Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Vol. 1-6). Havelock Ellis
to reassure me, growing ever more hopelessly ashamed of what it seemed was a criminal or a gravely morbid nature.
"Among all my fellow-students I knew of no one constituted like myself; but my natural reserve—increased, of course, by my consciousness of what I saw would be thought to be a criminal tendency—did not urge me to exchange of confidences or to the formation of; close friendships.
"After graduation I became a resident medical officer in the hospital and private assistant to one of the professors—a physician and teacher of worldwide reputation. With him I associated on the most cordial and affectionate terms; and often in the course of conversation I tried to bring him to discuss the subject, but without success. It was obviously unpleasant and uninteresting to him. Enough was said, however, to enable me to realize that he held the current ideas on the subject; and I would not for worlds have allowed him, to guess that I myself came under the despised and tainted category.
"I have seldom heard sexual inversion discussed among my professional friends. They speak of it with disgust or amusement. I have never met a professional man who would consider it dispassionately and scientifically. For them it was a subject entirely belonging to psychological medicine.
"I have had no admitted case of it among my patients; but I have often instinctively felt that some who consulted me about other matters would have taken me into their confidence about that, but for their fear of being cruelly misunderstood.
"As to my moral attitude I fear to speak. Grossness disgusts me; but I am not sure that I should be able to resist temptation placed in my way. But I am absolutely sure that I should never, under any circumstances, tempt others to any disgraceful act. If I ever committed any sexual act with one of my own sex whom I loved, I could not look at it or approach it in any other than a sacramental way. This sounds blasphemous and shocking, but I cannot otherwise express my meaning.
"As regards the marriage of inverts, my own feeling is that for a congenital invert—no matter how fully the situation be explained beforehand—it is a step fraught with too great possibilities of tragedy and of the deepest unhappiness, to be advised at all. My view is that for the invert, far more than for the ordinary person, there is no escape from the supreme necessity of self-control in any relationship he may form. If that be attained then the ideal is a relationship with another man of similar temperament—not a platonic one, necessarily—by means of which the highest happiness of both may be reached. But this can occur very seldom.
"To poetry and the fine arts I am very susceptible, and I have given a great deal of time to this study. I am devoted heart and soul to music, which is more and more to me every year I live. Trivial or light music I cannot endure, but of Beethoven, Bach, Händel, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, and Wagner I should never hear enough. Here, too, my sympathies, are very catholic, and I delight in McDowell, Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Hugo Wolf."
HISTORY VII.—"My parentage is very sound and healthy. Both my parents (who belong to the professional middle class) have good general health; nor can I trace any marked abnormal or diseased tendency, of mind or body, in any records of the family.
"Though of a strongly nervous temperament myself, and sensitive, my health is good. I am not aware of any tendency to physical disease. In early manhood, however, owing, I believe, to the great emotional tension under which I lived, my nervous system was a good deal shattered and exhausted. Mentally and morally my nature is pretty well balanced, and I have never had any serious perturbations in these departments.
"At the age of 8 or 9, and long before distinct sexual feelings declared themselves, I felt a friendly attraction toward my own sex, and this developed after the age of puberty into a passionate sense of love, which, however, never found any expression for itself till I was fully 20 years of age. I was a day-boarder at school and heard little of school-talk on sex subjects, was very reserved and modest besides; no elder person or parent ever spoke to me on such matters; and the passion for my own sex developed gradually, utterly uninfluenced from the outside. I never even, during all this period, and till a good deal later, learned the practice of masturbation. My own sexual nature was a mystery to me. I found myself cut off from the understanding of others, felt myself an outcast, and, with a highly loving and clinging temperament, was intensely miserable. I thought about my male friends—sometimes boys of my own age, sometimes elder boys, and once even a master—during the day and dreamed about them at night, but was too convinced that I was a hopeless monstrosity ever to make any effectual advances. Later on it was much the same, but gradually, though slowly, I came to find that there were others like myself. I made a few special friends, and at last it came to me occasionally to sleep with them and to satisfy my imperious need by mutual embraces and emissions. Before this happened, however, I was once or twice on the brink of despair and madness with repressed passion and torment.
"Meanwhile, from the first, my feeling, physically, toward the female sex was one of indifference, and later on, with the more special development of sex desires, one of positive repulsion. Though having several female friends, whose society I like and to whom I am sincerely attached, the thought of marriage or cohabitation with any such has always been odious to me.
"As a boy I was attracted in general by boys rather older than myself; after leaving school I still fell in love, in a romantic vein, with comrades of my own standing. Now—at the age of 37—my ideal of love is a powerful, strongly built man, of my own age or rather younger—preferably of the working class. Though having solid sense and character, he need not be specially intellectual. If endowed in the latter way, he must not be too glib or refined. Anything effeminate in a man, or anything of the cheap intellectual style, repels me very decisively.
"I have never had to do with actual pederasty, so called. My chief desire in love is bodily nearness or contact, as to sleep naked with a naked friend; the specially sexual, though urgent enough, seems a secondary matter. Pederasty, either active or passive, might seem in place to me with one I loved very devotedly and who also loved me to that degree; but I think not otherwise. I am an artist by temperament and choice, fond of all beautiful things, especially the male human form; of active, slight, muscular build; and sympathetic, but somewhat indecisive character, though possessing self-control.
"I cannot regard my sexual feelings as unnatural or abnormal, since they have disclosed themselves so perfectly naturally and spontaneously within me. All that I have read in books or heard spoken about the ordinary sexual love, its intensity and passion, lifelong devotion, love at first sight, etc., seems to me to be easily matched by my own experiences in the homosexual form; and, with regard to the morality of this complex subject, my feeling is that it is the same as should prevail in love between man and woman, namely: that no bodily satisfaction should be sought at the cost of another person's distress or degradation. I am sure that this kind of love is, notwithstanding the physical difficulties that attend it, as deeply stirring and ennobling as the other kind, if not more so; and I think that for a perfect relationship the actual sex gratifications (whatever they may be) probably hold a less important place in this love than in the other."
HISTORY VIII.—M. N., aged 30. "My grandfather might be said to be of abnormal temperament, for, though of very humble origin, he organized and carried out an extremely arduous mission work and became an accomplished linguist, translating the Bible into an Eastern tongue and compiling the first dictionary of that language. He died, practically of overwork, at the age of 45. He was twice married, my father being his third son by the second wife. I believe that two, if not more, of the family (numbering seven in all) were inverted, and the only one of them to marry was my father. My grandmother was the last representative of an old and very 'wild' Irish family. She died at an advanced age, of paralysis. My father was 36 and my mother 21 at the time of their marriage. I was born three years after and was their only child. The marriage proved a most unhappy one, they being utterly unsuited to each other in every way.
"My father's health during the first years of his marriage was very delicate, and I have reason to believe that it had been undermined in certain ways by his life abroad. I understand I was born with slight gonorrheal affection, and as a child my health was very indifferent. This latter may have been brought about by the peculiarly unhappy and unnatural life I led. I had no companions of my own age, and did not even attend any school