The origin and development of the moral ideas

No reference is made to pederasty either in the Homeric poems or by Hesiod, but later on we meet with it almost as a national institution in Greece. It was known in Rome and other parts of Italy at an early period;46 but here also it became much more frequent in the course of time. At the close of the sixth century, Polybius tells us, many Romans paid a talent for the possession of a beautiful youth.47 During the Empire “il était d’usage, dans les families patriciennes, de donner au jeune homme pubère un esclave du même âge comme compagnon de lit, afin qu’il pût satisfaire … ‘ses premiers élans’ génésiques”;48 and formal marriages between men were introduced with all the solemnities of ordinary nuptials.49 Homosexual practices occurred among the Celts,50 and were by no means unknown to the ancient Scandinavians, who had a whole nomenclature on the subject.51

Of late years a voluminous and constantly increasing literature on homosexuality52 has revealed its frequency in modern Europe. No country and no class of society is free from it. In certain parts of Albania it even exists as a popular custom, the young men from the age of sixteen upwards regularly having boy favourites of between twelve and seventeen.53

The above statements chiefly refer to homosexual practices between men, but similar practices also occur between women.54 Among the American aborigines there are not only men who behave like women, but women who behave like men. Thus in certain Brazilian tribes women are found who abstain from every womanly occupation and imitate the men in everything, who wear their hair in a masculine fashion, who go to war with a bow and arrows, who hunt together with the men, and who would rather allow themselves to be killed than have sexual intercourse with a man. “Each of these women has a woman who serves her and with whom she says she is married; they live together as husband and wife.”55 So also there are among the Eastern Eskimo some women who refuse to accept husbands, preferring to adopt masculine manners, following the deer on the mountains, trapping and fishing for themselves.56 Homosexual practices are said to be common among Hottentot57 and Herero58 women. In Zanzibar there are women who wear men’s clothes in private, show a preference for masculine occupations, and seek sexual satisfaction among women who have the same inclination, or else among normal women who are won over by presents or other means.59 In Egyptian harems every woman is said to have a “friend.”60 In Bali homosexuality is almost as common among women as among men, though it is exercised more secretly;61 and the same seems to be the case in India.62 From Greek antiquity we hear of “Lesbian” love.

The fact that homosexuality has been much more frequently noticed in men than in women does not imply that the latter are less addicted to it. For various reasons the sexual abnormalities of women have attracted much less attention,63 and moral opinion has generally taken little notice of them.

Homosexual practices are due sometimes to instinctive preference, sometimes to external conditions unfavourable to normal intercourse.64 A frequent cause is congenital sexual inversion, that is, “sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality toward persons of the same sex.”65 It seems likely that the feminine men and the masculine women referred to above are, at least in many instances, sexual inverts; though, in the case of shamans, the change of sex may also result from the belief that such transformed shamans, like their female colleagues, are particularly powerful.66 Dr. Holder affirms the existence of congenital inversion among the North-Western tribes of the United States,67 Dr. Baumann among the people of Zanzibar;68 and in Morocco, also, I believe it is common enough. But as regards its prevalence among non-European peoples we have mostly to resort to mere conjectures; our real knowledge of congenital inversion is derived from the voluntary confessions of inverts. The large majority of travellers are totally ignorant of the psychological side of the subject, and even to an expert it must very often be impossible to decide whether a certain case of inversion is congenital or acquired. Indeed, acquired inversion itself presupposes an innate disposition which under certain circumstances develops into actual inversion.69 Even between inversion and normal sexuality there seem to be all shades of variation.