"Male Greek statuary and the Phdrus 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sive s.e.xual 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 s.e.xuality 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 cla.s.s, and the idea of prost.i.tution 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 apt.i.tude, 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 gla.s.s. 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 s.e.x does not attract me, but I am very fond of children, girls as well as boys. (If there is s.e.xuality 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual outlook on life. While, however, it is the rule for the permanent direction of the s.e.xual 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual 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 heteros.e.xuality a.s.serted 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 h.o.m.os.e.xuality extremely common in schools. It was, however, the Oscar Wilde case which first opened his eyes to the wide prevalence of h.o.m.os.e.xuality, and he considers that the publicity of that case has done much, if not to increase h.o.m.os.e.xuality, 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 h.o.m.os.e.xuality. 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual or emotional instinct of each. No attempt was made at discrimination. A kiss was as unclean as the act of f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o, and no one had any gauge or principle whatever on which to guide the cravings of boyhood.
"My first initiation into the mysteries of s.e.x was at the hands of the dormitory servant, who showed me his p.e.n.i.s when he woke me in the mornings, and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed me when he gave me my hot bath on a Sat.u.r.day night. This old reprobate of 45 committed the act of f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o 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 princ.i.p.al 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 s.e.xual 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 n.o.ble 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 l.u.s.ts. The boy who occupied the cubicle next to mine was also a bad case of s.e.xual 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, m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed 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 s.e.xual 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 mora.s.s 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 chast.i.ty. 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 16 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 s.e.xual morals of the school never occurred to us. In fact, we lived a dream-life of chast.i.ty 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 s.e.xual 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e 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 pa.s.sions I could not then a.n.a.lyze and in the end committed the greatest of schoolboy crimes,-I sneaked. The action under the circ.u.mstances 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 h.e.l.l, 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 s.e.xual 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 circ.u.mstances: "If you do this," he said, "you will never be able to use your p.e.n.i.s with a woman. Therefore your best plan will be to go with a prost.i.tute. 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 d.a.m.ned 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 chast.i.ty; but then a change gradually set in, and I began to understand the relationship of the physical phenomena of s.e.x 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 Gra.s.s 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x phenomena: erotic dreams, loss of s.e.m.e.n, 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 m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed, 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 cla.s.s, whose development he was able to a.s.sist. "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 s.e.xual troubles vanished, together with the desire to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. "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 p.u.b.erty, and attaches importance to this as a factor in the evolution of his h.o.m.os.e.xual 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 pa.s.sionate emotions as with men.
He would like a son, but he has never been able to get up the necessary amount of pa.s.sion 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual pa.s.sions. He is averse to promiscuity. His ideal is a permanent union which includes s.e.xual 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual. 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual. 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 gla.s.ses 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual. My s.e.xual 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-a.n.a.lytical. 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 s.e.xual 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 2 and again at 3 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 12 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 psychoa.n.a.lytical method, with great success. I had a very bad relapse, as my brother, who had just heard I was h.o.m.os.e.xual, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 s.e.x 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. n.o.body at home believed me to know anything about life. They were at times very surprised when I fell out of the role 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 heteros.e.xual. 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 G.o.d 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 heteros.e.xual 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 s.e.xual intercourse with women.
"In Copenhagen I tried to excite my feelings with every cla.s.s 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.