Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 Sexual Inversion

In Louisiana, Florida, Yucatan, etc., somewhat similar customs exist or have existed. In Brazil men are to be found dressed as women and solely occupying themselves with feminine occupations; they are not very highly regarded.[31] They are called cudinas: i.e., circumcized. Among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico these individuals are called mujerados (supposed to be a corruption of mujeriego) and are the chief passive agents in the homosexual ceremonies of these people. They are said to be intentionally effeminated in early life by much masturbation and by constant horse-riding.[32]

Among all the tribes of the northwest United States sexual inverts may be found. The invert is called a boté ("not man, not woman") by the Montana, and a burdash ("half-man, half-woman") by the Washington Indians. The boté has been carefully studied by Dr. A. B. Holder.[33] Holder finds that the boté wears woman's dress, and that his speech and manners are feminine. The dress and manners are assumed in childhood, but no sexual practices take place until puberty. These consist in the practice of fellatio by the boté, who probably himself experiences the orgasm at the same time. The boté is not a pederast, although pederasty occurs among these Indians. Holder examined boté who was splendidly made, prepossessing, and in perfect health. With much reluctance he agreed to a careful examination. The sexual organs were quite normal, though perhaps not quite so large as his physique would suggest, but he had never had intercourse with a woman. On removing his clothes he pressed his thighs together, as a timid woman would, so as to conceal completely the sexual organs; Holder says that the thighs "really, or to my fancy," had the feminine rotundity. He has heard a boté "beg a male Indian to submit to his caress," and he tells that "one little fellow, while in the agency boarding-school, was found frequently surreptitiously wearing female attire. He was punished, but finally escaped from school and became a boté, which vocation he has since followed."

At Tahiti at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Turnbull[34] found that "there are a set of men in this country whose open profession is of such abomination that the laudable delicacy of our language will not admit it to be mentioned. These are called by the natives Mahoos; they assume the dress, attitude, and manners of women, and affect all the fantastic oddities and coquetries of the vainest of females. They mostly associate with the women, who court their acquaintance. With the manners of the women they adopt their peculiar employments, making cloth, bonnets, and mats; and so completely are they unsexed that had they not been pointed out to me I should not have known them but as women. I add, with some satisfaction, that the encouragement of this abomination is almost solely confined to the chiefs."

Among the Sakalaves of Madagascar there are certain boys called sekatra, as described by Lasnet, who are apparently chosen from childhood on account of weak or delicate appearance and brought up as girls. They live like women and have intercourse with men, with or without sodomy, paying the men who please them.[35]

Among the negro population of Zanzibar forms of homosexuality which are believed to be congenital (as well as acquired forms) are said to be fairly common. Their frequency is thought to be due to Arab influence. The male congenital inverts show from their earliest years no aptitude for men's occupations, but are attracted toward female occupations. As they grow older they wear women's clothes, dress their hair in women's fashion, and behave altogether like women. They associate only with women and with male prostitutes, and they obtain sexual satisfaction by passive pederasty or in ways simulating coitus. In appearance they resemble ordinary male prostitutes, who are common in Zanzibar, but it is noteworthy that the natives make a clear distinction between them and men prostitutes. The latter are looked down on with contempt, while the former, as being what they are "by the will of God," are tolerated.[36]

Homosexuality; occurs in various parts of Africa. Cases of effeminatio and passive sodomy have been reported from Unyamwezi and Uganda. Among the Bangala of the Upper Congo sodomy between men is very common, especially when they are away from home, in strange towns, or in fishing camps. If, however, a man had intercourse with a woman per anum he was at one time liable to be put to death.[37]

Among the Papuans in some parts of New Guinea, as already mentioned, homosexuality is said to be well recognized, and is resorted to for convenience as well, perhaps, as for Malthusian reasons.[38] But in the Rigo district of British New Guinea, where habitual sodomy is not practised, Dr. Seligmann, of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, made some highly important observations on several men and women who clearly appeared to be cases of congenital sexual inversion with some degree of esthetic inversion and even some anatomical modification.[39] These people, it may be noted, belong to a primitive race, uncontaminated by contact with white races, and practically still in the Stone Age.

Finally, among another allied primitive people, the Australians, it would appear that homosexuality has long been well established in tribal customs. Among the natives of Kimberley, Western Australia (who are by no means of low type, quick and intelligent, with special aptitudes for learning languages and music), if a wife is not obtainable for a young man he is presented with a boy-wife between the ages of 5 and 10 (the age when a boy receives his masculine initiation). The exact nature of the relations between the boy-wife and his protector are doubtful; they certainly have connection, but the natives repudiate with horror and disgust the idea of sodomy.[40]

Further light is thrown on homosexuality in Australia by the supposition of Spencer and Gillen that the mika operation (urethral subincision), an artificial hypospadias, is for the purpose of homosexual intercourse. Klaatsch has discussed the homosexual origin of the mika operation on the basis of information he received from missionaries at Niol-Niol, on the northwest coast. The subincised man acts as a female to the as yet unoperated boys, who perform coitus in the incised opening. Both informed Klaatsch in 1906 that at Boulia in Queensland the operated men are said to "possess a vulva."[41]

These various accounts are of considerable interest, though for the most part their precise significance remains doubtful. Some of them, however,—such as Holder's description of the boté, Baumann's account of homosexual phenomena in Zanzibar, and especially Seligmann's observations in British New Guinea,—indicate not only the presence of esthetic inversion but of true congenital sexual inversion. The extent of the evidence will doubtless be greatly enlarged as the number of competent observers increases, and crucial points are no longer so frequently overlooked.

On the whole, the evidence shows that among lower races homosexual practices are regarded with considerable indifference, and the real invert, if he exists among them, as doubtless he does exist, generally passes unperceived or joins some sacred caste which sanctifies his exclusively homosexual inclinations.

Even in Europe today a considerable lack of repugnance to homosexual practices may be found among the lower classes. In this matter, as folklore shows in so many other matters, the uncultured man of civilization is linked to the savage. In England, I am told, the soldier often has little or no objection to prostitute himself to the "swell" who pays him, although for pleasure he prefers to go to women; and Hyde Park is spoken of as a center of male prostitution.

"Among the working masses of England and Scotland," Q. writes, "'comradeship' is well marked, though not (as in Italy) very conscious of itself. Friends often kiss each other, though this habit seems to vary a good deal in different sections and coteries. Men commonly sleep together, whether comrades or not, and so easily get familiar. Occasionally, but not so very often, this relation delays for a time, or even indefinitely, actual marriage, and in some instances is highly passionate and romantic. There is a good deal of grossness, no doubt, here and there in this direction among the masses; but there are no male prostitutes (that I am aware of) whose regular clients are manual workers. This kind of prostitution in London is common enough, but I have only a slight personal knowledge of it. Many youths are 'kept' handsomely in apartments by wealthy men, and they are, of course, not always inaccessible to others. Many keep themselves in lodgings by this means, and others eke out scanty wages by the same device: just like women, in fact. Choirboys reinforce the ranks to a considerable extent, and private soldiers to a large extent. Some of the barracks (notably Knightsbridge) are great centres. On summer evenings Hyde Park and the neighborhood of Albert Gate is full of guardsmen and others plying a lively trade, and with little disguise, in uniform or out.

In these cases it sometimes only amounts to a chat on a retired seat or a drink at a bar; sometimes recourse is had to a room in some known lodging-house, or to one or two hotels which lend themselves to this kind of business. In any case it means a covetable addition to Tommy Atkins's pocket-money." And Mr. Raffalovich, speaking of London, remarks: "The number of soldiers who prostitute themselves is greater than we are willing to believe. It is no exaggeration to say that in certain regiments the presumption is in favor of the venality of the majority of the men." It is worth noting that there is a perfect understanding in this matter between soldiers and the police, who may always be relied upon by the former for assistance and advice. I am indebted to my correspondent "Z" for the following notes: "Soldiers are no less sought after in France than in England or in Germany, and special houses exist for military prostitution both in Paris and the garrison-towns. Many facts known about the French army go to prove that these habits have been contracted in Algeria, and have spread to a formidable extent through whole regiments. The facts related by Ulrichs about the French foreign legion, on the testimony of a credible witness who had been a pathic in his regiment, deserve attention (Ara Spei, p. 20; Memnon, p. 27). This man, who was a German, told Ulrichs that the Spanish, French, and Italian soldiers were the lovers, the Swiss and German their beloved (see also General Brossier's Report, quoted by Burton, Arabian Nights, vol. x, p. 251).

In Lucien Descaves's military novel, Sous Offs (Paris, Tresse et Stock, 1890), some details are given regarding establishments for male prostitution. See pages 322, 412, and 417 for description of the drinking-shop called 'Aux Amis de l'Armée,' where a few maids were kept for show, and also of its frequenters, including, in particular, the Adjutant Laprévotte. Ulrichs reports that in the Austrian army lectures on homosexual vices are regularly given to cadets and conscripts (Memnon, p. 26). A soldier who had left the army told a friend of mine that he and many of his comrades had taken to homosexual indulgences when abroad on foreign service in a lonely station. He kept the practice up in England 'because the women of his class were so unattractive.' The captain of an English man-of-war said that he was always glad to send his men on shore after a long cruise at sea, never feeling sure how far they might not all go if left without women for a certain space of time." I may add that A. Hamon (La France Sociale et Politique, 1891, pp. 653-55; also in his Psychologie du Militaire Professional, chapter x) gives details as to the prevalence of homosexuality in the French army, especially in Algeria; he regards it as extremely common, although the majority are free. A fragment of a letter by General Lamoricière (speaking of Marshal Changarnier) is quoted: En Afrique nous en étions tous, mais lui en est resté ici.

This primitive indifference is doubtless also a factor in the prevalence of homosexuality among criminals, although, here, it must be remembered, two other factors (congenital abnormality and the isolation of imprisonment) have to be considered. In Russia, Tarnowsky observes that all pederasts are agreed that the common people are tolerably indifferent to their sexual advances, which they call "gentlemen's games." A correspondent remarks on "the fact, patent to all observers, that simple folk not infrequently display no greater disgust for the abnormalities of sexual appetite than they do for its normal manifestations."[42] He knows of many cases in which men of lower class were flattered and pleased by the attentions of men of higher class, although not themselves inverted. And from this point of view the following case, which he mentions, is very instructive:—

A pervert whom I can trust told me that he had made advances to upward of one hundred men in the course of the last fourteen years, and that he had only once met with a refusal (in which case the man later on offered himself spontaneously) and only once with an attempt to extort money. Permanent relations of friendship sprang up in most instances. He admitted that he looked after these persons and helped them with his social influence and a certain amount of pecuniary support—setting one up in business, giving another something to marry on, and finding places for others.

Among the peasantry in Switzerland, I am informed, homosexual relationships are not uncommon before marriage, and such relationships are lightly spoken of as "Dummheiten". No doubt, similar traits might be found in the peasantry of other parts of Europe.

What may be regarded as true sexual inversion can be traced in Europe from the beginning of the Christian era (though we can scarcely demonstrate the congenital element) especially among two classes—men of exceptional ability and criminals; and also, it may be added, among those neurotic and degenerate individuals who may be said to lie between these two classes, and on or over the borders of both. Homosexuality, mingled with various other sexual abnormalities and excesses, seems to have flourished in Rome during the empire, and is well exemplified in the persons of many of the emperors.[43] Julius Cæsar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Commodus, and Heliogabalus—many of them men of great ability and, from a Roman standpoint, great moral worth—are all charged, on more or less solid evidence, with homosexual practices. In Julius Cæsar—"the husband of all women and the wife of all men" as he was satirically termed—excess of sexual activity seems to have accompanied, as is sometimes seen, an excess of intellectual activity. He was first accused of homosexual practices after a long stay in Bithynia with King Nikomedes, and the charge was very often renewed. Cæsar was proud of his physical beauty, and, like some modern inverts, he was accustomed carefully to shave and epilate his body to preserve the smoothness of the skin.

Hadrian's love for his beautiful slave Antinoüs is well known; the love seems to have been deep and mutual, and Antinoüs has become immortalized, partly by the romance of his obscure death and partly by the new and strangely beautiful type which he has given to sculpture.[44] Heliogabalus, "the most homosexual of all the company," as he has been termed, seems to have been a true sexual invert, of feminine type; he dressed as a woman and was devoted to the men he loved.[45]

Homosexual practices everywhere flourish and abound in prisons. There is abundant evidence on this point. I will only bring forward the evidence of Dr. Wey, formerly physician to the Elmira Reformatory, New York. "Sexuality" (he wrote in a private letter) "is one of the most troublesome elements with which we have to contend. I have no data as to the number of prisoners here who are sexually perverse. In my pessimistic moments I should feel like saying that all were; but probably 80 per cent, would be a fair estimate." And, referring to the sexual influence which some men have over others, he remarks that "there are many men with features suggestive of femininity that attract others to them in a way that reminds me of a bitch in heat followed by a pack of dogs."[46] In Sing Sing prison of New York, 20 per cent, of the prisoners are said to be actively homosexual and a large number of the rest passively homosexual. These prison relationships are not always of a brutal character, McMurtrie states, the attraction sometimes being more spiritual than physical.[47]

Prison life develops and fosters the homosexual tendency of criminals; but there can be little doubt that that tendency, or else a tendency to sexual indifference or bisexuality, is a radical character of a very large number of criminals. We may also find it to a considerable extent among tramps, an allied class of undoubted degenerates, who, save for brief seasons, are less familiar with prison life. I am able to bring forward interesting evidence on this point by an acute observer who lived much among tramps in various countries, and largely devoted himself to the study of them.[48]

There cannot be the slightest doubt that intellectual and artistic abilities of the highest order have frequently been associated with a congenitally inverted sexual temperament. There has been a tendency among inverts themselves to discover their own temperament in many distinguished persons on evidence of the most slender character. But it remains a demonstrable fact that numerous highly distinguished persons, of the past and the present, in various countries, have been inverts. I may here refer to my own observations on this point in the preface. Mantegazza (Gli Amori degli Uomini) remarks that in his own restricted circle he is acquainted with "a French publicist, a German poet, an Italian statesman, and a Spanish jurist, all men of exquisite taste and highly cultivated mind," who are sexually inverted. Krafft-Ebing, in the preface to his Psychopathia Sexualis, referring to the "numberless" communications he has received from these "step-children of nature," remarks that "the majority of the writers are men of high intellectual and social position, and often possess very keen emotions."

Raffalovich (Uranisme, p. 197) names among distinguished inverts, Alexander the Great, Epaminondas, Virgil, the great Condé, Prince Eugène, etc. (The question of Virgil's inversion is discussed in the Revista di Filologia, 1890, fas. 7-9, but I have not been able to see this review.) Moll, in his Berühmte Homosexuelle (1910, in the series of Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens) discusses the homosexuality of a number of eminent persons, for the most part with his usual caution and sagacity; speaking of the alleged homosexuality of Wagner he remarks, with entire truth, that "the method of arguing the existence of homosexuality from the presence of feminine traits must be decisively rejected." Hirschfeld has more recently included in his great work Die Homosexualität (1913, pp. 650-674) two lists, ancient and modern, of alleged inverts among the distinguished persons of history, briefly stating the nature of the evidence in each case. They amount to nearly 300. Not all of them, however, can be properly described as distinguished. Thus we end in the list 43 English names; of these at least half a dozen were noblemen who were concerned in homosexual prosecutions, but were of no intellectual distinction. Others, again, are of undoubted eminence, but there is no good reason to regard them as homosexual; this is the case, for instance, as regards Swift, who may have been mentally abnormal, but appears to have been heterosexual rather than homosexual;

Fletcher, of whom we know nothing definite in this respect, is also included, as well as Tennyson, whose youthful sentimental friendship for Arthur Hallam is exactly comparable to that of Montaigne for Etienne de la Boëtie, yet Montaigne is not included in the list. It may be added, however, that while some of the English names in the list are thus extremely doubtful, it would have been possible to add some others who were without doubt inverts.

It has not, I think, been noted—largely because the evidence was insufficiently clear—that among moral leaders, and persons with strong ethical instincts, there is a tendency toward the more elevated forms of homosexual feeling. This may be traced, not only in some of the great moral teachers of old, but also in men and women of our own day. It is fairly evident why this should be so. Just as the repressed love of a woman or a man has, in normally constituted persons, frequently furnished the motive power for an enlarged philanthropic activity, so the person who sees his own sex also bathed in sexual glamour, brings to his work of human service an ardor wholly unknown to the normally constituted individual; morality to him has become one with love.[50] I am not prepared here to insist on this point, but no one, I think, who studies sympathetically the histories and experiences of great moral leaders can fail in many cases to note the presence of this feeling, more or less finely sublimated from any gross physical manifestation.

If it is probable that in moral movements persons of homosexual temperament have sometimes become prominent, it is undoubtedly true, beyond possibility of doubt, that they have been prominent in religion. Many years ago (in 1885) the ethnologist, Elie Reclus, in his charming book, Les Primitifs,[51] setting forth the phenomena of homosexuality among the Eskimo Innuit tribe, clearly insisted that from time immemorial there has been a connection between the invert and the priest, and showed how well this connection is illustrated by the Eskimo schupans. Much more recently, in his elaborate study of the priest, Horneffer discusses the feminine traits of priests and shows that, among the most various peoples, persons of sexually abnormal and especially homosexual temperament have assumed the functions of priesthood. To the popular eye the unnatural is the supernatural, and the abnormal has appeared to be specially close to the secret Power of the World. Abnormal persons are themselves of the same opinion and regard themselves as divine. As Horneffer points out, they often really possess special aptitude.[52] Karsch in his Gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Naturvölker (1911) has brought out the high religious as well as social significance of castes of cross-dressed and often homosexual persons among primitive peoples.

At the same time Edward Carpenter in his remarkable book, Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk (1914), has shown with much insight how it comes about that there is an organic connection between the homosexual temperament and unusual psychic or divinatory powers. Homosexual men were non-warlike and homosexual women non-domestic, so that their energies sought different outlets from those of ordinary men and women; they became the initiators of new activities. Thus it is that from among them would in some degree issue not only inventors and craftsmen and teachers, but sorcerers and diviners, medicine-men and wizards, prophets and priests. Such persons would be especially impelled to thought, because they would realize that they were different from other people; treated with reverence by some and with contempt by others, they would be compelled to face the problems of their own nature and, indirectly, the problems of the world generally. Moreover, Carpenter points out, persons in whom the masculine and feminine temperaments were combined would in many cases be persons of intuition and complex mind beyond their fellows, and so able to exercise divination and prophecy in a very real and natural sense.[53]

This aptitude of the invert for primitive religion, for sorcery and divination, would have its reaction on popular feeling, more especially when magic and the primitive forms of religion began to fall into disrepute. The invert would be regarded as the sorcerer of a false and evil religion and be submerged in the same ignominy. This point has been emphasized by Westermarck in the instructive chapter on homosexuality in his great work on Moral Ideas.[54] He points out the significance of the fact, at the first glance apparently inexplicable, that homosexuality in the general opinion of medieval Christianity was constantly associated, even confounded, with heresy, as we see significantly illustrated by the fact that in France and England the popular designation for homosexuality is derived from the Bulgarian heretics. It was, Westermarck believes, chiefly as a heresy and out of religious zeal that homosexuality was so violently reprobated and so ferociously punished.

In modern Europe we find the strongest evidence of the presence of what may fairly be called true sexual inversion when we investigate the men of the Renaissance. The intellectual independence of those days and the influence of antiquity seem to have liberated and fully developed the impulses of those abnormal individuals who would otherwise have found no clear expression, and passed unnoticed.[55]

Muret, the Humanist, may perhaps be regarded as a typical example of the nature and fate of the superior invert of the Renaissance. Born in 1526 at Muret (Limousin), of poor but noble family, he was of independent, somewhat capricious character, unable to endure professors, and consequently he was mainly his own teacher, though he often sought advice from Jules-César Scaliger. Muret was universally admired in his day for his learning and his eloquence, and is still regarded not only as a great Latinist and a fine writer, but as a notable man, of high intelligence, and remarkable, moreover, for courtesy in polemics in an age when that quality was not too common. His portrait shows a somewhat coarse and rustic but intelligent face. He conquered honor and respect before he died in 1585, at the age of 59. In early life Muret wrote wanton erotic poems to women which seem based on personal experience. But in 1553 we find him imprisoned in the Châtelet for sodomy and in danger of his life, so that he thought of starving himself to death. Friends, however, obtained his release and he settled in Toulouse. But the very next year he was burnt in effigy in Toulouse, as a Huguenot and sodomist, this being the result of a judicial sentence which had caused him to flee from the city and from France. Four years later he had to flee from Padua owing to a similar accusation. He had many friends but none of them protested against the charge, though they aided him to escape from the penalty.

It is very doubtful whether he was a Huguenot, and whenever in his works he refers to pederasty it is with strong disapproval. But his writings reveal passionate friendship for men, and he seems to have expended little energy in combating a charge which, if false, was a shameful injustice to him. It was after fleeing into Italy and falling ill of a fever from fatigue and exposure that Muret is said to have made the famous retort (to the physician by his bedside who had said: "Faciamus experimentum in anima vili"): "Vilem animam appellas pro qua Christus non dedignatus est mori."[56]

A greater Humanist than Muret, Erasmus himself, seems as a young man, when in the Augustinian monastery of Stein, to have had a homosexual attraction to another Brother (afterward Prior) to whom he addressed many passionately affectionate letters; his affection seems, however, to have been unrequited.[57]

As the Renaissance developed, homosexuality seems to become more prominent among distinguished persons. Poliziano was accused of pederasty. Aretino was a pederast, as Pope Julius II seems also to have been. Ariosto wrote in his satires, no doubt too extremely:—

It is, however, among artists, at that time and later, that homosexuality may most notably be traced. Leonardo da Vinci, whose ideals as revealed in his work are so strangely bisexual, lay under homosexual suspicion in his youth. In 1476, when he was 24 years of age, charges were made against him before the Florentine officials for the control of public morality, and were repeated, though they do not appear to have been substantiated. There is, however, some ground for supposing that Leonardo was imprisoned in his youth.[60] Throughout life he loved to surround himself with beautiful youths and his pupils were more remarkable for their attractive appearance than for their skill; to one at least of them he was strongly attached, while there is no record of any attachment to a woman. Freud, who has studied Leonardo with his usual subtlety, considers that his temperament was marked by "ideal homosexuality."[61]