Sooner or later, while slogging through your umpteenth tome on the erotic past, you realize that practically all modern sex histories share one unquestionable underlying assumption: namely, that Sex Is a Very Good Thing Indeed.
Tossing off any pretences of objectivity, even the driest academic works tend to portray 'sexual progress' as being synonymous with 'more sex,' while the only 'good' kind of sexual control is birth control.
As an outsider, it's probably no coincidence that I first noticed this bias while trawling through the literature on homosexuality: I think the book that finally clinched it for me was a university hardback entitled Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600.
By one Helmut Puff.
It was then that I realized: if history is written by the victors, you can practically hear Freddie Mercury caterwauling 'We Are the Champions' when you open your average 'queer studies' text.
Oddly, though, the genre often overlooks one believe-it-or-not fact: contrary to what I would have guessed, the gay-rights movement didn't begin in New York or London—or even Paris or Amsterdam—but in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century.
As a matter of fact, it was a German émigré (Henry Gerber) who later founded America's first gay organization, naming the Society for Human Rights after the groups he'd been involved with in Berlin.
Some also credit Germany's gay-rights movement with pioneering the term 'activist'—amid a slew of other world firsts.
And not for nothing.
If spanking was le vice anglais, the French called homosexuality le vice allemand.
Homophobia and chauvinism aside, there were many reasons why the Continent's Germanic core became the home of gay emancipation in the nineteenth century.
Perhaps most importantly, Germany's activists had something concrete to kick against.
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