”The love that dare not speak its name”

Wilde’s characterization of his own love is apt, as during the time of the trial, homosexuality indeed did not have a proper name, but only very derogatory terms in various languages. In 1869, Hungarian Karoly Maria Benkert coined the terms ”heterosexual” and ”homosexual,” which were free from value judgments, but they did not come into wider use until the early 20th century.

The real revolution was the Kinsey Report, published in the United States in 1948, based on interviews with thousands of men revealing the spectrum of their sexual identities. It was followed by a similar study on women’s sexuality. The reports paved the way for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the relaxation of laws criminalizing homosexuality, which in Finland began in 1971.

In practice, gay men were thus outlaws in almost all of Europe during the 19th century and early 20th century, except in France, whose 1810 law allowed relations between men. This is why Oscar Wilde, after serving his sentence in a penal colony, retreated to die to France, where a large number of upper-class Englishmen had already moved to escape the broader implications of Wilde’s trial. England’s law had just been amended so that one could be charged based on mere denunciation, which is why it was called the blackmailer’s charter.

Similar feelings of fear and anxiety were shared by many of Mann’s contemporary writers. One of them was the American-British Henry James, who in many of his novels depicts the encounters between American and European attitudes. He kept his sexual orientation strictly secret. However, later revealed correspondence shows deep feelings towards young men. James’s estate did everything to conceal the letters, so they were only made public half a century after the writer’s death.

In the more liberal climate of France, Marcel Proust lived more openly. He had relationships and romances and was a familiar figure in Parisian clubs and other amusements. Nevertheless, he challenged a journalist who dared to hint at this ”secret”, which was already known to almost everyone, to a duel. In his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, Proust used a lot of material from his own life and that of his acquaintances, but obscured the characters’ identities, for example, by changing their gender. Similarly, in France, Nobel laureate André Gide dealt relatively openly with his sexuality in his novels. He also wrote an essay collection on the history of homosexuality, Corydon, whose publication he allowed only years later.

Thomas Mann, who hinted at his diverse sexuality in his books, allowed his secret diaries to be opened twenty years after his death, but they were only published uncensored in the early 1990s. What followed? The earth did not shake; instead, a lively Mann renaissance began. Three massive biographies were published in English alone, revealing aspects of the writer’s life, emotions, and creative processes. In Germany, a television series about the Mann family was also made. The ballet by John Neumeier based on Mann’s novella Death in Venice premiered at the Hamburg Ballet in 2003 and is now part of the National Ballet’s autumn program.