Monosexual/Plurisexual: A Concise History

ABSTRACT

Monosexuality and bisexuality (attraction to one and more than one gender/sex, respectively) are historical constructs, as are monomodal (e.g., gender/sex-based) and multimodal concepts of erotic attraction. I provide a brief outline of distinctions between single-gender and multi-gender attractions as they emerged in continental Europe. Nineteenth-century conceptualizations of sexual orientation in terms of gender-exclusivity were animated by medical frames for socio-sexual disfavor and aversion. From the early 1880s bisexuality became framed as a stage of “sexual inversion,” and, from 1891, associated with notions of gender-independent attraction to particular “types.” German and Dutch surveys reported in 1904 were pivotal in popularizing and internationalizing bisexual interest as a sexological intrigue.

KEYWORDS:

• Bisexuality (historical perspectives)
• Eugen Wilhelm (1842–1923)
• medical history
• monosexuality
• nonmonosexuality
• plurisexuality
• psychosexual hermaphroditism

Bi-, pluri- and nonmonosexual erotic receptivity has haunted sexual politics and sexual medicine for a long time. Identities have come to be associated with these respective terms, in ways awaiting general and local histories. Currently often defined as attraction to more than one gender (Cipriano et al., 2022) or sex, bisexuality’s medical-conceptual history remains to be studied in detail as well, not unlike transgender identification. Both secured an early medical profile in the reception of Carl Westphal’s 1869 concept of contrary sexual feeling (conträre Geschlechtsempfindung/Sexualempfindung), in the English-speaking world later vulgarized to sexual inversion. Specifically, both ended up being conceptualized in terms of stages of sexual inversion, the culmination of a longer, shared history as forms of mental, or mind-body, “intersexuality.” Having the sexual attributes of both male and female, and having a sexual inclination typical of both: bisexuality’s two nineteenth-century senses kept bleeding into the other well into the twentieth century, bridging gender “normality” and “abnormality.” Illustratively, in 1951 former president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Karl M. Bowman (1888–1973) used the synonym ambisexual in a nosologically (medical-classificatory) discerning way¹ though as he must have known, Ambisexualität had hitherto served as preferable to Bisexualität in the early psychodynamic sense (as advised in 1911 by Sándor Ferenczi). And how discerning had Bowman been? The APA’s 1952 DSM labeled “homosexuality” (undefined) a “sexual deviation” but not ambisexuality.

Still central to all constructions of “sexual orientation,” present-day distinctions between “monosexuality” (Stekel’s 1912 term) and nonmonosexuality seem the inheritance of an initially local (Central- and West-European) history of medicolegal labeling and emancipatory relabeling. A durable feature of this legacy is the mono-dimensionality of erotic orientation understood in monistic (if currently bifurcated) terms of sex/gender. Problematization at these points has been associated most readily with the work of first-generation psychoanalysts (e.g., Garber, 1995).² A recent attempt at dating the present-day sense of English bisexuality led the author to affirm, correctly, that “The period from 1890 to 1910 represents a pivotal moment for bisexuality as a concept and as a lexical category, but it is marked by a great deal of confusion among various concepts” (Lo Vecchio, 2021, p. 109). Yet surprisingly little light has been shed on early reifications of sexual, and especially homosexual, diversity. Most of Anglophone transgender and bisexuality historians (the latter including Angelides, 2001; Garber, 2000; Hutchins, 2018; Wolff, 1977) have skipped German and French. But most key texts on mentioned two historical “stages of sexual inversion,” written in these languages, were never translated. Of European work that offers relevant notes on bisexuality, little is complete or well-cited (Haeberle, 1994; Hekma, 1994; Herzer, 2017; Mendès-Leité et al., 1996). Van Alphen (2017) duly challenged the convention that bisexual identity managed to come into its own only from the 1970s,³ tracing Dutch developments at this point from the immediate post-WW2 era onward—but does little to illuminate earlier discourses.

As proposed below, bisexuality’s early history is that of the conceptual birth of sexual exclusivity per se, and more specifically the early medical history of non-bisexuality. Bisexuality was a theme that most early authors on homosexuality (a term coined in 1868/9) wrestled with: the idea had to grow on key contributors from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to Albert Moll, requiring an oeuvre-approach in each instance.

Toward sexual exclusivity

Medical historians may consider starting with the opinion of Soranus of Ephesus (fl. early 2nd c. CE) surviving in the Latin translation-adaptation, probably fifth-century, that is Caelius Aurelianus’ On Chronic Diseases (IV:9). This bit also preserves a fragment by pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides, who ventured that male and female seed might fail to properly fuse at conception (Aurelianus, 1950, pp. 900–905). According to Soranus/Aurelianus, thus, “a desire for both forms of love will harass the offspring” (utriusque veneris natos adpetentia sequatur). This rare and hard to interpret ancient medical account of homo/bisexuality made it into print in 1529, with multiple editions published during the eighteenth century, without securing much early modern commentary.

Though arguably ancient, notions of bisexual orientation inherit many of the looming problems in speaking about homosexuality and heterosexuality before 1868/9. Why, historically, was the one to exclude the other? As is well-known, various allusions to an inborn same-sex orientation, and thus to “sexual orientation,” were made from midcentury onward following Johann Ludwig Casper’s 1858 theoretical conception of “pederasty” in terms of an inborn mental hermaphroditism (geistige Zwitterbildung). There had been some important buildup to this epochal intuition, though the frame of reference of most clinicians, including Casper, was the pathicus/cinaedus (the male “bottom”) of ancient Rome, for instance as studied in the work of Julius Rosenbaum (he discussed Aurelianus, incidentally: Rosenbaum, 1839, p. 153ff). During especially the German Enlightenment the penchant driving the tribal custom that had been Greek paiderastia (then variably called amour antiphysique, amor graecus, paidophilia, philopaedia) was often represented as an aesthetic ideal of male love and rarely explicitly held to be an exclusive orientation. In legal medicine well into the nineteenth century, even in Casper’s work, the modern “homosexual” (pederast/sodomite/molly) was variably conceptualized as a debauchee who drifted, from “supersaturation” (Uebersättigung) or “exhaustion” of all normophilic and onanistic options, to any and all aberrant ones. Casper and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs both reflected on this old scenario of “Uranisierung/Uranifirung/Urnifirung” (Ulrichs, 1870, p. 24) from the norm, now acquiring more typological weight given investments in a new sense of inborn homosexuality. The early modern pederast’s medico-moral face had been immoderation and lack of self-composure, not yet that of a totalized “perversion of instinct.” This raises the introductory question of the medicalized history of sexual orientation per se, and more specifically of non-bisexuality: of single-gender erotic inclination.

Some pre-midcentury texts construed same-“sex” interest as monomania (Esquirol’s term for an idée fixe or dysfunctionally singular preoccupation), though this diagnostic call remained rare. A more robust early nineteenth-century discursive development can be traced of “pederasts” as gynophobes and misogynists, emphasizing exclusiveness of same-“sex” interest. This helps contextualize some of the interest to initially stage the 1860s Urning/Homosexualist as categorically, precisely phobically, non-heterosexual. Social horror vis-à-vis the sodomite turned to a clinical psychology of the preferential sodomite’s affective alienation from heterosexual interest: a nosological focus on an “unnatural” dégoût (sense of disgust) rather than on a goût antiphysique (unnatural appetite). Disinclination to and social marginalization of women had been thematized widely in reflection on causes for the “great national disease” that was ancient Knabenliebe; elaborately, for instance, in a work by theologian-priest Ignaz von Döllinger (1857, see pp. 684–691) and much earlier in the legal medicine of Müller (1782, see p. 779). Charles Fourier ([c.1806] 1847) spoke of a manie anti-féminine (p. 28). This element of the protopsychiatric pederast’s psychology and self-assertion was thematized in Casper’s much-cited pederast’s confession and rare others, including that of Fränkel’s homo mollis. “History’s first gay man” Ulrichs reaffirmed this by stipulating an urning/urningin’s “sexual/gendered dread” (geschlechtliche Horror vor Weibern/Männern) on the first page of his first pamphlet, Vindex. Krafft-Ebing, from 1882, flattered this idea by Latinizing it (Horror feminae, Horror viri), following up in 1889 with a gender-neutral term, Horror sexus alterius. This gender-specific sense of coitophobia Ulrichs initially named a defining, “inborn” “symptom” of Urningthum (homosexuality). Urnings were, first, not dionings (“heterosexuals”): their plight was not having, and never having had, a dual-“sex” (Geschlecht) option. As such Urningthum could be, and indeed was, construed as onto itself both an etiological-classificatory problem and possibly (as it would later be to forensic psychologist Von Schrenk-Notzing) a therapeutic target. To some of the earliest psychiatrists to take note of Ulrichs, gynophobia (Weiberscheu) was above all a sign of possible homosexuality.

Ulrichs was intervening in an earlier psychiatry of sexual aversion. Pederasty, onanism, “eunuchism” and negative sexual attitudes toward women had been cross-correlated in terms of mental disorder and sexual constitution. Masturbation and Weiberhaß (gynophobia) were causally related already in eighteenth-century legal medicine, a characterization of the masturbateur reiterated in authoritative spermatorrhea tracts including Lallemand’s. Surgeon-obstetrician in Rottenburg Bernhard Ritter (1804–1893), explicitly discussed the problem under a nosological heading entitled “diseases of the sexual sphere of a mixed kind,” specifically “frigidity” (1845, p. 81). Here, the ensemble of a lack of heterosexual inclination, onanistic and pederastic inclinations and gender atypicality already came close to the convoluted psychosexual category later to be called Urningthum, moreover already admitting both an acquired and sex-constitutional route to both male and female non-heterosexuality. A comparable state Ritter called Viragidität, a neologism or typo meant to convey the “well-known” concept of Viraginität:

As is well known, there are certain individuals among the female sex who, in their entire organization, bear more of the male type in themselves, and also in the expression of their inclinations and impulses manifest a more masculine than feminine sense. Such persons usually have a certain aversion to carnal union with the male sex, and if they ever indulge in the business of procreation, they do not feel that intensity of pleasure with which this act is usually connected; Such individuals, too well known by the name of “viragines” to be further described, do not fit into marriage; for apart from trying to appropriate male rights through perverted inclinations [verkehrte Neigungen], they are often infertile. (p. 83)

In several texts on viragines, the signum of acute dislike for cis-social and cis-sexual roles was similarly explicitized. This connects what had been, in ancient and early modern medicine, an unquestioned correlation of physical and mental habitus, to sexual inclination, further entrenching and essentializing said correlation.

Though this intersex framing of sexual orientation was rarely tied to male homosexuality (active or passive), around midcentury dislike for women was one of the few psychological traits of the Päderast mentioned in legal medicine textbooks (e.g., von Siebold, 1847, p. 111). “Causes of hatred of women are intellectual or emotional; physical reasons can also contribute to its development, especially if the sexual system is shattered or in some other way impaired as a result of unbridled and unnatural expulsions. Therefore, eunuchs, masturbators, pederasts and sodomites are mostly misogynists […]” (Anon, 1846, p. 619). If anything affirming this generalizing conjecture, same-sexually-inclined men explicitly disowned heterosexuality avant la lettre: marriage or regular prostitution were no remedies for this condition. An example here is an early “pederast’s confession” printed in the Schweizerische Monatschrift für praktische Medizin, of historical note because it predates Casper’s more famous one of 1863, and was already explicitly advertised as of potential interest to psychiatrists (Anon, 1857). Kaan (1861), known for his 1844 Psychopathia sexualis, also touched upon one onanist-pederast’s “exaggerated hatred of women, which increased to the point of fear [!] of even the remotest encounter with persons of the female sex.” In 1863 he doubled down: “In der Regel sind Päderasten Weiberhasser” (Kaan, 1863, p. 337). For Ulrichs (1864), and later Krafft-Ebing, horror (Abneigung, Ekel, Abscheu) constituted the flipside, or an acute corollary, of uranism: nausea, vomiting, disgust when attempting or even contemplating “natural” intercourse, in Krafft-Ebing’s operationalization.

First named in his third and first discussed in his fourth pamphlet, Ulrichs’ terms Uranodionäismus/Uranodioning (male bisexuality/bisexual) and Uranodioningin (female bisexual) are among the early acknowledgments of bisexual orientation as a sui generis condition, or rather, an urning-stage (Ulrichs, 1865a, pp. xxii, xxiii; Ulrichs, 1865b, p. 37 et passim). The rubrics reflected proceeding insight but were problematic to Ulrichs’ theorizing (he never met a Uranodioningin), and were eventually coordinated with two other urning and quasi-urning types, covering non-preferential and disavowed homosexuality (Uraniaster; virilisierte Mannling). Ulrichs’ epochal legal advocacy as an intervention in the prevailing medical-forensic stance on “pederasty,” but direct and immediate effects at this point of concession were few: medical references to uranodionings were dismissive and not many. Geigel (1869) and Löffler (1872) outlined Ulrichs’ terminology but both authors psychiatricized Ulrichs’ proselytizing (Geigel’s mock-diagnosis was Gynandromanie). An entry on conträre Sexualempfindung in an 1880 dictionary (likely the first ever) stated that Ulrichs had “rolled out a whole tableau of genders/sexes [Geschlechtern] to which he was accustomed to give names that were, though supposed to sound poetic, in actuality meaningless (Urninge, Dioninge, Uranodioninge)” (Blumenstok, 1880, p. 467). In the latter half of the 1890s, various now considerably more patient clinicians commemorated this terminology (Ulrichs’ pamphlets were also reprinted) but none ever adopted Uranodioninge.

Psychosexual hermaphroditism

Setting up a medical frame of sorts, Eugène Gley (1857–1930) was one of a number of mid-1880s authors (among whom Théodule-Armand Ribot) who began to see psychosexual disturbances as privileged sites for a general sexual psychology. Gley (1884, 1903) proposed the term hermaphrodisme moral (ou psychique), “mental hermaphroditism,” for cases in which “the normal anatomical constitution still exerts its influence; but, at the same time, the feelings which correspond to the genital function being perverted, the function is deviated. If these sentiments are more profoundly affected, we have absolute pederasts and tribades, which are so without intermittence” (p. 76n1). This footnoted ad-hoc definition, allowing “intermittently” same-sex affairs or interests, appears a response to recent research by Louis Martinau on lesbianism, specifically his typological distinction between “tribades à relations continues et tribades à relations intermittentes” (1884, pp. 12–17).⁴ Accordingly, the intermittent tribade is often married and would be less refined, more masculine, in her Sapphic excursions. Particularly striking to Gley was “the case of this young girl who, married, continues to have a shameful relationship with one of her [female] friends and even comes to introduce her permanently into the marital home, forcing her husband to accept this situation.” Gley’s term pioneered a “bisexual constitution” theory of Westphal’s “contrary sexual feeling,” more crucially one that explicitly allowed stages of inversion, from nonexclusive to exclusive (“absolute”) inversion.⁵

Not citing Gley, Krafft-Ebing more definitively conceptualized psychosexual hermaphroditism (psychosexuale/psychische Hermaphrodisie or psychosexuales Zwittertum; 1889a, 1889b, pp. 88, 96ff), as the first of four stages of inborn “contrary sexual feeling”: congenital, predominant homosexuality with “rudimentary, weak and merely temporary” heterosexuality. Eulenburg comparably spoke of a “light form or precursor [Vorstufe]” of sexual inversion (1894, p. 68). Others saw an analogy with female prostitutes: an “incomplete inversion” affecting “tertiary sexual characteristics” such as female honor and pleasure in “normal” intercourse (Kurella, 1896, p. 239). Case descriptions followed in work by Krafft-Ebing (cases also discussed by Von Schrenck-Notzing, 1892, pp. 212–214), Albert Moll, Havelock Ellis, Fuchs (1899, pp. 98–104), Löwenfeld (1903, pp. 229–232),⁶ with single anecdotal cases by Kraepelin (1893, pp. 686–687) and Forel (1905, p. 253). Ellis briefly reported the first English cases at the September 1895 Medico-Legal Congress held in New York: “I may here add that six of my [sexual inversion] cases are psychosexual hermaphrodites; that is to say that they find sexual satisfaction both with their own and the opposite sex” (Ellis, 1895, p. 259). He was in fact one of the very few English writers to ever present cases under this heading.⁷

Moll’s gradually expanded chapter on the subject offered the most extensive nineteenth-century discussion (Moll, 1891, see pp. 150–155, 1893, pp. 200–211, 1899, pp. 329–359).⁸ Moll (1891) accepted Krafft-Ebing’s terminology but significantly broadened its scope, underscoring the frequency, variety and varying intensities of nonexclusive homosexuality/heterosexuality, and stressing possible developmental aspects. Two years later Moll (1893, p. 200) concluded “that the study of psychosexual hermaphroditism is extremely important and will shed even more light on the psychology of love itself.” Bisexual interests here became a key not only to recent concepts such as masochism and fetishism but indeed the psychology of sexual variety and the complexity of human sexual experience in general. This elaborated on earlier discussions and cases of “periodic” or “temporary pederasty” (Tarnowsky, 1884/1886; Von Krafft-Ebing, 1877), in Tarnowski’s view comparable to alcoholism or the, in France, recently discovered exhibitionnisme: “The patients satisfy their perverse impulse two or three times a year, no more often, and the rest of the time they have normal intercourse with women.” In 1883 Ludwig Kirn alluded to the same observed dimension of symptomatic periodicity. Comparable to Ulrichs’ considerations, between 1886 and 1891 Krafft-Ebing also deliberated on the habituated or “cultivated” pederast (gezüchtete Päderast) who was perhaps indifferent in his inclinations but who, where homosexually active, still “feels himself in an active role corresponding to his real sex” and thus no psychosexual hermaphrodite. By 1891, this “category” had emancipated to a last outpost of male sexual normality, with bisexuals the starting point of “psychosexual degeneration.” Multiple types of non-monosexuality thus already animated late-1880s definitions of psychosexual health and illness. Clear differences in perception emerged at this point during the 1890s, specifically between Krafft-Ebing and Moll (Moll ultimately rated distinguishing homosexuals and bisexuals as “hardly possible”: 1910, p. 4n1). Multiple mid-1890s German-language critics of the “Vienna school” pathological model of homosexuality, including Alfred Hoche (1865–1943) and August Cramer (1860–1912), proclaimed the ubiquity, even the normality, of at the least developmental same-sex sexual interests in otherwise “normal” people.

In mid-1890s France, leading homosexuality-connoisseurs comparably pondered the question of what they called indifférént(e)s. Raffalovich (1895) spoke of men born indifferent (nés indifférénts: p. 122), Saint-Paul (1896) of indifférént(e)s as a subtype of invertis d’occasion (pp. 26–27), though these seemed rare:

One encounters few truly indifferent people, that is, beings whose sexual desires are directed indifferently and equally towards men and towards women. I have seen three cases of it, which seem to me beyond dispute; in two of these abnormal men there was a very slight preference of inversion [i.e., same-sex] to normal love. One of them wrote to me: “I feel very good about being able to direct my sexuality as I wish; I am perfectly indifferent, although the man aesthetically pleases me a little more than the woman, though I have good reasons to turn towards the woman, and I broke completely with the man.” (pp. 338–339)

Saint-Paul maintained his views in 1910, now using bisexuels as an umbrella term for occasionels and constitutional indifférents (1910, pp. vi, 337–338). Evidently used in self-descriptions, one is tempted to trace the notion of “sexual indifference” back to Dessoir’s (1894) concept of a developmental phase of undifferentiated sexuality (undifferenzirtes Geschlechtsgefühl; Stadium der Undifferenzirtheit, Stadium der Ungeschiedenheit), a concept floated in or before 1892 (Von Schrenck-Notzing, 1892, p. 154). In 1894 Dessoir explained some cases of young adult homosexuality in terms of prolonged indifferentiation in sexual orientation; Raffalovich discussed the article in 1894, and it proved widely suggestive to (notably) Moll, Ellis and Freud. This new developmental concept gave sexual undecidedness a particular pedagogical urgency: “If there is an indifferent type—and it is easy to admit it—love being a cerebral fact much more than an instinctive one, the great problem of education will be to guide the adolescent in the serious choice of his sexual vocation” (Saint-Paul, 1896, p. 207).⁹ This concern extended far into the twentieth century. Lombroso professed that, just as all kinds of criminal tendencies exist in childhood, “there is also a temporary type of homosexuality in childhood, even in those who subsequently develop a completely normal sexuality. Sometimes only a semi-sexuality [Halbsexualität] shows up, a kind of moral hermaphroditism which, according to [Giovanni] Marchesini, expresses itself in girls’ boarding schools as platonic love and is truly warmhearted” (Lombroso, 1906, p. 341). Rohleder (1915) comparably described Bisexualität as “hermaphroditism with regard to the sexual drive [sexuelles Triebzwittertum] […] an enduring dual-sexual stage with regard to the drive direction, a belated lack of differentiation” (p. 446). In the overseas recommendation of Clark (1914): “On account of the probability that adolescents incline to bisexuality no one should be pronounced a homosexual until the beginning of the twentieth year” (p. 341).

Marc-André Raffalovich (1864–1934), too, reused Gley’s expression for a more specific denotation (it is unclear whether he had read Gley, 1884): “I would call a mental or psychic hermaphrodite the individual whose two instincts (unisexual [i.e., same-sexual] and heterosexual) are in balance, one against the other; the individual who can, up to a certain moment, choose, or else who successively experiences the desire of one then of the other sex, who, loving a male, does not think of women and vice versa” (1896, p. 51). However, psychologists would have a rough time deciphering what, etiologically, dual receptivity entailed on a case-by-case basis: “Sexual psychology will have to be very advanced to solve the following problem: is mental hermaphroditism mainly the result of circumstances acting on the uranist with heterosexual inclinations or on the heterosexual with unisexual inclinations [cases of pseudohermaphrodisme moral, in other words], or is it mainly congenital?” (1896 original italics). He also offered this unambiguous tripartite terminology: “la tempérance sexuelle (hétérosexuelle ou uraniste ou bissexuelle)” (p. 17). Compare the more confusing use of “bisexuality” that had appeared, once, in work by Krafft-Ebing and in an 1894 bit by Raffalovich (a reworked version of this saw German and English translations published in 1895): “The unisexual who tries bisexuality [la bissexualité] is as corrupt as the normal-sexual man who attempts unisexuality; they have all vices, both those natural to them and others” (p. 217).

Bisexualität beyond hermaphroditism

How, beyond this 1880s-1890s discourse formation, a popular concept of “a bisexual” emerged, merits research. A 1909 piece on Berlin sexual slang relates that “Der Bisexuelle ‘ist Halbseiden,’” and that “Personen, die bisexuell sind oder nur gelegentlich mit Männern verkehren, ‘gehören zur Familie Mitmachowski’ oder ‘machen kurzweg mit’” (Von Schlichtegroll, 1909, p. 10). Another author confirmed Halbseiden and added the synonym angewärmt for “bisexuell … homoeventuell” (Berliner, 1910, p. 33; warm meant gay). Perhaps the earliest estimate of the relative prevalence of men that were “Heterosexual, Homosexual oder Bisexual” is found in an 1897 footnote by Otto Rudolf Podjukl (1855 or 1862–1900) alias “Otto de Joux” (his birth name was outed in the 1899 Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen). Podjukl’s seeming transliteration of Raffalovich’s terminology is possibly the earliest German attestation of this denotation: “According to the estimates of well-traveled Urnings, Hamburg would be the most heavily urnically burdened of all German cities; they claim that every fourth man there is Urning, but every sixth man is constitutionally bisexual [bisexual veranlagt]. However, these assumptions seem to me too exaggerated to merit credence” (“de Joux,” 1897, p. 215n). He twice used the term Bisexualität in a similar sense: once, asserting that “Bisexuality, too, has today witnessed an astonishing expansion” (p. 62n), and affixed to Raffalovich’s homosexuality typology (p. 76, cf. Raffalovich, 1896, p. 5), in Podjukl’s understanding denoting the case of “congenital sexual perversity or uranism, which can be suppressed by particularly favorable circumstances, by careful education and willpower, in order to give way to normal sex life or to connect with it after puberty has been reached.”

In 1896 Hirschfeld briefly acknowledged a “third group” of bisexual men and women—“their number may not be small”—under the now unremarkable but undiscussed heading of “mental hermaphroditism,” Seelenzwittertum (Hirschfeld, 1896, pp. 6, 12–14).¹⁰ The classificatory problem interested at least some of the mid-1890s forensic specialists. Contra Moll, Von Hüpeden (1895, see p. 443) considered “pederasts” who were married with children suggestive of “a lack of moral sense” more than of any inborn trait. In 1896, Eugen Wilhelm (1842–1923), then writing anonymously, offered a notably elaborate and informed rebuttal:

Quite apart from the numerous studies that have ascertained psychic hermaphroditism, it would be downright wonderful if nature knew fine gradations between the purely pronounced sex drive towards man and towards woman on the other hand, and if there were not various intermediate stages in this area, as everywhere else. But it is still worth noting that many so-called psychic hermaphrodites are to be regarded as pure urnings. The mere possibility of intercourse with the woman proves nothing for the sexual attraction to women. Many urnings can indeed perform the physical sexual act with a woman or at least with a certain category of women, but some have none at all, some only a gross sensual satisfaction without any mental excitement, the latter of which they can only feel towards men. Such urnings are only too readily classified as psychic hermaphrodites. (Wilhelm, 1896, p. 375)

Elsewhere Wilhelm rebutted another author along comparable lines: “It is also false that psychic hermaphroditism does not exist; aye, it would be wondrous if such intermediate stages did not exist” (Wilhelm, 1897, p. 446).

Terminology in Berlin soon shifted to “the bisexuals” (Anon, 1900; Hirschfeld, 1899, pp. 23, 24; Merzbach, 1904, p. 19). Berlin’s general reading public was notified of this post-medical sense at the earliest occasions: reviews of the first two volumes of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Gaulke, 1899, p. 961, 1901, p. 207). The new sense was not included in most early twentieth-century medical lexica, however, though it shows up in a 1905 volume of Meyers Grosses Konversations-Lexikon, under lemma Homosexualität (Meyer, 1905, p. 526). Ernst Burchard’s Lexikon des gesamten Sexuallebens had entries for both Bisexualität as well as (which will be discussed below) Typentheorie (Burchard, 1914, pp. 27, 189–180). But the 1923 and 1926 editions of the Handwörterbuch der Sexualwissenschaft remarkably did not have a separate entry for Bisexualität. The new sense appeared in the 1906 English translation of Otto Weiniger’s 1903 Geschlecht und Charakter (as the OED notes), though there were independent entries into medicine/psychiatry.¹¹ The OED nominates a review by Ellis in the Journal of Mental Science of a German article by psychiatrist-criminologist Paul Näcke (1851–1913) as a case in point, though this refers to the old sense of bisexual constitution (the topic of Näcke’s article). Two 1908 reviews, by Ellis and Ernest Jones, of another article by Näcke (1908), for the same journal and for the Review of Neurology and Psychiatry (respectively), did invoke the new sense, as did a review of yet another relevant article by Näcke (1911) in the American Journal of Psychology of April 1912.¹² At least one early medical reference to the new sense did arrive in 1907, in a message from Berlin in the Medical Record (New York) of October 26, 1907. It discusses a speech on homosexuality by Munich psychiatrist Dr. Hans Gudden (1866–1940), reportedly drafted in Hirschfeld’s demedicalizing spirit, proposing that “The proportion of purely homosexual individuals may be estimated as from 1 to 5%, including bisexual persons, 2 to 6%” (Anon, 1907, p. 700; bit reprinted in the Alienist and Neurologist of February 1908). One of the earliest mentions of this sense (“having sexual feeling for both sexes”) in an Anglophone medical dictionary is that in the eighth (1915) edition of Dorland’s American Illustrated Medical Dictionary (the seventh edition of 1914 had not included it). Inspirations may have been Ellis (1913, see p. 134), Clark (1914), and/or a traveler to Hirschfeld (“the Germans are obsessed with sex”: Herts, 1913, p. 494). Ellis (1915) wrote: “sexual attraction to both sexes, a condition formerly called psychosexual hermaphroditism, but now more usually bisexuality” (p. 278). The term with its new sense, in short, can be said to have become English medical jargon between 1907 and 1915, via the German. Prominent discussion by Bembo (1912), with reference to Hirschfeld’s study, helped establish the notion and term in the Spanish literature. Bembo proposed a typology based on the predominance of uranian or sapphic attraction: bisexuales ura-normales, uranistas and safistas (pp. 71–72, cf. 56).

Hirschfeld’s premier angle circa 1900 was the cultural profile and developmental psychology of married gay men: “Some writers tend to think of every married Urning as bisexual [bisexuell], a psychic hermaphrodite. That is incorrect. Only those deserve the term bisexual who feel libido and orgasm [sic] toward both sexes. In our experience, this is almost exclusively the case in the group […] in which it is not the sex [Geschlecht], but the type, that is decisive” (1901, p. 51). This last category could possibly include “men, but also many women, who feel an inclination to tender youths as well as to the related type of boyish girls, mostly in the so-called Backfischalter [teen years]” (p. 39). This idea of gender being of secondary importance or indeed irrelevant echoed Moll (1891, see pp. 153–154; 1898, pp. 482–484, 1899, p. 349), who opined that this was the case with “many” bisexuals. The nuance between sex-based attraction and type-specific or overriding monotypic attraction, was probed by questions 69, 74 and 76 of Hirschfeld’s (1899) questionnaire, the first of which sought to register bisexual attraction proper and the last two of which refer to “type.” Holding on to his restrictive definition (Hirschfeld, 1903, pp. 35ff, esp. 41), denied having been able to identify “real bisexuals,” and deferred answering the question of its “unlikely,” “uncomplicated” existence. Echoing Moll, essayist Erich Mühsam (1878–1934) had recently characterized Bisexualität—the question of “those whose drives are attuned to both sexes”—as an “extraordinarily important question […] which has been greatly neglected by many writers, including Dr. Hirschfeld (1903, p. 21). Mühsam devoted some eight pages to bisexuality, declaring it constitutional: a “bisexuelle Veranlagung” in a new sense of constitutionally dual-sex orientation. That Hirschfeld never met bisexuals was understandable: they either suppressed their homosexuality or found themselves misunderstood as self-deceiving urnings. Moreover, Mühsam’s acquaintances exemplified that Moll’s “type-theory” could not be used to erase the occurrence of seeming type-independent, and in cases essentially unqualified, bisexual attraction. Wilhelm (1904) agreed (“Most notable are the [Mühsam’s] comments on bisexuality, with which I wholeheartedly agree”: p. 502), though, as would Hirschfeld, Wilhelm remained conflicted over prevalence. In late 1909 he wrote to Näcke, “that he has only met very few truly bisexuals and considers the diagnosis to be difficult at this point. I [Näcke] dare not decide here” (Näcke, 1910, p. 589n1). Wilhelm elaborated this opinion in his review of Näcke’s latest (Wilhelm, 1911, see pp. 417–419). All of this is notable in light of Wilhelm’s self-identification with Bisexualität in a 1913 diary entry (Schlagdenhauffen, 2014, p. 54n4; see further Dubout, 2018, esp. pp. 69, 367–368).

Various survey-based estimates of the prevalence of male bisexual orientation appeared in 1904, including Hirschfeld’s own and one done in 1903 among Amsterdam students by Dutch physician-psychiatrist Lucien von Römer (1873–1965). These studies offered the first descriptive statistics on sexual, including bisexual, orientation (Hirschfeld, 1904; Von Römer, 1904, 1906), which given their converging results proved to Hirschfeld that bisexuality existed re vera: as an “innate peculiarity that cannot be determined by external influences […] formed by a constitutional complex of properties” (Hirschfeld, 1904, p. 52). Hirschfeld’s (1906) monograph-length essay, Of the Nature of Love, contained his first extensive discussion of the subject. In it, one finds the first narrative accounts of people identifying as bisexuell and/or identifying intimi as such, interspersed with people identifying their preferred types, crossing the sexual divide (pp. 165–182), followed by apparently readily associated accounts of married gay men, and age-defined orientations (ephebophilia, androphilia, gerontophilia; pp. 198ff). A robust frame here was Hirschfeld’s problematization of hard distinctions between type-interest, whether it be more hetero- than homosexual or vice versa, and on the other hand never fully indifferent bisexual interests. Striking is Hirschfeld’s resistance against using the category of bisexual interest as a way of containing and delimiting erotic continuities and fluidities that already risked being themselves overly contained and limited as “hetero” or “homo.” At the same time, he also examined, per mailed survey, how many of his Committee’s acquaintances identified as “bisexual” (10 of 113 respondents, of 787 surveys sent: Friedländer, 1905, pp. 409–411).

Hirschfeld’s December 1903 survey question read, in German: “Richtet sich Ihr Liebestrieb (Geschlechtstrieb) auf weibliche (W.), männliche (M.) oder weibliche und männliche (W. + M.) Personen?” The findings, showing a 4.5% bisexuality among a college student population (triple the “homosexual” count), were widely discussed, internationalizing “the bisexual.” Von Römer (1904) introduced the new, Berliner sense of bisexueelen into the Dutch language and literature; from his data he inferred a total of 75.000 Dutch bisexuals, on a then 5 million (est.) population (he himself claimed personal acquaintance with “300 homo- and bisexuals”). Raffalovich (1904, see p. 931n1) informed French criminal psychologists of the new data and terminology. Arnold Aletrino qualified the findings: “at this time we can only make guesses about the number of bisexuals and have to reckon only with possibilities because we know too little about these individuals” (Aletrino, 1905, p. 61, 1908, p. 666).

Back in Germany, the emergent idea of bisexuality made for a specific issue among discussants of the new survey approach. “The unexpectedly high scores obtained for bisexuals deserve attention in more ways than one,” opined a reviewer for the Hygienische Rundschau of October 15, 1904. They were also considered remarkable by the state Commission for Petitions, writing in the 1904 German Reichstag Session Reports that “it was significant that Dr. Hirschfeld took the position that there was no bisexual predisposition.” Clearly the old and new senses of the term, let alone Hirschfeld’s theoretical position, were confusing to political gatekeepers—who here decided to stick with the antihomosexual paragraph 175, contra Hirschfeld’s petitioning. Prominent critics of the methodology and interpretation included Moll (1905, 1910, see p. 4n1, 1926, p. 772), Benedikt Friedländer (1904, pp. 81-82n, 191–192 and appendix, 71–73, Friedländer and Moll (1905), Rüdin (1904), and Weygandt (1910, see pp. 966). Friedländer (who would shortly after secede from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) found bisexual too artificial- and medical-sounding to be applied to people like Shakespeare. He proposed a different terminology, admittedly male-centric and socially tricky—“Paederasten, Gynaekerasten und Amphierasten”—and proposed a gender-neutral term for the third, “Biamanten” (“the bi-amorous”; 1904, pp. 72-73n). Most vexing to Friedländer were the Zwischenstufentheorie and Urningstheorie stipulating a third sex, which he judged political in nature and bothered by a clinical bias that led to an underestimation of the ubiquitous, modal bisexuality that the ancients, with the exception of Plato, had simply taken for granted. Von Kupffer (1908) also proposed new terminology, specifically a distinction between male “biheterosexuals” (loving the feminine side of both women and male youth) and true bisexuals (loving both the masculine and feminine side in any gender/Geschlecht: p. 95).

Bisexuality interested various of the many authors on gender and sexual plurality during the 1900s and 1910s. Likely referring to Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch considered bisexuality to be “scientifically proven only in recent years” (1907, p. 595), moreover to be rooted in bisexual constitution. Multiple polemic works asserted bisexuality’s universality (e.g., Lehien, 1905). In a theoretical essay, Berg (1906, p. 101) distinguished mono-, duo- (monoamorous or serial monogamous), poly- (polyamorous), and pansexuals, bisexuals to be included under the second heading. Few stakeholders denied that bisexuality was a distinct entity, if a challenging one. Danish novelist Herman Bang (1857–1912), himself gay, believed in a congenital bisexual orientation (as he wrote in a posthumously published manuscript written in early 1909 or somewhat before: Bang, 1922, p. 22), for instance, and from experience contradicted ideas that this was “homosexual seduction.” Extensively quoting Bang though likely informed more by a clinical acquaintance with the problem, Hirschfeld’s coworker at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft Kronfeld (1923) declared “so-called bisexuality” “actually quite an unexplained area” (pp. 60–61).

Informed by Hirschfeld’s survey work but clearly also Krafft-Ebing, Freud’s (1905, p. 2) tripartite classification recognized absolutely, occasionally/contingently and amphigenously/amphigenic (psychosexually hermaphroditic) inverted people. Freud remarkably never re-used this third adjective in this sense though he held on to it even in the sixth (1926) edition of Three Contributions, whence its unrevised reappearance in the fourth (1930) English edition. Only in 1937, and only once, Freud used Hirschfeld’s terminology (“Wir heißen diese Leute Bisexuelle”: Freud, 1937, p. 232). The 1905 equation with Krafft-Ebing’s term, enclosed in parentheses, is puzzling. In his 1906 review, Wilhelm equated Freud’s seemingly needless and unexplained terminology, of which there are only a few other attestations, with Bisexuellen. The stakes were high. In one of the rare texts where Freud’s terminology is attested, Isidor Sadger wrote that “it is now well established that every human being is inherently bisexual [von Haus aus bisexuell]. We not only find homosexual roots in all psychoneuroses, but even the most normal person never lacks the inclination toward their own sex” (Sadger, 1909, p. 54). In a review of Näcke (1911) and Stekel (1912) agreed that “there is no such thing as monosexualism [Monosexualismus], as our homosexuals have taught us in psychoanalysis” (p. 143). Stekel on various later occasions maintained that “monosexual people do not exist!” (Stekel, 1917, p. 122), referring to a purported pervasive tendency to neurotically suppress bisexuality (he also denied that any sexual act could productively be called abnormal). Stekel was thus among the first to approach modern (as opposed to ancient) homosexuality psychologically as monosexuality (as noted Wilhelm in his review: Wilhelm, 1918).

American author Prime-Stevenson (1908) rated “bisexualism” (“similisexualism [= homosexuality] in men not distinctly Uranian [= ‘gay’]”) as frequent. He is one of the very few to invoke Ulrichs’ term for the occasion:

In modern Italy, where dionian-uranians are peculiarly a type—in all classes racially, one may say—in Italy, the proportion has been set at one in sixty-five: but in Italy bisexualism of the erotic impulse, an instinctive liking for now the male now the female in the sexual act, is an important aspect. In Germany, it is put at something near to two per cent. In France, it is reckoned at less than one per cent. In England at one in the hundred, or less. In Austria at one in seventy; in Russia at one in seventy-five to eighty (a low estimate); in Spain and the Spanish-settled countries, at one in sixty-five; and in the United States of North America at one in about eighty-five. (p. 75)

Prime-Stevenson’s “Categoric Personal Analysis for the Reader,” an appendix based on Hirschfeld’s 1899 questionnaire, specifically probed the Reader for the possibility: “do you take pleasure (or would you experience it) with now a man, now with a woman?” (p. 628). It indeed explicitly addressed the “Dionian-Uranian”: a new and distinct sexual persona. For the nomination of the most authoritative textbook discussion in this timeframe one is inclined to pick the 20-odd-page chapter on the “differential diagnosis between homosexuality and bisexuality” by Hirschfeld (1914, see pp. 198–215), which one finds condensed in a later textbook (Hirschfeld, 1918, see pp. 184–187). Subsequent substantive discussions include the anti-Hirschfeldian texts by Placzek (1922, see p. 136ff, 1925). The first English detailed discussion of bisexual case histories after Ellis were those (N = 5) in Henry’s (1941) Sex Variants (see pp. 17–98), the report of a committee on the subject formed in 1935. Readers familiar with German sexology had reason to be unimpressed. In his review for the American Journal of Psychiatry of November 1843, Benjamin Karpman complained that an abridged translation of Hirschfeld (1914) would have been a better use of resources.

The 1910s saw the first hormonal “treatments” for both homo- and bisexuality, which were based on organ extracts. Bisexuals seemed the most promising candidates. Hermann Rohleder assumed a “hermaphrodite pubertal gland” in bisexuals, to be confirmed by autopsies. Rohleder (1917) “tried this organotherapy several times with bisexuals, firstly Dr. Henning’s (Berlin) Testogan, this is an extract from bull testicles, and second, Natterer’s (Munich) Horminum masculinum, which is composed of testicular, prostate, seminal vesicle, hypophysis and pancreas tissue” (p. 1509).¹³ Both cases were unsuccessful; Steinach, in that same year, reported a successful heterosexualization of a bisexual by means of testicular implant (p. 1510) but long-term follow-up was never offered. Among attempts purportedly successful in monosexualizing men by means of gonadal replacement, is a “curative” operation in 1919 by Richard Mühsam (1920), a referral by Hirschfeld. R. Mühsam (1926, 1927) later maintained that of all his 27 diverse research subjects, his one bisexual case seemed his single success: “Only the bisexual has remained permanently heterosexual after his instinctual life has been corrected [‘straightened out’: richtig gelenkt] by the release of testicular hormones” (1927, p. 331). Rohleder’s (1925) conclusion was comparable: castration did not work, though testicular implants could be tried in male bisexuals with predominant heterosexuality and in married gay men to address any straight “impotence” (see pp. 141–142). Psychiatrist Valkema Blouw (1924) rather recommended suggestion with or without hypnosis, or psychoanalysis. This representative of the Dutch branch of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee advanced a five-item Kinseyesque scale, locating bisexueelen in-between “complete man/woman” (0–5% homosexuality) and “complete invert” (0–5% heterosexuality; p. 1505).

An example of physical-anthropological research is a 1923 dentistry dissertation at the University of Leipzig comparing the denture of 88 gay men, 33 bisexual men (also in part recruited via Hirschfeld) and 10 lesbians, finding a pattern of more feminine types of tooth arrangement in gay, and less so in bisexual, men (Dobkowsky, 1924). Bisexuals were again arranged in a proto-Kinseyan fashion, “in graded order according to the strength of the homosexual component” (p. 198). Meanwhile, alternations of homo- and heterosexual interest continued to interest early sexologists. Marcuse (1917) wrote a short article on “periodic-alternating hetero-homosexuality,” for instance, wherein a 31-year-old writer describes a seasonal homosexuality, which felt near to his real orientation and during which he was most productive and happy, alternated by a dysthymic season of “normal-sexual” orientation.

Conclusion

Nonmonosexual orientation was no trivial problem in nineteenth-century pluralistic conceptions of oriented sexuality. Where today bisexuality remains a cherished problem of definition and of visibility, the quick historical probe offered above suffices in granting these defining problems an extended track record. Rendered invisible mostly by historians’ disinterest to engage with primary sources, before WW2 bisexuality’s reality invited and moderated voluminous discussion concerning the definition, diversity, prevalence, etiology and (organo)therapy of non-heterosexuality, as well as intertwined, often constitutional ideas about gender. Multiple authors picked up on the issue during the 1890s, often from Krafft-Ebing. Hirschfeld, Moll, Wilhelm and Erich Mühsam all anticipated 1903/4 survey research in pondering the methodological and social problems with reifying “truly” bisexual—and thus of all sexual—orientation. All this suggests a substantive, and after 1904 international, role for non-monosexuality in the Western thematization of sexual diversity before and alongside psychoanalysis.

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Notes

1. “There are many variations in homosexual behavior. One group are normally heterosexual but resort to homosexual behavior when a partner of the opposite sex is not available. Another group of individuals are ambisexual and regularly indulge in both hetero- and homosexual relations and do not seek one form of sex behavior to the exclusion of the other.” Another group of “homosexuals” “regard themselves as females and often ask for castrative operations” (Bowman, 1951, p. 2848).

2. Freudians assumed various etiologically distinct types of non-“absolute” homosexuals. A former member of Freud’s Psychologische Mitwochgesellschaft remarked: “It is not bisexuality that is innate in humans, but polysexuality [Polysexualität], that is, the ability to perceive the secretory sexual intensity reflex with feelings of pleasure, regardless of the external stimuli that cause it” (Meisl, 1908, p. 197).

3. Anomaly (1927) was among the first anglophone texts to discuss an emergent social distinction between “bisexual” and “invert” constituencies, with “many” of the latter consulted by the anonymous author reportedly rejecting the idea of bisexuality as a transitional stage (see p. 61). “Anomaly” insisted on a hard distinction between partial and complete inversion, a stipulation criticized by Sullivan (1927): “Either we have been woefully misguided by our theory, or the completely heterosexual and the completely homosexual individual is [sic] an abstract construct which we erect in our speculation, as limits between which, in infinite gradations, actual individuals are to be classified” (p. 534, ital. in orig.).

4. This section was extensively quoted in a French translation of Lombroso’s work (Lombroso & Ferrero, 1896, pp. 411–413), though absent from the 1893 Italian original and the English version.

5. Gley’s hermaphrodisme moral thus superseded Casper’s denotation: this was how geistige Zwitterbildung had appeared in the 1862 French translation of his textbook. Alexander Lacassagne’s phrase, hermaphrodites moraux (1878, p. 456), could be an unacknowledged source for this term and view, though Lacassagne’s work offers little concept of a stage model for sexual inversion. Hermaphrodisme moral had at least once been applied to the eighteenth-century’s celebrity cross-dresser Chevalier/Chevalière d’Éon (de Semur, 1843, p. 185): an unelaborated but early qualification of eonism, here apropos an attempt to debunk the existence of “true hermaphrodites,” then also called bisexuels.

6. This section was added to the third edition of this work; the sixth (1922) edition still featured it. The fifth edition (1914) was the first to speak of, not variation in the relative share of hetero- or homosexuality but “grades” depending on the preponderance of homosexuality. Here Löwenstein also used the plural Bisexuellen as a synonym.

7. Seemingly the first Anglophone reference to this concept was by Chicago urologist James G. Kiernan (1852–1923). Outlining Krafft-Ebing’s matured psychosexual nosology before the Chicago Medical Society on March 7, 1892, Kiernan idiosyncratically supplemented to Krafft-Ebing’s “psychical hermaphroditism” (“[t]races of the normal sexual appetite are discoverable”) the term heterosexuals in which “inclinations to both sexes occur as well as to abnormal methods of gratification” (Kiernan, 1892, pp. 198, 199n30). This seems the term’s introduction into the English language, as Katz (1995, pp. 19–20) has suggested. This tabulated use can perhaps best be read conservatively as meaning that what Kiernan called sexual perversion proper (i.e., Krafft-Ebing’s conträre Sexualempfindung) covered what Kiernan here called “pure homosexuals,” trace-heterosexuals (Krafft-Ebing’s psychical hermaphrodites), and heterosexuals whose heterosexuality was substantive enough to deserve the designation, though admitting more than a trace of homosexuality or (rather than and) perverted gratification methods. A review of the 1892 English translation of Psychopathia sexualis (it had 1892 and 1893 editions, contra Katz’s remarks on this point) in the Medical Standard (Chicago) of July 1893 reprinted Kiernan’s tabulated outline. An awkward introduction of German nosology into English, in any case.

8. The later English rendering is much-abbreviated (Moll, 1931, here pp. 138–143).

9. Dessoir’s concept had been anticipated in the early 1890s by Chicago urologist G. Frank Lydston and Irish alienist Norman Conolly. Various Enlightenment writers explicitly recognized a male peri-pubescent, inclusive receptivity in love interests in connection to the specter of “pederasty.” Leipzig philosopher Friedrich August Carus (1770–1807) suggested, in a posthumous book, that “Even where the sexual sensation were really excited earlier [i.e., in childhood], it will long remain without certainty and without images, while the fantasy has not yet mediated the interaction between mind and sensuality” (1808, p. 71).

10. Podjukl had used Seelenzwitter, Seelenhermaphrodit and Seelenandrogyn throughout an 1893 work in reference to urnings in general, but here did not dwell on bisexuality in the 1897 sense. He did venture that “about 4,5% of the male population in Europe are born urnings, of which two thirds marry, one third cannot marry” (“de Joux,” 1893, p. 124).

11. Weiniger approvingly quoted Moll (1898) on “psychosexuelle Hermaphroditen.”

12. Much occupied with proper classification, Näcke (1911) considered how “ordinary bisexuality” related to late-onset, “tardive homosexuality” (pp. 631–632). The answer would have to be a peripubescent onset and more acute concurrence of desires in the former. Then again, one would expect transitional stages between these conditions. Näcke had gotten acquainted with multiple bisexuals: “I know a lawyer who is one of the best experts on inversion and is himself a bisexual [most likely Wilhelm], as well as a lady who had studied inversion among women very thoroughly and was also gifted as such” (Näcke, 1909, p. 1478). Näcke picked up on the theme at least as early as 1896 (in a review of Raffalovich, 1896), later suggesting that “geschlechtlich Indifferente” dreamt both homosexually and heterosexually, a distinguishing mark (Näcke, 1900, pp. 123–124), as would Rohleder later agree, and as psychoanalysts, still later, would elaborate (Coriat, 1917). Bisexuality held specific interest given that unlike mono-homosexuality it would stand a chance of being turned fully heterosexual, through hypnosis (Näcke, 1905). Bleuler (1918, see p. 439) agreed.

13. In 1926, Rohleder (1928) coined the term Trisexualität, a complex made up of hetero-, homo-, and automonosexuality.