February is LGBT History Month, which is significant in fighting discrimination against queer people. In his novella “Confusion”, created in 1925 and considered a classic of homosexual literature, author Stefan Zweig wrote about the homosexuality of one of the main characters. At that time, homosexuality was still a taboo subject and was punishable, by the way, well into modern times. It was not until 1994 in Germany, for example, that paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which made sexual acts between men criminal, was repealed without replacement. For LGBT History Month, let us hear Stefan Zweig in his sometimes exuberantly poetic language and with remarkably sensitivity. In the following excerpt from “Confusion” he tells about being gay in the late 19th century:
But here a man was disclosing himself to me exactly as he was, opening up his inmost thoughts, eager to bare his battered, poisoned, burnt and festering heart. A wild delight like that of a flagellant tormented itself in the confession he had kept back for so many years. Only a man who had been ashamed all his life, cowering and hiding, could launch with such intoxication and so overwhelmed into so pitiless a confession: Images began to flicker up, raised trembling by the inner storm of passion and gradually showing in the light. I saw a boy at first, a shy and introverted boy who dared not to speak to his comrades, but who felt a confused, a physically demanding longing for the best-looking boys at the school. However, when he approached one too affectionately, he was firmly repelled, a second mocked him with cruel clarity, and worse still, the two of them revealed his outlandish desires to the other boys. At one a unanimous kangaroo court ostracized the confused boy with scorn and humiliation from their cheerful company, as if he were a leper. His way to school became a daily penance, and his nights were disturbed by the self-disgust of one marked out early as a pariah, feeling that his perverse desires, although so far the featured only his dreams, denoted insanity and were a shameful vice.
His voice trembled uncertainly as he told the tale – for a moment it seemed about to fade away in the darkness. But a sigh raised it again, and new images rose from the gloomy haze, ranged one by one, shadowy and ghostly. The boy became a student in Berlin, and for the first time the underworld of the city offered him a chance to satisfy the inclinations he had so long controlled – but how soiled their satisfaction was by disgust, how poised by fear! – those surreptitious encounters on dark street corners, in the shadows of railway stations and bridges, how poot a thing was their twitching lust, how dreadful did the danger make them, most of them ending wretchedly in blackmail and always leaving a slimy snail-trail of cold fear behind for weeks! The way to hell lay between darkness and light – while the crystal element of the intellect cleansed the scholar in the bright light of the industrious day, the evening always impelled the passionate man towards the dregs of the outskirts of town, the community of questionable companions avoiding any policeman’s spiked helmet, and took him into gloomy beer cellars whose dubious doors opened only to a certain kind of smile. And he had to steel his will to hide this double life with care, to conceal his Medusa-like secret from any strange gaze, to preserve the impeccably grave and dignified demeanor of a junior lecturer by day, only to wander incognito by night in the underworld of shameful adventures pursued by the light of flickering lamps. Again and again the tormented man strained to master a passion which diverged from the accustomed track by applying the lash of self-control, again and again his instincts impelled him towards the dark and dangerous. Ten, twelve, fifteen years of nerve-racking struggles with the invisibly magnetic power of his incurable inclination were like a single convulsion. He felt satisfaction without enjoyment, he felt choking shame, and came to be aware of the dark aspect, timidly concealed in itself, of his fear of his own passions.
At last, quite late, after his thirtieth year, he made a violent attempt to force his life round to the right track. At the home of a relative he met his future wife, a young girl who, vaguely attracted by the mystery clinging about him, offered him genuine affection. And for once her boyish body and youthfully spirited bearing managed, briefly, to deceive his passion. Their fleeting relationship conquered his resistance to all things feminine, he overcame it for the first time, and hoping that thanks to his attraction he would be able to master his misdirected inclinations, impatient to chain himself fast when for once he had found a prop against his inner propensity for the dangerous, and having made a full admission of it to her first, he quickly married the girl. Now he thought the way back to those terrible zones would be barred to him. For a few brief weeks he was carefree, but soon the new stimulus proved ineffective and his original longings became insistent and overpowering. From then on, the girl whom he had disappointed and who disappointed him served only as a façade to conceal his revival inclinations. Once again he walked his perilous way on the edge of the law and society, looking down into the dark dangers below.
And a particular torment was added to his inner confucion: he was offered a position where such inclinations as his are a curse. A junior lecturer, who soon became a full professor, he was professionally obliged to be constantly involved with young men, and temptation kept placing new blooms of youth in front of him, ephebes of an invisible gymnasion within the world of Prussian conventionality. And all of them – another curse, another danger! – loved him passionately without seeing the face of Eros behind their teacher’s mask, they were happy when his comradely but secretly trembling hand touched them, they lavished enthusiasm on am an who had to keep strict control over himself. His were the torments of Tantalus: to be harsh to those who pressed their admiration on him, to fight a never-ending battle with his own weakness! And when he felt that he had almost succumbed to temptation he always suddenly took flight. Flight from himself, flight into the horrors of chasms and crooked alleys. He always went to some large metropolis where he would find intimates haunting the wrong side of the tracks, men of the lower class whose encounters besmirched him, whorish youths instead of young men of elevated and upright minds, but this disgust, this mire, this vileness, this poisonously mordant disappointment was necessary if he were to be sure of resisting the lure of his senses at home, in the close, trusting circle of his students. Ah, what encounters – what ghostly yet malodorously earthly figures his confession conjured up before my eyes! For this distinguished intellectual, in whom a sense of the beauty of form was a natural and necessary as breath, this master of all emotions was fated to encounter ultimate humiliation in low dives, smoky and smouldering, which admitted only initiates; he knew the impudent demands of rent boys with made-up faces, the sugary familiarity of perfumed barbers’ assistants, the excited giggling of transvestites in women’s skirts, the rabid greed of itinerant actors, the coarse affection of tobacco-chewing sailors – all these crooked, intimidated, perverse, fantastic forms in which the sexual instinct, wandering from the usual way, seeks and knows itself in the meaner areas of big cities. He had encountered all kinds of humiliation, ignominy and vileness on these slippery paths; several times he had been robbed of everything on him (being too weak and too high-minded to scuffle with a coarse groom), he had been left without his watch, without his coat, and in addition was spurned by his drunken comrade when he returned to their shady hotel on the city outskirts. Blackmailers had got their claws on him, one of them had dogged his footsteps at the university for months, sitting boldly in the front row of the audience and glancing up with a sly smile at the professor known all over town who, trembling to see the man’s knowing winks, could deliver his lecture only with a great effort. Once – my heart stood still when he confessed this too – once he had been picked up by the police in a disreputable bar in Berlin at midnight with a whole gang of such fellows; a stout, red-cheeked sergeant took down the trembling man’s name and position with the scornful, superior smile of a subaltern suddenly able to put on airs in front of an intellectual, graciously indicating at last that this time he was being let off with a caution, but henceforward his name would be on a certain list. And as a man who has sat too long in bars that smell of liquor finds its odor clinging at last to his clothes, so rumors and gossip gradually went round here in his own town, beginning in some place that could not be traced; it was the same as in his class at school – in the company of his colleagues their conversation and greetings to him became ostentatiously more frosty, until here too a glazed and transparent area of alienation cut the isolated man off from all of them. And even in the safety of his home, behind many locked doors, he still felt he was being spied on and known for what he was.
But this tormented, fearful heart was never offered the grace of pure friendship by a nobly minded man, the worthy return of a virile and powerful affection: he always had to divide his feelings into below and above, his tender longings for his young and intellectual students at the university, and those companions hired in the dark of whom he would think with revulsion the next morning. Never, as he began to age, did he experience a pure inclination, a youth’s wholehearted affection for him…