Of the many recent books and articles on gay history, the most important in my mind is Robert Beachy's essay on the “German Invention of Homosexuality” from 2010. I ran into Beachy in the archives of Berlin's Gay Museum a year later, as he was finishing Gay Berlin (Knopf, 2014), the now-seminal book that expands on the argument of that essay. The central protagonist in both is Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the jurist who declared before the Prussian court in the 1860s that his same-sex desire was not essentially an illicit behavior but rather a fundamental, intrinsic part of his (and others’) nature. This public plea, and the activist work Ulrichs did before and after to advocate for the legality and legitimacy of same-sex intimacy, becomes the core element of Beachy's point about locating the birth of the modern movement at the moment of Ulrichs's statement. And rightly so. But there is a detail in Ulrichs's story that apparently has gone overlooked, perhaps because it seems irrelevant to the larger, ostensibly more important story of the rise of gay rights: as Ulrichs himself testified, his first same-sex sexual fantasy, as a fifteen year old, was of a uniformed soldier entering his bedroom late one night.

Jeffrey Schneider, in a new book, seizes upon this detail, recognizing rather cleverly that soldiers were in fact central players, or rather fixations, in public debates about normative sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. Pairing Ulrichs's fantasy with W. E. B. Du Bois's 1893 essay about Berlin, in which the American sociologist could not help but be impressed by the ubiquity and allure of the German military, Schneider makes a compelling case for reading Wilhelmine sexuality and masculinity through the military, not only in its centrality in a variety of court cases and scandals in which high-ranking military men were accused of unlawful same-sex intimacy, but also—and perhaps more interestingly so—in the extent to which fantasies about soldiers and uniforms figured in the public imagination.

One of the payoffs of this new perspective on gay rights in German history is the complication of our vision of this movement as inherently progressive. Like Javier Samper Vendrell does in his book, The Seduction of Youth (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Schneider demonstrates that the movement's defense of same-sex intimacy often hinged on a surprising hyper-masculinist conservatism that viewed the homosocial and homoerotic camaraderie of the battlefields and barracks as ideal elements of a nation's fighting force. The Prussian military, as the strong arm of the German monarchy, might seem a curious fixture in efforts to expand the normative bounds of sexual respectability, but Schneider makes a good case for the extent to which queer activism was both bolstered and undermined by the alleged homoeroticism of soldiers in uniform. Whether in the Harden–Moltke libel case that revolved around the commensurability of homosexuality and soldierly duty; or in investigations into alleged homoerotic abuse among members of the Prussian army; or in the centrality of sexuality for later critiques of the military, Schneider demonstrates that much of the gay rights movement played out on the battleground of the military itself.

The rhetorical core of the book is fantasy, projection, and imagination about soldierly sexuality. The idea, greatly simplified, is that we can discover a lot about Imperial Germany by paying attention to the ways in which people fantasized and speculated about the things that played out underneath the surface of everyday life, especially when confronted with the fragmented archival reality of gay history (much of it, if recorded at all, is oblique and coded, and large archives like that of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific Humanitarian Committee were maliciously destroyed). Schneider admittedly lost me a little by spending much of the book's introduction on a somewhat jargony explication of the novelty of his intervention into fantasy theory (indeed this is generally not a book written for the general public). But his attention to fantasy, or rather his ability to read the gay rights movement as a whole—and individual texts and events, specifically—as fantasy is in practice very impressive and compelling. Using the genre of melodrama, with its distinctive exaggerated moral pedagogy, Schneider combines outstanding detective work with creative glosses on the Harden–Moltke trial, for example, and turns the courtroom into a stage on which masculinity, honor, and competing visions of homosexual emancipation played. This is very effective.

The structure of the book is not really chronological or narrative but rather thematic and methodological, as each chapter probes a widespread Wilhelmine fixation on both the military and transgressive sexuality through a different case study. Schneider uses the Moltke-Harden trial to set up subsequent chapters on larger scale (though less sensational) inquiries into sexual abuse in the military (cast by both experts and the general public alike as sadism) and male prostitution among soldiers. In both cases, especially since hard evidence of either was shrouded in at least some mystery and secrecy, what was more important was how sexologists, military officials, and the public projected their visions of respectability onto the investigations, which usually had the effect of reinforcing heterosexual normativity. Schneider devotes the final two chapters to clever readings of the works of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, which, in conversation with one another, not only used the military as a conceit for making sense of non-normative sexuality but also tended, as a result, to reinscribe the period's general aversion to publicly-legible male-male intimacy. The left-leaning Heinrich Mann's famous critique of Wilhelmine society in The Loyal Subject (1918), as Schneider shows, actually built its parody on a fundamentally conservative gender ethos and by ridiculing the protagonist's effeminacy.

This is a somewhat dense book and one addressed primarily to other scholars of the history of sexuality. But Schneider's hope (expressed as bookends to the main chapters) that his re-readings of trials and texts will provide useful methodological fodder to others in the field is a safe bet. More casual readers will also learn a great deal about sexology and the gay rights movement, and we can all profit from Schneider's lesson that fantasy is deeply revealing about our world's complex normativities.