Queer Places:
Copenhagen University, Nørregade 10, 1165 København, Denmark
Joachim Reinhard (April 27, 1858 – February 24, 1925) was a Danish writer. While at the University of Copenhagen, in 1877, Joachim Reinhard was accused by two students, who disliked his manner, of having attempted to seduce them. To escape the subsequent flurry of rumours, Reinhard left for the United States on his nineteenth birthday, returning to Denmark only when he felt the rumour-mongering had died down, several months later. Later he became a fiction writer and became involved with the circle of literary homosexuals which, in the 1880s, centred on Herman Bang. By the end of the decade, Reinhard was again the object of public rumours of homosexuality, this time in the national press, and again, in 1889, he fled Denmark for the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Reinhard belonged to the first generation of homosexual men in Denmark. He studied aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen (1876– 1877). Some students took a dislike to his arrogant and affected manners and spread the rumour that he had attempted to seduce two of them. At the same time another student, Martin Kok, caused a scandal at a party in the Student Union by drunkenly groping a cross-dressing student under his skirt. Under the weight of these rumours Reinhard, on his nineteenth birthday, fled to the US under an assumed name. He had no means of support in New York and a few months later, when the scandal had died down, he returned to Denmark. Privately Reinhard denied having attempted to seduce his fellow students, but his name was forever connected to the first publicised homosexual scandal in Denmark. For a few years he lived discreetly in the countryside as a private teacher and a journalist on provincial newspapers. Under a pseudonym, he published two novels that were well reviewed. After his return to Copenhagen in 1883, he published several more novels and became a member of a coterie of young literary homosexuals around the talented author and journalist Herman Bang. He also became a flaming queen. Unwisely, in 1889 Reinhard in a newspaper article attacked Georg Brandes, the dominant figure of modern literary criticism and cultural opposition in Denmark. A few days later a newspaper, owned and edited by Brandes's brother, ridiculed Reinhard as Martin Kok's ‘comrade-in-arms’ (i.e. as a homosexual). Other newspapers hinted at Reinhard as a sexual pervert and in November 1889 he emigrated to the US. In the 1890s Reinhard taught at Purdue University, later at a Catholic college in Arkansas. At his death in 1925 he was working as a librarian in Brooklyn, New York.
A large number of letters from Reinhard to Arthur Feddersen, an older and fatherly adviser, and to his contemporary, the author Karl Larsen, are preserved. They illustrate closely, on the level of the individual, the workings of the social process that made Reinhard a feminine homosexual. In 1908 Reinhard's friend, Karl Larsen, anonymously published a book in Germany, Daniel– Daniela. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Kreuzträgers von *** (Daniel– Daniela. From the Diary of a Man who Bears a Cross by ***). Reviewers in Germany accepted the authenticity of this tragic and pitiable self-description of a feminine homosexual man who confesses his love to a young officer and is treated to the whip. In a preface to the Danish edition (1922) under his own name, Larsen admitted that the book was a pastiche and a roman à clef written in order to contribute to an educated debate, but not motivated by sympathy for this type of person. There is no evidence in Reinhard's letters to Larsen that he figured as the protagonist of his friend's literary portrayal of an enemy.
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