There were political implications as welclass="underline" for the National Socialist Movement and the growing reaction in the early Thirties, male transvestism was the most ubiquitous sign of a weakening morality and sexual degeneracy of the Republic under democratic rule. Mustached Aunties were comical figures but also disturbing and concrete symbols of Germany’s psychological evisceration. Like ragged circus clowns who inexplicably bring tears to children, male transvestites furtively evinced an underground fraternity of ineffectual, castrated fathers.
While we check our overcoats, a pretty young woman makes her charming entrance in front of us. She removes her hat, slides out of a big sable coat, applies red polish to her lips, and flirtatiously brushes back her platinum-blonde bangs.
“What an entrancing mademoiselle,” I remark.
We enter after her. The Eldorado reminds us of little bar-restaurants from the French countryside: a bit of theatre, a bit of dancing. We catch sight of our ravishing blonde friend, who sits down at a nearby table. It is filled with a dozen strangely dressed companions.
“You know,” our waiter points out,” all those pretty girls sitting at the table over there are really men!”
That is the attraction of the house.
These false ladies, beautifully decked out, dance with each other, and gladly waltz with the club customers. We scrutinize them, itemizing each body part. Every time we seem to discover one glaring defect. Some of these camouflaged Eves are betrayed by a neck too muscular, a hand too wide, an ankle too thick. Others attain near perfection: Two lovely girls, one blonde, the other auburn, dance the Valse Boston faultlessly. They are slim, nearly without hips; their slender frames are extenuated by their long dresses, which reveal exquisite pairs of shapely legs. Unfortunately, they are men!
The most bewildering of these perverts are not the most perfectly feminine. There are, in the crowd, two or three big dondons (fat women) with short, thick-fingered hands, drooping breasts, huge behinds, Adam’s apples, and five o’clock shadows. One oversized dondon says about another, “The poor girl, how seedy she appears tonight!”
The life of these “transvestites” is interesting to observe: Most live in couples with a thousand jealousies and intrigues. Some are small-time prostitutes, others husbands, and a few are fathers with families. And the prostitutes are treated like members of any other respected profession.
Militant Homosexualists shared this one hateful belief with the right-wing and religious opposition. Ladies (and feminized males in general) were despicable; their soft, depilated bodies and mocking antics were an affront to German strength and German manhood. In the ethos of Brand’s disciples, male transvestites projected a weak, jaded, and mocking reflection of same-sex male desire; a dangerous and irreparably haunting challenge to phallocentric gays and their Hellenistic theories of male supremacy and the soldierly rectitudes of man-boy love. Men in drag were regarded as disgusting Untermänner. Women were born into their hapless gender. Aunties and Ladies enthusiastically adopted the dress, “soul,” and even the Christian names of the lowly sex.
Still a hardcore community of transvestites flourished in Berlin despite all efforts to suppress and sharply restrict their presence and nighttime pursuits. In fact, it was drag entertainments in the forms of balls and Dielen that customarily marked Berlin Weimar’s erotic vitalism, its taunting masquerade of tangled and flipped carnal lust. Deco line-drawings of men in taffeta dresses and women in top hats signified only one Jazz-Age metropolis. The actual demographics of sometime drag queens and kings in Berlin, however, remained a mystery. (There were probably more secret cross-dressers in London and New York during the Twenties.) What made the city Transvestite Central was the sexological work of Magnus Hirschfeld, who did for cross-dressing what Freud had already done for modern neurosis: define it.
“The Erotic Urge to Cross-Dress”
The impulse to dress and exhibit oneself in the clothing of the other gender was thought to be a transcultural phenomenon. In the preliterate world, wonder-working shamans traditionally wore garments forbidden to those of their sex. In Asia, court theatres alternately encouraged and savagely proscribed gender-reversed presentations. Severe Biblical prohibitions against cross-dressing attested to its ancient Western roots. And Roman chapbooks famously detailed orgiastic spectacles where demented emperors openly flaunted their peculiar lusts, disguised in the perfumed wraps of mythic fertility goddesses or bejeweled harlots.
In the room are some bourgeois couples and curious families from the neighborhood. They look upon the spectacle with wonder and fascination, like going to the movies.
The other Eldorado [on Motzstrasse] is more elegant. Sophisticated types spend the evening there for the performances and to savor a bottle of German champagne. On a small stage, some danseuses in tutus twirl on point: Again transvestites. (Many are from Paris.)
The main attraction is the “Dance of Héliogabal,” executed by a lissome and naked eighteen-year old beauty. Not a disciple of [André Gide’s] “Corydon.” One can easily recognize that he is a little-cousin of Nijinsky. His golden body and coltish grace are not unpleasant to watch.
At an adjoining table, before a small cup of “mokka,” sits a redheaded woman with Persian eyes. “Is this a man?” I ponder. After almost a half-hour, I still can’t decide, for the red-head has delicate hands and very pretty legs. When our mokka-drinking neighbor stands up to leave, I observe her from behind. Her forearms reveal the ruddy smooth complexion of a female chef but her posterior displays something different: the unmistakable solidity of a male buttocks. So? So, one doesn’t know anymore!
Bewildered, we leave for the lesbian lounges, the “Domino,” “House of My Sister-in-Law,” and “Mali and Ingel.” In these nightclubs, women dress like miniature gentlemen. At three in the morning, tired of deciphering the perpetual riddle of “who is what sex,” we depart for the safety of our hotel, confused and frustrated.
From the early Renaissance onward, a great folklore developed in Europe about cross-dressed women who lived fantastic lives as men, including great military and religious figures. In general, transvestism was viewed as an expansive form or feature of sexual inversion. The need to parade in the accouterments of opposite sex graphically “disclosed” a homosexual inclination. Central European psychologists, at the end of the nineteenth century, published hundreds of case histories establishing the obvious link between cross-dressing and classic uranism, or homosexuality.