"Jeg er et højst fuldstændigt og fejlfrit eksemplar af racen, så jeg blev modtaget som en kostbar skat". Om amtsforvalter Poul Andræ (1843-1928), kontrærsexualiteten og lægerne

Resumé

The Danish lawyer and public official Poul Georg Andræ (1843-1928) was born into
an affluent officer family, where his father, C.C.G. Andræ came to play a central political
role after the abolition of the absolute monarchy both as a minister and government
head. It was obvious that Poul and the younger brother Victor Andræ would
study, and after they had become lawyers from the University of Copenhagen in the
middle of the 1860s, they were employed as public officials in the central administration.
They were both unmarried, and with regards to Poul Andræ, it was clear to him
early on that his feelings and sexuality were only directed towards men. Through
surviving diaries and a number of the letters that he wrote and received, we can
follow his struggle against his ”unfortunate love” as he called it quite closely. It took
place through an ongoing dialogue with Danish doctors and psychiatrists, who in the
1870s and 1880s were more or less at a loss to understand these new phenomena. In
1891, Andræ travelled to Vienna to consult with the leading psychiatrist and sexologist
of the time, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and although he was not able to offer him
any treatment, he confirmed him to have been born contrasexual, in other words a
woman in a man’s body, and in this way took away some of Andræ’s deep feelings of
guilt.
In 1889, Poul Andræ applied for and received the position as county administrator
in the small market town of Skanderborg in Jutland, but he soon regretted it
bitterly. It was mainly to certify that he absolutely had to live in a large city that he
sought out Krafft-Ebing two years later. With this certificate in hand, he resigned in
1894 and moved back to Copenhagen, where he lived until his death at the age of
84. Throughout his entire life he continued to struggle for sexual information and
sexual equality; in particular, he became involved with the Wissenschaftlich Humanitarian
Committee, which was founded in 1897, and in his will he left considerable
funds to both the committee and to a number of books in Danish.