While the articles in this issue contribute in many ways to the representations of sexualities, gender and the political potential of transgression, we should not forget that the year 2004 also marks a centennial of transgressive thinking about women and sexuality, beginning with Anna Rüling's famous speech "What Interest does the Women's Movement have in Solving the Homosexual Problem?" (Welches Interesse hat die Frauenbewegung an der Lösung des homosexuellen Problems?).[1] While Anna Rüling, whose real name was Theo Anna Sprüngli (1880-1953), has provoked much writing and response to her famous speech in lesbian feminist scholarship, (particularly in Germany but also elsewhere), much less is known about Anna Rüling herself, and the context of her provocative juxtaposition in terms of her politics. As Christiane Leidinger suggests, Rüling's radical sexual politics, apart from this one speech, are oddly absent elsewhere in her political career - leaving a highly remarked and quoted but oddly isolated piece of political action. Nevertheless, she was posing a pertinent question that remained relevant throughout the twentieth century, particularly when the gay liberation movements and feminist movements in the 1970s were defining their boundaries anew.

Rüling (which is almost an anagram of Sprüngli) was born in 1880 in Hamburg to a German mother and a Swiss father. She lived all of her life in Germany where she died unexpectedly in 1953 from a heart attack at the age of 73, having produced much journalistic work during her adult life. She wrote for moderate national-patriotic women's journals, often on music. From the point of view of her writing career as well as her political career, Rüling's lesbian-political speech from 1904 was outside of her repertoire, with the exception of a collection of short stories (of which one has an unusual happy ending for the time!) in 1906.[2] Her political activity seems to have focused primarily around women's rights as her various engagements with women's organisations of her time illustrate. Based on the available biographical information thus far (Leidinger), Rüling's political stance has been characterised tentatively as patriotic and nationalist with a leaning to a militaristic, pro-war stand rather than predating a more radical lesbian-feminist politics.

Still, her speech marks the beginning of lesbian political public activism in the West, and as such it has assumed a far greater place in history than even Rüling/Sprüngli could have assumed or anticipated. Her proposition of a connection between the women's movement and the homosexual movement was not necessarily well received at the time, not least because she repudiated the pathologised model of a homosexual 'species' which was promoted by sexologists at the time. Equally, her attack on the sexual reform movement (which held that homosexual women were destined to achieve greater things) was also not necessarily welcomed. This, despite the fact that one of her central arguments was to outline the many points of possible connection between the women's and homosexual movements. In that sense, and maybe inadvertently, she proposed a form of coalition politics, which was only to be resurrected or re-conceived towards the end of the 1980s, when unitary identity categories were seen to be increasingly problematic and coalition politics was proposed as a basis of more successful political action. Having given her famous speech in 1904, she never seemed to return to try and bridge the divisions between the early homosexual movement and a feminist movement, although alliances between sexual reformers and feminists were much more successful.

In this sense, maybe our toast should go to the representations and the enduring legacies of her speech as well as to Anna Rüling. One hundred years may seem like a long time but the histories of lesbian and gay movements prove that nothing moves on a progressively upward curve; instead, many setbacks have been witnessed by individuals and groups engaged in sexual politics. Clearly, at a time when world political leaders like the United States make what seems to be an unprecedented juxtaposition of a war on terrorism and a war on lesbian and gay marriage, sexual transgression remains a highly politicised issue