queer masculinities

Wilhelm von Rosen: Denmark 91
her away for a quarter of an hour, sends it away, and remains completely
unworried about the consequences.’ 31
The end of the beginning
Whatever Holberg himself may have had in mind, and because of
Dorothea Biehl’s furious frustration in friendship, their tales linked
together in one discourse the unacceptable and criminal act of pederasty
and the acceptable emotionality of a special friendship. In spite
of the normative difference they were brought together. This can be
seen as the first appearance in Denmark of the important nexus within
the later concept of congenital homosexuality between the feelings
and the acts. In the words of the German physician Casper in 1852:
‘the strange psychological aspect of this disgusting aberration. [ …. ] The
sexual inclination of a man for a man is in many cases [ …. ] congenital.’
32 The romantic friendship of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
century was not homosexuality in disguise but rather a conception of
the male Self which contributed to changing, later in the nineteenth
century, the often violent and hierarchically determined act of sodomy
into the comparatively more democratic homosexuality.
Real queerdom did not emerge in Denmark until the nineteenth
century. French and German immigrants together with local actors and
ballet dancers formed a small circle of pederasts, which was effectively,
and very secretly, dissolved by the authorities in 1814. In the 1830s
hunger and deprivation led to boy prostitution within the large central
prison in Copenhagen. And in the 1850s Copenhagen became large
enough to sustain a small pederastic subculture, which had its nightly
meeting ground in precisely the same spot that is today visited by
adventurous queers. It came gradually and began fairly quietly.
Notes
1 On the legal theory and practice of sodomy in Denmark, see Wilhelm von
Rosen, ‘Sodomy in Early Modern Denmark: A Crime Without Victims’, The
Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment
Europe, ed. Gert Hekma, and Ken Gerard, (New York: Haworth, 1989)
(= Journal of Homosexuality 16, No. 1/2). For an overview in English of
Denmark’s gay history, see von Rosen, ‘A Short History of Gay Denmark
1613–1989: The Rise and the Possibly Happy End of the Danish
Homosexual’, Nordisk Sexologi 12 (Copenhagen: Dansk Psykologisk Forlag,
1994) 125–36. von Rosen, ‘Denmark’, Gay Histories and Cultures: An
Encyclopedia, 2 nd edn, ed. G. E. Haggerty, (New York, 2000), 251–4. The standard
work on Denmark’s gay history is von Rosen, Månens Kulør. Studier i