Hubert Kennedy
Hubert Kennedy, PhD, is a Research Associate at the Center for Research and Education in Sexuality at San Francisco State University. He has over 200 publications in several languages, from an analysis of the mathematical manuscripts of Karl Marx and a revelation of Marx's homophobia, to theoretical genetics and a proof of the impossibility of an organism that requires more than two sexes in order to reproduce. In addition, Dr. Kennedy has written biographies of the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano and the German homosexual emancipationist/theorist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and has edited the collected writings of Ulrichs. His translations of the boy-love novels of the German anarchist writer John Henry Mackay and his investigations of the writings of Mackay have helped establish Mackay's place in the gay canon. Dr. Kennedy also translated selections from Der Eigene for the volume Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany, coedited with Harry Oosterhuis, and is the author of The Ideal Gay Man: The Story of Der Kreis.
This site makes available as free ebooks several works by
John Henry Mackay, translated by Hubert Kennedy, and some of Kennedy's own works,
most importantly the biography of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. To read the ebooks, you
will need to download and install the Adobe Acrobat Reader. It is a free
download.
The photograph of Hubert Kennedy (above, center) was made by Robert Giard, who was known for his portraits of gay and lesbian writers. Giard died on 16 July 2002 at age 62.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement (2002), is a revised and enlarged edition of the biography Kennedy first published in 1988. An effort has been made to include the results of the latest researches. The text is now 16% longer and 40 illustrations are included. To read the ebook on-line, click here. (To download the file to your computer, right click and select “Save … As”.) Please be patient, as the file is quite large - over 7MB. With a fast Internet connection, the download will take about 2 minutes; a slow connection may take up to 40 minutes. Reactions to this publication are particularly welcome. Please write to the address at the bottom of the web page.
An Italian translation of the above ebook is available in a print edition from Massari Editore (http://www.enjoy.it/erre-emme/home.htm). Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: Pioniere del moderno movimento gay (2005), translated by Roberto Cruciani, with an introduction by Massimo Consoli, is No. 19 in the "Collana Pensiero Forte".
The revised German edition of this biography, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: Leben und Werk, was published in 2001 by MännerschwarmSkrip Verlag, Hamburg. For more information, click here.
Professor Les Wright's excellent review of the above biography was published in Journal of Homosexuality (vol. 46, nos. 1/2). To read it, click here.
A review by Kennedy of several recent books about Karl Heinrich Ulrichs is now on the premiere web site for Ulrichs information, Celebration 2002. To read it, click here.
Are you curious to see what Ulrichs’s publications looked like? Want to read the original of one? Click here to see a transcription of his first booklet Vindex. (As usual, right-click and select “Save … As” to download.) This is not a facsimile, but an effort has been made to make it appear like the original, with a Fraktur font and Ulrichs’s original spelling. For ease of reading, the length of the lines has been changed, but the general appearance and page numbering have been kept.
A facsimile of Vindex is in Kennedy’s on-line Briefcase. Click here and find Vindex in the “Public” folder. The booklet is only 37 pages, but (for technical reasons) has been divided into three files, all large. All together this facsimile Vindex takes 20 MB. Unless you have a high-speed Internet connection, it is not recommended.
In addition to the complete biography of
Ulrichs, Kennedy has published several articles on Ulrichs as well as entries on
Ulrichs for reference works.
For a brief, popular introduction to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs,
see Kennedy’s article in
the European Gay Review in 1986. (To read it click here.
To download it, right-click and select “Save … As”.)
A brief introduction in German was in Biographisches
Lexikon für Ostfriesland in 1997. (To read it
click here.
To download it, right-click and select “Save … As”.)
A longer, scholarly article on Ulrichs is “Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality” (1997). (To
read it click here.
To download it, right-click and select “Save … As”.)
In 2004 Kennedy submitted an article – “Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, an Early Advocate of Peace and Equality” – to the journal Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research for publication in a “special LGBTQ issue”, hoping it would introduce Ulrichs to a group that might not be aware of him. The article was rejected by the editors: “Unfortunately, we decided that yours would not fit as well as others.” Although it has little new for readers of this web page, it is made available here as submitted, since it does present Ulrichs from a slightly different viewpoint. To read it, click here.
Ulrichs’s Latin journal Alaudae [The Larks] appeared from May 1889 until his death in 1895. It was meant to promote Latin as an international language and had readers around the globe – in Egypt, America, Russia, Roumania,… A reprint edited by Wolfram Setz has been published (2004) by MännerschwarmSkript in Hamburg. It has over 400 pages, including an introduction by the Latinist Wilfred Stroh. For more information, click here and follow the link to Bibliothek rosa Winkel.
Giuseppe Peano
The “Definitive Edition” of Peano: Life and Works of Giuseppe Peano (2002) is now available as an ebook. The original edition was published in 1980; there was an Italian translation in 1983 that corrected a number of errors and also included the references that were missing from the English edition. Those improvements have all been added to the new edition. Also included are a number of illustrations. Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932) was the outstanding Italian mathematician of his day. This biography covers not only his pioneering contributions to mathematics and symbolic logic, but also his engagement with the international auxiliary language movement. The PDF file has about 1.4 MB. To read it, click here. (To download, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
In addition to the biography of Giuseppe Peano, Kennedy published a number of articles dealing with particular aspects of his life and work. Most of them are in the collection Twelve Articles on Giuseppe Peano. These articles were originally published in various journals in the years 1963–1984. To read the collection, click here. (To download, right click and select “Save … As”.)
Giuseppe Peano, a short biography (44 pages), was published in Switzerland in 1974 in a German translation by Ruth Amsler. It is a good introduction to the life and works of Giuseppe Peano. To read it, click here. (To download, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
John Henry Mackay
For a brief introduction to John Henry Mackay (and to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Heinrich Hössli), see Kennedy's entries in glbtq: an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, & queer culture (an excellent online encyclopedia). Click here for the link to them.
John Henry Mackay’s last book was Abrechnung: Randbemerkungen zu Leben und Arbeit (1932). The English translation, Summing Up: Marginal Notes to Life and Work, is now available. To read it on-line, click here. (To download the file to your computer, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Fenny Skaller and Other Prose Writings from the Books of the Nameless Love by John Henry Mackay, translated by Hubert Kennedy, was first published in 1988. It is now available as an ebook. To read it, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.) NB. The following two items are also part of Sagitta’s Books of the Nameless Love.
Over the Marble Steps: A Scene of the Nameless Love is a very brief one-act play by Mackay. An illustrated edition is available. To read it on-line, click here. (To download the file to your computer, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Mackay’s Poems of the Nameless Love is in Kennedy’s on-line Briefcase. Click here and find Poems of the Nameless Love in the “Public” folder. This is a bilingual edition - German and English, with an introduction by Kennedy - in the form of a “webbook” (to be read with your browser). The zip file (147 KB) contains 60 files, but unzipped is altogether less than 1 MB. After you have unzipped it to your hard drive, begin reading the webbook by opening the file “index.htm”. All files in the webbook are linked to the index.
Dear Tucker: The Letters from John Henry Mackay to Benjamin R. Tucker is now available in a new, illustrated edition. The file is rather large, about 1.5 MB, so it may take a while to download, but you will be rewarded when you see the illustrations. To read it on-line, click here. (To download the file to your computer, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Anarchist of Love: The Secret Life of John Henry Mackay, first published in 1983 and in an expanded version in 1996, is now an ebook. To read it click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Anarchist der Liebe: John Henry Mackay als Sagitta is the German translation of a 1988 expanded version of Kennedy's Anarchist of Love: The Secret Life of John Henry Mackay. To read it, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Reading John Henry Mackay is a collection of 10 articles by Hubert Kennedy (6 in English and 4 in German). To read it, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century is the book that make John Henry Mackay famous. The 1891 English translation by George Schumm is in the Anarchy Archives. To read it, click here.
Print editions of the following five volumes of Kennedy's translations of writings by John Henry Mackay are available from Xlibris. For more information and how to order, click on the title.
1. Shorter Fiction. Contains almost all the short stories and novellas of Mackay.
2. Autobiographical Writings. Contains Summing Up and Dear Tucker (mentioned above).
3. The Swimmer. The story of the rise and fall of a champion swimmer in Berlin, circa 1900.
4. Three Novels. Contains The People of Marriage, District Attorney Sierlin, and The Imagined World.
5. The Hustler. The story of a teenage hustler in Berlin in the 1920s. Original title: Der Puppenjunge.
Mackay's short novel Die Menschen der Ehe (1892) is a devastating portrait of Saarbrücken, the town where he grew up as a young boy. In it the character Dora Syk is patterned after his friend Gabriele Reuter, who later pictured Mackay in her novel Aus guter Familie (1895). The original German of Die Menschen der Ehe is in Project Gutenberg. To download it, click here.
Mackay's Der Schwimmer: Die Geschichte einer Leidenschaft (1901) is one of the earliest literary sports novels. It is a captivating story with good psychological insight and is also historically important for its picture of competitive swimming and diving in the early years of those sports. The original German is in Project Gutenberg. To download it, click here.
Mackay is also known as the re-discoverer of Max Stirner (1806-1856), and his biography of Stirner is the only one of that 19th-century philosopher of egoism, whose major work was Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1844). Kennedy's translation of Mackay's Max Stirner: His Life and His Work, the first translation into English, is available in a print edition from Amazon.com.
Mackay’s brief introduction to Stirner’s book, written in 1927, is also available for the first time in English. To read it, click here.
Kennedy’s article “Richard Strauss and John Henry Mackay” was presented in Thamyris 2 in a typographically very attractive layout by editor Mike Merisi. To read the article, click here.
James Mills Peirce
After “coming out” in the post-Stonewall period, Kennedy looked for a gay mathematics professor to write about - and found him in the nineteenth-century Harvard mathematician James Mills Peirce. The results of his research have been collected in Six Articles on James Mills Peirce. To read it click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Sex & Math in the Harvard Yard: The Memoirs of James Mills Peirce, a fictional biography, is Hubert Kennedy's only novel. Here's what the back cover blurb of the printed edition said about it:
James Mills Peirce (1834–1906) was a respected—and secretly gay—mathematics professor at Harvard University. This imaginative biography recreates college life at Harvard in the late nineteenth century and gives a realistic picture of the life of an intellectual coming to terms with his homosexuality. The intimate glimpses into his sex life add a charming touch to the historically accurate picture of the development of graduate education in New England. Those with an interest in the history of mathematics and/or the early history of the gay movement in Europe will especially appreciate this thoughtful and thoroughly researched presentation by a scholar of both subjects.
To read the novel, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Other Works of Hubert Kennedy
The Ideal Gay Man: The Story of Der Kreis (1999) tells the history of the Swiss trilingual journal, with generous excerpts from it. For more information and how to order, click on the title.
Der Kreis: Eine Zeitschrift und ihr Programm is the German edition of the book above. It may be ordered from www.gay-books.de.
The short story “Life’s Little Loafer” is Kennedy's attempt to imitate the style of John Henry Mackay (Sagitta). Did he succeed? To read it and find out, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
First published in 1976, Coming
Out in Providence describes Hubert
Kennedy's “coming out” at Providence College that year and tells how a
Congress
James Barr gained prominence in the 1950s with his novel Quatrefoil. The essay A Touch of Royalty: Gay Author James Barr is Kennedy's appreciation of his life and writing. To read it, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Kennedy is inordinately proud of his proof of “the impossibility of an organism that requires more than two sexes in order to reproduce” (as noted in the small print at the top of this page). The proof is in Three Sexes: Essays in Theoretical Genetics. To read it, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
After theoretical genetics, Kennedy studied the mathematical manuscripts of Karl Marx. The results of his study are in Negation of the Negation: Karl Marx and Differential Calculus. To read it, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Eight Mathematical Biographies is a collection of short articles, mostly written for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1970-76). The eight are: Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Cesare Burali-Forti, Alessandro Padoa, Marc-Antoine Parseval des Chênes, Giuseppe Peano, Mario Pieri, Emil Leon Post, Giovanni Vailati. To read the ebook, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Kennedy published some 60 book reviews in gay journals and magazines. Reviews of Seven Gay Classics is a collection of reviews of reprints of older works of special value. Their authors are: Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, John Henry Mackay, Benedict Friedlaender, Erich Bethe, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and Heinrich Hössli. To read the ebook, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
In Memoriam: Five Gay Obituaries contains the five obituaries published by Kennedy. The five are: Glenn Hogan, Mario Mieli, Roger Austen, Peter Schult, and Robert Turner (all but Schult known personally by Kennedy). To read the ebook, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Reviewing Boy-Love and NAMBLA is a collection of eleven book reviews and one conference report. To read the ebook, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Four in Gay History is a collection of articles discussing four men not included in the special categories above. They are: Fitzroy Davis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Karol Szymanowski, and Johann Baptist von Schweitzer. To read the ebook, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Selected Gay Book Reviews is a collection of twelve reviews written in 1980-2001 and originally published in The Advocate (8), The James White Review (1), and Journal of Homosexuality (3). To read the ebook, click here. (To download it, right click and select “Save ... As”.)
Comments and suggestions are
welcome. Write to hubertk@pacbell.net.
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