Marc-André Raffalovich

In 1894, Raffalovich started to contribute on the subject of homosexuality (unisexualité, as he called it) to the Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, a prestigious review founded in Lyon by Alexandre Lacassagne, a pioneer criminologist and professor of forensic medicine.In contrast to then-current theories of sexual inversion, according to which a man was a homosexual because he had a female soul in a male body and a woman was lesbian because she had a male soul in a female body, and which thus essentially reproduced heterosexuality, Raffalovich's view of "unisexuality" held that it consisted of attraction to the same sex, closer to the modern conception of homosexuality.He regarded a heterosexual's destiny as marriage and starting a family, whereas a homosexual's duty, he believed, was to overcome and transcend his desires with artistic pursuits and spiritual – even mystical – friendships.These views led him to clash with Magnus Hirschfeld and the members of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, with Raffalovich accusing them of being propagandists for moral dissolution and of wanting to destroy whole generations.Raffalovich's failure to reconcile his homosexuality and the Roman Catholic religion he accepted as true pushed him further into his criticism of the early gay liberation movement; in 1910, he finally stopped commenting altogether on the subject which had occupied such a place in his life.