The Monosexual Alps and the Bisexual Mediterranean in Homophile Travel Narratives

This paper investigates the place of bisexuality in the homophile publication Der Kreis, which was published in Switzerland between 1932 and 1967, and which kept the “homophile” tradition alive through the disruptions that fascism and the Second World War brought to homophile networks. Bisexuality appears in two primary modes in Der Kreis—first, in travel reports to Mediterranean countries, whose male inhabitants are described as almost uniformly bisexual, but also incapable of positive identification as such. Bisexuality also appeared in letters by self-identified “bisexual” men in German-speaking Europe. This latter group often received editors’ replies encouraging them to choose a side and drop the absurd idea that one might bisexual identification. To quote the editor of Der Kreis in a reply to one of these men, “[your] ‘division’ will never completely fulfill you... one day there will only be an either-or.”

The paper raises the question: why was it so difficult for bisexuality to cross the Alps? In other words, what role did the trope of the “bisexual Mediterranean” play in homophile thinking, and specifically in obscuring the fact of multiple-gender attraction within homophile and early homosexual circles? Scholars know that the “seduction of the Mediterranean” played an important role in forming German understandings of homosexual identity at the end of the 19th century. This paper investigates the remarkable persistence of the “bisexual Mediterranean”—and its presumed essential incompatibility with modernity—to make an argument about the difficulty of incorporating bisexuality into narratives of the gay rights movement.