In the 20’s, Berlin had an enormous presence of different types of bohemian restaurants and clubs for LGBTI people. The El Dorado was most popular with all kinds of people including transsexual and intersexual people. You would have transvestite contests that had a similar logic to the contemporary “Drag Queen Contest” that everyone can see in the TV-series RuPaul's Drag Race. All this happened before the second World War, before the Nazis and the open persecution of LGBTI-persons. And even before and during the Weimarer Republik, Hirschfeld gave transsexual or intersexual people a special ID, authorized by the police of Berlin, stating that “this person is biologically a man, but he wants to dress like a woman” and that it is not a sickness, but a different way of expressing his own sexuality. These IDs were approved and signed by the police of Berlin! We’re speaking about the beginning of the 20th Century! In fact, Hirschfeld wrote in the already mentioned “Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types” an obituary honoring Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, the Director of the Berlin Police. Hirschfeld had a really close relationship to von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem. The friendship started when von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem invited Hirschfeld to a meeting and asked for an explanation about these rare sexualities. He was interested in scientific explanations that included Hirschfeld’s experiences as a physician. From then on, von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, the Polizeidirektor, maintained a close relationship with the leader of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee) - Hirschfeld. The Committee also organized help for LGBTI people (medical treatments, legal counseling, etc.) and fought against paragraph 175. One time the Committee tried to erase §175 and even started collecting signatures from many famous persons. In order to support the decriminalization of sex between men, Albert Einstein also signed the letter. This period of German history raised many questions that you can find in the discussion about so-called LGBTI-rights nowadays.
And now 80 years later, being homosexual is still a big deal in some countries. You mentioned the Commonwealth Games as an example. Bishop Victor Gill of Trinidad said, “the gay agenda is being forced on us” and that “homosexuals must not trample on the rights of heterosexuals or Christians.” More than 90 per cent of Commonwealth citizens live in jurisdictions that criminalize gay people.
It is a collision of different logics that you can identify in modernity. For example, the president of Uganda said “the mouth is only to eat. Not to have sex with”. In a lot of countries, the discussion is curtailed and stifled by merely saying “No! We are different. We have a different culture”. In his speech at the 54th United Malays National Organization General Assembly (2003), the former president of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, said that homosexual rights were a cultural imperialism from Europe: “The world that we have to face in the new decades and centuries will see numerous attempts by the Europeans to colonize us either indirectly or directly. If our country is not attacked, our minds, our culture, our religion and other things will become the target.”
Of course, saying that this is a problem exclusively observable outside “occidental societies” is an unacceptable reductionism. Look for example at the current worldwide discussion about “gender ideology”, especially emanating from occidental right-wing political parties, which is an extremely successful political reduction of topics related to gender and sexuality.
Facing all these accusations: Why does society seem to expect LGBTI people to address their sexuality in the first place? For example, in some Commonwealth countries LGBTI people are not allowed to join the military. We do not ask heterosexuals about their sexual preferences.
I have a good friend in Chile, Jaime Parada, he was the first openly gay politician elected there. I’ve known him for about 20 years. We often discuss this topic and the discussions tend to be emotional. He always says, that coming out means that you can show yourself as a person, it is to say as a totality, but this part of you is only your sexuality and doesn’t transform you into a special person. He recently published a book about that topic with Raffaela di Girolamo, herself a psychologist, called “Coming out of the Closet” - Salir del closet.
It’s like, for example, this huge movement in the United States in the 1970s to forbid LGBTI persons, especially homosexual men, to teach in schools. Anita Bryant and her campaign are the classical example. The argument at first was that homosexuals do disgusting sexual practices and that they would try to transform kids into gay people. That means that you are “de facto” prohibiting the self-presentation of LGBTI persons in their role as teachers.
You can identify a similar problem with the presentation of self, for example, right now with the Me-Too Movement. The problem related to fundamental rights and self-presentation is “we, women, suffer from sexual assault”. We cannot present ourselves in equality and dignity because there is sexual violence against women. And of course, it is real. When you speak about it, it is not only a headline in the newspaper. All these famous actresses of Hollywood denounced the producer Harvey Weinstein. But they also shared their experience on Facebook and Twitter. They talk about the problems of self-presentation, discrimination and sexual violence against women.
With coming out, it’s the same thing. As an observer, I can see how society would treat me as a homosexual person and I can try to experience how that feels. For example, how it feels being with a person for 10 years and not being able to marry them. This entails everyday life problems: I want to buy a house. The problem is that, of course, you need money, you need a credit but when you’re not married, you cannot combine the salaries. And the bank treats you as if you were two individual persons without any formal connection to each other; you don’t have any legal instrument demonstrating that you are a couple. And there are a lot more problems in everyday life. What happens when sexual intercourse between men is illegal and you’re a lawyer or a policeman and the legislation said “if you’re a lawyer or policeman you are forbidden to commit crimes yourself”. Or you are a psychiatrist and homosexuality is defined as a disease. There you have the paradox that you have to say “I am sick!” inside your very same professional category, inside the same science you practice. What about the gay priests? Will you go to hell? Or in sports, where you have several contractual terms that are usually related each other. The terms take another kind of context into the consideration, not only sports, for example, some areas of your personal life. When you are a really famous runner and have a contract with some cereal company focused on kids, you may lose that contract in case you come out because the company might consider you coming out as a threat to popularity and hence as a threat to a successful advertising campaign. And there are lots and lots of other examples. So, it is a hard decision whether to come out or not.
Your doctoral supervisor at Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (FIW), Prof. Rudolf Stichweh, is a distinguished researcher. How did you meet? You are from Chile and did your master’s degree in systemic analysis at the University of Chile. Bonn isn’t exactly around the corner.
Professor Stichweh in my understanding of sociology is a main reference for a number of topics, but my main interest lied and still lies today with his conceptualization of world society with its special kinds of structures that you cannot easily reduce to just organizations and interactions between individual persons, the classical topics in sociology. The work of Professor Stichweh on this radically new platform of observation of society is without question groundbreaking. I have studied sociological theory and specifically systems theory for many years, and yet before coming to Germany I already read some translations of Professor Stichweh in English and Spanish. I then managed to meet him during a big congress in Chile on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Social Systems [Soziale Systeme], written by Niklas Luhmann in 1984. Professor Stichweh was there and I presented him my ideas. I tried in that moment to outline my research problem, the relationship between homosexuality and human rights, being careful not to trivialize the problem by giving easy answers. Using some key ideas of Professor Stichweh allowed me to formulate crucial critique on the current perspectives on the topic. And well, after a lot of preparation and preceding academic experiences I am here in Bonn because it’s where professor Stichweh is based.
What is it like doing research in such an exclusive environment?
Well, it was a really nice experience when I arrived here, because you have people here at the FIW working on different topics, with different approaches, but the main objective of the institute is to observe worldwide problems with universalistic tools, so that we can try to pursue, identify and resolve actual and complicated scientific problems. It’s a really good environment for discussions because it’s really focused on research.
I can cite a couple of examples from my department, the Department for Comparative Research on Democracies, that allows me to get high quality feedback from my fellow researchers. Dr. Evelyn Moser and Anna Skripchenko, for example, currently investigate the role of NGO’s in Russia, and I can refer some questions about the understanding of freedom of speech back to my own research. Also Dr. Lena Laube, who studies statelessness as a problem of the world society, more than once helped me clarify different dynamics of the immigration process in case the person in question is an LGBTI person, for example, in the case of asylum seekers.
Last but not least: In case I was to ask you about your sexual orientation, how would you react?
It’s a phenomenon that you have with these kinds of topics, that are both old and new, and that are related to minorities. For example, if you close your eyes and go to the United States and think about a professor tackling the issue of slave trade in the United States - will he be a “white guy” with blue eyes or an “Afro-American”? You can pose the same question about a professor doing research on feminism – which gender to you expect the professor to have? You probably expect a woman there. And in my case, it’s the same. People ask me about my own sexuality because you have a certain kind of expectations about it. We can try to transform that expectation into a sociological question. Women study women’s rights. Afro-Americans study Afro-Americans rights and gays study gay rights. So, many people wonder if I’m gay myself - and in Germany it’s always the last question. Even my girlfriend - she is German - thought at first, because of this topic, that maybe I was gay.
I don’t know if I’m right or not, but having 90% of women in my class here at the university in the course on fundamental rights and homosexuality, is probably because women are more at ease with the topic, independent of their own sexual orientation. For them it’s like, “It doesn’t matter, I can take this course and there won’t be bullying by my other friends.” It scratches gender theory and masculinity, which seems to make men feel insecure. For me it’s a really interesting topic, with relevant research to be done, and a chance to clarify a lot of things.