by Olivia Laing
This is not a moral judgement. Sontag made the choices that she wished to and so did Acker. The consequences that terrified one meant nothing to the other. Their deaths, like their illnesses, were at once totally random and emblematic, in keeping with the people that they were. The physical self is perpetually affected, as Reich saw, by other things: its past, its state of mind, the culture, society and political climate in which it abides. As the film Safe observes, there can be no possibility of a safe zone, no way of keeping yourself isolated from the world. Life demands exchange, a fact that illness by its nature reveals.
Sontag was right to come into the sickroom as a clean broom, to sweep out superstition. I have no doubt that her books alleviated the burden of fear and guilt and shame in a great many lives. And yet, and yet. There is no cure for death. No one has so far invented the ‘strange, chemical immortality’ that she once hopefully described to her weeping son, when he realised, as children do, that everyone he loved would die. For all that we would prefer to live, and for those who we love to be unharmed, the end of disease is an impossible fantasy. Much as I admire Sontag’s work, it seems saner to me to admit that we will never be fully purified of illness, never fully resistant to dying. Maybe some of Acker’s choices were wiser than they looked: to know that there is a moment for acceptance, to use the opportunity of being sick to make sense of what has gone before. This isn’t to argue against the necessity of getting treatment or of providing care, but rather to remember that these things occur against the fundamental thing that we all share: the fact of a limited lifespan.
3
Sex Acts
BRIGHTON HAD ALWAYS ATTRACTED escapists and refuseniks, people infatuated with freedom, keen to experiment with alternative lives. When I first visited as a child the shabby cream-coloured squares were full of ageing actors, but by the 1990s they’d been supplanted by a transient population of homeopaths, trance DJs and kundalini yoga teachers. Ever since the Prince Regent built his absurd breasted palace, the city had a reputation as a pleasure-dome, primarily queer but good-naturedly accommodating to other tastes, too. On Friday nights the clubs on the beach filled up with Londoners, dressed for business in leather harnesses and fairy wings, their faces streaked with glitter, the whole seedy town throbbing to the pulse of sex.
I moved there in my late teens and stayed a good decade longer than I meant to, finding roosts in tall, rickety houses with high ceilings and bad management companies, redeemed by vertiginous glimpses of the sea. In those end-of-the-line years, sex happened easily, without any strict gender demarcation. It was in the air, part of the particular atmosphere of the city. At the end of parties, the inevitable bodies would be sprawled on someone’s bed or by a random friend-of-a-friend’s basement pool. I loved it when the mood shifted, platonic affection sharpening into something more focused and greedy. Sometimes the sex was very good, without any of the other necessary components of a relationship, and so a few of these encounters went on for years, on a more or less cheerful basis, fitting into gaps around more serious engagements.
I wasn’t alone in this, at least not in the circles in which I moved. It was the cusp of the millennium, and my friends and I were right at the tail end of Generation X, the last gasp, our hedonism shot through with post-Aids caution. We knew the consequences of sex were death as well as birth, we grew up on Don’t Die of Ignorance and yet we were still hungry for pleasure – hungry too, and perhaps even more urgently, for experience. The fashionable pose back then was irony, a knowing detachment. We wanted to be older all the time, not grossly innocent and ignorant, like babies. I remember this even from school, bitchy girls in rolled-up skirts and maroon blazers, the endless questioning about how many bases you’d got to the night before. Later, when I read Eve Babitz, I recognized the style I’d grown up with. Better a libertine than a puritan.
Those years contained a lot of sweetness, a lot of late-night honey, but the prevailing ethos made it hard to see that there were striking pleasure disparities. It was apparent, in the heterosexual configurations at least, that the risks weren’t shared and neither were the consequences. We fucked and then we went to the GUM clinic on Eastern Road and had painful, frightening tests alone. There were unwanted pregnancies, weeks of steady anxiety over a late period, followed by a visit to the abortion clinic, the requisite tea and plate of sandwiches before you were allowed to dress and leave. It sounds like I’m describing the 1960s, but this was three, then four decades on. We were feminists who’d cut our teeth on riot grrrl fanzines, still somehow incapable of saying put a condom on, not just out of embarrassment but because the present-tense surrender was so conclusive it thrust the future out of existence. The poet Denise Riley once titled an essay ‘Linguistic Inhibition as a Cause of Pregnancy’ and that was us, somehow still buttoned up when naked. We knew only an idiot would have unprotected sex, but that didn’t answer the ongoing conundrum, which is that the sex was better, it’s just that the life that followed was palpably worse, at least for one member of the experimental unit.
No one could describe this as total freedom and yet everyone knew things could and had been worse. To be sexually active at the turn of the century was to taste the ripe fruit of a long history of struggle, a movement that had grappled with many of the same difficulties and dangers that remained attendant upon sexual exploration in my own lifetime. If I were to trace the roots of the liberties I enjoyed in Brighton, I’d find myself drawn inexorably to Weimar Berlin, a city I first encountered in print the same year that I had sex for the first time.
Johnny was in the year above me at college. I’d seen him around, toting a bass guitar, a beautiful dark-eyed boy with a thin face and hawk nose. For a while we were besotted with each other, electricity passing between us as we moved around the city, thighs brushing, hands interlocked. We were trawling a charity shop when I came across a broken-backed copy of Christopher Isherwood’s autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin, lured by the black-and-white cover photograph of neon lights cast slickly on wet pavements.
I was seduced and a little unsettled by Isherwood’s squalid, sophisticated city, a hot, unsteady bed of erotic activity. On the surface, it sounded a lot like Brighton: girls who looked like boys and boys who looked like girls, high kicks and low dives, cabarets and bars for every kind of taste, decorated for the tourists in thick layers of ‘gold and inferno-red’. The difference was that Weimar Berlin was on the brink of economic collapse. Everyone was for sale, and foreign pleasure-seekers like Isherwood could capitalise on a violently skewed exchange rate. It was, as his friend Klaus Mann put it, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah at a Prussian tempo . . . Our department store of associated vices.’
Though its glamour is often exaggerated, Weimar Berlin was one of the most sexually tolerant cities in Europe, if not the world. According to the painter Francis Bacon, who spent a dissipated month there as a teenager in 1927, ‘you had this feeling that sexually you could get absolutely anything you wanted.’ He remembered streets of clubs with people standing at the entrances ‘miming the perversions that were going on inside’, adding thoughtfully, ‘That was very interesting.’ When the liberal Weimar Constitution was adopted after the First World War, censorship was abolished, and even illicit practices like homosexuality went largely unpunished. The city was far more tolerant of same-sex love than draconian old England, where memories of Oscar Wilde’s hard labour still lingered bitterly three decades on, fuelling blackmail and nourishing hatred; a feeling that the 1928 obscenity trial over Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness had hardly helped to dispel.
Isherwood was preceded to the city by his friend Auden, who settled there around the time of the Hall trial, boasting in rapturous letters home about the seemingly infinite potential for encounter, not least because there were a hundred and seventy male brothels, all registered with a tolerant police (this number was at least slightly inflated). His Berlin journal closed with a dreamy list of lovers: Pieps, Cully, Gerhart, unknown, unknown. Little
wonder he described it as ‘the buggers daydream’.
Isherwood arrived on a visit the next spring. He was twenty-four and bristling with appetite and ambition: a small, distinctly boyish figure with a startling white grin and glossy brown hair that kept escaping over his eye, so precociously talented that he’d already published his first novel. Like Auden, he was leaving behind a world of privilege that he found claustrophobic and entrapping. His sexuality set him at odds with English society and he’d come to Berlin to enquire into the possibilities of love, though these pursuits were necessarily occluded in his autobiographical novels of the period. Later, he was more frank. In his 1976 memoir Christopher and His Kind, a book that helped ignite the gay liberation movement, he explained: ‘To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.’ (To Christopher, I might add, boys meant young men in their late teens and twenties, not children.)
He spent his first Saturday night as he would spend a hundred more, in the Cosy Corner, a boy bar in the working-class district of Hallesches Tor. Pushing aside the heavy leather door curtain, he found himself in a shadowy paradise of handsome, tough-looking young men. No one was going to judge him, let alone arrest him if he flirted, danced, kissed, even fucked. His churning stomach and thumping heart reminded him of how he’d felt as a medical student, watching surgery performed for the first time at St Thomas’s Hospital. Over the next weeks, and with the help of a handsome blond he called Bubi, he learned how to shed his awkwardness, to feel ‘natural’ having sex, as a swimmer might come to feel natural in the water, once they’d got past the first difficult, thrashing strokes.
He was embarrassed by his body, disliking in particular a weird patch of hair that sprang from an acne scar on his left shoulder, the source of ‘an intimate physical shame’. He was seeing the English therapist John Layard at the time, who persuaded him that it was his animal nature flaunting itself, and that he must embrace it. Layard had trained in Vienna, bringing back his own version of the Freudian speaking body, which communicated buried desires by way of psychosomatic or hysterical ailments. Isherwood kept getting sore throats, which Layard translated as an inability to say what he really wanted. His body was inviting him to be more honest, to live in accordance with his actual longings. (Auden was even more extreme than Louise Hay in his adherence to this theory in the 1920s, telling Isherwood that rheumatism was caused by stubbornness and that tall people were more spiritual than short ones, their height evidence of their striving towards heaven.)
Auden soon left, but the city had cast its spell over Isherwood. Even the language, even the damp streets were redolent of sex. ‘This is what freedom is,’ he told himself. ‘This is how I always ought to have lived.’ He returned in November, arriving a few weeks after the Wall Street Crash brought worldwide ruin and staying until Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. After a series of dalliances with hustlers he fell in love with a working-class boy, Otto, with a face like a ripe peach. Otto, he wrote rapturously in Christopher and His Kind, ‘was the coming of warmth and colour into the drab cold city, bringing the linden trees into leaf, sweating the citizens out of their topcoats, making the bands play outdoors.’ This is Freud’s libido, truly: an erotic energy that makes everything seem to glow and shiver with life.
But Berlin wasn’t just a fleshpot for satisfying one’s own personal appetite. Even Isherwood, who arrived believing sex entirely a private matter, recognised that this was a place in which the entire concept of sexual relations was undergoing rapid public change. In the Weimar period, Berlin had become the centre of a thriving liberation movement, a city-sized laboratory for refashioning attitudes to sex in the world at large. By chance as much as design, Isherwood found himself occupying a ring-side seat.
On his first day back, 30 November 1929, Isherwood paid a visit to an English friend, the archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre, also gay, who was living in an enormous house on In Den Zelten, looking out over the bright, leafy expanse of the Tiergarten, a cruising location for at least the last hundred years. The house had once belonged to a famous violinist and was still furnished in such a sumptuous, garlanded eighteenth-century style that you picked your way through ‘a Black Forest of furniture’. Though it looked like a domestic residence, albeit an unusually opulent one, it was actually the Institute for Sexual Research, owned and presided over by Magnus Hirschfeld, a chubby, kindly Jewish doctor in his early sixties, with thick glasses, wild grey hair and a walrus moustache. His nickname was Auntie Magnesia and he was the leading sexual reformer in the world. Isherwood’s friend Francis had a room above a lecture theatre and surgical unit and below lockable rooms where prisoners on sexual charges were permitted to await trial. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t care to have lunch here?’ he asked a wary Christopher.
Lunch, Isherwood found uncanny. The presence of patients in genteel drag unnerved him, as did the photographs of famous gay couples, among them Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, which hung alongside images of variant sex organs. Accepting his attraction to tough boys was one thing, but he couldn’t yet reconcile himself to what he described in Christopher and His Kind as these ‘freakish fellow-tribesmen and their distasteful customs’. At home, he’d been aware of his own submerged desires, but hadn’t yet seen the possibility of sexuality as the source of a shared, communal identity, something you are, as opposed to something you do. Even so, he felt a pull. By the time he finished his meal, he was intrigued enough to accept Francis’s offer of a room in the house.
The Institute was a very unusual place. It was the first sexual counselling centre in Germany, and one of the first in the world, offering advice on birth control and treatment for venereal disease (Francis was undergoing residential treatment for syphilis, though he also sat on one of the Institute’s committees and lectured on sexual ethnology). The world’s first sex-reassignment surgery had taken place in its clinic, and the house was also a sympathetic refuge for gay and transgender people (neither term yet in use), an early example of a residential queer community, in which sexually variant people could make an affectionate home together. Even some of the maids were post-op transsexuals. Despite his initial scepticism, Isherwood became so fond of the place that he stayed almost a year.
A beguiling black and white photograph from one of the Institute’s famous costume balls shows Hirschfeld in his thick glasses surrounded by a crowd of embracing young people, sprawled across each other’s laps. They’re dressed for a high old time, in tuxes and top hats, eye masks and elaborate powdered wigs. One figure seems to have come as Marie Antoinette, in a corseted ball gown with frothing satin skirts, three ropes of pearls slung around a pale neck. No one’s gender, Hirschfeld aside, is immediately clear. It looks so modern, so familiar I can’t quite believe I don’t recognise anyone (Season Two of Transparent had an arc set at Hirschfeld’s Institute, beginning with a scene lifted directly from this photograph). In 1929, Isherwood attended the Christmas ball in make-up and bell-bottoms he’d borrowed from a hustler. The sense of transgression thrilled him, as did an encounter with an aristocratic man who’d inherited a vast wardrobe of ball dresses. Each year, ‘he encouraged his friends to rip his gown off his body in handfuls’, until he drifted home in luxuriant rags.
As he discovered more about Hirschfeld, Isherwood came to regard him with love and even awe. Despite his cosy appearance, Auntie Magnesia was a seasoned campaigner, a gay man who believed homosexuality could be found in all cultures and countries of the world. In 1921, the year after the League of Nations was founded, he’d established the First International Congress for Sexual Reform (later the World League for Sexual Reform). The timing was significant. Europe was still reeling from violence on an unspeakable scale. Ten million men had died in the Great War, and in its aftermath the horror of the trenches gave way to a burst of utopian dreams: of a world without war, a brotherhood of man, an end to conflict based on arbitrary divisions of gender, class or nationality. Sex was part of that, a fantasy of love with
out disease or subjugation, free at last from guilt or religious duty, the pervasive association of bodily acts with vice or the demands of procreation.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, Hirschfeld had been driving the campaign against Paragraph 175 of the Prussian (later German) Criminal Code, which punished homosexual acts between men with prison terms of up to ten years. Paragraph 175 had generated a corrosive climate of fear and shame, resulting in blackmail and even suicide. Hirschfeld’s own engagement with the subject of sex had been precipitated by the suicide of one of his medical patients in 1896: a young gay officer who was pressured into marriage by his parents and who shot himself on his wedding night. In the suicide note he addressed to Hirschfeld, he explained he couldn’t tell his parents about ‘that which nearly strangled my heart.’
Many European countries, led by post-revolutionary France, had eliminated anti-sodomy laws a century earlier (Britain, where the death penalty for sodomy had been maintained until 1868, was even more punitive than Germany). Although Hirschfeld’s previous campaign against Paragraph 175 had failed, the introduction of the more tolerant Weimar constitution in 1919 convinced him that the time was ripe for repeal and he established the Institute that same year. Cannily, he built a museum of sexuality on the second floor, furnished with dildos, whips and artfully constructed false trousers for flashers, to which Francis took a giggly Isherwood on his first afternoon. The museum drew the crowds, as did a box for anonymous questions on sex. By the early 1930s, fourteen thousand had been submitted, many of them answered by Hirschfeld himself.
This information gathering had a larger aim. One of the great questions of the time was whether homosexual desire was inborn and natural or acquired and aberrant, a consequence of damaging childhood experience or exposure to adult seduction, and either way pathological. Hirschfeld realised that if he could prove it was the former, he could undermine the argument for Paragraph 175 altogether, since criminalisation hinged on the belief that homosexual acts were not only deviant, degenerate and wicked, but – crucially – volitional.