The thing about the Madness of Ludwig II is that, apart from his prodigiously good taste,

there was nothing mad about it.  The poor dude was gay, pure and simple.  Not stupid, not cruel, not frivolous, not mean or ill-natured--just gay. And it's not as if there were no mounting evidence, towards the end of the 19th century,  that a lot of people, most of them male, were gay. At least as many as there were dipsomaniac, left-handed, color-blind and crippled people.  So why did the powers and institutions that, in the 19th century were (beginning, say, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire) with all the interests they had in finding out just what would constitute a fairly descriptive, over-all objective demographic of the exceedingly various peoples they expected to form into countries in their own right, if not democracies, (which everyone, I think, admits that at least the Austro-Hungarian Empire did an exhaustive job of trying to do) so insist, contrarily to the evidence, on the abnormality--indeed the criminality--of male homosexuality?

The answer, I fear, is not edifying, and point to the conclusion that the Emperor Franz-Josef, like the Tsar, and like the majority of Englishmen, was, in normal matters, an idiot.