Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Vol. 1-6). Havelock Ellis
to do things which he vaguely, if at all, realizes are wrong, and that only because a puzzling sort of instinct tells him so; or else he is given just enough information to whet his curiosity, usually in the shape of warnings against certain apparently harmless bodily acts, which he not unnaturally tries out of curiosity, and finds them very pleasant. It may be undesirable that a boy should have full knowledge, at the time he goes to school, but it is more undesirable that he should go with a burning curiosity, or a total ignorance on the subject. I am convinced that much might be done in the way of prevention if boys were told more, and allowed to be open. Much of the pleasure of sexual talk among boys I believe to be due to the spurious interest aroused by the fact that it is forbidden fruit, and involves risk if caught. It seems to me that frankness is far more moral than suggestion. I would not 'expurgate' school editions of great authors; the frank obscenity of parts of Shakespeare is far less immoral than the prurient prudishness which declines to print it, but numbers the lines in such a way that the boy can go home and look up the omitted passage in a complete edition, with a distinct sense of guilt, which is where the harm comes in."
It is probable that only a small proportion of homosexual boys in schools can properly be described as "vicious." A. Hoche, describing homosexuality in German schools ("Zür Frage der forensischen Beurteilung sexuellen Vergehen," Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1896, No. 2), and putting together communications received from various medical men regarding their own youthful experiences at school, finds relationships of the kind very common, usually between boys of different ages and school-classes. According to one observer, the feminine, or passive, part was always played by a boy of girlish form and complexion, and the relationships were somewhat like those of normal lovers, with kissing, poems, love-letters, scenes of jealousy, sometimes visits to each other in bed, but without masturbation, pederasty, or other grossly physical manifestations. From his own youthful experience Hoche records precisely similar observations, and remarks that the lovers were by no means recruited from the vicious elements in the school. (The elder scholars, of 21 or 22 years of age, formed regular sexual relationships with the servant-girls in the house.) It is probable that the homosexual relationships in English schools are, as a rule, not more vicious than those described by Hoche, but that the concealment in which they are wrapped leads to exaggeration. In the course of a discussion on this matter over thirty years ago, "Olim Etoniensis" wrote (Journal of Education, 1882, p. 85) that, on making a list of the vicious boys he had known at Eton, he found that "these very boys had become cabinet ministers, statesmen, officers, clergymen, country-gentlemen, etc., and that they are nearly all of them fathers of thriving families, respected and prosperous." But, as Marro has remarked, the question is not thus settled. Public distinction by no means necessarily implies any fine degree of private morality.
Sometimes the manifestations thus appearing in schools or wherever youths are congregated together are not truly homosexual, but exhibit a more or less brutal or even sadistic perversion of the immature sexual instinct. This may be illustrated by the following narrative concerning a large London city warehouse: "A youth left my class at the age of 16½," writes a correspondent, "to take up an apprenticeship in a large wholesale firm in G—— Street. Fortunately he went on probation of three weeks before articling. He came to me at the end of the first week asking me to intercede with his mother (he had no father) not to let him return. He told me that almost nightly, and especially when new fellows came, the youths in his dormitory (eleven in number) would waylay him, hold him down, and rub his parts to the tune of some comic song or dance-music. The boy who could choose the fastest time had the privilege of performing the operation, and most had to be the victim in turn unless new boys entered, when they would sometimes be subjected to this for a week. This boy, having been brought up strictly, was shocked, dazed, and alarmed; but they stopped him from calling out, and he dared not report it. Most boys entered direct on their apprenticeship without probation, and had no chance to get out. I procured the boy's release from the place and gave the manager to understand what went on." In such a case as this it has usually happened that a strong boy of brutal and perverse instincts and some force of character initiates proceedings which the others either fall into with complacency or are too weak to resist.
Max Dessoir[127] came to the conclusion that "an undifferentiated sexual feeling is normal, on the average, during the first years of puberty—i.e., from 13 to 15 in boys and from 12 to 14 in girls—while in later years it must be regarded as pathological." He added very truly that in this early period the sexual emotion has not become centered in the sexual organs. This latter fact is certainly far too often forgotten by grown-up persons who suspect the idealized passion of boys and girls of a physical side which children have often no suspicion of, and would view with repulsion and horror. How far the sexual instinct may be said to be undifferentiated in early puberty as regards sex is a little doubtful. It is comparatively undifferentiated, but except in rare cases it is not absolutely undifferentiated.
We have to admit, however, that, in the opinion of the latest physiologists of sex, such as Castle, Heape, and Marshall, each sex contains the latent characters of the other or recessive sex. Each sex is latent in the other, and each, as it contains the characters of both sexes (and can transmit those of the recessive sex) is latently hermaphrodite. A homosexual tendency may thus be regarded as simply the psychical manifestation of special characters of the recessive sex, susceptible of being evolved under changed circumstances, such as may occur near puberty, and associated with changed metabolism.[128]
William James (Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, p. 439) considered inversion "a kind of sexual appetite of which very likely most men possess the germinal possibility." Conolly Norman (Article "Sexual Perversion," Tuke's Dictionary of Psychological Medicine) also stated that "the sexual passion, at its first appearance, is always indefinite, and is very easily turned in a wrong direction," and he apparently accounted for inversion by this fact, and by the precocity of neurotics. Obici and Marchesini (Le 'Amicizie' di collegio, p. 126) refer to the indeterminate character of the sexual feelings when they first begin to develop. A correspondent believes that sexual feelings are undifferentiated in the early years about puberty, but at the same time considers that school life is to some extent responsible; "the holidays," he adds, "are sufficiently long to counteract it, however, provided the boy has sisters and they have friends; the change from school fare and work to home naturally results in a greater surplus of nerve-force, and I think most boys 'fool about' with servants or their sisters' friends." Moll (Konträre Sexualempfindung, 1889, pp. 6 and 356) does not think it proved that a stage of undifferentiated sexual feeling always occurs, although we have to recognize that it is of frequent occurrence. In his later work (1909, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, English translation, The Sexual Life of the Child, ch. iv), Moll remains of the same opinion that a homosexual tendency is very frequent in normal children, whose later development is quite normal; it begins between the ages of 7 and 10 (or even at 5) and may last to 20.
In recent years Freud has accepted and developed the conception of the homosexual strain; as normal in early life. Thus, in 1905, in his "Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse" (reprinted in the second series of Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1909), Freud regards it as a well-known fact that boys and girls at puberty normally show plain signs of the existence of a homosexual tendency. Under favorable circumstances this tendency is overcome, but when a happy heterosexual love is not established it remains liable to reappear under the influence of an appropriate stimulus. In the neurotic these homosexual germs are more highly developed. "I have never carried through any psychoanalysis of a man or a woman," Freud states, "without discovering a very significant homosexual tendency." Ferenczi, again (Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. iii, 1911, p. 119), without reference to any physical basis of the impulse, accepts "the psychic capacity of the child to direct his originally objectless eroticism to one or both sexes," and terms this disposition ambisexuality. The normality of a homosexual element in early life may be said to be accepted by most psychoanalysts, even of the schools that are separated from Freud. Stekel would go farther, and regards various psychic sexual anomalies as signs of a concealed bisexual tendency; psychic impotence, the admiration of men for masculine women and of women for feminine men, various forms of fetichism—they