Talk about your dubious religions!

The Washington Post has an article about an art exhibition called "The First Homosexuals" which apparently deals with (what might be called) the Foucault-ian question of when and how homosexuality came to be defined.   (I wrote about that topic, probably for the first time, way back in 2007.)

The article opens with (what I think is) a not completely convincing statement that people are recently not inclined towards seeing sexuality as an innate gay/straight divide:

Until fairly recently, a prevailing idea about homosexuality was that it was innate. If you were gay, went the thinking, you only needed to discover this deep biological truth about yourself (and somehow overcome deep societal prejudice) to live an authentic life.

But, vital as it proved in the fight for basic rights, the idea that you were “born this way,” as Lady Gaga’s anthem put it, had to be invented before it could be dissolved, as it has been lately among young people eager to embrace a more experimental and dynamic approach to sexual attraction and sexual self-fashioning.

I suppose that the surveys showing a dramatic rise in the number of young people - especially young women - prepared to self label as bisexual does support that?   But then again, what does it mean if its mainly young women who are putting their hand up as open to everything, but not young men?   I basically don't know that we should take such self-identification surveys all that seriously, given how social ideas float around and morph.    

But as my earlier musing from 2007 indicates, I have always thought that the Foucault view may have had something to it.   

The Post review's version of what happened is as follows:

The term “homosexual” was coined by the Hungarian German journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny, in an 1868 letter and a pamphlet the following year. Kertbeny believed “homosexual” wasn’t something that you were — it was an act, a taste, a proclivity and as such, it ran counter to the idea of fixed identities.

Kertbeny’s letter was written to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a lawyer and early advocate for the rights of people he called “urnings” (men sexually attracted to other men) and “urinden” (women attracted to other women). These he considered fixed identities, produced when the body of one sex contained, from birth, the soul of its opposite. Ulrichs’s terminology changed as German psychiatrists later adopted the term “homosexual,” but ironically, it was his vision of an innate sexual identity that won the day.

The show sets out to explore the ramifications of this historical turn, which marked “the dawn,” write the curators, “of our modern, binaristic conception of sexuality in exactly the terms its author [Kertbeny] detested.”

OK, all somewhat interesting, but the real reason for this post is down to this bit of information in the article which I had never heard of before:

A small but memorable section of the show is devoted to a “temple dedicated to queer art and spirituality.” The Sanctuary of Art Elisarion, as it was known, was founded in the 1920s by Elisàr von Kupffer, a German artist and writer, along with his lifelong partner Eduard von Mayer. The temple served a new religion, Klarismus (Clarism), built on the idea that the gender binary was a perversion of divine will and that everyone was inherently homosexual, since there was in fact only one sex. The figure of the androgynous adolescent became Clarism’s symbol for spiritual transcendence. 

Well, don't the Germans come up with some funny ideas.   Anyway, it seems that the art exhibition fills in more details: 

The aesthetic and spiritual ideals of artist Elisàr von Kupffer melded with the theories of his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960) to yield a unique form of fin de siècle utopianism. They invented a new religion they called Clarism and built a temple to encourage its spread. Clarism is best understood in the context of other turn of the century utopian movements, such as theosophy, but it possessed a particularly Germanic flavor in its evident fascination with the classical past. Germany at this period understood itself as the new Greece, and von Kupffer and von Mayer found their ideal—and the kernel of their religion— in the easy bisexuality of the classical era, in which relationships with men and relationships with women operated seemingly on different planes and were not therefore seen as mutually exclusive. They materialized this bisexuality in elevating an androgynous gender ideal, modeled after a nonbinary figure of Adonis they saw painted in fresco in Pompeii.

While these images of von Kupfer and other models may strike us as fundamentally homosexual, it was precisely that category that these images were intent on opposing. Homosexual and heterosexual were defined, after all, through difference from their opposite term, but for Clarism, this opposition was to be replaced by a synthesis. Their new gender ideal was embodied by rounded male buttocks, wide hips, a voluptuous fleshiness, a lack of body hair and the elevation of the adolescent form—adolescent because they saw adolescents as possessing characteristics of both sexes. Perhaps not surprisingly, these were also physical traits von Kupfer himself possessed. Such a nonbinary archetype spurred the formation of a new painterly ideal, for von Kupfer trained as an artist, even studying for a short with Ludwig von Hofmann, also in this exhibition. The nonbinary form favored by von Kupfer was also not merely an aesthetic innovation, for Clarism believed in the leveling of all gender differences, in both embodied and political terms.

In their temple, erected in Minusio, Switzerland, a semi-tropical locale bordering Italy, von Kupfer placed more than 140 paintings, including one that was an immense cyclorama now on view at Monte Verità. In fact, he likely built what came to be called the Elisarion in Minusio because of the presence of Monte Verità, for it was a utopian vegan (later vegetarian) nudist commune, and thus indicative of the social tolerance of the locals.

There you go - a utopian vegan nudist commune that featured the veneration of the adolescent (but male!) form as "non binary".   Except for, you know, the actual genitals, I guess?

I wonder how long it lasted.  Not very long, I suspect.  (I see that the "Temple" still exists, though, although is only open to the public by appointment.)

The co-founder von Kupfer, the Post goes on to explain, may have been a gay nudist into adolescents, but that didn't stop him loving Hitler!:

Von Kupffer is now remembered as a crank esoteric, an advocate, a bigot who wrote fawning letters to Hitler.  

Ah well, just one of those slightly amusing attempts at creating a new religion that was doomed to failure....