Ok, you guys, here's my question.

I've always felt grossed out by Ulrich's old formulation that an "Urning" (his word for "gay") was "a woman's soul trapped in a man's body." So here's a parlor game. What formula would you adopt for your own sexuality?

I'll go first: A man's soul trapped in other mens' teenage sons' bodies.

"Anima virilis in corporibus filiorum adulescentium ceterorum virorum inclusa."

===Didaskalos


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Here's what I'm writing, a bunch of boring old stuff:


Appendix B: "Uranians" versus "Calamites."
If "Uranians" refers to the the British Boy-Lover poets from the end of the 19th century to about 1930, and "Calamites" to the American boy-lover poets inspired by Walt Whitman as well as Pater, then was the trans-Atlantic expatriot American boy-lover poet Edward Perry Warren, who spent most of his life in England, a Uranian or a Calamite? The history of the two terms is rather vexed, and requires sorting out. The term "Uranian" can ultimately be traced back to the tale of two loves in Plato's Symposium. Uranian ("Heavenly") Eros is the son of Uranian Aphrodite; Pandemian ("Common") Eros is the son of Pandemian Aphrodite. Pandemian Aphrodite is the daughter of Dione and Zeus and presides over Pandemian Eros, heterosexual love, the common desire that just wants to get off with a stupid partner; Uranian Aphrodite has only one parent, Zeus the father, so that those who are motivated by her son, Uranian Eros, love only the male; her son, then, presides over boy-love, and boy-love is a matter of improving a young man's mind and character.
"Calamus" (the reed) and "Carpus" (the fruit) were a pair of boys in love, in the late (4th-5th C.) Greek epic Dionysiaca by the Egyptian Nonnos. In the tale, the two boys love, play, and race together, but are slain by the devious underground malice of Calamus' father, the River Maeander. Walt Whitman, enchanted by the phallic form of the American "calamus" plant, and its peculiar odor, made the calamus reed into the chief symbol of the swampy sexuality of his homoerotic "Calamus" poems.
Before the term "homosexuality" had been invented and standardized on, males who loved other males were at a loss for a word to describe themselves. The German legal adviser Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, wrenching classical formulae to meet his own emotional needs, defined "Urning" somewhat differently than the speaker in the Symposium. "Urning" then became Anglicized as "Uranian" -- but compare Ulrich's formulation, and the distinction made between Uranian and Pandemian in the Symposium had: Ulrich summed up his "Urning" sexuality in one of most infelicitous phrases in the history of homosexuality: anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, "A woman's soul trapped in a man's body." Urningthum is all about Ulrich's femininity, otherwise inexpressible in German society. But in the Symposium, the essence of "Uranian" love is that it contains no admixture of the female principle at all!
Kaylor, in his work Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, shows some legitimate exasperation with the common attribution of the invention of the term "Uranian" to Ulrichs, and makes the sensible point that Hopkins, Pater and Wilde knew enough Greek to have drunk Platonic inspiration directly from the source -- the Symposium -- rather than from the muddied tributary of Ulrich's pronouncements about "Urnings" or "Uranians."
"Given that the prominent Uranians were trained Classicists, I consider ludicrous the view, widely held, that ‘Uranian’ derives from the German apologias and legal appeals written by Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860s, though his coinage Urning — employed to denote ‘a female psyche in a male body’ — does indeed derive from the same Classical sources, particularly the Symposium. Further, the Uranians did not consider themselves the possessors of a ‘female psyche’; the Uranians are not known, as a group, to have read works such as Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Research on the Riddle of Male-Male Love); the Uranians were opposed to Ulrichs’s claims for androphilic, homoerotic liberation at the expense of the paederastic; and, even when a connection was drawn to such Germanic ideas and terminology, it appeared long after the term ‘Uranian’ had become commonplace within Uranian circles, hence was not a ‘borrowing from’ but a ‘bridge to’ the like-minded across the Channel by apologists such as Symonds. (p. xiii, footnote)" (Secreted Desires, 2006, xiii, footnote)
To repeat: although the coinage of the word "Uranian" can be traced back to the Symposium, Ulrich's concept of a "woman's soul trapped a man's body."
As Ulrichs was burbling about Urnings in Germany in the 1860's, Walt Whitman's 1860 Leaves of Grass was making its rough, sauntering way through America, in particular the "Calamus" section, which dealt with the subject of "adhesiveness" and "athletic love" and "comrades," in all its sweaty, sticky, smelly glory. John Addington Symonds, the author of A Problem in Greek Ethics, also began writing poetry in the 1860's, and tried to recruit Whitman to the cause of open homosexuality, although Whitman refused to be drawn out, denied that "morbid inferences" (about homosexual activity?) could be drawn from his poetry, and claimed, rather dubiously, to have fathered six children. These "evangelistic" or "early gay liberationist" stirrings did not go unnoticed, and Algernon Charles Swinburne attacked Symonds for admiring Italian gondoliers, and their blue pants, by labeling Whitman and his homosexually-inclined, poetry-scribbling followers like Symonds with a damning phrase in his Studies of Poets and Poetry. This is from the chapter " Recollections of Professor Jowett." who was known for translating Plato.
". . .or such renascent blossoms of the Italian Renascence as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino's bosom. The cult of the calamus, as expounded by Mr. Addington Symonds to his fellow-calamites, would have found no acceptance or tolerance with the translator of Plato." (Swinburne, Poets, 1895, Chapter 26, emphasis added.)
Greg Woods explains the portmanteau origins of the "wonderful sneer" "Calamite" coined by Swinburne:
"Algernon Swinburne called him [Whitman] and his followers 'Calamites', a wonderful sneer, neatly combining 'calamities' with 'catamites' in its reference to Whitman's holy writ Calamus." (Woods, Greg. A History of Gay Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998, emphasis added.)
At this point there is no geographical specificity to the terms "Uranian" and "Calamite." The term "Uranian" includes Greek, German, and British figures; "Calamites" includes both the American Whitman and the British Symonds who lives in Switzerland and Italy. Timothy D'Arch Smith in his account of the British boy-love poets of the 1890's, Love in Earnest, found it convenient to categorize them as Uranians; the term Uranian then, for purposes of his book, took on a "British" flavor. Is there, then a new geographical difference structure emerging, in which the British boy-lovers were "Uranians" and the Americans "Calamites" ?
Not according to J. Z. Eglinton, who says, with reference to Symonds and friends: "Nor was it surprising that they soon acquired the sobriquet of "Calamites" (deliberately chosen to resemble "catamites," but derived from Whiteman's "Calamus" poems). Though it originally applied only to Symonds' immediate circle of friends, I have in the recent study extended the name of the entire clique for lack of a better one: "Victorian paidophilic poetasters" is impossibly cumbersome, and not entirely accurate since some members lived until recent years.
(Greek Love, 375)
In his 1978 introduction to Men & Boys, however, Donald Mader seems to have thought of "Calamites" as a American counter-part to the British Uranians. He has retracted that in his latest revision of the introduction.
"When I provided an introduction to the facsimile reprint of Men and Boys three decades ago, in it I spoke of "Calamites", choosing to use that term for the Uranians' American contemporaries, in the belief that they had to be considered as more or less separate from the British poets that d'Arch Smith had chronicled in Love in Earnest. For anyone who has read this far, it will be clear that I have abandoned that term here. Over the past three decades we have learned enough more about Edward Mark Slocum and his transatlantic contacts, in particular with key Uranians such as Leonard Green and George Cecil Ives, that we can establish a formal contact between the British and Americans, deep enough that it is no longer surprising that what d'Arch Smith termed "the best collection of Uranian poetry" [i.e., Men and Boys] should have been produced in New York." (Donald Mader, the REVISED, 2008 Introduction to Men & Boys. From the website:
http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/index.php?title=On_Men_and_Boys, Page 25)
What remains, then, of the neat distinction between British Uranians and American Calamites? Nothing; the terms Calamite and Uranian are so utterly intertwined at this point, that neither connotes anything more specific than an interest in male-male sexuality, with imminent possibilities of poetry and pederasty.