HOMOSEXUALISM; ITS GENESIS
Love's normal goal is the union of the male and the female in a way
which may insure the reproduction of the species. At times, however, we
behold love deviating from the path that leads to that goal: a man may
love another man as passionately as he would love a woman, a woman may
be consumed with desire for another woman.
Certain parts of the ancient world looked with indifference upon
such deviations from the normal. The poems of Sappho, the dialogues
of Plato, to only mention the best known sources of information on
the subject, prove that in classic Greece homosexual unions were
countenanced by public opinion. In the "Banquet" young Alkibiades
describes, with a frankness reminiscent of eighteenth century novels,
his attempts at "seducing" Socrates. In the holy island of Thera an
inscription commemorates the "wedding" of two young men, Erastos and
Klainos, which was celebrated with all sorts of ceremonies.
A distinction was even drawn in those days between homosexual love
which was purely sexual and the kind of love which was both sexual and
intellectual.
=Groups of Male Lovers=, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Kratinos and
Aristodemos, etc., became famous and legendary owing to their unusual
faithfulness and constancy. Pederasty was countenanced by the very
behavior of the Greek gods, of Zeus in particular.
The various philosophers granted women the right to indulge in
homosexual love if they wished, but, nevertheless, Lesbian love, as it
was called after Sappho of Lesbos, was rather considered as a freak
of nature, if not a vice. The low social condition of Hellenic women
accounts for that illogical difference in treatment.
=Women Were Harem Slaves= with little opportunity for intellectual
development and their homosexualism could not drape itself in the
mantle of intellectual pretence which it wore in the gymnasiums and
schools frequented by men.
Greek mythology offers no example of love between goddesses.
Sappho and the Lesbian poetesses gave female passion an eminent place
in Greek literature but the Aeolian women did not found a tradition
corresponding to that of the Dorian men.
We even find in Lucian's works a passage indicating that some of the
Greeks felt at the thought of female homosexualism the repugnance which
we feel at the thought of male homosexualism.
=The Tide Turns.= About the third century and until the
eighteenth, the tide turned, at least in the Western world, and
homosexualism found itself confronted by a barrier of penalties
which in certain lands included capital punishment. After the French
revolution such extreme penalties were abandoned in several European
countries.
At present, death is no longer the wages of the homosexual sin, but
jail sentences and ostracism of the most severe sort punish the
sinner when detected. Legally, then, homosexualism is considered as
a voluntary "perversion," to be punished, not as an abnormality, to
be treated or accepted. This position is absolutely ridiculous and
goes counter to every possible scientific view of homosexualism, its
nature and its genesis. Whether psychiatrists consider sexualism from
a "purely physical" point of view or from a "purely psychic" point
of view, they all consider it, not as a matter of free choice, but as
a compulsion, an organic compulsion according to the first view, an
unconscious mental compulsion according to the latter.
Opprobrium and punishment constitute no solution for any compulsion, be
it physical or mental.
=Many Theories= have been advanced as to the genesis of homosexualism
and most of them are very unsatisfactory because every one of them
generally excludes the others and because they attempt one thing which
cannot be done: to found homosexualism either on a purely physical or
on a purely mental basis. We can never understand homosexualism until
we consider it from an organic point of view, according to which mental
states are neither the cause nor the result of physical states, or vice
versa, but mental and physical states are two aspects of the organism,
of the personality.
The first hypothesis I intend to review is that of the Berlin
sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld which has had more influence on modern
thought than any other theory of homosexualism and which unfortunately
has been accepted as gospel truth by many homosexuals.
=The Third Sex.= Hirschfeld reminds us in his book "Intermediate
Sexual Stages" that during the first eight weeks of its existence, the
fetus is neither male nor female. It is only about the eighth week that
a differentiation takes place and that the sex of the unborn can be
determined.
A thousand physical influences may be at work in fetal life which
may cause underdevelopment of the male fetus' organs, which then may
resemble a female's in many particulars, or the overdevelopment of a
female's clitoris which may make it slightly similar to a man's penis.
Thousands of variations can be observed which, in certain cases, have
caused the attending physician to declare the child's sex as "doubtful."
According to the degree of development of their sexual organs,
Hirschfeld suggests a classification of the intermediates into
hermaphrodites, androgynes, transvestites, homosexuals and metatropists.
I shall not touch upon the first two classes, hermaphrodites and
androgynes, which are obvious, gross, physical malformations of a
congenital character.
Transvestism, homosexualism and metatropism, however, deserve careful
consideration.
=The Transvestites= are men who experience a craving to go about
dressed as women, women who are anxious to dress themselves as men.
Hirschfeld considers them as closely related to the male androgynes who
crave to have breasts like women and are ashamed of facial or bodily
hair, and to the female androgynes who are ashamed of their breasts and
wish to have a beard and body hair.
Transvestites generally explain that they do not feel free except in
the garb of the opposite sex. "In men's clothes," a male transvestite
said, "I have the feeling of wearing a uniform." "In feminine clothes,"
a female transvestite said, "I feel inhibited and hampered. It is only
when wearing masculine garments that I feel energetic and efficient."
The late Dr. Mary Walker, the French painter Rosa Bonheur, the French
explorer Madame Dieulafoy, were characteristic examples of energetic
women who felt compelled to abandon the garb of their sex and to dress
themselves as men.
=Are Transvestities Homosexual?= Dr. Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna objects
to drawing a line between transvestites and homosexuals. But we must
make a distinction. Hirschfeld is right in stating that there are no
more homosexuals among transvestites than among normal individuals. He
means, of course, _conscious_ homosexuals practicing their abnormal
form of love. We know however, that there are thousands of men and
women who, while _consciously_ experiencing the greatest disgust at
the thought of homosexual practices are _unconscious_ homosexuals.
Their dreams leave no doubt as to the nature of their cravings. We
may reconcile the Stekel view with the Hirschfeld view by saying that
transvestites are in the majority of cases unconscious homosexuals.
They may _consciously_ lead a most normal life: Madame Dieulafoy was
married and apparently very devoted to her husband whom she followed on
all his voyages of exploration.
_Unconsciously_, however, and for reasons which we shall examine later,
transvestites crave a change of sex.
=Metatropism= is masculine behavior in women, feminine behavior in
men. Normal man is physiologically aggressive in love, normal woman is
submissive. In cases of metatropism, those characteristics are reversed.
=The Metatropic Man= prefers tall, strong, powerful women,
often of a different nationality or race, at times, women with some
physiological handicap, lameness or deformity (the French philosopher
Descartes was attracted to women suffering from strabism). He generally
selects a woman older than himself, either very intellectual or very
low ethically. In one case he is dominated by her mental superiority,
in the other he feels that he is sacrificing his principles or
his social standing. Professional or business women appeal to him
especially. He is often a shoe fetishist. Clothing which denotes power,
authority, impresses him.
=The Metatropic Woman= seeks feminine, beardless men, with perhaps
a good head of long hair (poets, artists). Madame Dudevant, the French
novelist, adopted the masculine name George Sand and had affairs with
two sickly artists, Musset, the poet, and Chopin, the composer.
The metatropic woman is often a professional or business woman who, in
her love relation, assumes a very independent, dictatorial attitude to
men. She favors young men whom she can dominate better.
In what Hirschfeld calls metatropists, we recognise parent-fixation
men and women, obsessed by a conscious or unconscious incest fear, a
complication which has been discussed in another chapter.
Krafft-Ebing and Albert Eulenburg classify metatropic men with
masochists (see Chapter XX) and metatropic women with sadists (see