Colonialism and Homosexuality

Robert Aldrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134644599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Colonialism and Homosexuality is a thorough investigation of the connections of homosexuality and imperialism from the late 1800s - the era of 'new imperialism' - until the era of decolonization. Robert Aldrich reconstructs the context of a number of liaisons, including those of famous men such as Cecil Rhodes, E.M. Forster or André Gide, and the historical situations which produced both the Europeans and their non-Western lovers.

Colonial lands, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century included most of Africa, South and Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans and the Caribbean, provided a haven for many Europeans whose sexual inclinations did not fit neatly into the constraints of European society.

Each of the case-studies is a micro-history of a particular colonial situation, a sexual encounter, and its wider implications for cultural and political life. Students both of colonial history, and of gender and queer studies, will find this an informative read.

Part I

Colonials and homosexuality

1 The sex life of explorers

Explorers, hardy adventurers on an unending quest for the unknown, and with remarkable endurance in the face of adversity, counted among the most famous heroes of imperialism. An eager public followed their expeditions in newspapers and rushed to buy accounts of their journeys, geographical societies fêted them and governments engaged them to ‘push back the frontier’ of imperialism and to collect intelligence for diplomatic manoeuvres. Battling malaria and other tropical fevers, fighting head-hunting cannibals and bloodthirsty chieftains (as they would have put it), racing with imperial rivals to reach the fabled city of Timbuktu or to discover the source of the Nile, these men were quintessentially romantic figures of the imperial age. Scientific interest, a desire for fame and taste for adventure lured them overseas, and sometimes took them to their deaths.

Most explorers did not exactly fit into traditional European moulds. Some fled Europe, rejecting societies they considered degenerate, compatriots whom they judged flaccid, or political regimes at odds with their ideals. Private demons haunted others. By necessity, they gave up the comforts of European life for the ardours of exploration, most content when ‘on the road’. They were, in general, solitary men, more at home in camp tents than drawing rooms, happier in the company of the men they recruited for their expeditions, and the porters, guides and bearers in their entourage, than among the armchair travellers who celebrated their exploits.

Explorers often married late and left their wives for long periods of solitude and worry before they came home. Some explorers declined marriage entirely and avoided entangling alliances with women. A few were certainly homosexual — Eigil Knuth, a great Danish explorer of Greenland, ‘in his old age privately regretted that he did not at some point in his earlier life come out publicly as a homosexual’.¹ Evidence suggests that others were homosexually inclined, or that their most significant emotional attachments lay with men.² This chapter examines five of them, a German in South America, an Englishman in the Indian sub-continent, a Russian pioneer of Central Asia, another Englishman, who trekked through the Libyan Desert and the ‘Empty Quarter’ of Arabia, and one of the most famed of all explorers, Henry Morton Stanley. In each case, attraction to the company of other men contributed to the timing, itineraries or motivations of their imperial ventures³.

Humboldt and his friends

One explorer always involved in intense friendships with men, and the timing of whose departure for the overseas explorations that made his fame was determined by the failure of plans to settle down with his most intimate friend, was Alexander von Humboldt. ‘The greatest scientific traveler who ever lived’, according to Charles Darwin, Humboldt was a geographer, anthropologist and general man of science, author of thirty volumes of field studies and a five-volume magnum opus, Cosmos (1845 to 1862), an attempt to catalogue all human knowledge about the physical world.

Born into an aristocratic family in Berlin in 1769, Alexander’s brother was Wilhelm von Humboldt, a renowned comparative linguist. The death of their father when Alexander was nine, and a difficult relationship with their distant, cold mother, marred the brothers’ childhoods. Alexander studied in Freiburg, Frankfurt, Göttingen and Hamburg, and during a university holiday hiked around Europe with George Forster, the illustrator who accompanied Captain Cook to the South Seas. At twenty-two, Humboldt took a job as a government mines inspector in Franconia; his mother’s death five years later left him with the money to pursue his desire to explore.

Humboldt frequented fashionable salons as a young man, flirting with young women who found him handsome and charming. He also formed close attachments to fellow male students. In 1794, he met Reinhardt von Haeften, a 21-year-old lieutenant who was stationed in Bayreuth, where Humboldt was working. Humboldt soon developed a fascination – ‘crush’ would be an appropriate term — with the young officer, revealed by the first extant letter he sent to his ‘good dearly beloved Reinhardt’ on 19 December: ‘I hope on Christmas night to wrap my arms around your neck.’ First, however, he had to visit Goethe, whose company he enjoyed and with whom he could have spent the holidays. But then,

I would see you six days later, and such a loss I would not like for the whole world. Perhaps other men cannot understand this … I know, I live only for you, my good and unique Reinhardt, only in your company am I completely happy.

The next spring, Humboldt and Haeften travelled to Munich and Innsbruck, then on to Venice, Vicenza, Verona, Milan and Switzerland, a trip that Humboldt said he had organised largely for Haeften’s benefit. He confessed to a woman friend his ‘affinity’ with this ‘unique and excellent man’, adding that he had experienced with Haeften such ‘scenes of human existence as one lives through [only] one or two times’. Humboldt exulted in the ‘sea of beatitude for me’ that Haeften had expressed in a letter after their return.⁴

Humboldt concocted a plan to spend more time with Haeften, despite the lieutenant’s romantic interest in a woman, then marriage. In 1797, Humboldt decided that he, his brother, Alexander’s wife and three children, with Haeften and his wife and two children, should live together in Italy for several years. In January, he wrote to Haeften that over two years had passed since they had first met. Happy was the day that Haeften had expressed his friendship to Humboldt, who saw in him ‘a man of such delicacy of sentiment and purity of soul [that] since that time I feel myself in full communion with you, united as by an iron lock’. More florid words followed about the strength and depth of a friendship that only death could end.

With such shared sentiments we are working together for our common happiness. The most satisfying days of my life have been the last two years in that I was given this closeness to you, and even now feel growing in me each day this happiness.

Again he wrote:

I never cease to bless the day when, for the first time, you opened yourself to me, and told me what a comfort you felt from it. I felt better myself in your presence and I was thenceforth linked to you by chains of steel. Even if you were to reject me and treat me coldly and disdainfully, I would still like to remain close to you, and I could thank heaven for having let me know, before my death, what two human beings can mean for one another. From day to day, my love and my attachment to you grow… The love I have for you is not just friendship or brotherly love, it is veneration, the recognition of a child, and devotion to your will is my most exalted law.⁵

Humboldt nevertheless empathised with Haeften’s marital contentment:

Now Christine [Haeften’s wife] is yours, you have that which fundamentally characterises human happiness, a fine wife whom you love, and a friend [Humboldt himself] who would be happy to sacrifice his life if by doing so he could assure your perpetual tranquillity.

His feelings clearly stated, Humboldt detailed his plan. ‘I know from experience that for you the greatest pleasure of all the delights in life is travel, the best way to cultivate the capacities of man and to give his mind new experiences of the world.’ He suggested that the entourage of Haeftens and Humboldts spend six to eight months in Rome, Florence and Naples, then pass the cooler months travelling around the Italian peninsula and Sicily, staying on as long as Haeften would agree. The sojourn promised an idyllic time:

What could be more important for you, my good and dearly beloved Reinhardt, that this experience in the fullness of your youth, broadening your mind by contact with excellent fellows? When you will meet noble delights, when the senses are stimulated by new objects and the character develops, raising itself to a feeling for the great and the morally beautiful, in a word, assuring us the sentiment of noble humanity. Oh! These years living with us in Italy will remain the richest in pleasure of your life.

Humboldt’s letter also announced that he planned an expedition to America, but ‘I will undertake it when you have decided whether to remain in Italy or to return to Germany after — as I hope — two or three years’.

Wilhelm von Humboldt was at first dubious about the arrangement, but Alexander convinced him to join the venture. As Alexander wrote to Haeften: ‘My brother depends more on me than I do on him, and although he may not yet have found interest in you, nevertheless the thought that he cannot have me near him without you will bind him gratefully to you’.⁶ So Haeften and his wife, and Wilhelm and his spouse, gathered their caravan of servants and carriages in Jena later in 1797. They proceeded to Dresden and Vienna, where they had to delay their trip because of unrest and war in Italy — a product of the French Revolution’s shock effects. Wilhelm and his family continued on to Switzerland and France, while Alexander and the Haeftens spent the winter in Salzburg. By May 1798, the group reunited, the journey started again, but the party soon separated, though the reasons are unclear. Wilhelm’s wife wrote enigmatically to a friend who had asked after the Haeftens: ‘I have nothing new to say about them; they remain unchangeable people.’⁷ Haeften and his wife returned to Germany. By October, Humboldt was in Spain to arrange his trip to America. The failure of the plan to live in Italy with Haeften pushed forward the expedition to America, where Humboldt would remain for the next five years.

Humboldt wrote to Haeften warmly before he left in early 1799 and continued to correspond with him afterwards, though many of his letters were lost on the way from South America to Europe. Those that remain testify to Humboldt’s abiding affection for Haeften, although he was now being seduced by the new world:

Believe me, my dear friend, man should not live just in Goch and in Bayreuth and in Erpath [Haeften’s stomping-ground], but also in the tropics. What a delight! With each day I am more and more happy at having made the trip to this continent.

He described the landscape, his excursions into the jungle, the exoticism of the Indians, the pleasures of research, the collaboration with budding Spanish-American researchers, the fun of nightly dancing with the blacks. Humboldt’s letters overflow with the transcendental delights of the tropics:

My God! What a world of plants, birds with the most beautiful plumage, forests of mahogany, ebony, cedar, palm and brazilwood! What wonderful aromas! Butterflies as big as our Sperling, spiders that the hummingbirds devour…If you could just see, dear Reinhardt, the brightly-coloured hummingbirds, flamingos, all sorts of parrots, screamers and troupials that we can see in flocks around the gardens.⁸

While Humboldt was still in America, Haeften died in 1803, at the age of thirty. Humboldt only learned of his death some time afterwards, and wrote a rather stilted letter to his widow, in which he rambled on about Greek and Hebrew philosophies of life and death. Wilhelm, who read the message, told his own wife that he found his brother’s letter moving but could not understand a word of it – ‘You can gather from the contents of this letter that one is not closer to nature when one has retired from the civilised world,’ he joked; Wilhelm added that his brother had acidly asked if Haeften’s widow had already remarried.

Meanwhile in Ecuador, in 1802, Humboldt had taken up with a young American-born Spaniard, Francisco José de Caldas, an amateur astronomer. Humboldt was impressed with his work, and Caldas travelled for a while with Humboldt and his fellow scientist, Aimé Bonpland, helping them with geography and map-making. Caldas was overjoyed when Humboldt decided to use a map that he had drawn, and enthused to a correspondent about his ecstatic happiness in Humboldt’s friendship. Caldas hoped to join Humboldt on the continuation of his expedition to Peru and Mexico, but his hopes were dashed when Humboldt refused to let him accompany the party. Caldas gathered that the refusal was because either the other explorers feared that he was not fit enough for the journey or that Humboldt found his company tedious — Caldas confessed that his reserve, shy temperament and pious sentiments separated him from the ebullient, light-hearted and irreverent Humboldt. Outwardly, the two remained on go...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Part I Colonials and homosexuality
• 1 The sex life of explorers
• 2 Captains of empire
• 3 The company of men
• 4 Writers' lives and letters
• 5 Artists and homoerotic ‘Orientalism'
• 6 Scandals and tragedies
• Part II Sites of colonial homosexuality
• 7 Sex in settler societies
• 8 Sex in the South Seas
• 9 The British (and others) in South Asia
• 10 Forster, Masood, Mohammed and the maharajah
• 11 The French in North Africa
• Part III The end of empire
• 12 Anti-colonialism and homosexuality
• Epilogue
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index