PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This article asks how it was possible for early 20th century homosexual litera- ture to talk about anal intercourse between men. At the beginning of the cen- tury, sexology, psychoanalysis, and jurisprudence were talking about homosexual anal intercourse, while homosexual rights acitivism was focused on presenting a respectable picture of homosexual men and women, which was accompanied by a tendency of desexualizing homosexuality. Fictional literature reacted to the conflicting imperatives to reveal and to conceal homosexual sexuality by dethe- matizing anal sex, but also by employing a variety of strategies to talk about it in non-explicit ways. On the basis of a corpus of narrative texts by Karl Friedrich von Linden, John Henry Mackay, Friedrich Radszuweit, Granand, Karl Eske, and others, this article differentiates six strategies of alluding to anal intercourse: from the marked gap to metaphor and metonymy.