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Sexualwissenschaft

By Miller Oberman

Written after looking at a photo of Magnus Hirschfeld and friends

“What matters now is to restore honor and justice to the many thousands before us, with us, after us.” —Magnus Hirschfeld, from Anders als die Andera, (Different from the Others) 1919.


Preposition, before location. An indeclinable
word or particle. Indeclinable. That which
cannot be turned aside or shunned. Inevitable,
un-deviating. I practice a kind

of time travel. Bringing beside me
ancestors I never knew existed before,
beneath, under, towards. This travel 
unimpacted by time, space or death.

One night in 1998 I fell asleep with my face
on the windowsill, fell asleep looking out
into the rain alone after someone I trusted
hurt me badly and publicly. I hadn’t slept or eaten

in days, grief-feral, leaky and childish, pacing
the brown room planning future hardness.
I was just learning there were others like me,
our art, our lonely lives and violent ends. Except

now I go, not back exactly, but during,
between, among, and not alone. It’s basically
a dance party. Billy Tipton rolls his piano in,
plays and smokes (time travel smoking is non-

cancerous). Richard Bruce Nugent paints
at my old leather coffee table, Annemarie
Schwarzenbach takes notes, loads film, rumpled
and handsome. I get bored of crying and we go

to Berlin to see Hirschfeld before the sun comes up,
before the Brown Shirts sack the Institut für
Sexualwissenschaft, burn his books and papers in the street.
His gay patients kept killing themselves, so he

made a place for them, and they’re all drinking
wine from a jug. No glasses, just pass it around
and hang it from an exposed pipe if you’re using
all your hands to hold your lover, your friend.

The room is steamy with sweet queer breath,
everyone in their finest tails and top hats, light
bouncing off brocade and Hirschfeld’s perfectly
round spectacles. One man’s eyes are closed as he

holds another in his lap. I’ve had this face,
flood of love and relief, eyes closed to
better feel everything, store up joy.
Soon we will get our dance monocles,

float to the Eldorado for drinks and drag.
You in your Victorian wig and crinoline,
you in your headpiece of gilded branches,
you in your cape and masquerade mask, your

fierce gazes. Billy plays “The Man I Love” as we gather
our coats. Hirschfeld and Nugent, Schwarzenbach,
these other beauties. They are all, as Hirschfeld
wanted, living. All these dead I am not dead because of.


 

 

 

Listen as Miller Oberman reads Sexualwissenschaft.
Added: Friday, November 22, 2024  /  Used with permission.
Miller Oberman
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Miller Oberman is the author of Impossible Things (Duke University Press, 2024) and The Unstill Ones (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2017). He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Prize, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. Miller’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Poem-a-Day, and Foglifter. Miller is an editor at Broadsided Press, and teaches at and serves on the board of Brooklyn Poets. He teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York. Miller is a trans Jewish anti-Zionist committed to the liberation of all. He lives with his family in Kingston, NY.

Image Description: Miller Oberman sits with his right elbow on a table and his head resting on his right hand. He wears a blue button down shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Miller is white with short dark brown hair. 

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