GLR September-October 2025

ESSAY A Romance Almost Lost to History H ARLAN G REENE

H ISTORY HANGS by a thread and always has—gay history especially. It’s not just the inevitable forgetting but also the dangers to which we are heir. With scissors, a snippet of a letter can be censored, a diary disembow eled, and gay reference lost. Whether from obliviousness, squeamishness, or outright prejudice, survivors, scholars, and archivists (and today blindly obedient bureaucrats) have destroyed and are destroying or ignoring LGBT history, so that even some who make the cut survive as half-shadows or sanitized geldings. Yet despite these obstacles, past LGBT lives and stories are still emerging—more and more, in fact, as more of us react, glean, examine, and chase down facts to reclaim (for good or for ill) neglected figures. A few decades ago, researching something else, I stumbled upon a bit of history that had long been silenced, a tale that may be one of the oddest gay American love stories of the early 20th century. In his day, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) was hailed as a popular and prolific novelist as well as a cultural and lit II, following a conviction later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, he was imprisoned as a Nazi provocateur. That these two apparently polar opposites—one a Zionist Jew, the other a Hitler devotee—had once been lovers was a too-hot-to handle story that never got out in their youth, and as their careers took off, they molded their personas to fit their publics, a tactic some biographers abetted, using the power of their pens and their prejudices to shape how we have come to know these men. The first to come to my attention was Lewisohn. Born in Berlin, he was the only child of a very assimilated Jewish fam ily that moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when Lewisohn was young. He fell in love with the English language and the beautiful Southern city, wanting nothing more than to belong to a society that could not quite assimilate a Semitic-looking youngster who nevertheless self-identified as a Christian and a Southern gentleman. He was so obviously brilliant that, in a ges ture of noblesse oblige, the locals took up a collection for his education, and off he went to Columbia University. Harlan Greene is a novelist, historian, and archivist based in Charleston, SC, whose books include The Real Rainbow Row: Explo rations in Charleston’s LGBTQ History . erary critic. He became one of his era’s most prominent intellectual spokesmen for Jew ish and Zionist causes and was a founding faculty member of Brandeis University. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962) gained fame as a poet, memoirist, and editor of a national magazine, with friends includ ing Theodore Roosevelt. Viereck published widely on everything, but during World War

Standard biographies tell of his fight to become a college professor when universities would not hire Jews (though he identified as a Methodist). As World War I began, he saw his career as a champion and translator of German literature fur ther stymied. His marriage to a much older woman soured, and his 1926 novel about it, The Case of Mr. Crump , praised by the likes of Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud, could only be pub lished in Paris, where Lewisohn had fled with another woman and soon came to associate with artists and authors like James Joyce. His personal life kept him in the headlines, as his first wife refused to divorce him, his common-law wife stalked him, and when he was finally free, he married again and again. (One jilted lover broke into a wedding ceremony, giving the officiat ing rabbi a heart attack. Needless to say, tabloids loved him.) After claiming his Jewish identity, he warned the world of Hitler and the coming Holocaust. So much for many of the standard biographies. In the early 20th century, looking for a room to rent in New York City, he met the Viereck family, whose paterfamilias was would earn them scorn, which Lewisohn was willing to accept to keep his lover’s caresses and “scarlet” kisses. (The manu script drafts of poetry in a local archive had, by squeamish, oblivious, or merely incurious cataloguers, been denuded of their homosexual content.) Viereck blossomed under Lewisohn’s encouragement (the latter drawing an ejaculating penis in the margins of his texts), and together they published Viereck’s first work with an appre ciation, staged in scholarly prose, by his lover Lewisohn. Then came Viereck’s 1907 Nineveh and Other Poems— a slap in the face to the tastes of the day and what just may have been Amer ica’s first home-grown book of decadent and Uranian verse— which catapulted him to sudden fame. Proclaimed the country’s brightest talent, he’d crest early, however, becoming just a flash in the pantheon of American poets, many of whom would later drum him out of the Poetry Society of America for his politics. Taking Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and Jesus Christ as his idols, he befriended Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas and tried to start a rumor that Wilde was still alive. Also in 1907, long before Anne Rice, Viereck authored a homoerotic vampire novel. A handsome young writer in The House of the Vampire is metaphorically, if not literally, sucked an illegitimate descendant of the Hohen zollern family, with rumors that his father was the Kaiser himself. The young, German born son of the family, George Sylvester, known mostly as Sylvester (and eventually as Swastika), was seen as a genius with an alluring, magnetic personality. Lewisohn and Viereck became lovers, inspiring both to write verse referencing a dangerous love that

That these two apparently polar opposites—one a Zionist Jew, the other a Hitler devotee—had once been lovers is a story that was too hot to handle.

September–October 2025

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