Renaissance des Eros Uranios : die physiologische Freundschaft, ein normaler Grundtrieb des Menschen und eine Frage der männlichen Gesellungsfreiheit

Benedict Friedländer

An active member of the early homosexual emancipation movement and simultaneously one of its most persistent and cogent critics, Benedict Friedlaender (1866-1908) intended this book as a rebuttal of the "third sex" theories of Ulrichs and Hirschfeld. It also stands as a major document on its own merits, anticipating some of the theories advanced by Sigmund Freud and Hans Blüher. Friedlaender argues as a biologist that man's normal state is bisexuality; the family is the institutionalization of heterosexual desires, while society and the political state arise from equally natural homosexual relations. Historically, Friedlaender argues that Christian asceticism has been responsible for the suppression of same-sex love, but he sees reasons for optimism about a Hellenic renaissance. Friedlaender's views are vitiated by a pronounced anti-feminism, and his disputes with Hirschfeld finally led him to head a secession from the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1906.