Back to the table of contentsThree articles for the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality; one about Amsterdam, one about the duch gay organization COC, one about sadomasochism.
This medieval city experienced its greatest expansion and its Golden Age in the 17th century, when it considered itself to be the center of the world. The first signs of subcultures of sodomites are to be encountered in the latter part of that century, and they became abundant with the large- scale persecutions of sodomites in the Dutch Republic after 1730. Cruising took place in taverns, on squares, on the city walls, in churches, and underneath the very city hall in front of which sodomites were being executed for the crime of sodomy (anal sex). In the late 18th century some tribades (lesbians) were persecuted as well. Little is known about the "wrong lovers" in the first part of the 19th century, but their underworlds surfaced toward the end of the century. Police began actively harassing homosexual spaces and doctors began writing their case histories. At the close of the 19th century, an anti-vice organization published a list of brothels that also included the addresses of six or so homosexual meeting places. From 1897 onward, the Amsterdam physicians Arnold Aletrino and Lucien von Römer took up the cause of homosexual emancipation. Both belonged to the Dutch section of the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee), founded in 1912 in The Hague. In 1901, Aletrino defended the rights of "uranians" before the fifth congress of Criminal Anthropology in Amsterdam, facing an audience of staunch adversaries, among them Cesare Lombroso. 1904 saw the appearance of the first gay novel in Dutch, Pijpelijntjes by Jacob Israël de Haan. It provided detailed information on gay life in Amsterdam. The book provoked a scandal and De Haan lost his jobs as a teacher and as a journalist for the socialist daily newspaper. All the while, a gay and lesbian bar culture was slowly developing, but it was fervently persecuted by the police. Gay bars were the targets of raids both before and during the Second World War. Although the Germans did introduce their anti-homosexual legislation in the Netherlands, they undertook little to enforce it. The few Dutch gays to be prosecuted under this law had had sexual relations with German soldiers. Soon after the war, a significant subculture of bars and dance halls unfolded in Amsterdam. Lesbians played a key role in this expanding subculture, often acting as bartenders. The most celebrated example was the butch dyke Bet van Beeren of 't Mandje, a bar frequented by gay men, lesbian women, sailors and prostitutes. The DOK, the largest gay dance hall in the world at its inception in 1952, brought Amsterdam world fame. The first leather bar Argos in the fifties and the first gay sauna in the sixties bolstered Amsterdam's reputation as it became an important travel destination for British, German and French gay men. The COC, the Dutch homophile movement, was launched in Amsterdam in 1946 and enjoyed its heyday during the sexual revolution in the sixties and early seventies. As early as the late fifties, Amsterdam had already become a gay capital, with a burgeoning subculture and a strong political movement. Halfway through the seventies, lesbian and gay groups queered sexual politics. In the late seventies, a whole network of gay groups sprang up alongside the COC, in trade unions, political parties, universities, medicine and many other walks of life. Aids hit Amsterdam slightly later than other gay centers, and the response of the gay movement and the government was prompter. Sex venues and dark rooms were not shut down, because they were regarded not only as places for virus transmission, but for safe sex education as well. An important institution has been the homosexual help organization the Schorer Foundation, which was founded in 1967 and grew wings during the Aids epidemic of the eighties. Amsterdam's gay reputation has been ebbing since the eighties. As other Western European cities began to generate sexual infrastructures similar to those Amsterdam had developed earlier, the city relinquished its head start. The sole advantages it can now boast are its tolerant social climate, its compact urban structure and its architectural beauty. One new impulse in the nineties has come from kinky sex parties. Lesbians have been consistently marginal in Amsterdam's subculture. The first exclusively lesbian bar opened its doors in 1970, and later efforts to establish similar venues met with little success. The predominant features of lesbian life at present are circles of friends meeting at home or on sports fields. A few small, mostly mixed bars are the visible part of the lesbian scene. Some discos and bars feature monthly lesbian parties. In the gay movement, where lesbian women were largely absent up to the sixties, they gained an equal place in the eighties. Today equal homosexual rights have been virtually secured in the Netherlands, and both the national and the city government have resolved to pursue policies of nondiscrimination toward gays and lesbians. Some major incidents, such as gay bashing at the national pride day in nearby Amersfoort in 1982 and the murder of a gay man cruising in an Amsterdam park in 1985, gave a strong boost to homosexual politics in the Netherlands. In many cities, including Amsterdam, the police force is now required to learn about gays and lesbians and to protect gay cruising places. In the Amsterdam city hall, a deputy mayor and a city official have been charged with shaping a form of homosexual emancipation that emphasizes lesbian visibility. The city council has several openly gay or lesbian members. The city authorities have strongly endorsed the 1998 Amsterdam Gay Games. While gay and lesbian emancipation is thus a prominent feature of Amsterdam politics, city officials still show little awareness that their city is a major gay tourist attraction, and little willingness to promote this attribute. Much to the contrary, they are extremely wary of Amsterdam's "bad" reputation as a city of sex and drugs. A planned campaign to advertise Amsterdam as a gay capital was initially called off due to adverse reactions from commercial interests, but has since been picked up again. Amsterdam may be a gay capital, but its gay institutions and opportunities enjoy no universal endorsement from politicians, nor from the public at large.
A Dutch chapter of the German Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee) was founded in 1912 by the Dutch esquire J.A. Schorer. In 1940, shortly before Germany invaded the Netherlands, the homosexual monthly Levensrecht (Right to Live) saw the light. Its editors went underground for the duration of the war and revived the journal shortly thereafter. Their initiative resulted on December 7, 1946 in the founding of the Shakespeare Club in Amsterdam, which was renamed Center for Culture and Recreation (COC) three years later. It soon spawned chapters in other Dutch cities. Its most prominent representative was the left-wing activist Nico Engelschman, who worked under the pseudonym Bob Angelo. The club organized social events and lobbied the authorities to exercise toleration toward gay men and lesbians. Its politics were prudent in view of the adverse climate. The preferred term was "homophile," because it played down the sexual aspect of gay and lesbian life. In the fifties, the COC went on to establish an International Committee for Sexual Equality (ICSE), the forerunner of the ILGA. A panel of psychiatrists, priests and other professionals was set up in the Netherlands to initiate a scholarly debate on homosexuality. This group, which brought together Protestants, Catholics and non-Christians, was very successful, in that its members achieved high visibility in discussions on homosexuality in the sixties. They assumed tolerant stances, and this paved the way for homophile emancipation in political parties, churches and social organizations. The COC grew by leaps and bounds in the sixties and opened itself up to the public. Its new leader, Benno Premsela, became the homosexual voice in the media, making his first open television appearance in 1964. By enlisting the aid of the leading contemporary Dutch novelist, Gerard Reve, and by allying itself with the booming Dutch Society for Sexual Reform (NVSH), the COC paved the way for a broad-ranging debate on homosexuality. The distinction in the ages of consent for homosexual and heterosexual sex under criminal law was done away with in 1971, and two years later gays and lesbians were given access the armed forces and the COC gained statutory recognition. It had renamed itself the Dutch Society for Integration of Homosexuality COC in 1971 to highlight its more political stance. The term recreation was dropped, because any separate social organization of homosexuals was now deemed superfluous. However, when the COC subsequently failed to develop a perspective on either the content of homosexuality or the conditions of integration, its political role began to weaken. In the seventies, new radical groups and separate organizations of gays and lesbians in political parties, trade unions and universities put an end to the monopoly of the COC as the "mother church" or "national home" of all Dutch homosexual men and women. Yet it remains the biggest organization of gays and lesbians in the Netherlands, with some 8000 members and with chapters in up to 50 cities and towns. It is still the recipient of most of the subsidies earmarked for gay and lesbian emancipation by local and national government. Though it retains a key place among the wide array of gay and lesbian organizations, it no longer plays the leading role it did in the sixties, and other groups and individuals have taken over its central position in gay and lesbian debates. In recent discussions on gay genes, same-sex marriage and pedophilia, for instance, the COC has remained largely invisible. It has turned into a bureaucratic organization focused more on internal than external dynamics. At its 50th anniversary celebrations in 1996, the hot news on the COC was its financial and organizational predicament. The COC has shown itself incapable of formulating its place in a postmodern Dutch society that perhaps tolerates, but fails to accept gay and lesbian desires.
The abbreviation s/m points to both sadist/masochist and slave/master while the slash indicates for some that the two roles are in general not exclusive, but reversible. The term sadomasochism is coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia sexualis (1890). He defined it as mostly imaginary pleasure in pain. The word has noble ancestry as it derived from the names of Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) and Knight Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895).
Perhaps because most sexual relations in history had been unequal and exploitative, sadomasochism found shelter in normal sexuality and only came to the fore in the late-nineteenth century when equality and democracy became erotic ideals. But unlike homosexuality, sadomasochism did not produce an important subculture, movement or press till after the Second World War. It was seen by psychiatrists as well as by the general public as a major and dangerous perversion that in the end would lead to lust murder.
Since the fifties a gay and since the seventies a lesbian leather scene developed in which s/m plays an important part. The connection with leather is accidental; Sacher-Masoch's favourite fetish was fur and Sade liked satin for boys. Fetishes like high heels, uniforms, slave collars or brandings express relations of unequality. S/m is often linked not only to fetishes but also to other "perversions" like bestiality, golden shower, scat, exhibitionism, voyeurism and so on. All kinds of bondage are used in s/m.
Contemporary advocates have come up with a series of claims. S/m should be a consensual game that has little to do with cruelty or violence. The abuse should often be more psychical than physical. According to them, the masochist is the master of the game who sets the rules that the sadist subsequently applies for mutual pleasure. When limits are transgressed, the masochist will indicate with a code word that the game has to be interrupted or ended (Townsend, Samois, Mains, Thompson). This conventional apology may be functional to disclaim criticisms that s/m is harmful and abusive, racist, patriarchal and homophobic but does not fit the excesses of desire that become apparent in s/m.
Leo Bersani criticizes apologetic work because, according to him, s/m does not undermine but repeats social structures of dominance and submission, masculinity and femininity, active and passive roles, penetrating and unclosing, power and subservience. He suggests that s/m will not "survive an antifascist rethinking of power structures". Notwithstanding his firm critique, he points to Freud's concept of "self-shattering" that would apply to masochism and enable non-identitarian politics.
Gilles Deleuze in his book on Sacher-Masoch eulogized long ago male masochists as exemplary outlaws who have given up their prerogatives and annihilated the figure of the father. According to him and Anita Phillips, sadist and masochist are not complementary, but very different figures. If the masochist indeed sets the rule of the sex game, he needs not a sadist but a simulacrum of a sadist.
Sade, Georges Bataille and other writers focus not on rules for desire but on desirable transgressions. Annie LeBrun has pointed to the abyss of desire that Sade disclosed. He has been presented most often as a sadistic torturer while his foremost interests were masochistic -- to be fucked and whipped. His loss of self in literary and real scenes of rape and torture might well be analyzed as a corporal revolution against the dictates of religion that suffocated sexual desire. Masochism could be considered at the historical conjunction of Sade's and still of our time as a way to experience sexual desire in its extremes of torture and filth.
A century before Nietzsche, Sade went beyond good and evil by delving into abysmal pleasures. These were not any longer the forbidden and unmentionable vices of Christianity but lustful transgressions that should be stimulated by sexy stories and practical philosophy. Passion offered Sade in the eighteenth century a way beyond restraints and denials of his time. He desired not so much destruction of self but of the Ancien Regime to create new political configurations and sexual pleasures. His utopia were castles, boudoirs and bordello's devoted to a surrender to sexual abjection.
Sade's work offers a persuasive alternative for contemporary culture that remains confined by limits set on sex by ideas of chastity, love or normalcy. Sadian philosophy goes beyond concepts of identity and community, volition and consensus, private and public, male and female and so forth. Such dichotomies are under postmodern attack because they fix sexuality in closets of paralysed preferences and stagnant practices.
Sadism and masochism have different forms that separate and intermingle, have different backgrounds and perspectives, need specific explanations and work within certain social and historical contexts. Nowadays they represent desires, lifestyles and cultures that seem to be on the rise. The question will become not so much if s/m can withstand an antifascist inquiry but what desires we lust for.