Queer Places:
Assistens Cemetery,
Copenhagen, Kobenhavns Kommune, Hovedstaden, Denmark
Poul Georg Andræ (August 26, 1843 - June 15, 1928) was a Danish historical author and civil servant. He was the son of Prime Minister C.G. Andræ and independently wealthy.
Andræ has dealt with his father's life and business in a large-scale biography (4 volume 1897-1912) and several writings and publishing works, like Andræ and his Invention of the Prosecution of Election and Secretary of the Adjourn political diaries (1914–16). He also wrote Via Appia (1882-89).
He graduated in law in 1868 and became a civil servant in the colonial and finance administration. In 1894 he obtained an early discharge from the civil service, with a pension, by producing a medical certificate issued by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafftebing, probably for ‘nervousness’ caused by ‘contrary sexuality’.
Andræ’s literary production centred on the history of his father's political career. As the son of a prime minister he was appointed Cavalier of the Chamber in 1884; in 1912 he became (titular) Councillor of State.
The publication in 1891 of a lecture on ‘perverted sexuality’ by the prominent psychiatrist and professor Knud Pontoppidan – the first medical treatise in Denmark on homosexuality – incited an anonymous Danish ‘contrary sexual’ to publish a very long and learned article, ‘The Feeling of Contrary Sexuality’, in the leading journal of medicine. It is virtually a certainty that Andræ was the author behind the pseudonym ‘Tandem’ (Latin: ‘at last’). The article was based on the author's own experiences as one who ‘more than anyone else in this country, knows of contrary sexuals in the most varied professions’. Tandem relied heavily on Krafftebing's understanding of contrary sexuality as an illness connected with a neuropathological condition. However, as the editor of the journal remarked, the author was somewhat onesided. With great skill he managed to interpret Krafftebing to mean that genuine ‘contrary sexuals’ were absolutely never attracted to the sexually immature, nor did they – in the main – commit sodomy (anal intercourse). Instances of such behaviour were not caused by congenital contrary sexuality, but should be understood as perversities committed by otherwise heterosexual men. Tandem's account of the experiences of ‘a patient who cannot avoid ejaculations’ while watching naked young men on a nearby bathing raft was an example of the abnormally early and strong sexual drive of the ‘contrary sexual’, but may also have been a personal memoir. Indirectly the author demonstrated that ‘contrary sexuality’ was not opposed to respectability and could be combined with learning, insight and intelligence, and found in society's better classes. Thus Andræ was the first in Denmark to publicly defend homosexuals. This he did by allying himself as an emanicipationist with psychiatry.
In later life Andræ became a well known character in Copenhagen's café milieu, odd, awkward and generous. In his will he left a sum of money for the translation and publication (in 1928) of Magnus Hirschfeld's 1901 pamphlet "What Should The People Know About The Third Sex?"
My published books:
