physician, with whom he has long had a close friendship, until at
a time of great mental distress A.H. voluntarily revealed his
state. He is accustomed to refined society, has always read much,
abhorred athletic pursuits, and loved poetry, children, and
flowers. His love of nature amounts, indeed, to a passion.
Wherever he has been he has made friends among the best people.
He confesses to occasional periods of addiction to intoxicants,
induced by sociable companionship, and only controlled by force
of will.
For business he has not the slightest aptitude, and cannot look
after his own affairs. He is always dreading poverty and
destitution. He believes, however, that he passes among his
friends as fairly capable.
He considers that inversion is natural in his case and that he
has a perfect right to gratify his own natural instincts, though
he also admits they may be vices. He has never sought to
influence an innocent person toward his own tendencies.
HISTORY XI.--T.D., knows of nothing abnormal in his ancestry. His
brother has homosexual tendencies, but is also attracted to
women. A sister, who is very religious, states that she has
little or no sexual inclinations. They were all of a dreamy
disposition when young, to the disgust of their teachers. He sent
the following account of himself from the University at the age
of 20:--
"When I was a child (before I went to school at 9)," he writes,
"I was already of an affectionate disposition, an affection
turned readily to either sex. No boy was the cause of my
inclinations, which were quite spontaneous. (No doubt, part of
the cause may be found in our social system, by which ladies are
rather drawing-room creatures to be treated with distant
respect.) When I was 10, at a preparatory school, I first began
to form attachments with other boys of my own age, in which I
always had regard to physical beauty. It is this stage, in which
the sexual element is latent, that Shelley speaks of as preceding
love in ardent natures.
"At 12 I learned masturbation, apparently by instinct, and, I
regret to say, practised it to excess for the next seven years,
always secretly and with shame, and often with the accompaniment
of prurient imaginings which did not prevent my relations with
those I loved being of a very spiritual nature. Masturbation was
often practised daily, with bursts of repentance and abstinence,
latterly more rarely. But until I was 15 I really knew nothing of
sexual matters, and it was not till I was at least 17 that I was
conscious of sexual desire, which I repressed with shame.
"Owing to excessive self-abuse, I am unable to emit except
manually, but desire is strong. I think naked contact would
suffice, and in any case intercrural connection. _Pedicatio_ and
_fellatio_ I abhor. I love boys between the ages of 12 and 15;
they must be of my own class, refined, and lovable. I only desire
the active masculine part. I now regard my inclinations as
natural and normal to me. The difficulty is that of leading the
other party to regard it as such, besides the young age required
and clandestine nature of proceedings necessary. The moral
difficulties of circumstances are so strong that I have little
hope of ever gratifying my passion fully. I have found myself
deceived in the character of the boy twice. The last friendship
lasted three years, during which time I only saw him naked two or
three times (this caused erection), never touched him pruriently,
and only kissed him once.
"I have never found a satisfactory object of my affections, and
my happiness, perhaps my health, have been seriously injured. At
my public school a master helped me to a truer understanding of
these things. The merely animal sodomy which exists in many
public schools was unknown. What I learned of sex I learned for
myself. I am recommended to turn my aspirations to the abstract
universal maid; but so far at least I cannot do it.
"Male Greek statuary and the _Phoedrus_ of Plato have had a
great, though only confirmatory, influence on my feelings. My
ideal is that of Theocritus XIII, wherein Hercules was bringing
Hylas to the perfect measure of a man. My first thought is the
good of my friend, but, except for the good subjective influence
of passion, I have failed utterly.
"I am very tall, dark, rather strong, fond of games, though I do
not excel, owing to short sight. I am English, though I have
French blood, which may account for an unreservedly passionate
disposition. Though unlike other people, I am not in the least
feminine, nor has anyone thought so to my knowledge. I can
whistle easily and well. I am so masculine that I cannot even
conceive of passive sexual pleasure in women, much less in men.
(That is one of the difficulties in boy-love.) My affections are
inextricably bound up in the ideals of protection of one weaker
than myself. In the earlier days, when sexuality was less
conscious, this was a great source of romantic feeling, the
glamour of which is rather departing. I cannot understand love of
adult males, much less if they are of lower class, and the idea
of prostitution is nauseous to me.
"I think I may say that I have the esthetic and moral sense very
strongly ingrained. Indeed, they are largely synonymous with me.
I have no dramatic aptitude, and, though I flatter myself that my
taste is good in music, I have no knowledge of music. If I have a
favorite color, it is a dark crimson or blue, of the nature of
old stained glass. I derive great pleasure from all literary and
pictorial art and architecture; indeed, art of all kinds. I have
facility in writing personal lyrical verse; it affords me relief.
"I think my inversion must be congenital, as the desire of
contact with those boys I loved began before masturbation and has
lasted through private and public resorts and into university
life. The other sex does not attract me, but I am very fond of
children, girls as well as boys. (If there is sexuality in this,
which I trust there is not, it is latent)."
This statement is of interest because it may well lead us to
suppose that the writer, who is of balanced mind and sound
judgment, possesses a confirmed homosexual outlook on life.
While, however, it is the rule for the permanent direction of the
sexual impulse to be decided by the age of 20, that age is too
early to permit us to speak positively, especially in a youth
whose adolescent undifferentiated or homosexual impulses are
fostered by university life. This proved to be! the case with
T.D., who, though doubtless possessing a psychically anomalous
strain, is yet predominantly masculine. On leaving the university
his heterosexuality asserted itself normally. About six years
after the earlier statement, he wrote that he had fallen in love.
"I am on the eve of marrying a girl of nearly my own age. She has
sympathy as well as knowledge in my fields of study; it was thus
easier for me to explain my past, and I found that she could not
understand the moral objections to homosexual practices. My own
opinion always was that the moral objections were very
considerable, but might in some cases be overcome. In any case I
have entirely lost my sexual attraction toward boys; though I am
glad to say that the appreciation of their charm and grace
remains. My instincts, therefore, have undergone a considerable
change, but the change is not entirely in the direction of
normality. The instinct for sodomy in the proper sense of the
word used to be unintelligible to me; since the object of
attraction has become a woman this instinct is mixed with the
normal in my desire. Further, an element which much troubled me,
as being most foreign to my ideal feelings, has not quite left
me--the indecent and often scatologic curiosity about immature
girls. I can only hope that the realization of the normal in
marriage may finally kill these painful aberrations. I should add
that the practice of masturbation has been abandoned."
HISTORY XII.--Aged 24. Father and mother both living; the latter
is of a better social standing than the father. He is much
attached to his mother, and she gives him some sympathy. He has a
brother who is normally attracted to women. He himself has never
been attracted to women, and takes no interest in them nor in
their society.
At the age of 4 he first became conscious of an attraction for
older males. From the ages of 11 and 19, at a large
grammar-school, he had relationships with about one hundred boys.
Needless to add, he considers homosexuality extremely common in
schools. It was, however, the Oscar Wilde case which first opened
his eyes to the wide prevalence of homosexuality, and he
considers that the publicity of that case has done much, if not
to increase homosexuality, at all events to make it more
conspicuous and outspoken.
He is now attracted to youths about 5 or 6 years younger than
himself; they must be good-looking. He has never perverted a boy
not already inclined to homosexuality. In his relationship he
does not feel exclusively like a male or a female: sometimes one,
sometimes the other. He is often liked, he says, because of his
masculine character.
He is fully developed and healthy, well over middle height,
inclined to be plump, with full face and small moustache. He
smokes many cigarettes and cannot get on without them. Though his
manners are very slightly if at all feminine, he acknowledges
many feminine ways. He is fond of jewelry, until lately always
wore a bangle, and likes women's rings; he is very particular
about fine ties, and uses very delicate women's handkerchiefs. He
has always had a taste for music, and sings. He has a special
predilection for green; it is the predominant color in the
decoration of his room, and everything green appeals to him. He
finds that the love of green (and also of violet and purple) is
very widespread among his inverted friends.
HISTORY XIII.--Artist, aged 34. "The earliest sex impression that
I am conscious of," he writes, "is at the age of 9 or 10 falling
in love with a handsome boy who must have been about two years my
senior. I do not recollect ever having spoken to him, but my
desire, so far as I can recall, was that he should seize hold of
and handle me. I have a distinct impression yet of how
pleasurable even physical pain or cruelty would have been at his
hands. (I have noticed that in young children it is often
difficult to differentiate the sexual emotions from what in the
grown up would be definite cruelty.)
"It must have been at about this time that I discovered--entirely
by myself--the act of masturbation. The process grew up quite
naturally, though I cannot but think that the cooped-up life in a
London street and a London school, with want of physical
exercise, as well as want of landscape, color, and beautiful
form, had much to do with it. The tone of the school I was at was
singularly clean, but I question whether the vaunted cleanliness
of tone of day-schools can compensate for the open life and large
discipline of an English public school.
"How far the rather frequent masturbation between the ages of 10
and 13 may have had to do with weakly health I do not know, but
when I was 12 I was taken by my mother to a famous doctor. He
made no inquiries of a sexual nature, but he advised that I
should be sent away from London. He had a sentimental horror of
violent games, etc., for boys, and put aside various suggested
public schools. Finally I was sent to a private school at the
seaside.
"The private school was clean and wholesome. The plunge into the
sexual cocytus of the great public school that followed was
effectually sudden. In my day ---- was a perfect stew of
uncleanness. There was plenty of incontinence, not much cruelty,
no end of dirty conversation, and a great deal of genuine
affection, even to heroism, shown among the boys in their
relations to one another. All these things were treated by
masters and boys alike as more or less unholy, with the result
that they were either sought after or flung aside, according to
the sexual or emotional instinct of each. No attempt was made at
discrimination. A kiss was as unclean as the act of _fellatio_,
and no one had any gauge or principle whatever on which to guide
the cravings of boyhood.
"My first initiation into the mysteries of sex was at the hands
of the dormitory servant, who showed me his penis when he woke me
in the mornings, and masturbated me when he gave me my hot bath
on a Saturday night. This old reprobate of 45 committed the act
of _fellatio_ with most of the boys in turn as he went the
dormitory rounds. For the older lads I cannot speak, but over us
younger ones of 14 and 15 he exercised a sort of unholy terror
and fascination. He was very popular; we came to him like doves
to a snake. When I revisited my old school many years later he
was occupying a very responsible position in the college chapel,
and I noticed that he wore that expression of sly reverence which
I think I can now instantly detect when I see it in a man.
"For the rest the dormitory was boisterous and lewd, and there
was a good deal of bullying, which probably did little harm. My
principal recollection now is of the filthy mystery of foul talk,
that I neither cared for nor understood. What I really needed,
like all the other boys, was a little timely help over the
sexual problems, but this we none of us got, and each had to work
out his own principle of conduct for himself. It was a long,
difficult, and wasteful process, and I cannot but believe that
many of us failed in the endeavor. We had come unprepared with
any advice. The principle upon which we were apparently trained
was the repression of every instinct. My mother was ignorant from
innocence, my father from indifference, and so between them I was
sent out helpless. A mother incurs great responsibility in
sending her child away unprepared. A parent should not seek to
shift his responsibility upon the schoolmaster. Love alone should
be the fount from which revelations should flow; the master, from
the very nature of his position, cannot reveal.
"An imminent breakdown in health--due, it would now appear, to
quite obvious causes--relieved me from the purgatory of the
college dormitory, and I was removed to one of the private
houses. These establishments were considered more select and less
'rough.' The social atmosphere was, however, perhaps more
unwholesome, because more effeminate, and was full of noble young
sucklings. The nominal head of the house under normal conditions
might have been a real leader; as it was, the real head of the
house was a gilded young pariah, fairly low down in the school
and full of hypocrisy and unnatural lusts. The boy who occupied
the cubicle next to mine was also a bad case of sexual
misdirection, though he had not the social distinction to make
him quite so refined a terror. I had every opportunity of
watching him until, two years later, he was fortunately asked to
leave. He talked bawd from morning till night, got drunk on one
or two occasions, masturbated constantly without concealment, had
several of the younger boys _inter femora_, though without
evincing any care or affection for them, and gave one the
impression of having been born for a brothel. His one redeeming
quality was an element of good nature: a characteristic one often
finds among such as are selfish and irresponsible. I have since
been told that he has gone completely to the dogs. Whether this
young cub's sexual instincts could have been turned or guided I
do not know; but in a rougher and simpler life than that of a
public school, in a more open and less hypocritical atmosphere,
he might, perhaps, have been licked into better shape. Hypocrisy
is a vice, however, that schoolboys themselves are fortunately
free from. It comes later. The tone among the boys was frankly
and violently unclean, though unclean not from instinct, but from
want of direction and from repression.
"I have not a single happy recollection of this period of my
school life. Yet out of this morass of misbegotten virtues I
plucked my first blossom of genuine affection. I call it a
blossom because it never ripened even to flower. I had been given
the extreme of filth to feed upon at the outset, and now I found
for myself the extreme of chastity. It will be a matter of
lifelong regret to me that the love which was the lodestar of my
school years was never fulfilled or set upon a sound basis of
comradeship.
"When I was about 16½ years old there came into the house a boy
about two years younger than myself, and who became the absorbing
thought of my school days. I do not remember a moment, from the
time I first saw him to the time I left school, that I was not in
love with him, and the affection was reciprocated, if somewhat
reservedly. He was always a little ahead of me in books and
scholarship, but as our affection ripened we spent most of our
spare time together, and he received my advances much as a girl
who is being wooed, a little mockingly, perhaps, but with real
pleasure. He allowed me to fondle and caress him, but our
intimacy never went further than a kiss, and about that even was
the slur of shame; there was always a barrier between us, and we
never so much as whispered to one another concerning those things
of which all the school obscenely talked. Any connection between
our own emotions and the sexual morals of the school never
occurred to us. In fact, we lived a dream-life of chastity that
could not relate itself to any human conditions. This was
suddenly broken in upon. My friend was very beautiful and an
object of attraction to others. That some of the elder boys had
made offers of sexual intercourse to him I knew, but to him, as
to me, that was unspeakable wickedness. One day I heard that four
or five of these suitors of his had mishandled him; they had, I
believe, taken off his trousers and attempted to masturbate him.
The offense was probably horse play of an animal nature; to me it
seemed an unpardonable offense. The matter had been reported to
the master by a servant, but confirmatory evidence was needed
before punishment could follow. I was torn asunder by passions I
could not then analyze and in the end committed the greatest of
schoolboy crimes,--I sneaked. The action under the circumstances
was courageous, but I was indifferent so long as the boy I loved
judged me rightly. The result was that at the close of the term
four or five of the senior boys were 'asked to leave.' The
remaining brief period of my school life, which had previously
been a living hell, became really happy. That this should have
been brought about to the harm of four or five boys whose sin,
after all, was but a misdirected impulse for which the system was
responsible, seems to me now all very wrong. Of the boys sent
away, however, certainly three have made honorable careers. For
my friend and I, we became more afraid of each other than before;
as our affections increased, so our fear of them increased also.
The friendship was too ethereal to live; but even yet we still
have a deep respect for one another.
"When at the age of 19 I left school I was allowed to knock about
for a year before entering college. During this time I picked up
a sexual experience that may or may not have been a valuable one,
I certainly look back upon it now, with regret, if not with
horror. My father had discovered, some months before this date,
that I was in the habit of masturbating, and he gave me what he
conceived to be the right counsel under the circumstances: 'If
you do this,' he said, 'you will never be able to use your penis
with a woman. Therefore your best plan will be to go with a
prostitute. Should you do this, however, you will probably pick
up a beastly disease. Therefore the safest way would be to do it
abroad if you get the chance, for there the houses are licensed.'
Having delivered himself of this advice he troubled himself no
further in the matter, but left me to work out my own destiny.
The great physician, to whom I was taken about this time, also
gave me his advice on this point. 'Masturbation,' he said, 'is
death. A number of young men come to me with the same story. I
tell them they are killing themselves, and you will kill
yourself, too.' The doctor's hope was apparently to frighten his
young patients into what he conceived to be natural conditions of
life, and one went away from him with the impression that every
sexual manifestation in one's self was a physical infirmity, due
to one's own moral weakness. It took me some time before I could
make up my mind to follow my father's advice, but after a period
of real moral agony I deliberately and entirely in cold blood
acted upon it. I sought out a scarlet woman in the streets of
---- and went home with her. From something she said to me I know
that I gave her pleasure, and she asked me to come to her again.
This I did twice, but without any real pleasure. The whole thing
was too sordid and soulless, and the man who decides to take an
evil medicine regularly has first to make up his mind that he
really needs it.
"At about the same time I chanced to be, for a few months, in a
German university town, and I determined, as I had the
opportunity, to carry the parental advice to the logical
conclusion. I tried a licensed house. The place was clean and
decent, and the conditions, I take it, such as one would normally
find in any properly regulated continental city; but to me the
whole thing appeared unspeakably horrible. It was a purely
commercial transaction, and it had not even the redeeming element
of risk to one's self, or of offense against a social or
disciplinary code. I came away feeling that I had touched bottom
in my sexual experiences, and I understood what it was that Faust
saw when the red mouse sprang from the mouth of the witch in the
Walpurgis dance.
"These were the only occasions upon which I have had sexual
intercourse with women. Looking back to them now, they appear to
me to have been almost inevitable; but if I had my life over
again I would shun them as I would a lethal draught. I believe I
came out of the fire unscathed; probably, indeed, it did me good,
in the sense that it made it possible for me to look deeper into
life; though to what extent seeing the torments of the damned
makes us do this, perhaps only a Dante could tell. To gain
knowledge at the expense of the shame and misery of others I hold
to be fundamentally wrong and immoral. What is to me, however,
the chief and bitterest thought is that I flung away the first
spring of manhood where I got no love in return. His virginity
is, or should be, as glorious and sacred a possession to a youth
as to a maiden; to be guarded jealously; to be given only at the
call of love, to one who loves him--be it comrade, mistress, or
wife--and whom he can love in return.
"The full university life into which I now entered at the age of
20 brought with it a flood of new ideas, feelings and sensations.
The friendships I made there will always remain the central ones
in my life. Up to my last term at college at the age of 24 I
still wore my chain-mail of artificial chastity; but then a
change gradually set in, and I began to understand the
relationship of the physical phenomena of sex to its intellectual
and imaginative manifestations. (I was not destined to fully
realize this for some years and then exclusively through and out
of my own personal experience.) It was the study of Walt
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ that first brought me light upon this
question. Hitherto I had kept the two things locked up, as it
were, in two separate air-tight compartments,--my friendships in
one, my sex instincts in another,--to be kept under and repressed
by the public-school code as I conceived it.
"It is needless to say that I was continually troubled by the
customary sex phenomena: erotic dreams, loss of semen,
troublesome erections at night, etc. These I repressed as best I
could, by habitual masturbation and by the regular diet and
exercise which academic life made possible. At one time, for the
period of a year I should say, I tried to overcome the desire for
masturbation by gradual stages, on the principle of the
drunkard's cure by which he took every day less tipple by the
insertion of one pebble more in his bottle. I marked on my
calendar the erotic dreams and the nights on which I masturbated,
and sought gradually to extend the intervening periods. Six
weeks, however, was the longest time for which I was able to
abstain."
A few years later the writer of this communication formed an
intimate relationship (in which he did not make the first
advances) with a youth, some years younger than himself and of
lower social class, whose development he was able to assist. "But
for my part," he remarks, "I owe him as much as I gave him, for
his love lighted up the gold of affection that was in me and
consumed the dross. It was from him that I first learned that
there was no such thing as a hard-and-fast line between the
physical and the spiritual in friendship." This relationship
lasted for some years, when the young man married; its effects
are described as very beneficial to both parties; all the sexual
troubles vanished, together with the desire to masturbate.
"Everything in life began to sing with joy, and what little of
real creative work I may have done I attribute largely to the
power of work that was born in me during those years."
HISTORY XIV.--Scotchman, aged 38. His paternal ancestors were
normal, so far as he knows. His mother belonged to a very
eccentric old Celtic family. Soon after 5 he became so enamored
of a young shepherd that the boy had to be sent away. He
practised masturbation many years before the age of puberty, and
attaches importance to this as a factor in the evolution of his
homosexual life.
He has had erotic dreams rarely about men, about women more
frequently. While indifferent to women, he has no repulsion
toward them. He has had connection with women two or three times,
but without experiencing the same passionate emotions as with
men.
He would like a son, but he has never been able to get up the
necessary amount of passion to lead to marriage.
He has always had a sentimental and Platonic affection for men.
Of late years he has formed two friendships with adults of an
affectionate and also erotic character. He cares little for
anything beyond mutual masturbation and kissing; what he desires
is the love of the male.
In appearance there is nothing abnormal about him except an air
of youth. He is vigorous both in body and mind, and has enormous
power of resisting fatigue. He is an excellent man of business.
Is a patient student. He sees no harm in his homosexual passions.
He is averse to promiscuity. His ideal is a permanent union which
includes sexual relations.
HISTORY XV.--T.S., artist, aged 32. "I was born in England. My
father was a Jew, the first to marry out of his family and to
marry a Christian. My great-grandparents were cousins; he was a
German and she was a Dane. My grandparents were also cousins; he
was a Swede and she was a Dane.
"My maternal grandfather was an English Protestant, and my
maternal grandmother was Irish, fanatically Roman Catholic, and a
very eccentric woman.
"In my father's family there have been many members of note. In
my mother's family there were many renowned lawyers.
"My father had an elder brother who was homosexual. He was
already, at 31 years of age, a prominent author, when he died of
consumption. I have also a second cousin on my father's side who
is a very good tenor; he is also homosexual. In my mother's
family I know of nothing abnormal.
"In neither family is there or has there been any insanity, but
rather an overwealth of brain.
"My parents were an ideally happy couple. They were engaged after
knowing each other six days, and after being separated three
months they married. They were married thirty-five years without
a quarrel. I have a brother three years older, born a year after
their marriage, and a sister seven years younger.
"My brother takes after his father in appearance. He is a great
lover of women and much spoiled by them. He is quite normal and
abstemious.
"My sister is a very womanly woman. As a girl she disapproved
very much of girl friendships and always confided in her mother.
At 13 years of age she met the man she is now married to. They
waited ten years before marrying and are now an ideally happy
couple. My sister is perfectly normal and very abstemious.
"I lived my first ten years in England, eighteen years in Sweden,
two years in Denmark, two years in Bavaria, Austria, and Italy,
and am now living in Berlin. I consider myself English. I am
mentally a man, but all my physical feelings and desires are
those of a woman.
"I am middle height and very slight. Weigh 106 English pounds,
without clothes. My hands and feet are small and well-shaped.
Head of normal size. Features small. Eyes green. Have worn
glasses since I was 7 years old. Complexion fair. Appearance not
Jewish. The skin of my body is very white, without blemish. Very
little hair on my face. Hair on head and abdomen luxuriant. No
hair whatever on stomach and chest. Color of hair auburn
everywhere except below navel, that black. (My father's,
mother's, and brother's hair was brown. My sister has auburn
hair, and so had the aforementioned uncle.) My breasts are
slightly round; my hips are normal. I do not gesticulate much.
From my material self it would be difficult to draw the
conclusion that I was homosexual. My sexual organs are normal.
"My disposition is apparently bright, but in reality melancholy.
Have very little love for human nature, but have a partiality for
the British and Jewish races. Hate business, politics, sports,
and society. Love music, art, literature, and nature. Deep
interest in mysticism. Am clairvoyant. Have been used many times
as a medium. Lead two separate lives, an outer and inner psychic
life. Am a fatalist and a theosophist. Profound belief in
reincarnation, always have had, because when I was a little child
I could 'remember' so much. Have an excellent memory, dating back
to my third year. Have always been too self-analytical. Have from
my earliest childhood felt myself an alien. Am very sensitive,
physically and psychically. Have no wish to wear woman's clothing
or do woman's work. As to clothes for myself, I prefer black and
not much jewelry.
"I could only love a perfectly manly man from 21 to 40 years of
age. He must be physically beautiful and well made. Size of
sexual organs plays no part. The muscles must be developed and
the hands must be especially well shaped. Hands are my fetish. (I
could never love anyone with ugly hands.) He must have no odor
issuing from his body (though I do not dislike faint perfume when
clothed), and, above all, never have a bad breath. He must be
intelligent, love music, art, literature, and nature. He must be
refined and cultured and have been about the world. He must have
simplicity in behavior, dress, and manner, and, above all, be
clean-bodied as clean-minded. Cynicism I cannot stand. (Here I
may state I once owned a St. Bernard dog which reminded me much
of my ideal. He was always sedate, always loving, and faithful;
generally quiet. He only got excited when out in the elements.) I
have not been able to get on with people who have no sense of
humor. From my birth I was physically weak. First I suffered from
eczema. Being born with a double squint, I was operated on at 2½
and again at 3½ years of age, with excellent result. From 4 to 12
years of age I had convulsions (often), and all the illnesses of
childhood. At the age of 12½ years I took scarlet fever, followed
by a weak heart, which grew stronger after a year, and Bright's
disease, which lasted fifteen years with hardly a break. This
illness had its wonted effect of producing melancholia and
upsetting the whole nervous system. Bright's disease stopped
suddenly but was followed by a succession of illnesses. Then I
had neuritis very badly. I then removed to Bavaria, and to regain
nervous strength I was treated by Freud's psychoanalytical
method, with great success. I had a very bad relapse, as my
brother, who had just heard I was homosexual, came to visit me
and threatened to have me put under guardians, if my father
should die. It took me weeks to recover from the shock. We broke
off all intercourse and though my brother has been several times
in the same town where I have been, we remain strangers. At this
time my father died suddenly. Last spring four suicides of
friends in so many weeks had a very bad effect on my nerves. I am
now in Berlin in better spirits, but the cramp continues badly at
times.
"To this I must add that since my fourteenth year, independent of
any illness, I have suffered mentally and physically from
menstrual pains recurring every twenty-eight days and lasting
from six to eight days. That these were the equivalent pains to a
woman's menstruation periods I could get no doctor to admit till
I was treated for a length of time by a German nerve specialist.
"The physical pains begin abruptly. Sudden congestions of blood
in the brain and in the abdomen. Sudden perspirations, heat and
cold. Great nervous pains in the small of the back, also in the
nerve-centers of abdomen and stomach. Sharp, shooting pains in
the breasts and especially the nipples. Sudden toothache which
stops as suddenly. The skin becomes darker, sometimes mottled. I
have the whole time a taste of blood in my mouth and often
everything I eat tastes of blood. I have great difficulty at that
time in eating meat. Physical longings for erotic adventure,
counterbalanced by mental nausea at the bare idea.
"The mental symptoms are: sudden feeling of deep depression,
suicidal tendencies, alternating with sudden inexplicable
lightheartedness. Capriciousness and great dissatisfaction with
myself and life generally. Horror at my own incompleteness of sex
and sudden fits of hatred toward women and a great longing to be
loved by men. This condition changes slowly back to the normal
one. It takes several days for me to lose my physical weakness
owing to it.
"Physically I was developed at 16 years of age. Mentally I was
developed at a very early age, but I kept my inner life quite
dark, always playing the innocent. Nobody at home believed me to
know anything about life. They were at times very surprised when
I fell out of the rôle I had planned for myself. Up till I was 17
years of age nothing to do with other people's morals was ever
discussed before me. I looked so pure, and do now, that people
are always careful in front of me. My father never discussed such
things with me. From my earliest childhood I loved men dearly,
though I was always at daggers drawn with my father and brother.
I worshipped my mother then, as I do now. My sister and I did not
at all get on as children, though we are the best of friends now.
She and her husband as well as my mother have been kindness
itself ever since they knew of my condition. Not till I was over
30 years did I meet a man I loved as well as my mother, and he is
heterosexual. I must have loved my father and brother at first,
but continual conflicts, incompatible temperaments and mutual
misunderstandings and want of sympathy made life at home
horrible. I must admit from my earliest childhood I had a certain
contempt for my father and brother because I found them so
materialistic. I had all my childhood rows with my brother. My
father took his part, my mother mine. After I had recovered from
my father's sudden death (my first words were after reading the
letter: 'Thank God it isn't mother!') I felt a great relief, but
it took a long time for me to grasp that I was really free.
"I have always liked women's society and, as a youth, I was very
fond of gossip, which I by no means am now. I have many women
friends, more than men friends. These women friends are all
heterosexual except one. I very often like elderly women; I
suppose I see mother in such women. A woman never could make me
blush, but a man I admired could easily.
"I was 23 years of age when a married woman of good family asked
me to come and spend the night with her. I went, and though she
was beautifully built, cleanly, and though her garments and
apartments were of the utmost good taste, I did not have any
erection. On the other hand, I felt myself to be most unclean and
bathed three times each of the following three days. Since then I
have never tried to have sexual intercourse with women.
"In Copenhagen I tried to excite my feelings with every class of
woman, in vain. I suppose it is that my nature is so like woman's
that there can be no reaction. With men I am often very shy and
nervous, tongue-tied, and my hands perspire. Never so with women.
"As a child I loved men and used to fall desperately in love with
some who came to the house. I would, when no one was there, kiss
their hats, or gloves, or even their sticks.
"I can remember, when I was about 6 years, how I fell in love
with a very good-looking 26-year-old German. He had very curly
hair and his hands were very beautiful. He was very fond of me
and I used to call him 'my Boy.' When visiting us he often used
to 'tuck me in' after the nurse had gone down. He always had
sweets or something for me. I can remember how I used to fling my
arms round his neck and cover his face with kisses. I would then
draw his head down on my pillow and he would tell me fairy-tales
and I would go off to sleep quite happy.
"At 7 years of age, while staying in the country, a very
good-looking groom, about 25 years of age, misbehaved himself
with me. I often used to visit him in the stables, as this man
had a strange attraction for me. One day he tickled me. While
doing so he produced my penis and also his own, which was in full
erection. He tried in every way to excite my feelings, in vain.
For him the occasion terminated in an ejaculation. He forbade me
to tell anyone, and I did not do so, but tried to find out all I
could on the subject, with little or no result. From that day I
hated the groom and I felt a sort of guilt, as if I had 'lost
something.' Not till I was 12 years did I understand.
"From my earliest childhood I had one ideal of a man. From that
ideal I have never swerved. At the age of 30 I found a friend
who, though quite heterosexual, has, without giving me any sexual
intercourse, given me the love I have always needed. He has been
for the last couple of years a second mother, father, sister,
brother, and lover. Through him I have regained my health, my
love of nature, and he has helped to deaden my hatred toward
human nature and my bitterness. A better friend I never wish to
find. It has made up for all the years of mental and physical
suffering. One strange thing is that the feeling is mutual. He
has had a tragic life, for his wife, whom he loved beyond
everything, died under very sad circumstances. He says I am the
best male friend he has ever had. While with him, much of the
lower nature in me was stamped out. I shall always look upon him
as the turning point in my life. I think he wrought some of his
finest influence through his music. He played Beethoven and
Wagner for me for a couple of hours every day for months, and
thus opened up a new world to me.... He is six years older than I
am.
"At 10 years of age we moved to Sweden, a country I hated from
first to last. About this time I began to notice that there was
something strange about myself. I felt myself an alien, and have
done so ever since. An event of importance in my life was, I feel
sure, when my father's sister tried to take away my mother's
character. It was done in jealousy and spite, and my aunt had to
beg my parents' pardon. Outwardly the affair was patched up; but
I feel sure my father never really forgave his sister. Jews never
forgive.
"This event awoke in me a great hatred toward women, and it was
many years before I could at all control it.
"At the age of 14 I was much with a good-looking, musical
American, a year older than myself. One day, while romping, very
much the same thing occurred as with the groom. I still had no
sexual feelings. We remained good friends. I often wished to kiss
him. After the first time he would not allow it. He was very much
liked among the officers and so-called high society men, and had
always much money. About ten years later I heard he used to
accept money after intimate intercourse with those society men.
"During my fifteenth year I had great longing for sexual
intercourse with men. At this time the first signs of hair were
to be seen on my abdomen.
"At the age of 16 a gardener, a married man with family,
initiated me into mutual self-abuse. He lived in the back house
of the apartment house we then inhabited. He was about 40 years
of age, an ugly but muscularly developed man. These practices
took place in the cellar, to which there were three entrances. I
never allowed him to kiss me and the sight of his children always
awoke in me a great feeling of nausea. That was the natural
reaction of a bad conscience. For the man himself I had the
utmost contempt. This man told me of several parks and _pissoirs_
where men met, and I went to these places now and again for
erotic adventure.
"I must here relate that at the age of 16 my mother warned me
against self-abuse. It had the opposite effect, made me curious,
so I began at once. I have continued ever since, at least once a
day. (I have never had an involuntary emission in my whole life.)
Between 17 and 22 it became necessary for me to do so several
times a day. Working at art, painting, and above all music and
beauty have a strong influence over me and set my erotic longings
in violent motion. I have never found this do me any harm.
Abstinence, on the other hand, has a very harmful effect on me,
upsetting the whole nervous and physical system. I often find
that there is a something very much wanting in self-abuse: the
commingling of two human bodies who are _mentally_ as well as
physically in sympathy gives an electrical satisfaction which
quiets the whole nervous system. That at least has been my
experience.
"The gardener left and moved to the country. I then sometimes
visited _pissoirs_ or, as they are often called, 'panoramas'
(because they are round and one sees much there). What I saw in
the parks during the long summer nights was quite a revelation.
During the summer, when the husbands had sent their families in
the country, many of them led a very indiscreet life. What I saw
the first summer killed all the respect I had for elderly people.
I had always connected marriage and gray hairs with virtue and
morals; then I learnt otherwise. I must say I became about this
time a _sensual pig_. I knew how dangerous these places were on
account of the police and blackmailers, but that gave the hunt a
double zest. At this time I led a double life and was always
watching and analyzing myself. I had to do with heaps of men of
all classes. I was often offered money, but that I would on no
condition accept. To pay or to be paid kills every sort of erotic
feeling in me and always has done so. I once wished to experiment
with myself. I was offered a small sum of money by a former
schoolmaster. I accepted this just to see how it would affect me.
The next moment I threw the money as far away as possible. Then I
saw I had none of the prostitute nature in me. I was simply
overwhelmed with sensuality. I considered I was a criminal and
wished to see in how many ways my nature had the criminal
instinct. I wanted to see if I could become a thief. I stole a
silver button in a shop where antiquities were sold, but I went
to the shop the same day again and returned the button, without
the people knowing. I found I could not become a thief. Then the
question came. Why had I felt a criminal since my seventh year?
Was it my fault? If not, whose fault was it? Not till I studied
Freud's psychoanalytical system did I get a clear insight into my
own character.
"When I was 20 years of age I met a gentleman one night in a
heavy snow-storm. We walked and talked and understood each other.
He belonged to one of Sweden's first aristocratic families. He
was extremely refined. He asked me to his rooms. We undressed and
lay down. He had a very beautiful head and a still more beautiful
body. I think that all my erotic feelings were numbed by looking
at his beautiful body. To me anything sensual would have been
sacrilege, I thought, and I can remember the feeling of awe which
came over me. He was them 20 years of age, but his hair was quite
white. First he did not understand, and then he was very gentle
to me. I kept perfectly chaste for three whole months after the
sight of his body. We saw each other often. Eight years later we
met for the last time. He suffered much from melancholia. At that
time I prevented him from committing suicide. This winter,
however, he shot himself.
"At the age of 22 my sister introduced me to a charming,
intelligent and refined, half-English, half-Swedish painter. We
'recognized' each other at once, though we had never seen each
other before, and even knew each other's characters to the
smallest traits. My parents liked him better than any friend I
had ever had. My sister and he were from the first like sister
and brother. The first evening in my home he and I kissed each
other. The women were mad about him. Later I found many men were
too. I was three weeks his senior. He had his own rooms. I have
never felt any such wonderful harmony as when our naked bodies
mingled. It was like floating in ether. With him it was the only
time I had been active in _fellatio_. We were much together,
though not much physically, for he had many love affairs with
women. What I loved was the way he would cut off all advances of
men, I was his 'little brother' and so he calls me to this day.
He is now married in America, and the father of a pretty little
daughter. We are the best of friends to this day.
"The two years in Copenhagen were some of the happiest I have
spent, though nearly the whole time I was in physical pain. In
Austria I found, among the Tyrolese peasants, that the
Englishmen, who come there in winter for sports and in the summer
for mountain climbing, have demoralized the young male peasants
with money. Homosexual intercourse is easy to get if you are
willing to pay the price,--larger in season, less out of season.
"In Italy it is merely a question of money or passion, but
everything in love there is quite transient.
"In Bavaria I found the love and peace 'which passeth all
understanding.' This love and friendship without anything of a
physically intimate nature brought me back from the 'deep black
gulf' to which I was swiftly floating. When I met my friend I was
nearly at the end of my tether. What his love and friendship has
done for me, together with Freud's psychoanalytical system,
nobody will ever know.
"Since being in Berlin, a town I like very much, a new life has
opened for me, a life where one lives as one likes if one does
not have to do with young boys. Here are homosexual baths,
pensions, restaurants, and hotels, where you can go with one of
your own sex at a certain fee per hour. Berlin is a revelation.
But since being here I find the physical erotic side of my nature
is little excited. I suppose it is the old story of 'forbidden
fruit.'
"My parents kept a very hospitable home. The last two years in
Sweden I was never at home. I hated society and knew much too
much about the private histories of those who came to my home.
They all belonged to the highest society. The highest society and
the lowest are very much alike. Of course my parents knew nothing
about these people. When I told my mother a great deal of private
history of people who came to our house, she was thunderstruck
and could at last understand my contempt for so-called good
society. I have visited in later years only in artistic and
theatrical circles; I consider that class of people more natural
than the other class and much more kind-hearted.
"My life has quite another side, the mystic side. But that would
be a much longer story than this. Suffice it to say, I am of a
highly sensitive nature, gifted with second sight." [A detailed
record of the subject's visions, premonitions of death of
acquaintances, etc., has been furnished by him.]
"I tried on four occasions to commit suicide, but I now see there
is nothing to be gained by doing so.
"Two years ago I told my parents about my sexual condition. It
was a frightful blow to them. My father had the circumstances
explained to him; he never understood the matter and never
discussed it with me. Had I told him earlier I feel quite certain
that, with his despotic nature, he would have put me in a
madhouse. My mother and sister have treated me very kindly
always. My brother has disowned me."
HISTORY XVI.--Irish, aged 36; knows of nothing unusual in his
ancestry. His tastes are masculine in every respect. He is
strong, healthy, and fond of exercises and sports. The sexual
instincts are abnormally developed; he confesses to an, enormous
appetite for almost everything,--food, drink, smoking, and all
the good things of life.
At about the age of 14 he practised masturbation with other boys
of the same age, and also had much pleasure in being in bed with
an uncle with whom the same thing was practised. Later on he
practised masturbation with every boy or man with whom he was on
terms of intimacy; to have been in bed with anyone without
anything of the sort taking place would have made sleep
impossible, and rendered him utterly wretched. His erotic dreams
at first were concerned with women, but more recently they are
usually of young men, and very rarely of women. He is mostly
indifferent to women, as also they have always been to him.
Although good-looking, strong, and masculine, he has never known
a woman to be in love with him. When about the age of 18 he
imagined he was in love with a girl; and he had often, between
the ages of 20 to 30, cohabited with prostitutes. He remembers on
one occasion, many years ago, having connection with a woman
seven or eight times in one night, and then having to masturbate
at noon the next day. He is unmarried, and thinks it is unlikely
that he ever will marry, but he adds that if a healthy, handsome,
and intelligent woman fell in love with him he might change his
mind, as it would be lonely to be old and alone, and he would
like to have children.
He is never attracted to men older than himself, and prefers
youths between the ages of 18 and 25. They may be of any class,
but he does not like common people, and is not attached to
uniforms or liveries. The requisite attractions are an
intelligent eye, a voluptuous mouth, and "intelligent teeth." "If
Alcibiades himself tried to woo me," he says, "and had bad teeth,
his labor would be in vain." He has sometimes been the active
participant in _pedicatio_, and has tried the passive rôle out of
curiosity, but prefers _fellatio_.
He does not consider that he is doing anything wrong, and regards
his acts as quite natural. His only regret is the absorbing
nature of his passions, which obtrude themselves in season and
out of season, seldom or never leaving him quiet, and sometimes
making his life a hell. Yet he doubts whether he would change
himself, even if he had the power.
HISTORY XVII.--Age 25; is employed in an ordinary workshop, and
lives in the back alley of a large town in which he was born and
bred. Fair, slight, and refined in appearance. The sexual organs
are normal and well developed, and the sexual passions strong.
His mother is a big masculine woman, and he is much attached to
her. Father is slight and weakly. He has seven brothers and one
sister. Homosexual desires began at an early age, though he does
not seem to have come under any perverse influences. He is not
inclined to masturbation. Erotic dreams are always of males. He
declares he never cared for any woman except his mother, and that
he could not endure to sleep with a woman.
He says he generally falls in love with a man at first sight--as
a rule, some one older than himself and of higher class--and
longs to sleep and be with him. In one case he fell in love with
a man twice his own age, and would not rest until he had won his
affection. He does not much care what form the sexual relation
takes. He is sensitive and feminine by nature, gentle, and
affectionate. He is neat and orderly in his habits, and fond of
housework; helps his mother in washing, etc. He appears to think
that male attachments are perfectly natural.
HISTORY XVIII.--Englishman, born in Paris; aged 26; an actor. He
belongs to an old English family; his father, so far as he is
aware, had no homosexual inclinations, nor had any of his
ancestors on the paternal side; but he believes that his
mother's family, and especially a maternal uncle who had a strong
feeling for beauty of form, were more akin to him in this
respect.
His earliest recollections show an attraction for males. At
children's parties he incurred his father's anger by kissing
other small boys, and his feelings grew in intensity with years.
He has never practised self-abuse, and seldom had erotic dreams;
when they do occur they are about males.
His physical feeling for women is one of absolute indifference.
He admires beautiful women in the same way as one admires
beautiful scenery. At the same time he likes to talk with clever
women, and has formed many friendships with frank, pure, and
cultivated English girls, for whom he has the utmost admiration
and respect. Marriage is impossible, because physical pleasure
with women is impossible; he has tried, but cannot obtain, the
slightest sexual feeling or excitement.
He especially admires youths (though they must not be immature)
from 16 or 17 to about 25. The type which physically appeals to
him most, and to which he appeals, is fair, smooth-skinned,
gentle, rather girlish and effeminate, with the effeminacy of the
_ingénue_, not the _cocotte_. His favorite to attract him must be
submissive and womanly; he likes to be the man and the master. On
this point he adds: "The great passion of my life is an
exception, and stands on an utterly different level. It realizes
an ideal of marriage in which neither is master, but both share a
joint empire, and in which tyranny would be equally painful to
both. But this friendship and love is for an equal, a year
younger than myself, and does not preclude other and less
creditable _liaisons, physical_ constancy being impossible to men
of our caliber."
_Pedicatio_ is the satisfaction he prefers, provided he takes the
active, never the passive, rôle. He is handsome, with broad
shoulders, good figure, and somewhat classic type of face, with
fine blue eyes. He likes boating and skating, though not cricket
or football, and is usually ready for fun, but has, at the same
time, a taste for reading.
He has no moral feelings on these matters; he regards them as
outside ethics, mere matters of temperament and social feeling.
If England were underpopulated he thinks he might possibly feel
some slight pangs of remorse; but, as things are, he feels that
in prostituting males rather than females he is doing a
meritorious action.
HISTORY XIX.--T.N. His history is given in his own words.
"From the time of my earliest imaginings I have always been
attached by strength in men and often thought about being carried
off by big warriors and living with them in caves and elsewhere.
When about 7 a young man used to show me his penis and handle
mine occasionally. At private boarding school masturbation was
fairly frequent and I suppose I was initiated about 12 or 13.
After leaving I occasionally indulged, but nothing happened until
I was about 20, except that I was often attracted by strong,
well-built young men of good character; a man who was not honest
and good-hearted had no attraction. At 20 I was much attached to
a young man of my own age. He was engaged. This did not prevent
him on one occasion endeavoring playfully and with his brother to
obtain access to my person. I successfully resisted, although if
_he_ only had been present I should not have done so, but
welcomed the attempt, and I have often regretted I did not let
him know this. But I had a dim idea that my penis was somewhat
undeveloped and this made me shy. Circumstances separated us.
About two years later I was crossing the Channel when I engaged
in conversation with a man about eight years older, who was one
of our travelling party. I think the attraction was a case of
love at sight, certainly on my side. A few nights later he had so
arranged that we shared a bedroom, and he very soon came over to
me and tenderly handled my person. I reciprocated and I look back
all these years to that night with pleasure and no feeling of
shame. On one occasion, about this time, I happened to be
sleeping with another young fellow (an office mate) on a holiday,
when I awoke and found him handling my penis caressingly. I
gently removed his hand and turned over. I thought none the less
of him, but my body seemed to belong only to myself and the
friend I loved. He was not an urning, I am sure, but we Were
often together and I much entered into his interests and felt
infinite satisfaction with life, made good progress and many
friends. Our physical intimacy was repeated, he taking the active
part in intercrural contact. Then he married very happily. Our
friendship remains, but circumstances prevent our often meeting,
and there is no longer desire on either part.
"For some years I was rather lonely in spite of friends. I was
somewhat attracted to another man, but his superior social
position was a defect to me. Then when about 28 I came in contact
with a young man of 24, of the artisan class, but superior in
ideals and intelligence to most men. I loved him at first glance
and to this day. At first it was just friendship, but soon his
form, voice, and thoughts entered into my very soul by day and
night. I longed always to be near him, to see him progress and
help him if I could. I would joyfully have given up home,
friends, and income, and followed him to the end of the world,
preferably an island where we two might at least be the only
white men. He seemed to embody all I longed for in the way of
knowledge of nature, of strength, of practical ability, and the
desire to imitate him in these things widened and strengthened my
character. The first time I slept with him I could only summon
courage to put my arm over his chest, but I could not sleep for
unsatisfied desire, and the unrelieved erection caused a dull
pain on the morrow. I had always disliked conversation that might
be regarded as bordering on the obscene, and consequently was
very ignorant on most matters; it pained me even to hear him
laugh at such remarks. I think if he had been intimate with me I
should have not conversed much on such topics, but now I felt
pleasure in such things with him as they expressed intimacy. I
dreamed about him and was never really happy in his absence; the
greatest joy would have been to have slept in his arms; the
hairiness of his legs and arms were also most fascinating.
Perhaps a year later, we were again at night together, and this
time I by degrees felt his private organs, but he was cold and I
felt a little unsatisfied. I wanted to be hugged. This happened
once more, and then on a later occasion,--not that it afforded me
much gratification, but because I wanted to stimulate him to
ardor,--I attempted masturbation. This aroused his disgust and I
was consequently dismayed. He told me I ought to marry and,
although I knew his love was all I wanted, I did not feel but
what I could make a woman happy. The constant unrelieved
erections which took place when I saw my friend adopt a graceful
attitude caused pain at the bottom of my back, and I consulted
two specialists, who also advised marriage. I did not tell them I
was an 'invert,' for I hardly knew it was a recognized thing, but
I did tell them something of what had taken place, and they made
next to no comment, but implied it was frequent. My friend now
felt repulsion toward me, but did not express himself, and as
other circumstances then caused a barrier between us to a certain
extent, I did not realize the true reason of his coldness. But I
felt utterly miserable. When I met a noble woman whom I had long
known I asked her to be my wife and she consented. Although I
told her very soon, and long before our marriage, of my
limitations as a husband and of my continued longing for my
friend, I feel now I did a great wrong, and I cannot understand
why I was not more conscious of this at the time; that I was to a
certain extent deceiving her relations was inevitable. I had
expected to devote my life in making her happy, but I soon found
that the true reason of my friend's apparent unfaithfulness was
my own action, combined with a feeling on his part that it was as
well that our affection should cease even at the cost of
misunderstanding. Since then, three years ago, I have not had a
happy day or night, and am therefore quite unable to promote
happiness in others. Without my friend, I can find no
satisfaction with wife, child, or home. Life has become almost
unbearable. Often I have seriously thought of committing suicide,
only to postpone it to a time which would be less cruelly
inopportune to others. I see my friend (now married) almost
daily, and suffer tortures at seeing others nearer to him than
myself. No explanation seems possible, as the whole idea of
inversion is so repugnant to him, and being an honorable man he
would feel marital ties preclude _any_ warmth of affection. But
all the longing of my life seems to be culminating in a driving
force which will carry me to the male prostitute or to death. I
can concentrate my mind on nothing else, and consequently have
become inefficient in work and have no heart for play. I know if
my longings could be occasionally satisfied I should immediately
recover, but my fear is that if I killed myself those who knew me
in happier days would only be confirmed in the impression of my
degeneracy and would feel my instincts had caused it, whereas it
is the denial and starvation of them which would have brought
about the result. I know now by experience of self and others
that my disposition is congenital and that I have been rendered
unhappy myself and a cause of unhappiness to others by the too
late knowledge of myself. The example of my former friend who
married misled me to think I too _could_ marry and make a happy
home; so that when the man I loved advised me I resolved to do
so, as I would have done almost anything else _he_ suggested. If
I could have withdrawn from the engagement without embarrassment
to the devoted woman who became my wife I would have done so, if
she gave me the opportunity. Nothing in my married state has
brought me pleasure and I often wish my wife would cease to love
me so that we might separate. But she would be heart-broken at
the suggestion and I feel driven to attempt to relieve my
feelings even in a way that has previously seemed repulsive to
me,--I mean by use of money.
"About my feelings toward my child there is not much to say, as
they are not very strong. I believe I carry him and help bathe
and attend to him as much as most fathers, and when he is a few
years older I hope I may find him very companionable. But he has
brought me no real joy, though I see other men look at him almost
with affection. But he has brought added happiness to his
mother."
The next case is interesting as showing the mental and emotional
development in a very radical case of sexual inversion.
HISTORY XX.--Englishman, of independent means, aged 49. His
father and his father's family were robust, healthy, and
prolific. On his mother's side, phthisis, insanity, and
eccentricity are traceable. He belongs to a large family, some of
whom died in early childhood and at birth, while others are
normal. He himself was a weakly and highly nervous child, subject
to night-terrors and somnambulism, excessive shyness and
religious disquietude.
Sexual consciousness awoke before the age of 8, when his
attention was directed to his own penis. His nurse, while out
walking with him one day, told him that when little boys grow'
up their penes fall off. The nursery-maid sniggered, and he felt
that there must be something peculiar about the penis. He
suffered from; irritability of the prepuce, and the nurse
powdered it before he went to sleep. There was no transition from
this to self-abuse.
About the same time he became subject to curious half-waking
dreams. In these he imagined himself the servant of several adult
naked sailors; he crouched between their thighs and called
himself their dirty pig, and by their orders he performed
services for their genitals and buttocks, which he contemplated
and handled with relish. At about the same period, when these
visions began to come to him, he casually heard that a man used
to come and expose his person before the window of a room where
the maids sat; this troubled him vaguely. Between the age of 8
and 11 he twice took the penis of a cousin into his mouth, after
they had slept together; the feeling of the penis pleased him.
When sleeping with another cousin, they used to lie with hands
outstretched to cover each other's penis or nates. He preferred
the nates, but his cousin the penis. Neither of these cousins was
homosexual, and there was no attempt at mutual masturbation. He
was in the habit of playing with five male cousins. One of these
boys was unpopular with the others, and they invented a method of
punishing him for supposed offenses. They sat around the room on
chairs, each with his penis exposed, and the boy to be punished
went around the room on his knees and took each penis into his
mouth in turn. This was supposed to humiliate him. It did not
lead to masturbation. On one occasion the child accidentally
observed a boy who sat next to him in school playing with his
penis and caressing it. This gave him a powerful, uneasy
sensation. With regard to all these points the subject observes
that none of the boys with whom he was connected at this period,
and who were exposed to precisely the same influences, became
homosexual.
He was himself, from the first, indifferent to the opposite sex.
In early childhood, and up to the age of 13, he had frequent
opportunities of closely inspecting the sexual organs of girls,
his playfellows. These roused no sexual excitement. On the
contrary, the smell of the female parts affected him
disagreeably. When he once saw a schoolfellow copulating with a
little girl, it gave him a sense of mystical horror. Nor did the
sight of the male organs arouse any particular sensations. He is,
however, of opinion that, living with his sisters in childhood,
he felt more curious about his own sex as being more remote from
him. He showed no effeminacy in his preferences for games or
work.
He went to a public school. Here he was provoked by boy friends
to masturbate, but, though he often saw the act in process, it
only inspired him with a sense of indecency. In his fifteenth
year puberty commenced with nocturnal emissions, and, at the
same time, he began to masturbate, and continued to do so about
once a week, or once a fortnight, during a period of eight
months; always with a feeling that that was a poor satisfaction
and repulsive. His thoughts were not directed either to males or
females while masturbating. He spoke to his father about these
signs of puberty, and by his father's advice he entirely
abandoned onanism; he only resumed the practice, to some extent,
after the age of 30, when he was without male comradeship.
The nocturnal emissions, after he had abandoned self-abuse,
became very frequent and exhausting. They were medically treated
by tonics such as quinine and strychnine. He thinks this
treatment exaggerated his neurosis.
All this time, no kind of sexual feeling for girls made itself
felt. He could not understand what his schoolfellows found in
women, or the stories they told about wantonness and delight of
coitus.
His old dreams about the sailors had disappeared. But now he
enjoyed visions of beautiful young men and exquisite statues; he
often shed tears when he thought of them. These dreams persisted
for years. But another kind gradually usurped their place to some
extent. These second visions took the form of the large, erect
organs of naked young grooms or peasants. These gross visions
offended his taste and hurt him, though, at the same time, they
evoked a strong, active desire for possession; he took a strange,
poetic pleasure in the ideal form. But the seminal losses which
accompanied both kinds of dreams were a perpetual source of
misery to him.
There is no doubt that at this time--that is, between the
fifteenth and seventeenth years--a homosexual diathesis had
become established. He never frequented loose women, though he
sometimes thought that would be the best way of combating his
growing inclination for males. And he thinks that he might have
brought himself to indulge freely in purely sexual pleasure with
women if he made their first acquaintance in a male costume, as
_débardeuses, Cherubino_, court-pages, young halberdiers, as it
is only when so clothed that women on the stage or in the
ball-room have excited him.
His ideal of morality and fear of venereal infection, more than
physical incapacity, kept him what is called chaste. He never
dreamed of women, never sought their society, never felt the
slightest sexual excitement in their presence, never idealized
them. Esthetically, he thought them far less beautiful than men.
Statues and pictures of naked women had no attraction for him,
while all objects of art which represented handsome males deeply
stirred him.
It was in his eighteenth year that an event occurred which he
regards as decisive in his development. He read Plato. A new
world opened, and he felt that his own nature had been revealed.
Next year he formed a passionate, but pure, friendship with a boy
of 15. Personal contact with the boy caused erection, extreme
agitation, and aching pleasure, but not ejaculation. Through four
years he never saw the boy naked or touched him pruriently. Only
twice he kissed him. He says that these two kisses were the most
perfect joys he ever felt.
His father now became seriously anxious both about his health and
his reputation. He warned him of the social and legal dangers
attending his temperament. But he did not encourage him to try
coitus with women. He himself thinks that his own sense of danger
might have made this method successful, or that, at all events,
the habit of intercourse with women might have lessened neurosis
and diverted his mind to some extent from homosexual thoughts.
A period of great pain and anxiety now opened for him. But his
neurasthenia increased; he suffered from insomnia, obscure
cerebral discomfort, stammering, chronic conjunctivitis,
inability to concentrate his attention, and dejection. Meanwhile
his homosexual emotions strengthened, and assumed a more sensual
character. He abstained from indulging them, as also from
onanism, but he was often forced, with shame and reluctance, to
frequent places--baths, urinaries, and so forth--where there were
opportunities of seeing naked men.
Having no passion for women, it was easy to avoid them. Yet they
inspired him with no exact horror. He used to dream of finding an
exit from his painful situation by cohabitation with some coarse,
boyish girl of the people; but his dread of syphilis stood in the
way. He felt, however, that he must conquer himself by efforts of
will, and by a persistent direction of his thoughts to
heterosexual images. He sought the society of distinguished
women. Once he coaxed up a romantic affection for a young girl of
15, which came to nothing, probably because the girl felt the
want of absolute passion in his wooing. She excited his
imagination, and he really loved her; but she did not, even in
the closest contact, stimulate his sexual appetite. Once, when he
kissed her just after she had risen from bed in the morning, a
curious physical repugnance came over him, attended with a sad
feeling of disappointment.
He was strongly advised to marry by physicians. At last he did
so. He found that he was potent, and begot several children, but
he also found, to his disappointment, that the tyranny of the
male genital organs on his fancy increased. Owing to this cause
his physical, mental, and moral discomfort became acute. His
health gave way.
At about the age of 30, unable to endure his position any longer,
he at last yielded to his sexual inclinations. As he began to do
this, he also began to regain calm and comparative health. He
formed a close alliance with a youth of 19. This _liaison_ was
largely sentimental, and marked by a kind of etherealized
sensuality. It involved no sexual acts beyond kissing, naked
contact, and rare involuntary emissions. About the age of 36 he
began freely to follow homosexual inclinations. After this he
rapidly recovered his health. The neurotic disturbances subsided.
He has always loved men younger than himself. At about the age of
27 he had begun to admire young soldiers. Since he yielded freely
to his inclinations the men he has sought are invariably persons
of a lower social rank than his own. He carried on one _liaison_
continuously for twelve years; it began without passion on the
friend's side, but gradually grew to nearly equal strength on
both sides. He is not attracted by uniforms, but seeks some
uncontaminated child of nature.
The methods of satisfaction have varied with the phases of his
passion. At first they were romantic and Platonic, when a
hand-touch, a rare kiss, or mere presence sufficed. In the second
period sleeping side by side, inspection of the naked body of the
loved man, embracements, and occasional emissions after prolonged
contact. In the third period the gratification became more
frankly sensual. It took every shape: mutual masturbation,
intercrural coitus, _fellatio, irrumatio_, and occasionally
active _pedicatio_; always according to the inclination or
concession of the beloved male.
He himself always plays the active, masculine part. He never
yields himself to the other, and he asserts that he never has the
joy of finding himself desired with ardor equal to his own. He
does not shrink from passive _pedicatio_; but it is never
demanded of him. Coitus with males, as above described, always
seems to him healthy and natural; it leaves a deep sense of
well-being, and has cemented durable friendships. He has always
sought to form permanent ties with the men whom he has adored so
excessively.
He is of medium height, not robust, but with great nervous
energy, with strong power of will and self-control, able to
resist fatigue and changes of external circumstances.
In boyhood he had no liking for female occupations, or for the
society of girls, preferring study and solitude. He avoided games
and the noisy occupations of boys, but was only non-masculine in
his indifference to sport, was never feminine in dress or habit.
He never succeeded in his attempts to whistle. He is a great
smoker, and has at times drunk much. He likes riding, skating,
and climbing, but is a poor horseman, and is clumsy with his
hands. He has no capacity for the fine arts and music, though
much interested in them, and is a prolific author.
He has suffered extremely throughout life, owing to his sense of
the difference between himself and normal human beings. No
pleasure he has enjoyed, he declares, can equal a thousandth
part of the pain caused by the internal consciousness of
pariahdom. The utmost he can plead in his own defense, he admits,
is irresponsibility, for he acknowledges that his impulse may be
morbid. But he feels absolutely certain that in early life his
health was ruined and his moral repose destroyed owing to the
perpetual conflict with his own inborn nature, and that relief
and strength came with indulgence. Although he always has before
him the terror of discovery, he is convinced that his sexual
dealings with men have been thoroughly wholesome to himself,
largely increasing his physical, moral, and intellectual energy,
and not injurious to others. He has no sense whatever of moral
wrong in his actions, and he regards the attitude of society
toward those in his position as utterly unjust and founded on
false principles.
The next case is, like the foregoing, that of a successful man of letters
who also passed through a long period of mental conflict before he became
reconciled to his homosexual instincts. He belongs to a family who are all
healthy and have shown marked ability in different intellectual
departments. He feels certain that one of his brothers is as absolute an
invert as himself and that another is attracted to both sexes. I am
indebted to him for the following detailed narrative, describing his
emotions and experiences in childhood, which I regard as of very great
interest, not only as a contribution to the psychology of inversion, but
to the embryology of the sexual emotions generally. We here see described,
in an unduly precocious and hyperesthetic form, ideas and feelings which,
in a slighter and more fragmentary shape, may be paralleled in the early
experiences of many normal men and women. But it must be rare to find so
many points in sexual psychology so definitely illustrated in a single
child. It may be added that the narrative is also not without interest as
a study in the evolution of a man of letters; a child whose imagination
was thus early exercised and developed was predestined for a literary
career.
HISTORY XXI.--"Almost the earliest recollection I have is of a
dream, which, from my vivid recollection of its details, must
have repeated itself, I think, more than once, unless my waking
thoughts unconsciously added definition. From this dream dated my
consciousness of the attraction to me of my own sex, which has
ever since dominated my life. The dream, suggested in part, I
think, by a picture in an illustrated newspaper of a mob
murdering a church dignitary, took this form: I dreamed that I
saw my own father murdered by a gang of ruffians, but I do not
remember that I felt any grief, though I was actually an
exceedingly affectionate child. The body was then stripped of its
clothing and eviscerated. I had at the time no notion of
anatomical details; but the particulars remain distinct to my
mind's eye, of entrails uniformly brown, the color of dung, and
there was no accompaniment of blood. When the abdomen had been
emptied, the incident in which I became an active participant
occurred. I was seized (and the fact that I was overpowered
contributed to the agony of delight it afforded me) and was laid
between the thighs of my murdered parent; and from there I had
presently crawled my way into the evacuated, abdomen. The act, so
far as I can decide of a dream at an age when emission was out of
the question, caused in me extreme organic excitement. At all
events, I used afterward definitely to recur to it in the waking
moments before sleep for the purpose of gaining a state of
erection. The dream had no outcome; it seemed to reach its goal
in the excitement it caused. I was at that time between 3 and 4
years old. (I have been told that erections occurred when I was
only 2 years old. It was between 3 and 4 that I used to induce,
at all events, the _sensation_ of an erection. But I was nearer 5
when, sitting on my bed and waiting to be dressed, I got an
involuntary erection and called my nurse's attention to it,
asking what it meant. The _appearance_ must, therefore, have been
usual to me at that date, but certainly the sensation was not.)
"At that time I was totally ignorant of the conditions, of
puberty, which afterward, when I discovered them, so powerfully
affected me. I could not even visualize the private organs of a
man; I made no deductions from myself. The only naked bodies I
had seen then--I judge from circumstances, not from any actual
memory of the facts--were those of my own sisters. In the waking
dreams which I began to construct, though I recurred often to the
one already narrated, the goal of my desire was generally to
nestle between the thighs or to have my face pressed against the
hinder parts of the object of my worship. But for a time my first
dream so engrossed me that I did not indulge in any promiscuity.
Gradually, however, my horizon enlarged, and took in, besides the
first mentioned, three others: a cousin very much my elder, an
uncle, and the curate of the parish.
"At this stage I began to invent circumstances for the indulgence
of my passion. One of the earliest was to imagine myself in a
tank with my three lovers floating in the water above me. From
this position I visited their limbs in turn; the attraction
rested in the thighs and buttocks only. I fancy this limitation
of the charm to the lower parts only lasted until actual
experience of a more complete embrace made me as much a lover of
the arms and breast; indeed, later I became more emotionally
enamored of these parts than of all the rest. At the beginning of
things I simply loved best what my mind could first get hold of.
"Quite early in my experience, when I was not more than 5, I
awoke earlier than usual, and saw my nurse standing in complete
nudity, commencing her toilet. She seemed to me a gross, coarse,
and meaningless object; the hair under her armpits displeased me,
and still more that on the lower part of her body. In the case of
men, directly I came to have cognizance of the same thing on
their bodies, the effect was exactly the opposite. It so happened
that about this time the gardener had received some injury to his
leg, and in showing the bruise to another exhibited before my
eyes a skin completely shagged over with dark hair. Though the
sight of the bruise repulsed me, my pleasure was intense, and the
vision of the gardener's legs was in my bed every night for a
week afterward. My point is that the sight of my nurse was liable
to rouse interest just as much as the far more prosaic display of
the gardener's wounded leg, but my nature made it impossible.
"It was about this time, if not before, that an enormous sense of
shyness with regard to all my private duties began to afflict me.
So great was it that I could endure from no hand except my
mother's or my nurse's the necessary assistance in the buttoning
and unbuttoning of my garments, always excepting those who were
about my own age, toward whom I felt no privacy whatever.
"When I was a little more than 5 I formed a friendship with a
young clerk, a youth of about 15, though he seemed to me a
grown-up person. One day, as he sat at his desk writing, I sat
down and began playing with his feet, investigating the height to
which his socks went under his trousers; in this way I obtained
six inches of bare leg. Conscious of my courage I fell to kissing
it. My friend laughed, but left me to my devotions in peace. This
was the first time in which a feeling of romance mixed itself in
my dreams; the physical excitement was less, but the pleasure was
greater. I cannot understand why I never repeated the experience.
He remained to me an object of very special and tender
consideration.
"In the next episode I have to relate the ideal was totally
absent, and the part I played was passive rather than active. I
was put to sleep with a boy considerably my senior. His
initiation led to a physical familiarity between us which was not
warm or kind, and I was allowed no scope for my own instinctive
desires for a warmer kind of contact; if I sought it under cover
of my companion's slumbers I found myself kicked away. Only on
one occasion did I find a few moments of supreme charm, while his
sleep remained sound, by discovering in the recesses of the sheet
an exposed surface of flesh against which I pressed my face in an
abandonment of joy. For the rest I was a passive participant, his
pleasure seeming to end in the mere handling of the fleshy
portions of my body. For this purpose I usually lay face downward
across his knees. So far as I can remember, this intimacy led to
a decrease in my pursuit of imaginative pleasures; for about a
year no further development took place.
"At about this date I was circumcised on account of the prepuce
being too long.
"Between the 6th and 7th years a change of environment brought me
into contact with a new set of faces. I had then a bed to myself,
and once more my imagination awoke to life. It was at this time
that I found myself constructing from men's faces suppositions as
to the rest of their bodies: a brown face led me to suppose a
uniformly brown body, a pale face a pale body. This idea of
variety began to charm me. I now made definite choice in my
reveries whether I would go to sleep between white thighs, or red
thighs, or brown thighs. Going to sleep definitely describes the
goal of the method to which I had addicted myself. As soon as I
entered my bed I abandoned myself to the construction of an amour
and retained it as long as I had consciousness. I may say that I
was not conscious of any emissions under these circumstances
(until some years later, when I brought it about by my own act),
but the pleasure was fairly acute.
"All this time there were secret meetings, with my bedfellow of
the year before. But they now took place by day, in various
hiding-places, with little unclothing or exposure, and my
companion was cold and fastidious and repelled any warmth on my
part; it became to me a dry sort of ritual. I had an idea at that
time that the whole thing was so much an original invention of
his and mine that there was no likelihood of it being practised
by anyone else in the world. But this consideration did not
restrain me in constructing love scenes with all those whose
appearance attracted me. At this period nearly every man with
whom I came in contact won at least my transient desire; only the
quite old and deformed lay outside the scope of my wishes. Many
of my amours developed in church; the men who sat near me were
the objects of my attention, and the clergyman, whose sermon I
did not listen to, supplied me with an occasion for reverie on
the charms his person would have for me under other
circumstances. It must have been at this time that I began to
elaborate ideas of a serried rank of congregated thighs across
which I lay and was dragged. I would arrange them in definite
order and then imagine myself drawn across from one to the other
somewhat forcibly. Admiration of strength was beginning at this
time to have a definite part in my conceptions, but anything of
the nature of cruelty had not then appealed to me. (I except the
original dream of my childhood, which seems to me still to stand
fantastically apart.) In the inventions to which I now gave
myself the sense of being passed across limbs of different
texture and color was subtle and pleasurable. I think the note of
constructive cruelty which now followed arose from an imagined
rivalry among my lovers for possession of me; the idea that I was
desired made me soon take a delight in imagining myself torn and
snatched about by the contending parties. Presently out of this I
began constructing definite scenes of violence. I was able in
imagination to lie in the thick and stress of conglomerated
deliciousness of thighs struggling to hold me; I was able to
imagine at least six bodies encircling me with passionate
contact. At the same time I had an ingrained feeling of my own
physical smallness in relation to the limbs whose contact threw
me into such paroxysms of delight. A new and sufficiently
ludicrous invention took possession of me; I imagined myself
strapped to the thigh (always, I think, the right one) of the man
on whom I chose, for the time, to concentrate my desires, and so
to be worn by him during his day's work, hidden beneath his
garments. I was not conscious of any difficulty due to my size.
The charm of bondage and compulsion was here, again, in the
ascendant. I fancy that it was in this connection that I first
anticipated whipping as the delightful climax to my emotions,
administered when my possessor, at the end of his day's work,
unclothed himself for rest.
"Up to this stage my attraction to the male organ of generation
had been slight and vague. Two things now contributed to bring
thought of it into prominence. On two or three occasions when I
accompanied farm laborers to their occupations I saw them pause
by the way to relieve nature. My extreme shyness as regards such
matters in my own person made this performance in my presence
like an outrage on my modesty; it had about it the suggestion of
an indecent solicitation to one whose inclination was to headlong
and delirious surrender. I stood rooted and flushing with
downcast eyes till the act was over and was conscious for a
considerable time of stammering speech and bewildered faculties.
When I afterward reviewed the circumstances they had the same
attraction for me that amorous cruelty was just then beginning to
exercise on my imagination. My mind secretly embraced the fearful
sweetness of the newly discovered sensation, surrounding the
performance of the function with all sorts of atrocious and
bizarre inventions. For a time my intellect hung back from
accepting this as the central and most fiery secret of the male
attraction; but shortly afterward, when out walking with my
father, I saw him perform the same act; I was overwhelmed with
emotion and could barely drag my feet from the spot or my eyes
from the damp herbage where he had deposited the waters of
secrecy. Even today, when my mind has been long accustomed to the
knowledge of generative facts, I cannot dissociate myself from
the shuddering charm that moment had for me. The attraction my
father's person had always had for me was now increased tenfold
by the performance I had witnessed (though I had not seen the
penis in any of these cases).
"For a considerable time only those lovers were dominant in my
imagination whom I had witnessed in the act that had so
poignantly affected me. My delight now took the form of imagining
myself strapped to the thighs of the person while this function
was in progress.
"By this time I must have been 8 years old. The cold and secret
relationship of which I have given an account had continued
without instructing me in any of the ardent possibilities it
might have suggested; no force or cruelty was used upon me, no
warmth was lavished. It made little difference that my companion
had now discovered the act of masturbation; it had no meaning to
me, since it led to no warmth of embrace. His method was to avert
himself from me; I had to fawn upon him from the rear and also to
invent indecent stories to stimulate his imagination. I felt
myself a despised instrument, the mere spectator of an act which,
if directed toward me with any warmth, would have aroused the
liveliest appetite. At this time, as I have since seen, my
companion was gaining knowledge from the ancient classics. For a
time some charm was imparted by his instructing me to adopt a
superincumbent face-to-face embrace. The beginning of his puberty
was enormously attractive to me; had he been less cold-blooded I
could have responded passionately to his endearments; but he
always insisted on rigorous passivity on my part, and he
explained nothing. One day, by a small gratuity, he induced me to
offer him my mouth, though I still had no comprehension of the
result I was helping to attain. Once the orgasm occurred, and the
effect was extremely nauseous; after that he was more careful. My
companion was approaching manhood, and his demands became more
frequent, his exactions more humiliating.
"At the same time my passion for male love was growing stronger.
I was able to construct from the unsatisfactory bondage in which
I was held images of bodily embrace which I had not before had
sufficient sense of human contact to form, though I seldom
imagined any of the acts that in actual experience repulsed me.
One day, however, I shirked a particularly repulsive humiliation
which my companion had forced upon me. He discovered the
deception, rose from the prone position in which he lay, and
throwing me across his knees thrashed me violently. I submitted
without a struggle, experiencing a curious sensation of pleasure
in the midst of my pain. When he repeated his order I found its
accomplishment no longer repulsive. One of the few pleasurable
memories this intimacy, extending over years, has left for me is
that moment of abject abasement to one who, with no warmth of
feeling, had yet once had sufficient energy to be brutal to me.
"It must have been from this incident that the calculated effect
of flagellation began to have weight with me when I indulged my
imagination. A wish to be repulsed, trampled, violated by the
object of my passion took hold of my instincts. Even then--and,
indeed, up to my 13th year--I had no idea of normal sexual
connection. I knew vaguely that children were born from women's
bodies; I did not know--and when told I did not believe--the true
facts of the marital relationship. All that I had
experienced--both in fact and imagination--was to me so highly
individual that I had no notion anything kindred to it could
exist outside of my own experience. I had no notion of sex as the
basis of life. Even when I came gradually to realize that men and
women were formed in a way that argued connection with each
other, I still believed it to be a dissolute sort of conduct, not
to be indulged in by those who had claims to respectability.
"I had, however, by this time arrived at a strong attraction
toward the organs of generation and all aspects of puberty, and
my imagination spent Itself in a fantastic worship of every sign
of masculinity. My enjoyment now was to imagine myself forced to
undergo physical humiliation and submission to the caprice of my
male captors, and the central fact became the discharge of urine
from my lover over my body and limbs, or, if I were very fond of
him, I let it be in my face. This was followed usually by a
half-caressing castigation, in which the hand only was
instrumental.
"The period of which I am now writing was that of my entry into
school life. My imaginary lovers immediately became numerous; all
the masters and all the boys above a certain age attracted me;
for two I had in addition a feeling of romantic as well as
physical attachment. Indeed, from this time onward I was never
without some heroes toward whom I indulged a perfectly separate
and tenderly ideal passion. The announcement that one was about
to leave surprised me into a passionate fit of weeping; yet my
reserve was so great and my sense of isolation so crushing that I
made no effort at intimacy, and to one for whom I felt
inexhaustible devotion I barely spoke for the first three years,
though meeting him daily. At this time the subjects of my
contemplation had distinctly individualized methods of approach.
Thus in one case I imagined we stood face to face in our
night-gear; suddenly mine was stripped from me; I was seized and
forcibly thrust under his and made to hang with my feet off the
ground by my full weight on the erect organ which inserted
itself between my thighs; so suspended--my body enveloped in the
folds of his linen and my face pressed upon his heart--I
underwent a castigation which continued until I was thrown down
to receive a discharge of urine over my prostrate body. Such
images seemed to come independently of my will.
"It was at this time that I found a large pleasure in imagining
contact with people whom I disliked; the prevailing note of these
intimacies was always cruelty, to which I submitted with acute
relish. I discovered, however, from the ordinary school
experiences of corporal punishment, that it had no charm to me
when administered for school offenses, even from the hands under
which at other times I imagined myself as delighting to receive
pain. The necessary link was lacking; had I perceived on the part
of my judge any liking for the operation, there would probably
have been a response on my side. On one occasion I was flogged
unjustly; conscious as I was of its cruel instead of judiciary
character, this was the only castigation I received which had in
it an element of gratification for my instincts. At the same time
I never forgave the hand that administered it; it is the only
instance I remember in myself of a grudge nourished for years.
"Meanwhile, amid this chaos of confused love and hatred, of
relish for cruelty and loathing for injustice, my first
thoroughly romantic and ideal attachment was developing itself. I
may say, of those to whom romance as well as physical attachment
bound me, that they have remained unchangeable parts of my
nature. Today, as it was twenty years ago, when I think of them
the blood gushes to my brain, my hands tingle and moisten with an
emotion I cannot subdue: I am at their feet worshipping them. Of
them my dreams were entirely tender; the idea of cruelty never
touched the conception I had of them. But I return to that one
who was the chief influence of my youth: older than myself by
only three years, he was of fine build and athletic, with
adolescence showing in his face; my tremulous beginnings of
worship were confirmed by a word of encouragement thrown to me
one day as I went to receive my first flogging; no doubt my
small, scared face excited his kind pity. I made it my concern
afterward to let him know that I had not cried under the ordeal,
and I believe he passed the word around that I had taken my
punishment pluckily. So little contact had I with him that beyond
constant worship on my part I remember nothing till, about three
years later, I received from him a kind, half-joking
solicitation, spoken in clean and simple language. So terrific
was my shyness and secrecy that I had even then no idea that
familiarity of the sort was common enough in schools. I was
absolutely unable to connect my own sensations with those of the
world at large or to believe that others felt as I did. On this
occasion I simply felt that some shrewd thrust had been made at
me for the detection of my secret. He had drawn me upon his knee;
I sat there silent, flushing and dumbfounded. He made no attempt
to press me; he had, as he thought, said enough if I chose to be
reciprocal; beyond that he would not tempt me. A few years ago I
heard of him married and prosperous.
"In following up my emotions in this direction I have far
outstripped the period up to which I have given a complete
exposition of my development. I must have been more than 12 years
old before school life persuaded me to face (as taught by
sniggering novices) the actual facts of sexual intercourse. At
the same time I learned that I had means of extracting enjoyment
from my own body in a definite direction which I had not till
then suspected. A growing resistance on my part to his cold
desires had led to a break with my former intimate; to the last
he had taught me nothing, except distaste for himself. I now
found ready teachers right and left of me. One of my
schoolfellows invited me to watch; him in the process of
masturbation; the spectacle left me quite unmoved; the result
appeared to me far less exciting than the discharge of urine
which, until then, I had associated with male virility. I was so
accustomed to my own lone amorous broodings that the effort and
action required for this process, when I attempted to imitate it,
disconcerted my thoughts and interfered with concentration on my
own inventions. I had never experienced the pleasure accompanying
the spasm of emission, and there seemed to be nothing worth
trying for along that road. I desisted and returned to my
reveries. I was now in a perfect maze of promiscuity; there must
have been at least fifty people who attracted me at that time. I
developed a liking for imagining myself between two lovers,
generally men who were physical contrasts. It was my habit to
analyze as minutely as possible those who attracted me. To gain
intimacy with what was below the surface I studied with attention
their hands, the wrists where they disappeared (showing the hair
of the forearm), and the neck; I estimated the comparative size
of the generative organs, the formation of the thighs and
buttocks, and thus constructed a presentment of the whole man.
The more vividly I could do this, the keener was the pleasure I
was able to obtain from their contemplated embraces.
"Till now I had been absolutely untouched by any moral scruples.
I had the usual acquiescence in the religious beliefs in which I
had been trained; it did not enter my head that there was any
divine law, one way or the other, concerning the allurements of
the imagination. From my thirteenth year slight hints of
uneasiness began to creep into my conscience. I began perhaps to
understand that the formulas of religion, to which I had listened
all my life with as little attention as possible, had some
meaning which now and then touched the circumstances of my own
life. I had not yet realized that my past foretold my future, and
that women would be to me a repulsion instead of an attraction
where things sexual were concerned. I had the full conviction
that one day I should be married; I had also some fear that as I
grew to manhood I might succumb to the temptations of loose
women. I had an incipient revulsion from such a fate, and this
seemed to me to indicate that moral stirrings were at work within
me. One night I was amorously attacked in my bedroom by two of
the domestics. I experienced an acute horror which I hid under
laughter; my resistance was so desperate that I escaped with a
tickling. I had been accustomed to sit on the servants' knees, a
habit I had innocently retained from childhood; I can now recall
in detail the approaches these women had been used to make me. At
the time I was utterly oblivious that anything was intended.
"I was equally oblivious to things that had a nearer relation to
my own feelings. In passing along a side-street one night I was
overtaken by a man who began conversation on the weather. He
asked me if I were not cold, began passing his hand up and down
my back; then came a question about caning at school, whether
certain parts of me were not sore, leading to an investigating
touch. I put his hand aside shyly, but did not resent the action.
Presently he was for exploring my trousers pockets and I began to
think him a pickpocket; repulsed in that direction, he returned,
to rubbing my back. The sensation was pleasant. I now took him
for a pimp who wished to take me to a prostitute, and as at that
time I had begun to realize that such pleasures were not to my
taste I was glad to find myself at my destination, and said
good-bye sharply, leaving him standing full of astonishment at
his failure with one who had taken his advances so pleasantly. I
could not bring myself to believe that others had the same
feelings as myself. Later I realized my escape, not without a
certain amount of regret, and constructed for my own pleasure a
different termination to the incident.
"I was now so possessed by masculine attraction that I became a
lover of all the heroes I read of in books. Some became as vivid
to me as those with whom I was living in daily contact. For a
time I became an ardent lover of Napoléon (the incident of his
anticipation of the nuptials with his second wife attracting me
by its impetuous brutality), of Edward I, and of Julius Cæsar.
Charles II I remember by a caressing cruelty with which my
imagination gifted him. Jugurtha was a great acquisition.
Bothwell, Judge Jefferies, and many villains of history and
fiction appealed to me by their cruelty.
"I had become an adept in the mental construction necessary for
the satisfaction of my desires. And yet up to that date I had
never seen the nude body of a full-grown adult. I had no
knowledge of the extent to which hair in certain instances
develops on the torso; indeed, my efforts at characterization
centered, for the most part, around the thighs and generative
organs. At this time one of my schoolfellows saw a common
workman, known to me by name, bathing in a stream with some
companions; all his body was, my informant told me, covered with
hair from throat to belly. In face the man was coarse and
repulsive, but I now began to regard him as a lovely monstrosity,
and for many nights embraced the vision of him passionately, with
face buried in the jungle growth of hair that covered his chest.
I was, for the first time, conscious of deliberately (and
successfully) willing not to see his face, which was distasteful
to me. At the same time another schoolfellow told me, concerning
a master who bathed with the boys, that hair showed above his
bathing-drawers as high as the navel. I now began definitely to
construct bodies in detail; the suggestion of extensive hairiness
maddened me with delight, but remained in my mind strongly
associated with cruelty; my hairy lovers never behaved to me with
tenderness; everything at this period, I think, tended to draw me
toward force and violence as an expression of amativeness. A
schoolfellow, a few years my senior, of a cruel, bullying
disposition, took a particular delight in inflicting pain on me:
he had particularly pointed shoes, and it was his custom to make
me stand with my back to him while he addressed me in petting and
caressing tones; just when his words were at their kindliest he
would inflict a sharp stroke with the toe of his boot so as to
reach the most tender part of my fundament; the pain was
exquisite; I was conscious that he experienced sexual pleasure (I
had seen definite signs of it beneath his clothing), and, though
loathing him, I would, after I had suffered from his kicks, throw
myself into his imaginary embraces and indulge in a perfect rage
of abject submission. Yet all the time I would gladly have killed
him.
"At the age of 14 I went, for a time, to a farm-house, where I
was allowed to mingle familiarly with the farm-laborers, a fine
set of muscular young men. I became a great favorite, and, having
childish, caressing manners a good deal behind my real age, I was
allowed to take many liberties with them. They all lived under
the farmer's roof in the old-fashioned way, and in the evening I
used to sit on their knees and caress and hug them to my heart's
content. They took it phlegmatically; it apparently gave them no
surprise. One of the men used to return my squeezes and caresses
and once allowed me to put my hand under his shirt, but there
were no further liberties.
"It was not until I was nearly 15 that the event happened which
made me, for the first time, restless in my enforced solitude. I
was verging on puberty, and perhaps in the hope that I should
find my own development met by a corresponding warmth I again
came into intimate relations with the companion whose frigid
performances had caused me weariness and disgust. He was now a
man, having reached majority. He put me into his bed while he
undressed himself and came toward me in perfect nudity. In a
moment we were in each other's arms and the deliciousness of that
moment intoxicated me. Suddenly, lying on the bed, I felt
attacked, as I thought, by an imperative need to make water. I
leaped up with a hurried excuse, but already the paroxysm had
subsided. No discharge came to my relief, yet the need seemed to
have passed. I returned to my companion, but the glamour of the
meeting was already over. My companion evidently found more
pleasure in my person than when I was a mere child; I felt moved
and flattered by the pleasure he took in pressing his face
against certain parts of my body. On a second occasion, one day,
I seemed involuntarily about to transgress decency, but again, as
before, separated myself, and remained ignorant of what it was on
which I had verged in my excitement. At another meeting, however,
I had been allowed to prolong my embrace and to act, indeed, upon
my full instincts. Once more I felt suddenly the coming of
something acutely impending; I took my courage in my hands and
went boldly forward. In another moment I had hold of the
mysterious secret of masculine energy, to which all my years of
dilirious imaginings had been but as a waiting at the threshold,
the knocking on a closed door.
"It was inevitable that from that day our intimacy should dwindle
into dissolution (though other causes anticipated this natural
decay), but I no longer found masturbation a dry and wearisome
formula. In my novitiate I was disheartened to find how long it
took me to dissociate myself from the contemplative and attach
myself to the active form of self-gratification. But I presently
found myself committed to the repetition of the act three times a
day. On almost the last occasion I met my intimate he showed an
exceptional ardor. At that meeting he proposed to attempt an act
I had not previously considered possible, far less had I heard
that it was considered the worst criminal connection that could
take place. I had a slight fear of pain, but was willing to
gratify him, and for the first time found in my submission a
union of the two amative instincts which had before disputed sway
in me: the instinct for tenderness and the instinct for cruelty.
_Pedicatio_ failed to take place, but I received an embrace which
for the first time gave me full satisfaction. My delight was
enormous; I was filled with emotions. I have no words to describe
the extraordinary charm of the warm, smooth flesh upon mine, and
the rougher contact of the hairy parts. Yet I was conscious, even
at the time, that this was but the physical side of pleasure, and
that he was not and never could be one whom I might truly be said
to love.