Sexology Essay

The prevalence of sexology literature and scholarship was and remains to be a topic of discourse when questions to the origins of a ‘homosexual’ identity arise. In today’s society, one usually points to the New York City Stonewall Riots in 1969 as the beginning for the recognition of homosexual love and identity. Indeed, this event remains to be an important marker in queer* history, but there are many scholars in various interdisciplinary fields who would instead argue that emergence of homosexuality as an identity stemmed from medical and psychiatric research carried out by German psychiatrists and doctors.

This field of Sexology, developed from German and French influences, developed a taxonomy and categorization of sexual ‘deviance,’ in which homosexuality was at first seen as pathological and unnatural. This notion of a ‘degenerate’ sexuality and deviances, political, legal and social groups began to understand homosexuality in medicalized terms. Krafft-Ebbing, Ulrichs, Freud. Paedophilia and greeks.

The adjective “nameless” used to describe homoerotic love was never fully articulated until the Oscar Wilde trial. England in the year1895 (Kennedy 5), like Germany, punished sodomy with strict jail time. As in Germany, where it seemed no bourgeois male member of society was safe from speculation of his sexual orientation, famed author, Oscar Wilde was not immune to speculation in England. During his sodomy trial, Wilde, when questioned about the content of a ‘questionable’ poem by Lord Alfred Douglas (Two Loves), Oscar replied with his findings as: “the Love that dare not speak its name” (5). Scholars speculate that this is in fact where John Henry MacKay acquired “nameless”, in order to describe (or not describe) his attracti...

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...ere only a very few individuals whom he would be able to love.”

Conclusion

For John Hnery MacKay the term “Nameless” derived form the highly publicized Oscar Wilde obscenity trials was the root for his later description of same-sex and man-boy love by calling it “nameless/namenlose.” MacKay asserted that the love between a man and a boy could not be named, nor pathologized by medical science or sexology. MacKay’s disdain for these terms, led him to describe his homosexual desire as to be without a name because of the stigmas attached to these terms and how there were used in Weimar German society in the political and legal system to criminalize and punish same-sex desire. In order to make this more clear in his literature, MacKay’s Sagitta writings BNL and Puppenjunge serve as examples of MacKay’s own search to explain something that cannot or should not be named.