The Epistemic Politics of Nature

This chapter continues the narrative focus on the Ulrichs–Kertbeny comradeship. Ulrichs' and Kertbeny's campaign for homosexual rights is interpreted as a cultural battle over the civic meaning of truth-claims about nature. Ulrichs based his demand for homosexual rights on the moral authority of nature. In contrast to Victorian amatory codes deriding homosexuality, Ulrichs insisted that there is no such thing as an unnatural love. Kertbeny savaged this logic claiming that references to nature had no place in the political fight for sexual equality. He eventually broke his ties with Ulrichs due to their insoluble disagreement about the strategic function of natural discourses in a post-Prussian politics. Despite their falling out, Ulrichs and Kertbeny both believed that the purpose of sexual science was to inform citizens of the existence of sexual variance.

Inventing Sexual Liberalism

This chapter explores the invention of new nomenclatures for sexual minorities in the works of Ulrichs and Karl Kertbeny (1824–1882). Due to a personal tragedy—a close friend, who was a homosexual, committed suicide—Kertbeny decided to join Ulrichs' fight for homosexual rights. Kertbeny embraced Ulrichs' contention that, in order for sexual minorities to gain equal rights and social acceptance, dominant stigmatizing classificatory idioms must be replaced by new scientific terminology. Before they appeared in Kertbeny's anti-Prussian essays of 1869, the words heterosexuality and homosexuality did not exist. These words are used today in the absence of the knowledge that their invention signaled a post-Prussian liberal sexual politics of inclusion and equal rights.

Scottish Churches, Morality and Homosexual Law Reform, 1957–1980

The role of Scottish Churches in the decision not to include Scotland in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act requires scrutiny. This article examines the role of the Church of Scotland, and other Churches, in debates regarding homosexuality in the years following publication of the Wolfenden Report. It argues that although Scotland's Churches appeared steadfast in their determination to prevent homosexual law reform during the 1950s and 1960s, there was much ambivalence, contradiction and debate and that, in fact, Scotland's two main Churches played a significant role in the development of Scotland's foremost homosexual rights organisation, the Scottish Minorities Group.