forbidden love
by Douglas Messerli
John Henry Mackay, Der Puppenjunge, 1926 (translated into
English by Hubert Kennedy as The Hustler
[Xlibris, 2002])
How to talk
about John Henry Mackay’s 1926 novel, The
Hustler (Der Puppenjunge)? This
fiction about the Berlin gay sexual world between the wars, is a true love
story featuring a male hero, Hermann Graff, an intelligent, hard-working, and
somewhat sophisticated young adult who, moving to Berlin from the countryside,
encounters and falls in love with a fifteen-year-old street hustler, Gunther
(whose last name, Nielsen, is mentioned only late in the work). How can we
evaluate a work today, accordingly, which documents what our culture can only
perceive as a despicable, perverted and criminal act? Of course we can leave it
simply as that, a document of another time and place that gives us significant
insight into certain segments of the population, and reveals, at times quite
graphically, the not-so-hidden underworld of German gay life of the 1920s until
Hitler put an end to its existence.
And as such, as a document, Mackay’s work, in its social, sexual, psychological, and economic concerns, is quite significant as a portrait of the culture. The Hustler traces the journey of a young country bumpkin, tortured by his indentured servitude, who escapes to the big city, joining hundreds of other youths like him, whose only way of surviving was to walk the streets portrayed in this book—Friedrichstrasse, Under der Linden, and, most importantly, The Passage—or nightly frequenting bars such as the Adonis in order to pick up young and older gentlemen who, after having sex or simply enjoying the company of these young boys, paid them a few marks which allowed the hustlers to survive for another day.
Certainly, we know that thousands of run-away children and young adults on the streets of our larger US cities still survive in this fashion today; but hardly anything except journalistic reports, a few film references (one thinks, particularly of Gus Van Sant’s My Private Idaho, which hints of such incidences), and photographic evidence of artists such as Philippe-Lorca di-Corcia (although his subjects are generally “of age”) have sought to artistically reveal their plight. MacKay’s book, on the other hand, takes us deeply into the culture, hinting at a society, detailed in Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin (see above), that included all levels of society. Young Gunther is “purchased” for a healthy sum, paid weekly by a Count whose only desire appears to be to look at the naked boy, laying upon a bear fur rug, on evenings. As in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, this voyeur is represented as far more detestable type that those who actually embrace the young boy for one or two nights. At a later point, Gunther joins a group of artists, teachers and other invited bourgeois businessmen in their homes, where several young boys are celebrated and decently paid for their favors. As in Beachy’s book, it appears that nearly everyone in the society is busily pursuing pederastic urges; the only exception seems to be the military, perhaps because so many of them were selling their services to others who preferred older uniformed boys and young men.
If today, this bustling trade in pederasty
seems shocking, it is perhaps useful to remember that throughout Europe,
particularly in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and even in England, whose draconian
homosexual laws made such activities less obvious (but which were advocated in
books by notable figures such Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds), the
role of childhood was not so sharply demarcated from adulthood as it is today.
Indeed, one might argue that it was only in the Victorian era that childhood
began to be perceived as individuals to be set off a realm in which young boys
and girls might be permitted to live in innocence and indolence, separated and
segregated both in terms of the workplace and the bed.
Throughout the centuries before the later
decades of the 19th century there was no distinct line between
childhood and adulthood; children worked in the fields, factories, and mines;
young boys and girls were often perceived as fair game for adult sexual
activities. Indeed, in Mackay’s book, after Gunther’s confusion as to why he is
being looked over and touched within the Passage, when he discovers that it’s
all about sex, he suddenly is relieved; after all, he recalls, he’s often been
the subject of sexual probing by the local priest without being given anything
in payment but a couple of apples. In Berlin he, at least, is properly
remunerated.
Psychologists
and social workers have given us ample evidence that such abuse of children
today results in a lifetime of social difficulties and psychological problems
(see, for example, my discussion of Joel and Ian Golds’ and Suspicious Minds elsewhere in this volume).
Being neither a psychologist nor sociologist, I might ask, nonetheless, whether
other, earlier cultures, evidenced the same degree of social and psychological problems,
outside of violence and verbal abuse, in children who had had sex with adults?
Where the young boys involved in love affairs with Greek aristocrats prone to
depression and suicidal thoughts later in their life? In other words, does the culture’s very abhorrence
of an act help to create an environment that helps to traumatize its victims?
Since that is our cultural perspective, however, perhaps it does not truly
matter that we are justifiably appalled by acts of pederasty. Yet, at the same
time our culture, in its open acceptance of homosexuality, is also facing the
fact that many young people identify themselves as being gay, bisexual, or
transgender at a far earlier age than in previous decades, which may possibly
effect the sexual behaviors of youths who previously could not have imagined
engaging in such sexual activity while being underage. In other words, although
as a culture we might still desire to insulate childhood as a period of
innocent discovery and wonderment, our children themselves may redefining their
own roles with regard to adolescent sexual activity.
What Mackay’s book also makes clear is
that, despite the fact, as Beachy observes, the Berlin police were far more
open-minded about the homosexual and lesbian behavior of their inhabitants,
there was still plenty to fear from the “cops,” particularly for the young
hustlers who, when arrested, where often put away in brutal institutions, as is
Gunther, until they came of age. Gunther returns to the country having been
left, through his incarceration, without any will or desire; a walking dead
man, he has been destroyed not through the sexual attentions of his johns, but
through the inattentions of the prison system. When Hermann Graff naively
implicates himself as Gunther’s lover, he, on the other hand, is arrested and
imprisoned only for two months.
Today, of course, Gunther might be “freed”
and, hopefully, redeemed through social help and education. Hermann would likely
be imprisoned for numerous years and forced to wear a monitor around his foot
for the rest of his life, while unable to live anywhere in American cities with
their numerous parks and schools, while in Mackay’s book, Hermann, after
sharing his tale with a sympathetic aunt, is awarded an inheritance and allowed
to return to Berlin to seek a more appropriate young boy with whom he might
establish a true love relationship—at least until his young companion grew a
moustache!
And that is the problem in discussing Mackay’s The Hustler. He did not intend his work as merely a “document.” Mackay, an anarchist opposed to a great many of the current German laws, particularly Paragraph 175 (the German law against sodomy), was advocating, like Adolph Brand, for whose magazine he contributed poems, for boy-man love And like the influential spokesmen for gay acceptance in Germany, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, he argued that love for young men was something in-born, unchangeable, and therefore, something which a educated populace should be able to accept. Indeed, his views where reiterated, although far more circumspectly, by the American sexual documentarian, Alfred Kinsey, who suggested in the 20th century that instead of judging those who behaved sexually aberrantly, it was perhaps better to try to comprehend why they did so, and how prevalent their behavior was.
Were Mackay’s fiction simply an example of
a piece of bad literature written more as a piece of propaganda than a work of
art, again we might forgive it. But as translator Hubert Kennedy reminds us, Christopher
Isherwood—who obviously himself experienced some of these Berlin sexual
adventures—wrote of the book: “I have always loved this book dearly—despite and
even because of its occasional sentimental absurdities.” And yes, The Hustler, at moments, is indeed
sentimental, even maudlin, particularly when Hermann feels he has lost his
young would-be lover forever. But you don’t have to be a gay man to empathize
with Mackay’s hero, and you certainly don’t need to be a child-abuser to feel
sympathy with Gunther’s and Hermann’s unfortunate fates.
Mackay’s wonderful dialogues between the
young hustlers as they come together to enjoy an occasional celebratory dinner
at the famed Hustler’s Table at Uncle Paul’s saloon is nearly as good as scenes
in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. And
Gunther’s insistence on reading pulp fictions and in watching the comic
sensations of Harry Piel’s films, reminds one of the stubborn adolescent vapidity
of Lolita.
That said, Mackay’s book is not a
self-conscious, clever, comic fantasy of pederasty such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; but it is still far more honest
than the numerous cinematic and literary works such as Gigi, Lili, and Daddy Long
Legs, all starring, coincidentally, the long-legged gamin Leslie Caron, who
gets away with striking up long-terms relationships with older men by playing a
15 or 16 year-old who is actually in her early 20s. And certainly Hermann is
far more respectable than Woody Allen is in his relationship with the
supposedly underage Muriel Hemingway in Manhattan.
Hermann refuses to even have sex with Gunther until they have begun to
establish a real friendship, which is why the boy, frustrated with emotions of
true love he does comprehend, bolts, leaving the strong-willed but desperately
panting older man behind.
Many of us, of course, will assert that such
a plot-line is typical of child-abusers who pretend that the children really
want their sexual attentions, thus inwardly justifying their behavior. Perhaps
that is true, but it surely be better to be loved by someone like Hermann in
Gunther’s very believable world, than to be toyed with by all the others.
Obviously that does not justify anything. And, perhaps, in the context of the
unforgiveable hatred of most of society against potential sexual predators, we
can no find any room in our lives for an understanding of Mackay’s character
nor allowance for the views the author is promoting.
Our laws permit us to discuss the ideas of this book only as a creation of words, while having nothing to do with a living being behind them. Today even a psychologist who might suggest that some sexual encounters between adults and juveniles are possibly initiated by the youths themselves, is liable to get him or her censured and even barred from his profession. Near the end of his life, even Mackay surely knew that the growing acceptance of homosexuality within his culture would never embrace his particular manifestation of it. Almost as a mini-manifesto, Mackay agues through the voice of Hermann Graff:
He knew his sexual
disposition. He knew how it stood with him.
He still read a great
deal, but did not trouble himself for an ex-
planation where there was
nothing to explain. Many of the theories
now posed he held to be
false and dangerous.
He was a love just like
any other love. Whoever could not or
would not accept it as love was
mistaken. The mistake reflected
onto those who were mistaken.
They were still in the
majority, those who were mistaken. And
therefore in possession of
force.
But they were
mistaken there too. For force never has power
over
human sentiments. The most human of all feelings—and
strongest except hunger—was love. (p. 158)
Mackay
knew even during the active sexual world of Berlin in 1926, surely, that his
hero and those like him were doomed to defeat, even if he could not imagine
that all gay activity would soon come to temporary end within German society.
Today, even the actions of the gods, like Zeus, is reprehensible enough to
bring out an army of well-meaning society members ready to string up the
offender to the nearest lamp post. There is no longer any possibility of
salvation for a Hermann Graff. But, he breathes, if only momentarily, still in
this book.
Los Angeles,
January 13, 2015
Reprinted from My Year 2015: Who Are You? Who Am I?
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