne-Marie, I have gone one better by far. Having done on my behalf the heavy-lifting that careful research always demands, she was able to find useful pointers in a pattern book of our own time, Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women, c.1560-1620 (Macmillan, 1985), which deals with the exactness of things way back when.

And then, faster even than Jumping Jack Flash himself, she made me one. An exact likeness! And so I now possess my very own faux-authentic Renaissance codpiece, made to the exact pattern of the one worn by that Medici whose name I have just cited (with a few extra bits of decorative embellishment boldly snatched from the codpiece of yet another Medici called Cosimo I, and worn just a little later, in 1574.)

So how did it work exactly?

First, she asked me for my measurements. (She knew that I wanted to show it off at a lecture). I sidestepped that nasty little bolt of unanticipated impertinence by giving her the measurements of my waistband. Was I being obtuse and unhelpful?

Not at all! Waistband measurements are very useful because you tie the thing on at the waist, where it hangs down (yet always pridefully, as the Honorable Member demands), at the height of every raised expectation.

On a now-distant day before the lockdown, Anne-Marie presented me with this delight of an eye-feast, in a tall and rather elegant black box, on the steps of a dancing academy in Covent Garden called Pineapple, which is three leaps and a single smart lunge away from the Royal Opera House. The codpiece was modestly nestled, nose down, as if it might have gently crash-landed, in white tissue paper.

When I lifted the lid, to the consternation of the many gathered around (who had been tipped off about the time and place of its imminent appearance), I felt a little like a waggish, thin-mustachioed, pier-end prestidigitator. But a codpiece, even when inert in a box, is a thousand times the cultural superior of a mere rabbit.

And yet, viewed from behind, you notice that there is no point of entry. It is flat-backed, sealed off. No nosing allowed then. The codpiece revealed its function not as a hubristic spectacle, but as mere decoration!

Did the member itself ever cower at the rear, one wonders, fearful that the codpiece may have made a promise that actual anatomy might not deliver? Never! Never! There was always too much at stake.

What was it made from then? Covered in gorgeous red-dyed damask, it was stabilized (like any fresh-primed time bomb of roaring lustfulness) with cotton ticking, and tightly stuffed (you have to pack it as hard as you can because it needs to maintain its solid-looking and -feeling shapeliness for hours, months, years) with an organic fabric called kapok.

Kapok! What an oddly jaunty little word that is. Kapok is the stuff with which children’s toys are stuffed. These materials are not authentic to the time, of course. (This we would have recognized well enough, I have no doubt, as soon as we hear the word “children” uttered. There were no children in the 16th century. There were only miniature adults, and they were always dressed as such.)

Way back when, the codpiece would have been stuffed with horsehair or bombast (a kind of cotton wadding). Its outside might have been made of leather. An animal bone could have been inserted to ensure the maintenance of shapeliness. Needs must.

The point was this: it must never flag in its attentions. Never.

Egregious Renaissance Maleness, From the Inside Out : An up-close look at the codpiece.

By Michael Glover. Hyperallergic , April 18, 2020

There really is no delicate way to open a story about a piece of horsehair-lined leather designed to cover and celebrate a man’s genitals, is there? So let’s just get on with it: The codpiece, as it is called, was wildly popular for just a brief few decades during the Renaissance, and yet it remains a cult object of comical fascination to this day. And it has, you may be delighted or terrified to learn, had a big year: it is the subject of a slim new treatise, the color of artisanal gatorade, entitled Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art, by the English art critic and poet Michael Glover, released by David Zwirner Books. And it was an unexpected motif in the Spring 2020 menswear collection by American designer Thom Browne, shown in Paris this past June.

In celebration of these codpiece-driven coincidences, David Zwirner Books brought together Glover and Browne for an episode of their podcast, Dialogues, which host Lucas Zwirner taped with the pair in Browne’s midtown Manhattan showroom, where the codpiece-pieces themselves could gaze on in tender admiration. Following the podcast taping, we spoke with both author and designer to unpack how this bizarre fashion footnote has continued as a source of inspiration.

Like many objects sprung from delusional masculine grandeur, the codpiece is a punchline, yet so much more. “The codpiece is all about boastfulness and braggadocio, sad men pretending to be more than they could ever hope to be,” as Glover diagnoses in his book, and in a recent phone call, he shared the more pedestrian details: “It would have had to have a fairly hard exterior, probably made of leather. Inside, the padding would probably have been horsehair.” (Horsehair is very breathable—hence its starring role in the world of luxury mattresses.) It would have been measured, he confirmed, though a brief google search reveals that if there was once a special term for the profession of codpiece measurer, it has been lost to the sands of time.

The codpiece eventually reemerged as something more utilitarian in the worlds of ballet and sports—le cup, le jockstrap—but its original purpose was more direct as a visual symbol: “It extends and aggrandizes the genital area,” Glover said. “It suggests that the penis, and everything else that clusters about it, is enormous in proportion. And is tremendously potent. And that the owner, that person, is extremely virile, and is capable of achieving almost anything.”

Exhilarating!

Though it may be hard to imagine, the codpiece was once an object of deep seriousness. Glover’s notion for the book arrived during a hilarious visit to London’s National Portrait Gallery, where a “crepuscular” room filled with Tudor family portraits includes a drawing copied from a destroyed portrait of Henry VIII, “standing in front of his father, spread-legged looking like a mighty Tudor oak, just the way in which this is positioned on the wall, and the way I was standing, the more I looked at it, the more it became evident to me, in a blinding flash of insight, that this entire painting pivoted about this enormous codpiece. It was like a capturing wheel at the center of the painting, but the entire world pivoted about it, and that made me laugh inwardly.”

“There was a certain amount of humor” with which the codpiece was treated during its heyday, he explained, “but it was quite often serious. It was part of the grandiose self display, certainly with Henry VIII. [He] needed a lot of grandeur of self display, because the Tudor monarchs were not long on the throne. He needed to show himself off and he always did.So it was a weapon. It was power.”

That self-seriousness has only added to its comedic potential over time. Male vanity, of course, used to express itself visually with outrageous displays of myth-building tailoring and portraiture, while it’s now become something more like an oil-and-vinegar combo of preening and insecurity. The insecurity often gets in the way of the preening, unfortunately, and perhaps that is why despite the codpiece’s brief relevance to the history of fashion, it has returned again and again as a token of male virility disguised as performance wear in sports and dance. That’s the spirit Browne’s seersucker runway captured, with its pirouetting ballerinos in tutus, codpieces proudly displayed like badges, a sendup of the overt sexual signaling of historical fashion. (Panniers, the women’s basket-like undergarment that made the hips two doors-wide, got similar treatment in the collection.)

A runway fashion observer may not know “the history of it, but they know of a codpiece,” Browne explained in a recent interview. That vague sense of historicism gave the collection its edge of madcap humor, underscoring that the codpiece’s more familiar contemporary cousin, the cup, is far from immune to that same ridiculous interpretation. Rendered in seersucker and affixed to dresses, suits, and dresses that looked like suits, the codpiece, Browne said, was “somewhat for decoration, and for humor.”

Browne is not a designer who lets his collections hang heavy with laborious nods to other centuries, periods, or cultures. The levity of his work comes from his indulgence of a dilettante’s attitude towards his references: “I don’t really approach [fashion design] from a historical point of view,” he said. ”It’s more taking ideas and almost reintroducing them in ways that aren’t a time reference.” That’s why he loves endlessly tweaking and freaking the suit, an object so deeply embedded in the greater style consciousness that even minor changes, like his floodwater hems, drive people nuts: “We still get reactions, even 15 years later. Some people hate it—they don’t understand why it exists, and I love that about it.”

“I just like to make people see things differently,” Browne said. “And make people either love it, or hate it.”

Why the Codpiece Remains One of Menswear’s Most Essential Accessories.  By Rachel Tashjian. GQ , December  13, 2019.

The codpiece—a fashion curio, yes, but one whose padded cup runneth over as a conversation piece. The designer Thom Browne, whose collections have featured codpieces over the years, and the writer Michael Glover, who just published an unlikely and hilarious history of the codpiece in art, talk male vanity, gender fluidity, camp, Catholicism, tailoring, and more—all revolving around this little flap of cloth about the midsection.

Dialogues :The David Zwirner Podcast.  December 13, 2019. 

David Zwirner Books