Providentia

The Castrato

There are different traditions concerning why Giovanni Velluti was castrated as a young boy. Born in Montolmo, Italy in 1780, his father had planned a military career for him but this plan changed abruptly when Giovanni developed a high fever. According to the most common legend, his parents had taken him to a local surgeon for treatment and the surgeon, mistaking the parents` intentions, castrated Giovanni instead. That marked the end of any military career for the boy and he was sent to be trained as a singer.

Castration in boys between the ages of seven and twelve prevents the larynx from undergoing the normal physiological changes associated with puberty and enables boy sopranos to keep their large vocal range throughout their lives. While some testosterone continues to be produced by the adrenal glands, the reduced sex hormone levels in their bodies results in other physical changes including lack of facial hair, physical tallness, smooth skin, rounding of the hips and a high speaking voice. The very term "castrato" or "eunuch" was often considered offensive and words such as "musico" or "virtuoso" were preferred (political correctness has a long history).

While castrati have been around since ancient times, the use of castrated boys as Church singers was first introduced in 16th century Spain. Women were not allowed to sing in choirs (due to one of St. Paul's teachings requiring women to be silent in church) and castrati seemed ideal for falsetto roles. The angelic quality of their voices caused this innovation to spread across many European countries but it was in Italy where the tradition of the castrato singer took root. By all accounts, the purity of their voices combined the awesome vocal quality of boy sopranos with the lung capacity of adult men. The spread of opera across the continent made castrati widely sought after as singers and they often became the superstars of their day.

Despite the fact that castrations for non-medical purposes had become illegal by Giovanni`s time, there were still doctors (and even barbers) across Italy who practiced the operation discreetly. The castrations would then be explained away as being due to congenital problems or "accidents". While the primitive nature of the surgery meant that many boys died of blood loss or infection, most survived to continue their musical careers. It may never be known many boys were castrated over the years but some estimates suggest that there were thousands.

The competition among castrati was fierce and only the greatest singers were allowed to become opera stars. For the rest, there were the church choirs and the modest living that these positions provided. Many poor Italian families found that having one son castrated meant an opportunity for the entire family to have a better life as a result. Church doctrine banned castrati from marrying or taking holy orders and their lives tended to be focused exclusively on their music and providing for their families.

Giovanni Velluti is widely considered to be the last great castrato opera singer. While the popularity of castrati as singers and the sponsorship of the Catholic church ensured a steady market for centuries, this era came to an end during Velluti's lifetime. He mesmerized audiences across Europe and many operatic roles were written just for him. Although he was a prima donna by nature with singers and music directors often finding it impossible to work with him, Velluti was in a position to demand (and get) special treatment. He made his London debut in 1825 despite growing English opposition to castrato singers. As the first castrato to sing opera in England in twenty-five years, he certainly had his share of fans and critics. Velluti even became music director for a season but financial problems and poor reviews caused him to leave England. By 1830, he had retired from stage and became a gentleman farmer until his death in 1861.

Aside from his musical career, Velluti became legendary for his flamboyant clothes. feminine good looks, and romantic escapades with numerous women in high society. Contrary to popular belief, castrati are not sexless. If anything, many castrati are said to be able to hold an erection longer than an uncastrated male due to lack of ejaculatory tension. Women often saw Velluti as an ideal lover since there was no pregnancy risk (plus husbands seemed incapable of believing that a castrato could be romancing their wives).

After Velluti's retirement, there were no more roles for castrati in opera and, with a Papal declaration condemning the practice in 1878, few choir roles were available either. Despite official church doctrine, it was only in 1913 when Alessandro Moreschi, the last Vatican castrato, was removed from the Sistine choir. He made two gramophone recordings in 1902 and 1904 which are the only ones of its kind in existence. Even given the poor sound quality, Moreschi's voice evokes an earlier era although he was well past his prime by the time the recordings were made. It was his very public funeral in 1922 that truly marked the end of the castrato age.

While countertenors and falsettos are often used in opera to simulate the castrato effect and androgynous singers continue to have musical careers today, we can only imagine how it must have been during the long period when castrati reigned supreme as singers. It is hard to believe that sexual mutilation of young boys could have been allowed for so long but, like many other examples of similar practices, maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time.

Keeping Up Appearances

One of the most memorable figures of the eighteenth century must surely be the Chevalier Charles D'Eon(or Chevaliere Charlotte D'Eon as he became more famously known). Born in Tonnerre, France in 1728 to a distinguished family, Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée Éon de Beaumont completed his education in 1749 and began a diplomatic career. He also became a spy for King Louis XV and took part in an espionage mission to the Russian court. While dressed as a woman, he became a close associate of the then-Empress. Later, posing as the uncle of the woman he had previously pretended to be, he reportedly convinced the Empress to sign an important treaty with France. After returning from Russia in 1761, he became a military officer and fought in the Seven Years War. When the war ended in 1763, along with a decoration for bravery, he also earned the rank of Chevalier and a position with the French embassy in London. As a favourite of English society, D'Eon was in a good position to remain in England after a quarrel with the new ambassador prevented him from returning to France. He took revenge by writing a best-selling book that scandalized the English and French courts and D'Eon lived in England as an exile for fourteen years. Until the rumours started...

D'Eon's boyish appearance, absence of facial hair, and lack of interest in female companionship led to speculation that he was really a woman. Allegations concering his gender arose in England and in France and became the subject of substantial wagers. It was a trial in 1777 before Lord Mansfield that forced the rumours into the open. The grounds for the trial were straightforward enough: a surgeon named Hayes had made a substantial bet with a broker over whether D'Eon was really a woman. While D'Eon was not directly involved, the humiliation caused by the trial led him to quit England and return to France. King Louis XV had died by this time and his successor, Louis XVI was less kindly disposed towards him. D'Eon was told on arriving in France that the King had issued a decree that he "should resume the dress of his sex"

The Chevalier took the King at his word and, for the rest of his life, dressed and behaved like a proper French lady (in addition to a pension, the King also provided D'Eon with funds for a new wardrobe). He later claimed that he had been born a girl but that his father had raised him as a boy to ensure an inheritance from his in-laws. In 1779, Chevaliere D'Eon (as he was then called), published his (probably ghostwritten) memoirs La Vie Militaire, politique, et privée de Mademoiselle d'Eon. When the American Revolution broke out, D'Eon asked for permission to abandon his female dress and join the military but his offer was rebuffed. D'Eon returned to England in 1785 and stayed in London until his death in 1810. The French Revolution brought an end to the royal pension on which he had been living and he spent the last years of his life supporting himself by participating in fencing demonstrations (until an injury forced an end to his fencing career). His efforts to complete another autobiography never got past the planning stage and he died in poverty. It was only when his body was laid out for burial that (as one contemporary writer described it): "death proved the folly of those who had forced him into petticoats; for his manhood was placed beyond all doubt by an anatomical examination of his body". Even though he had lived with a woman, Mrs. Mary Cole, for the last fifteen years of his life, she had never suspected that he was really a man. He is buried in St. Pancras Cemetery in London where his grave still attracts visitors.

Despite various attempts at attaching a proper diagnostic label to describe the Chevalier's gender-bending life, he continues to defy classification. His case gave rise to an early term for cross-dressing, eonism, although it is has since fallen into disuse. Was D'Eon a transvestite or something more? His absence of facial hair and effeminate features suggest that he may have been a transsexual although there is insufficient information to tell either way. So, much like James Barry with whom he has been often compared, the Chevalier D'Eon remains a mystery long after his death. Perhaps that's the way that he would have wanted it.

Car Fetishist Sentenced

A 45-year old Alberta man was sentenced to time served and two years probation for indecent exposure charges arising from an apparent sexual fetish for classic cars. The defendant (not named in the original news story) pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent exposure for repeatedly climbing on top of classic cars and masturbating in public. On March 22 of this year, he was caught masturbating on top of a $50,000 BMW Sedan at a Home and Garden show at the Northlands Agri Com. He was observed on two other occasions pleasuring himself on other cars in the Edmonton area.

A psychiatric evaluation report submitted at the time of his sentencing indicated that the man was sexually aroused by classic cars and also had a longstanding history of minor mental retardation due to a thyroid condition. While deemed to be a high risk for committing similar sexual offenses in future, he was not considered to pose an active risk to the public at large. In the submitted report, psychiatrist Curtis Woods indicated that the offender "announced that he is specifically sexually attracted to 'the roof top ... it's curved like a woman's body, the sex appeal, it felt good". He also reported a sexual attraction to motorcycles

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Love Hurts

The publication of Richard Krafft-Ebbing's masterwork Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886 represented a landmark in thinking about human sexuality and the bizarre forms that it can take. In addition to describing different types of sexual expression that the author regarded as "perverse" (usually any form of sex that didn't lead to procreation), it quickly became one of the most influential books on human sexuality ever written and introduced numerous new terms into common usage. One of these terms, "masochism" which Krafft-Ebbing defined as "the opposite of sadism (which he also coined). While the later is the desire to cause pain and use force, the former is the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force". For all that he had given a name to a shadowy sexual practice that had never before been described in the scientific literature, one person in particular who was less than pleased with the new term was the Austrian author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Krafft-Ebbing justified naming this new sexual anomaly after the prominent author whom he described as "the poet of Masochism" due to his erotic writings and because of his own eccentric personal life (to which we now turn).

Born in 1836 in what is now the Ukraine (but then part of the Austrian empire), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was part of a fairly upper-middle class family (his father was a police director), he studied law, history and mathematics at Graz University and then returned to his home town to begin a quiet academic life. He wrote fiction and non-fiction alike although it was his fiction, often concerning historical themes, that quickly won out. He gave up lecturing to become a full-time author and "man of letters". His short stories marked him as a brilliant author known for his humanist and utopian ideas but he largely supported himself as a journalist. Although Sacher-Masoch was well-regarded in literary circles, it was the sexual themes that came out of his later works that have made him so well-known. His plan for a grandiose short story cycle that he called The Legacy of Cain was never completed but the short stories and novels that he did finish revealed his fascination for being physically dominated and abused by women (especially ones that wore fur). The short novel for which he is best known, Venus in Furs was published in 1870, and has become an erotic classic in its own right. In this book, the hero Severin asks to be treated as a slave and to be abused by Wanda (the "Venus in furs" of the story). The fact that Sacher-Masoch often acted out these fantasies in real-life with his wives and mistresses was not well-known since he preferred to keep his private life as private as he could.

Sacher-Masoch was, to put it mildly, displeased when Krafft-Ebbing made him an apostle of sexual perversion. He had gone to great lengths to maintain his public persona as a man of letters and he found this new fame humiliating. Doubly galling was the fact that the word "masochism" took on a life of its own and quickly became an established medical term. It may be a coincidence that his health went into a decline shortly after Psychopathia Sexualis came out but by March of 1895, he was delusional and violent. After attempting to kill his then-wife Hulda, she arranged for him to be discreetly moved to an asylum in Lindheim, Hesse. Although his official obituary states that he died that year, there are claims that Sacher-Masoch lived on as an anonymous asylum inmate and actually died years later.

Despite his name being a byword for kinky sexuality, the full-extent of Sacher-Masoch's private life only became known in 1906 when his first wife, Aurora, published her memoirs (under the pseudonym of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch). The lurid details generated tremendous controversy and kept his books in the public eye. Despite moral outrage and attempts at censorship over the years, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch has attained a not-so-quiet immortality (but perhaps not the kind that he would have wanted).

Delusional "Pseudotranssexualism" in Schizophrenia

The Summer, 2007 issue of Psychiatry described a case history of a 40-year old male patient with chronic schizophrenia who developed a preoccupation with changing his gender. The authors review relevant literature and concluded that twenty percent of all schizophrenic patients experience sexual delusions at some point during the evolution of their illness (including becoming convinced that they are actually the wrong sex). While true coexistence of schizophrenia and gender identity disorder is rare, disentangling them can be extremely tricky. Considering the irreversible consequences of gender reassignment surgery and the medical and legal implications implications, it is important that these patients be properly diagnosed.

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Burning the Library

Magnus Hirschfeld never set out to be a pioneer.

Born in the 19th century Prussian city of Kolberg (now part of Poland) as the son of a prominent Jewish physician, it seemed only natural that he would follow in his father's footsteps .   After taking his doctoral degree in 1892, he maintained a practice as a general practitioner and naturopath as well as being an avid writer. His writings focused on diverse aspects of human sexuality and he had ample material from his own private life to draw from. While he tended to view his own sexual orientation as a "private mater", it is now accepted that he was a homosexual and a transvestite (and possibly even a foot fetishist). Rather than pursue the closeted lifestyle that most German homosexuals of his time pursued (under the German Penal code, homosexuality had been a criminal offense since 1871), he wrote a series of works proposing that homosexuality represented an "intermediate sex" (he also coined the term "transvestite).

Along with other gay activists, he founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897 to encourage a liberalizing of laws against homosexuality. They even sponsored a bill to overturn the laws against homosexuality (the petition favouring the bill was signed by numerous prominent Germans including Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Martin Buber, and Richard Kraftt-Ebbing) in 1898. It failed to pass but their movement continued. While many of Hirschfeld's ideas about homosexuality would probably be scorned today (homosexual males being feminine, homosexuality being a disease that deserved pity rather than arrest, etc.), he was a true pioneer at a time when such pioneers were rare. His published works on sexology influenced many later researchers including Havelock Ellis.

On the site of a former royal palace in Berlin, Hirschfeld opened the Institut fur Sexualwissenshaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in 1919. In addition to housing Hirschfeld's immense library of books on sexology, it was a centre for medical research and consultation for patients from all over Europe. Hirschfeld continued to make public appearances and was regularly referred to in the news media as the "Einstein of Sex".  His writings were extensive and included a 23-volume "Yearbook for the Sexual Intermediates" (the first periodical for homosexuals). He also helped write one of the first gay-themed films in 1919 Anders al die Andern (Different from the Others) which was banned by the German government in 1920. It was at his public appearances that he faced the wrath of anti-gay (and anti-Semitic) activists. At one appearance in 1921, his skull was fractured and he was left lying in the street.  Despite these encounters, he was a well-recognized public figure and renowned sexual expert.  It was only natural that Einar Weigener sought him out in 1930 for help in achieving the first sex-change operation (which certainly added to Hirschfeld's notoriety). International conferences were organized and progress was being made.

And then it all fell apart...

The rise of Nazism put an end to Hirschfeld's crusading.  He went on an extended lecture tour in 1930 and decided not to return to Germany. The Nazis began to organize a campaign to purge Germany's libraries of "un-German material" and it was on May 6, 1933 that several vans with over one hundred students and a brass band (!) broke into the Institute while the band played. They seized Hirschfeld's entire library of over ten thousand books which went up in flames in a public bonfire three days later. A busted sculpture of Hirschfeld was marched through the street and then tossed into the flames. The Nazis also seized the Institute's files which listed the names and addresses of many homosexuals living in Germany. The information was used to compile their notorious "pink list" of homosexuals who were sent to the concentration camps along with other "marginal populations".  Hirschfeld eventually settled in France where he died of a stroke in 1935.  He lived long enough to see virtually all traces of the gay emancipation movement in Germany wiped out.  He is buried in Nice.

While it is tempting to dismiss the destruction of the Institute and library as a sad consequence of the Nazi rise to power, the example is an uncomfortable one. How often are modern scientists forced to defend themselves due to "unpopular" research that contradicts accepted norms and beliefs?  And how easily can extremists gain power under the right circumstances?

Any library can go up in flames with enough fuel.

Autoerotic Asphyxia Death Due to Full Body Wrapping

While cases of autoerotic asphyxiation involving accidental death arising from the use of various breath-stopping techniques for sexual gratification have long been reported in the research literature, a recent case reported in the July 2007 issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences takes things somewhat further.  The authors report on the case of a 34-year old man who apparently died of asphyxiating from wearing an extremely complex plastic full-body wrap.  The authors conclude that it is the "the largest and most complex plastic bag ever involved in a published case of autoerotic death". 

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American Psychological Association to Revisit Gay Conversion Therapy

The American Psychological Association has announced the formation of a task force to review current scientific trends and its ten-year old stance on "gay conversion therapies".  Given the contentious nature of the subject and the growing focus on forcing adolescents to undergo sexual conversion, the six-person task force will review the current APA policy and make recommendations for the future.

In a press release dated May 21, 2007, APA president, Dr. Sharon Stephens Brehm welcomed the new task force as its work will " help inform all mental health practitioners about appropriate and effective therapeutic responses to sexual orientation".  The issue of sexual conversion of adults and adolescents will be addressed separately and the final report is expected to cover the following points:

1. The appropriate application of affirmative therapeutic interventions for children and adolescents who present a desire to change either their sexual orientation or their behavioral expression of their sexual orientation, or both, or whose guardian expresses a desire for the minor to change;
2. The appropriate application of affirmative therapeutic interventions for adults who present a desire to change their sexual orientation or their behavioral expression of their sexual orientation, or both;
3. The presence of adolescent inpatient facilities that offer coercive treatment designed to change sexual orientation or the behavioral expression of sexual orientation;
4. Education, training, and research issues as they pertain to such therapeutic interventions; and
5. Recommendations regarding treatment protocols that promote stereotyped gender-normative behavior to mitigate behaviors that are perceived to be indicators that a child will develop a homosexual orientation in adolescence and adulthood

A preliminary report is expected in December of this year but the date for final completion has yet to be determined.

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Police Recover 1,500 Pairs of Shoes Stolen by Fetish Thief

A 26-year old unemployed forklift operator was arraigned in a Waukesha, Wisconsin courtroom and charged with three counts of burglary after police recoverd over 1,500 pairs of girl's shoes stolen from three public high schools and a middle school in the Waukesha area.  Erik D. Heinrich is believed to have used master keys from his work for a local cable company to burglarize local schools and break into student lockers to acquire the shoes to satisfy an elaborate fetish.  In addition to the shoes, police also found "numerous" photos of adolescent girls, an undisclosed number of athletic socks, and recent high school yearbooks.  Heinrich had been previously convicted of a similar break-in at a local high school in 2005.  Police are also investigating his role in other burglaries. 

Heinich appeared in court without an attorney and advised the court that he is unlikely to raise the $10,000 bail that has been placed on him. 

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Activists Seek to End Breast Ironing in Cameroon

A national network of mothers in Cameroon is forming a coalition with other agencies and journalists to call attention to the controversial cultural practice of breast ironing.  Designed to make pubescent girls less sexually attractive, breast ironing involves the pounding of a girl's breasts with a hot grinding stone for hours each day until they flatten out and stop growing.  Pestles, belts and other heated objects can also be used.  An estimated 50 per cent of women in the region of Douala, Cameroon have had it done and the practice remains shrouded in silence.  Typically viewed as a secret between mothers and daughters, many girls are believed to endure the pain in silence despite the trauma associated with the practice.    While traditionalists defend breast ironing as a way to prevent early pregnancy, the psychological effect can be devastating for young girls who can develop serious emotional and physical problems later in life (including breast cancer, abscesses, and inability to breastfeed). 

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