The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

236 chapter 19notorious Paragraph 175—inherited by the German Empire in 1875 from theunusually harsh Prussian code. The Bolsheviks at first legalized homosexuality,in accord with their progressive ideas. But by 1934 they had decided itwas just another sign of bourgeois decadence, and did what they usually didwith bourgeois decadents. 13Alan Turing, the British mathematician of the computer and breaker ofthe German military code, was homosexual. He was fictionalized as heterosexual,by the way, in the movie Enigma; compare Proust’s technique. In1952, just before the strange business of legal ramifications for private actsbegan its long unraveling, Turing was sentenced by a court to take femalehormones. He reckoned gaily that the sentence was better than the judge’salternative of prison; or, as he did not say, the psychiatrists’ of electric shocktherapy or lobotomy. 14During the early twentieth century in American culture as in other Germaniccountries one can see the gynophobic and homophobic hysteria of abourgeois Courage spreading like an oil slick. In the first lines of The SeaWolf (1904) Humphrey van Weyden, the narrator and victim, introduced asan effete writer of essays on “Poe’s place in American literature” for theAtlantic, “scarcely knows where to begin.” His last name means in Dutch “ofthe meadows,” van der weyden, and in London’s time evoked the racialdegeneration of the Eastern, Hudson Valley Dutch “aristocracy”—such asRoosevelt (“rose field”). Van Weyden is a derivative writer, and starts out asan evident pansy, implies Jack London of the West, quite another breed ofman-writer.The scene of the sinking ferry which opens the book is dense with genderanxiety. London spends a page recurring to Van Weyden hearing the“screaming bedlam of women.” So when Van Weyden is swept away bythe tide ripping out of the straits from San Francisco Bay, he himself recalls,“I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked.” The Cockney cook from afatefully passing ship who helps fish him out is “weakly pretty, almost effeminate,”as Cockneys apparently always are. In a transvestite gesture, he givessome of his clothes to Van Weyden, who recalls,“I shrank from his hand, myflesh revolted”—whether from the taint of the “hereditary servility” of theCockney race or from “his effeminate features” is unclear.And yet the Cockney assigns effeminacy to Van Weyden himself, a literarygentleman, unproletarian: “You’ve got a bloomin’ soft skin, that you ’ave,more like a lydy’s than any I know of.” When the captain Wolf Larsen