Abstract
In 1902, founder of the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, Magnus Hirschfeld, developed a ‘psychobiological questionnaire’ to investigate human sexuality.1 The section labelled ‘sexual instinct’ [Geschlechtstrieb] asked: ‘What approximately are the highest and lowest limits in age of the people to whom you feel drawn, or is age of no importance to you?’2 Hirschfeld's interest in age as a driver of sexual attraction reflects broader sexual scientific attempts to map an erotics of age.3 This article explores how and why the relative age of sexual subjects was theorised by British and German sexual scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It demonstrates that questions around age preoccupied sexual science and argues, more specifically, that constructions of male homosexuality were driven by anxieties about interactions between children or adolescents and older men.4 In so doing, the article reveals the interrelationship between sexological debates about homosexuality and scientific explorations of childhood sexuality and adolescent development. It shows that age needs to be acknowledged as a crucial category shaping sexual scientific debate and structuring understandings of modern homosexuality.5 As is well known, the erotic charge provided by age difference was central to many culturally prominent eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century understandings of same‐sex desire.6 European and American elites interpreted classical (predominately Ancient Greek) cultures as providing affirmative models of youthful male beauty and intimate attachment between older and younger men or boys.7 While precise differences in age were rarely specified, partners were separated on the basis of maturity into active (the erastes) and passive roles (the eromenos). Moreover, attraction to younger same‐sex partners was not seen to exclude opposite‐sex relationships: men who desired male youths could also be married to women. The influence of this material on individual identities can be found, for example, in sexological case studies or letters received by prominent Hellenic writers.8 At the same time, this idealisation of age‐differentiated erotics reinforced existing associations between same‐sex activity and the sexual misuse of younger people by older men.9 In response, some sexual scientists sought to tease apart age‐structured and same‐sex relationships. These authors defined the male homosexual through his exclusive inborn attraction to other consenting adults. This article shows that this influential construction of the modern homosexual as a discrete congenital type emerged in direct response to considerations around age.10 It also demonstrates that, notwithstanding the emergence of this model, questions about the impact of sexual encounters with older men on a younger person's sexual development continued to be debated within sexual science, creating dialogue between theorisations of homosexuality and concurrent studies of childhood sexuality.11 As such, investigations of male homosexuality continued to revolve around urgent questions about how and when same‐sex desire emerged and what impact sexual experiences in youth had on later desires. These debates remained at the centre of early twentieth‐century sexual science in Britain and Germany, complicating the inborn model and securing the centrality of age as a key category in modern articulations of sexuality.
Highlights
In 1902, founder of the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, Magnus Hirschfeld, developed a ‘psychobiological questionnaire’ to investigate human sexuality.[1]
The unstable term ‘pederasty’ could refer to male same-sex acts, anal sex and other sexual behaviours deemed criminal, its presence in sources about child corruption reflects the prominence of anxieties about the dangers faced by young males. Such nineteenth-century accounts of age-differentiated sexual exploitation resonated with sexual scientific questions about childhood and adolescent sexual development
As the following section shows, the distinctive sexual scientific model of male homosexuality as an inborn and unchanging identity emerged in direct response to concerns about age-differentiated bonds
Summary
While Schopenhauer saw pederastic longings as natural and widespread among those too old or too young to produce healthy offspring, he insisted that only ‘weak and brainless’ older men would act on these desires.[25] In Richard Burton’s analysis of ‘pederasty’ in his 1886 Terminal Essay, the ‘vice against nature’ [le vice contre nature] was predominantly perpetrated across the so-called ‘sodatic zone’ on young male victims.[26] The Untrodden Fields of Anthropology (1896), published under the pseudonym Jacobus X, includes similar accounts of the alleged global prevalence of ‘depraved’ ‘Arabs’, ‘Chinamen’ and ‘Europeans’ demanding ‘unnatural acts’ from ‘precocious debauchees’ whose ages (when stated) ranged from seven to twenty.[27] As these writings suggest, the language of pederasty served, at least in part, as a locus for the articulation of anxieties about child and adolescent sexual assault rather than the exploration of adult male same-sex desires that might be read in terms of proto-homosexuality.[28] the unstable term ‘pederasty’ could refer to male same-sex acts, anal sex and other sexual behaviours deemed criminal, its presence in sources about child corruption reflects the prominence of anxieties about the dangers faced by young males Such nineteenth-century accounts of age-differentiated sexual exploitation resonated with sexual scientific questions about childhood and adolescent sexual development. As the following section shows, the distinctive sexual scientific model of male homosexuality as an inborn and unchanging identity emerged in direct response to concerns about age-differentiated bonds
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
