feminine attributes is in his capacity for lavishing trust and affection
upon unworthy objects. During my acquaintance with him he has at
different times had two friends for whom he had especially strong
affection, even to the extent of taking them into his own abode; and in
one case going so far as to talk of adoption. From his own account of
his relations with these young men, the inference which the
disinterested listener would draw was that they were persons who were
playing a good thing for all it was worth. According to his own
statement, they were mulcting him, on one pretext or another, of large
sums of money, albeit always on some colorable excuse. He always,
however, affirmed their essential goodness of character and refused to
believe that they could be otherwise, even when they were acting towards
him in the most unfeeling manner. To my mind, in his relations with
these acquaintances, he afforded an almost perfect parallel to the woman
who, wedded to a drunken brute, nevertheless remains faithful and
adoring to the end.
Another somewhat feminine trait is a sensitiveness that is readily moved
to tears. I have already referred to the time when he wept over an
implied criticism of his work. An equally characteristic episode
occurred later, during a visit to his home from his mother. One night he
was caught in a heavy rain, and reached home drenched to the skin. The
next morning, his face convulsed and tears hardly kept back, he told me
of his fear that he was losing his love for his mother because he did
not feel like talking to her the night before—as if forsooth a drenching
would not have dampened the desire for speech in any man.
One other trait worth mentioning—because it is one that I regard as more
or less feminine—is a certain lack of perspective, a tendency to allow
minor details to bulk as large in his eye as major. This showed itself
in his work, which, though always characterized by thoroughness, was
frequently too much so, the really vital things being allowed to become
obscured by a mass of detail of minor importance.
May, 1918.
APPENDIX II
THE CASE OF OSCAR WILDE
_By the author of this autobiography_
Oscar Wilde presents a different phase of homosexuality from the author,
that is, active pederasty. Apparently his was the active rôle in
pædicatio or inter femora. According to Frank Harris, Wilde’s confidant
and the author of his best biography, Wilde thus analyzes his penchant:
“What is the food of passion but beauty, beauty alone, beauty always,
and in beauty of form and vigor of life there is no comparison [with the
female sex]. If you loved beauty as intensely as I do, you would feel as
I feel. It is beauty which gives me joy, makes me drunk as with wine,
blind with insatiable desire.” “There are people in the world who cannot
understand the deep affection that an artist can feel for a friend with
a beautiful personality.”
Like the author, Wilde was born and reared in the best environment and
enjoyed unexcelled educational advantages. But as a boy and youth, he
betrayed no feminine mental traits. Unlike the author, he was not
feminesque physically. Further, while the author during youth and early
“manhood” was notably small, Wilde grew to be one of the largest of men,
six feet, two inches in height, and of stout build.
Apparently instinct did not become sufficiently powerful to cry for
appeasement until he became a student at Oxford. While one of the
leaders in scholarship and already a society favorite, it was
nevertheless being whispered that he was a pederast. This was due to his
openness, he not seeming to care if every one knew of his penchant, and
not realizing that he was guilty of anything scandalous.
Having graduated from Oxford with the highest honors, Wilde took up his
residence in London. Unlike the author, he was capable cum femina, but
did not marry until twenty-nine. Two sons resulted. Marriage and
fatherhood are the two strongest arguments against him in any judgment
on his pederasty.
Hardly another human being has at the age of thirty achieved such fame.
In the family of the author, then a boy of ten, and living in a
different country and 3,000 miles away, the name “Oscar Wilde” was a
household term. Even every child of the village was as familiar with
that name as with that of the man next door. This fame resulted from his
being the idol of England’s aristocracy, the greatest social light of
the nineteenth century in any land, one of the most brilliant
conversationalists that ever breathed, a poet of high rank, and the
foremost English playwright of his generation.
But notwithstanding that during the late eighties and early nineties of
the nineteenth century, Wilde was the most widely known and the most
talked about man in London, he was so disdainful of the opinion of
mankind as to visit regularly—not incognito, but under his own
illustrious name—the leading maison publique of London which catered
exclusively to active pederasts. He here made the acquaintance of
adolescents—little better than gutter-snipes—some of whom he
subsequently entertained in private rooms of London’s foremost hostelry.
He also had a habit of leaving his meek, long-suffering wife at home
with the children, and taking up his residence in a furnished apartment,
where he entertained his adolescent friends. Occasional visits would be
paid his wife and children. Some of London’s leaders of thought,
although at the same time “men-about-town,” have been known to exclaim
at what they witnessed in the city’s drinking palaces: “Is this the
great Oscar Wilde who sits, chats, and drinks here with ragamuffins whom
he has picked up off the street!”
Blackmail was looked upon as an every-day occurrence. As money both came
and went easily, he never gave it a second thought.
Gradually stories of his doings spread throughout all grades of London
society. The middle and lower classes soon came to hold his name in
abomination, but comparatively few of the “upper crust”—with whom he
exclusively associated apart from his nights with adolescent
menials—held anything against him because of his almost unrivaled
talents and delightful personality.
In 1895, at the age of forty-one, Wilde had reached the zenith of
earthly glory. But the puritan element had naturally come to hold him in
the greatest detestation. He was thoroughly pagan in thought and in his
published works. Particularly was he thoroughly saturated with the
writings and ideas of the ancient Greeks, with whom pederasty was common
and open. Unlike the author, he had had no religious training, and when
adult seems always to have turned the cold shoulder on the Church. Some
of his writings were positively blasphemous. He would boast also that
for him morality was non-existent—only the beautiful. While possibly
irresponsible to a considerable degree for his pederasty, he was
decidedly to be blamed for flaunting it in the face of everybody. On the
whole, he was, because of his exalted position and his writings, the
most pernicious influence of the 19th century on British morals. The
puritan element were quick to take advantage of his arrest under the
charge of being a “corrupter of youth,” and jumped into the fray. The
slums of London were combed in order to find witnesses.
From Harris’s “_Oscar Wilde and His Confessions_” I quote Wilde’s most
striking defensive statement at his trial:
“The ‘love’ that dare not speak its name in this century is such a great
affection of an older for a younger man as there was between David and
Jonathan, such as Plato made the very base of his philosophy, and such
as you find in the sonnets of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare—a deep
spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect, and dictates great
works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michael Angelo and those two
letters of mine [evidence against him], such as they are, and which is
in this century misunderstood—so misunderstood that, on account of it, I
am placed where I am now [in the prisoner’s dock]. It is beautiful; it
is fine; it is the noblest form of affection. It is intellectual, and it
repeatedly exists between an elder and younger man, when the elder man
has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope, and glamor of
life. That it should be so the world does not understand. It mocks at it
and sometimes puts one into the pillory for it.”
Subsequently his confidant, Harris, asked in private: “There is another
point against you which you have not touched on yet: Gill asked you what
you had in common with those serving men and stable boys? You have not
explained that.”
“Difficult to explain, Frank, isn’t it, without the truth?” ... “How
weary I am of the whole thing, of the shame and the struggling and the
hatred. To see those people coming into the box one after the other to
witness against me makes me sick.... Oh, it’s terrible. I feel inclined
to stretch out my hands and cry to them, ‘Do what you will with me, in
God’s name, only do it quickly; cannot you see that I am worn out? If
hatred gives you pleasure, indulge it.’”
In other conversations with Harris, Wilde justified his penchant, as
narrated in the biography, as follows:
“There is no general rule of health; it is all personal, individual....
I only demand that freedom which I willingly concede to others. No one
condemns another for preferring green to gold. Why should any taste be
ostracised? Liking and disliking are not under our control. I want to
choose the nourishment which suits _my_ body and _my_ soul.”
“Each man ought to do what he likes, to develop as he will.... They
punished me because I did not share their tastes. What an absurdity it
all was! How dared they punish me for what is good in my eyes?...”
“What you call vice, Frank, is not vice.... It has been made a crime in
recent times.... They all damn the sins they have no mind to, and that’s
their morality.... Why, even Bentham refused to put what you call a vice
in his penal code, and you yourself admitted that it should not be
punished as a crime; for it carries no temptation with it. It may be a
malady; but, if so, it appears only to attack the highest natures....
The wit of man can find no argument which justifies its punishment....
You admit you don’t share the prejudice; you don’t feel the horror, the
instinctive loathing. Why? Because you are educated, Frank, because you
know that the passion Socrates felt was not a low passion, because you
know that Caesar’s weakness, let us say, or the weakness of Michael
Angelo, or of Shakespeare, is not despicable. If the desire is not a
characteristic of the highest humanity, at least it is consistent with
it.... Suppose I like a food that is poison to other people, and yet
quickens me; how dare they punish me for eating of it?... It is all
ignorant prejudice, Frank; the world is slowly growing more tolerant and
one day men will be ashamed of their barbarous treatment of me, as they
are now ashamed of the torturing of the Middle Ages.”
Harris constitutes himself an apologist for his friend. He outlines a
conversation in which he defended Wilde during the time of the latter’s
imprisonment. After demolishing the argument of a leading English
journalist that “any one living a clean life is worth more than a writer
of love songs or the maker of clever comedies”—Mr. John Smith worth more
than Shakespeare [who was a rake and very likely a psychical
hermaphrodite], Harris “pointed out that Wilde’s offence was
pathological and not criminal and would not be punished in a properly
constituted state.” Harris is quoted further:
“You admit that we punish crime to prevent it spreading; wipe this sin
off the statute book and you would not increase the sinners by one: then
why punish them?”
[Another guest of the journalist:] “Oi’d whip such sinners to death, so
I would. Hangin’s too good for them.”
“You only punished lepers in the Middle Ages because you believed that
leprosy was catching: this malady is not even catching.”
“Faith, Oi’d punish it with extermination.”...
“You are very bitter: I’m not; you see, I have no sexual jealousy to
inflame me.”
Oscar Wilde deserved his fall—possibly not because he was a pederast,
but because he flaunted his pederasty before the world, and because he
was otherwise anti-ethical and anti-religious in the highest degree.
After two years in prison, he never again set foot in the British
Empire. His wife would never again even see him. He lost all ambition to
put to use his extraordinary literary talents. For the rest of his life
he made his home for the most part in Paris. Apparently he indulged his
penchant more than ever. He remarked once that life would not be worth
living if desire should die, as compared with the author’s heartfelt
wish that it might die in himself. He was constantly pursuing
adolescents of the laboring class. He was known to call in to dine with
him at a high-class restaurant a dirty, unkempt, but Adonis-faced
gutter-snipe. He now acquired syphilis. The chase appeared to be the
chief aim of his life, although he now distinguished himself also as an
extreme gourmand, tippler, and sybarite in general, not to mention his
habitually swindling his old friends out of money.
According to general belief, death came in 1900 at the age of forty-six,
and was due to a general breakdown occasioned by gluttony, alcoholism,
absinthism, and syphilis. But strong reasons existed why he and his
confidants should palm off his death upon the world. In 1918 it is
rumored that he is still alive, at the age of sixty-four.
Wilde has given evidence of a slight approach toward feminine mentality.
(1) He was unequalled in vanity. (2) During his twenties, he wore his
hair in tufts several inches long and partially concealing his ears and
coat-collar. (3) He was the most extreme esthete (extravagant feeder on
beauty wherever it is to be found, like the author) the world has ever
seen. Æstheticism and homosexuality are often linked together. (4) At
thirty-three he became editor of England’s leading woman’s magazine. (5)
Harris speaks of his “extraordinary femininity and gentle weakness of
his nature, and instead of condemning him as I have always condemned
that form of sexual indulgence, I felt only pity for him and a desire to
protect and help him.” Harris further expresses Wilde’s reaction to the
prison atmosphere as essentially that of a “woman.”
Wilde’s case suggests an hypothesis: Homosexuality is due to innate
abnormal participation in the mentality of the opposite sex. Whether an
active pederast or a passive invert results, depends on the degree of
feminization. If slight, the former results, who is also capable of
heterosexual love and coitus—a psychical hermaphrodite, as was Wilde,
who however had a far stronger leaning toward the homosexual than toward
the heterosexual. If the degree is high—for example, almost entirely
feminine psychically and even inducing feminesque anatomy—a passive
invert results, as in the case of the author.
September, 1918.
APPENDIX III
QUESTIONNAIRE ON HOMOSEXUALITY
[The governments of all cultured lands take from time to time censuses
of the blind, the deaf, and other defective classes. None has ever taken
a census of homosexualists, although the latter are fully as numerous as
the two definite classes previously named, and their effect on the
social body is even more marked. The Medico-Legal Journal, on the basis
of the following questionnaire, makes the first essay, in the history of
culture, in lining up the defective class in question so that science
may have a broader knowledge of them than that afforded by the
comparatively few detached biographical and analytical notes at present
extant. The reader is therefore requested to fill out the following
questionnaire—or have the intelligent homosexualist do so—and mail it to
the Medico-Legal Journal, New York. If unable to answer all queries,
kindly give as much information as possible. Additional schedules will
be furnished on request. Unpublished textual descriptions of cases would
be welcome, and will be returned on request. The results of this
questionnaire will be published, and the addresses of respondents will
be filed for due notification.]
(1) Physical sex of homosexualist...... (2) Age at date.... years
(or.... years at death)
(3) No. of brothers.... Sisters.... (4) Approximate age of father at
subject’s birth.... Of mother....
(5) Underline applicable physical type: Brunette. Blonde. Red-haired.
Not definitely any of these.
(6) Principal occupation as adult.....................
(7) Lineage (i.e., from what foreign countries did forebears emigrate)
........................................................................
(8) Environment in which life principally passed (Indicate by x’s):
Rural or Municipality Municipality Municipality
village 2,500 to 25,000 to 100,000 to Municipality
under 25,000 100,000 500,000 over 500,000
2,500
Up to 10
years ..... ..... ..... ..... .....
old
11 to 20
years ..... ..... ..... ..... .....
old
21 to 50
years ..... ..... ..... ..... .....
old
After 50
years ..... ..... ..... ..... .....
old
(9) Ever legally married..... Children, how many.....
(10) Plays any musical instrument.......................................
(11) Underline interest in sport: Practically none. Slight. Extensive.
(12) Underline interest in music: Practically none. Slight. Extensive.
(13) Underline interest in other art (designate): Practically none.
Slight. Extensive.
(14) Underline interest in religion: Practically none. Slight.
Extensive.
(15) Underline applicable schooling: Less than 8 years. High school.
Liberal arts college. Postgraduate. Professional school.
(16) If liberal arts course, favorite subjects in order of
preference....
(17) Number—if any—of foreign languages ever spoken with considerable
ability..... Number studied for translation.....
(18) What—if any—mental diseases suffered...............................
(19) A dipsomaniac..... Other drug addiction.....
(20) What rather serious (excluding the practically universal)
bodily diseases suffered......................
..................................................... Particularly
underline applicable: Venereal warts. Syphilis. Gonorrhea. Locality
(initial) of last three...
(21) If dead, cause of death............................................
(22) What—if any—disease has run in the family of either parent.........
(23) What other blood relatives have shown sexual abnormality:
Definite relationship Nature of abnormality ....................
...........................................
....................................................................
....................................................................
(24) Are sexual organs normal..... Describe any abnormalities...........
........................................................................
........................................................................
(25) Underline applicable fundamental or original instinct: Fellatio
(active buccal). Passive buccal. Masturbation of other. Mutual onanism.
Pædicatio (anal), indicating whether subject is active or passive, or
both. Cunnilingus (corresponding to active fellatio in the male).
Tribadism (corresponding to masturbation of other in the male).
(26) Approximate age when instinct first manifested itself in the
feelings.....years. In actions.....years.
(27) Secondary or acquired methods of coitus............................
........................................................................
(28) Is subject a psychical hermaphrodite (attracted toward both
sexes)....
(29) Does coitus stimulate any erogenous center (i.e., afford a
pleasurable titillation of any portion of the body) or is the
satisfaction entirely or almost entirely mental ........
(30) State of health day following coitus...............................
(31) If a male, does coitus induce an emission..... If so,
is sensation pleasurable or horrifying.............
........................................................................
(32) Is there love or adoration for the associate, or is the latter used
merely to secure the stimulation of the subject’s erogenous
center..........................................
(33) Upper and lower age limits of individuals that attract, with
indication of subject’s own age at the different periods
................................................................
(34) Any quality or apparel (such as plumpness, military
uniform) that constitutes a special attraction....
........................................................................
(35) If a physical male, is he undersized..... If female, unusually
large..... Muscles vigorous or feeble.........
(36) Is there a striking contrast between the real and apparent age.....
(37) Any peculiarity about the hair system, particularly the facial.....
........................................................................
(38) If a physical male, any tendency to wear the hair several inches
long.......................................
(39) Describe any anatomical approach toward the psychical
sex (e.g., milk glands in a male).....................
........................................................................
(40) Ever desired to wear apparel of psychical sex.....
Ever worn such apparel since childhood.........
........................................................................
(41) If a physical male, fondness for loud or fancy apparel.....
If female, for plain apparel..............
........................................................................
(42) Ever arrested or imprisoned for following instincts of
psychical sex..... If so, aggregate number of months or years
imprisoned..............................................
(43) Please note any other significant data as to particular
homosexualist on separate sheets.
GENERAL QUERIES:
(44) Approximate number of homosexualists—positively known as such—have
you encountered in your life-time: Passive inverts.... Active
pederasts.... Male psychical hermaphrodites.... Physically female
homosexualists....
(45) How many additional individuals have been under your suspicion:
Passive inverts.... Active pederasts.... Male psychical
hermaphrodites.... Physically female homosexualists....
(46) The author of “Autobiography of an Androgyne” estimates, roughly,
_passive inverts_ as 1 out of 300 physical males. Please give your
estimate: Passive inverts, 1 out of....males. Active pederasts, 1 out
of....males. Male psychical hermaphrodites, 1 out of....males. Female
psychical hermaphrodites, 1 out of....females. Other physically female
homosexualists, 1 out of....females. (In query 46, only adults are to be
considered.)
NAME AND ADDRESS OF PHYSICIAN SUBMITTING SCHEDULE. THIS INFORMATION WILL
BE CONSIDERED CONFIDENTIAL, AND IS ESSENTIAL.
Name......................
Street and number.................
Post-office.................
Date.......... State.................
INDEX TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A
Abnormality, congenital, 29
Abstinence would wreck life, 106
Acting out a drama, 120
Active pederasts, 156
Actives are ultra-virile, 118
Adopted son, first, 87, 236 ff., 249
Adopted son, second, 240 ff., 249
Advice to young inverts, 94, 242
Æstheticism, 16
Aftermath of dissipation, 93, 94, 150, 195, 243
Age 4 to 8, 31 ff.
9 to 12, 38 ff.
13 to 18, 44 ff.
19 to 21, 79 ff.
22 to 23, 139 ff.
24 to 26, 180 ff.
27 to 28, 195 ff.
29 to 30, 210 ff.
31 to 39, 225 ff.
40 to 44, 238 ff.
Ague, sexual, 62, 72
Alcohol, author’s attitude, 78, 126
Alcohol conduces ven. disease, 126, 234
Aliases, origin of, 26
Alleviating ill effects, 95
Anatomical peculiarities of associates, 87, 127
Androgyne defined, 6
Androgyne’s marriage bond, 83
Androgynes the handiwork of God, 108
Androgynism, frequency of, 2, 34
Apparel, feminine, coveted, 36, 103
Apparel of inverts, 36, 122, 202
Appeal to General G., 229
Appeal to highminded adolescents, 105, 195
Appeal to U. S. district attorney, 229
Army officers, interviews with, 213, 215, 226, 229, 230
Arrest, 112, 130, 213, 226, 230
chronic fear of, 114
wishing for, 171
Assault and battery, 64, 135, 136, 145, 146, 149, 172, 225–228
Attraction, in boyhood, exercised on males, 10, 37, 44
Attractiveness, what constituted, 86, 148, 149
B