ABSTRACT
The racial gender-binary ideal might be expected to proscribe non-normative gender identities and sexual practices, even associating them with racial taint. As the first part of this chapter shows, this was to a large extent the case, especially in the nineteenth century and before. However, as is often pointed out, the twentieth-century gay-rights movement, and, indeed, homosexuality itself have often been coded as White. Through a close reading of their work, this chapter discusses how the early British homosexual apologists John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) and Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) not only argue, against expectation, for the racial respectability of a certain sort of male homosexual – Carpenter more and Symonds less subtly – but enlist the racial gender-binary ideal to do so. This chapter also briefly discusses the German homosexual and antisemite Hans Blüher, who, by contrast, ties the nobility of homosexuality to its distance from the racial gender-binary ideal and hence, on his view, from Jewish taint.
