The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

ourgeois vs. queer 235artist, of effeminate aesthete, of weak-kneed degenerate. ...[I wish] nothingbetter than to end in honorable battle for King and Country.” 11 On May9, 1915, King and Country arranged to wipe away the stain.The eagerness of American, British, and German doctors after the 1870sto get into the business of social engineering, a half century in advance oftheir total victories in drug and licensing laws, played a role in the strangerise of homophobia. Lucy Ann Lodbell, who in the 1850s passed as ReverendJoseph Lodbell without arousing the interest of the legal or medical authorities,and wrote a memoir, was by 1883 reclassified as mentally ill, justifyingincarceration in a madhouse. “It is reasonable to consider true sexual perversion,”wrote one Dr. “Wise” about the reverend’s case, “as always a pathologicalcondition and a peculiar manifestation of insanity.” 12 The turnagainst same-sex intimacy—intimacy practiced among males in armies andnavies always, and praised in Hellenizing and Romantic literature throughWalt Whitman and A. E. Housman—led to a succession of laws prohibitinggender deviation, something like a men’s version of the women’s push forProhibition, with likewise a reign of terror half-enforcing the laws.D’Emilio and Freedman note that the medicalization of homosexualityworked two ways. Especially in a purity-minded America fearful of contagionfrom immigrants and blacks and other untouchables, it made peoplethink that the unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort was a disease that couldbe spread by contact, or perhaps “recruitment,” as to a fraternity. Why doyoung men become gay? Because the parties are better.Yet at the same time medicalization encouraged Americans to think thathomosexuality was an inherited identity rather than a vicious moral failing.Thus Kinsey’s research from the late 1930s on. Certainly the psychiatrists,whose American branch dropped homosexuality as an “illness” only in 1973,though not finally in all versions of the illness until 1986, deserve full creditfor a long and manly history of torturing homosexuals. For transsexuals theAmerican, Canadian, and British psychiatrists are still at it, bless ’em, at, forexample, the Clarke Institute in Toronto, named after a famous Canadianeugenicist, and at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and especially the ratpsychologists and psychoanalysts among them.As the second European war approached, the fear of the feminine climaxed.In Britain in the twenty years of increasing state power after 1931,prosecutions under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885quintupled. In the 1930s the Nazi state was using with enthusiasm the