Christopher and His Kind Read Free Page B

come back or Francis would call the police. The screaming ended and the door was slammed in his face. He stood staring at it, too astonished to move. Then he shouted, “Francis—it’s me, Christopher!”
    The door reopened and Francis reappeared. “I say, how awful of me! I do apologize! I felt certain you must be the boy who came home with me last night. Just because I was drunk, he thought he could steal everything in the place. I caught him at it and threw him out … But you don’t even look like him … Why, I know you, don’t I?”
    â€œI was over here in the summer, looking for someone. You were so kind, taking me round the bars. As a matter of fact, I’ve just got back from England—”
    â€œWon’t you come in? I’m afraid this place is in an awful mess. I’m never up at the unearthly hour they want to clean it. Is this your first visit to Berlin?”
    â€œWell, no—I told you, I was here in the summer—”
    â€œDo forgive me, lovey—my mind’s a total blank before I’ve had lunch. I suppose you wouldn’t care to have lunch here, would you? Or is that more than you can face?”
    What Christopher was being asked to face was the ordeal of having lunch with the staff and some of the patients of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut fuer Sexual-Wissenschaft—Institute for Sexual Science—which occupied the adjoining building. A sister of Dr. Hirschfeld lived in this apartment and let out two of its rooms to Francis. It so happened that she had a third room which was vacant just then and which she charged less for, because it was small and dark. By the time lunch was over, Christopher had decided to move into it.

TWO
    The building which was now occupied by the Hirschfeld Institute had belonged, at the turn of the century, to the famous violinist Joseph Joachim; its public rooms still had an atmosphere which Christopher somehow associated with Joachim’s hero, Brahms. Their furniture was classic, pillared, garlanded, their marble massive, their curtains solemnly sculpted, their engravings grave. Lunch was a meal of decorum and gracious smiles, presided over by a sweetly dignified lady with silver hair: a living guarantee that sex, in this sanctuary, was being treated with seriousness. How could it not be? Over the entrance to the Institute was an inscription in Latin which meant: Sacred to Love and to Sorrow.
    Dr. Hirschfeld seldom ate with them. He was represented by Karl Giese, his secretary and long-time lover. Also present were the doctors of the staff and the patients or guests, whichever you chose to call them, hiding their individual problems behind silence or polite table chatter, according to their temperaments. I remember the shock with which Christopher first realized that one of the apparently female guests was a man. He had pictured transvestites as loud, screaming, willfully unnatural creatures. This one seemed as quietly natural as an animal and his disguise was accepted by everyone else as a matter of course. Christopher had been telling himself that he had rejected respectability and that he now regarded it with amused contempt. But the Hirschfeld kind of respectability disturbed his latent puritanism. During those early days, he found lunch at the Institute a bit uncanny.
    Christopher giggled nervously when Karl Giese and Francis took him through the Institute’s museum. Here were whips and chains and torture instruments designed for the practitioners of pleasure-pain; high-heeled, intricately decorated boots for the fetishists; lacy female undies which had been worn by ferociously masculine Prussian officers beneath their uniforms. Here were the lower halves of trouser legs with elastic bands to hold them in position between knee and ankle. In these and nothing else but an overcoat and a pair of shoes, you could walk the streets and seem fully clothed, giving a camera-quick exposure