The origin and development of the moral ideas

A very important cause of homosexual practices is absence of the other sex. There are many instances of this among the lower animals.72 Buffon long ago observed that, if male or female birds of various species were shut up together, they would soon begin to have sexual relations among themselves, the males sooner than the females.73 The West Australian boy-marriage is a substitute for ordinary marriage in cases when women are not obtainable. Among the Bororó of Brazil homosexual intercourse is said to occur in their men-houses only when the scarcity of accessible girls is unusually great.74 Its prevalence in Tahiti may perhaps be connected with the fact that there was only one woman to four or five men, owing to the habit of female infanticide.75 Among the Chinese in certain regions, for instance Java, the lack of accessible women is the principal cause of homosexual practices.76 According to some writers such practices are the results of polygamy.77 In Muhammedan countries they are no doubt largely due to the seclusion of women, preventing free intercourse between the sexes and compelling the unmarried people to associate almost exclusively with members of their own sex. Among the mountaineers of Northern Morocco the excessive indulgence in pederasty thus goes hand in hand with great isolation of the women and a very high standard of female chastity, whereas among the Arabs of the plains, who are little addicted to boy-love, the unmarried girls enjoy considerable freedom.

Both in Asia78 and Europe79 the obligatory celibacy of the monks and priests has been a cause of homosexual practices, though it must not be forgotten that a profession which imposes abstinence from marriage is likely to attract a comparatively large number of congenital inverts. The temporary separation of the sexes involved in a military mode of life no doubt accounts for the extreme prevalence of homosexual love among warlike races,80 like the Sikhs, Afghans, Dorians, and Normans.81 In Persia82 and Morocco it is particularly common among soldiers. In Japan it was an incident of knighthood, in New Caledonia and North America of brotherhood in arms. At least in some of the North American tribes men who were dressed as women accompanied the other men as servants in war and the chase.83 Among the Banaka and Bapuku in the Cameroons pederasty is practised especially by men who are long absent from their wives.84 In Morocco I have heard it advocated on account of the convenience it affords to persons who are travelling.

Dr. Havelock Ellis justly observes that when homosexual attraction is due simply to the absence of the other sex we are not concerned with sexual inversion, but merely with the accidental turning of the sexual instinct into an abnormal channel, the instinct being called out by an approximate substitute, or even by diffused emotional excitement, in the absence of the normal object.85 But it seems to me probable that in such cases the homosexual attraction in the course of time quite easily develops into genuine inversion. I cannot but think that our chief authorities on homosexuality have underestimated the modifying influence which habit may exercise on the sexual instinct. Professor Krafft-Ebing86 and Dr. Moll87 deny the existence of acquired inversion except in occasional instances; and Dr. Havelock Ellis takes a similar view, if putting aside those cases of a more or less morbid character in which old men with failing sexual powers, or younger men exhausted by heterosexual debauchery, are attracted to members of their own sex.88 But how is it that in some parts of Morocco such a very large proportion of the men are distinctly sexual inverts, in the sense in which this word is used by Dr. Havelock Ellis,89 that is, persons who for the gratification of their sexual desire prefer their own sex to the opposite one? It may be that in Morocco and in Oriental countries generally, where almost every individual marries, congenital inversion, through the influence of heredity, is more frequent than in Europe, where inverts so commonly abstain from marrying.

But that this could not be an adequate explanation of the fact in question becomes at once apparent when we consider the extremely unequal distribution of inverts among different neighbouring tribes of the same stock, some of which are very little or hardly at all addicted to pederasty. I take the case to be, that homosexual practices in early youth have had a lasting effect on the sexual instinct, which at its first appearance, being somewhat indefinite, is easily turned into a homosexual direction.90 In Morocco inversion is most prevalent among the scribes, who from childhood have lived in very close association with their fellow-students. Of course, influences of this kind “require a favourable organic predisposition to act on”;91 but this predisposition is probably no abnormality at all, only a feature in the ordinary sexual constitution of man.92 It should be noticed that the most common form of inversion, at least in Muhammedan countries, is love of boys or youths not yet in the age of puberty, that is, of male individuals who are physically very like girls. Voltaire observes:—“Souvent un jeune garçon, par la fraîcheur de son teint, par l’éclat de ses couleurs, et par la douceur de ses yeux, ressemble pendant deux ou trois ans à une belle fille; si on l’aime, c’est parce que la nature se méprend.”93 Moreover, in normal cases sexual attraction depends not only on sex, but on a youthful appearance as well; and there are persons so constituted that to them the latter factor is of chief importance, whilst the question of sex is almost a matter of indifference.

In ancient Greece, also, not only homosexual intercourse but actual inversion, seems to have been very common; and although this, like every form of love, must have contained a congenital element, there can be little doubt, I think, that it was largely due to external circumstances of a social character. It may, in the first place, be traced to the methods of training the youth. In Sparta it seems to have been the practice for every youth of good character to have his lover, or “inspirator,”94 and for every well-educated man to be the lover of some youth.95 The relations between the “inspirator” and the “listener” were extremely intimate: at home the youth was constantly under the eyes of his lover, who was supposed to be to him a model and pattern of life;96 in battle they stood near one another and their fidelity and affection were often shown till death;97 if his relatives were absent, the youth might be represented in the public assembly by his lover;98 and for many faults, particularly want of ambition, the lover could be punished instead of the “listener.”99 This ancient custom prevailed with still greater force in Crete, which island was hence by many persons considered to be the place of its birth.100 Whatever may have been the case originally, there can be no doubt that in later times the relations between the youth and his lover implied unchaste intercourse.101 And in other Greek states the education of the youth was accompanied by similar consequences.

At an early age the boy was taken away from his mother, and spent thenceforth all his time in the company of men, until he reached the age when marriage became for him a civic duty.102 According to Plato, the gymnasia and common meals among the youth “seem always to have had a tendency to degrade the ancient and natural custom of love below the level, not only of man, but of the beasts.”103 Plato also mentions the effect which these habits had on the sexual instincts of the men: when they reached manhood they were lovers of youths and not naturally inclined to marry or beget children, but, if at all, they did so only in obedience to the law.104 Is not this, in all probability, an instance of acquired inversion? But besides the influence of education there was another factor which, co-operating with it, favoured the development of homosexual tendencies, namely, the great gulf which mentally separated the sexes. Nowhere else has the difference in culture between men and women been so immense as in the fully developed Greek civilisation. The lot of a wife in Greece was retirement and ignorance.

She lived in almost absolute seclusion, in a separate part of the house, together with her female slaves, deprived of all the educating influence of male society, and having no place at those public spectacles which were the chief means of culture.105 In such circumstances it is not difficult to understand that men so highly intellectual as those of Athens regarded the love of women as the offspring of the common Aphrodite, who “is of the body rather than of the soul.”106 They had reached a stage of mental culture at which the sexual instinct normally has a craving for refinement, at which the gratification of mere physical lust appears brutal. In the eyes of the most refined among them those who were inspired by the heavenly Aphrodite loved neither women nor boys, but intelligent beings whose reason was beginning to be developed, much about the time at which their beards began to grow.107 In present China we meet with a parallel case. Dr. Matignon observes:—“Il y a tout lieu de supposer que certains Chinois, raffinés au point de vue intellectuel, recherchent dans la pédérastie la satisfaction des sens et de l’esprit. La femme chinoise est peu cultivée, ignorante même, quelle que soit sa condition, honnête femme ou prostituée.

Or le Chinois a souvent l’âme poétique: il aime les vers, la musique, les belles sentences des philosophes, autant de choses qu’il ne peut trouver chez le beau sexe de l’Empire du Milieu.”108 So also it seems that the ignorance and dullness of Muhammedan women, which is a result of their total lack of education and their secluded life, is a cause of homosexual practices; Moors are sometimes heard to defend pederasty on the plea that the company of boys, who have always news to tell, is so much more entertaining than the company of women.