The Modern Lesbian Classic Published Over a Century Ago

Anna Elisabet Weirauch's 'The Scorpion' would be surprisingly modern if published today.

Under the Weimar Republic, there were 170 queer spaces around Berlin, and while sex between men was illegal, sex between women regulated, neither was as heavily restricted or censored as they were in most countries. Clubs, cabarets, books and magazines about queerness flourished in this somewhat tolerant atmosphere. Some of the earliest were the works of Anna Elisabet Weirauch.

Weirauch’s The Scorpion (1919, trans 1932) was one of the first books to portray lesbianism in a positive light, and to portray queerness as something natural and innate. It fascinated and surprised me because although Weirauch wrote it over a century ago, it’s surprisingly modern, espousing values and psychological insights that are remarkably ahead of their time. There’s a lot of the wildness of Eva Baltasar’s queer women, or of Constance Debrè, of an unwillingness to live by the rules or society, all three asking if it is truly so awful to be queer in the face of so much class injustice, of so many bourgeois …