CHAPTER XVII

HOMOSEXUALISM; ITS GENESIS

Love's normal goal is the union of the male and the female in a way which may insure the reproduction of the species. At times, however, we behold love deviating from the path that leads to that goal: a man may love another man as passionately as he would love a woman, a woman may be consumed with desire for another woman.

Certain parts of the ancient world looked with indifference upon such deviations from the normal. The poems of Sappho, the dialogues of Plato, to only mention the best known sources of information on the subject, prove that in classic Greece homosexual unions were countenanced by public opinion. In the "Banquet" young Alkibiades describes, with a frankness reminiscent of eighteenth century novels, his attempts at "seducing" Socrates. In the holy island of Thera an inscription commemorates the "wedding" of two young men, Erastos and Klainos, which was celebrated with all sorts of ceremonies.

A distinction was even drawn in those days between homosexual love which was purely sexual and the kind of love which was both sexual and intellectual.

=Groups of Male Lovers=, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Kratinos and Aristodemos, etc., became famous and legendary owing to their unusual faithfulness and constancy. Pederasty was countenanced by the very behavior of the Greek gods, of Zeus in particular.

The various philosophers granted women the right to indulge in homosexual love if they wished, but, nevertheless, Lesbian love, as it was called after Sappho of Lesbos, was rather considered as a freak of nature, if not a vice. The low social condition of Hellenic women accounts for that illogical difference in treatment.

=Women Were Harem Slaves= with little opportunity for intellectual development and their homosexualism could not drape itself in the mantle of intellectual pretence which it wore in the gymnasiums and schools frequented by men.

Greek mythology offers no example of love between goddesses.

Sappho and the Lesbian poetesses gave female passion an eminent place in Greek literature but the Aeolian women did not found a tradition corresponding to that of the Dorian men.

We even find in Lucian's works a passage indicating that some of the Greeks felt at the thought of female homosexualism the repugnance which we feel at the thought of male homosexualism.

=The Tide Turns.= About the third century and until the eighteenth, the tide turned, at least in the Western world, and homosexualism found itself confronted by a barrier of penalties which in certain lands included capital punishment. After the French revolution such extreme penalties were abandoned in several European countries.

At present, death is no longer the wages of the homosexual sin, but jail sentences and ostracism of the most severe sort punish the sinner when detected. Legally, then, homosexualism is considered as a voluntary "perversion," to be punished, not as an abnormality, to be treated or accepted. This position is absolutely ridiculous and goes counter to every possible scientific view of homosexualism, its nature and its genesis. Whether psychiatrists consider sexualism from a "purely physical" point of view or from a "purely psychic" point of view, they all consider it, not as a matter of free choice, but as a compulsion, an organic compulsion according to the first view, an unconscious mental compulsion according to the latter.

Opprobrium and punishment constitute no solution for any compulsion, be it physical or mental.

=Many Theories= have been advanced as to the genesis of homosexualism and most of them are very unsatisfactory because every one of them generally excludes the others and because they attempt one thing which cannot be done: to found homosexualism either on a purely physical or on a purely mental basis. We can never understand homosexualism until we consider it from an organic point of view, according to which mental states are neither the cause nor the result of physical states, or vice versa, but mental and physical states are two aspects of the organism, of the personality.

The first hypothesis I intend to review is that of the Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld which has had more influence on modern thought than any other theory of homosexualism and which unfortunately has been accepted as gospel truth by many homosexuals.

=The Third Sex.= Hirschfeld reminds us in his book "Intermediate Sexual Stages" that during the first eight weeks of its existence, the fetus is neither male nor female. It is only about the eighth week that a differentiation takes place and that the sex of the unborn can be determined.

A thousand physical influences may be at work in fetal life which may cause underdevelopment of the male fetus' organs, which then may resemble a female's in many particulars, or the overdevelopment of a female's clitoris which may make it slightly similar to a man's penis. Thousands of variations can be observed which, in certain cases, have caused the attending physician to declare the child's sex as "doubtful."

According to the degree of development of their sexual organs, Hirschfeld suggests a classification of the intermediates into hermaphrodites, androgynes, transvestites, homosexuals and metatropists.

I shall not touch upon the first two classes, hermaphrodites and androgynes, which are obvious, gross, physical malformations of a congenital character.

Transvestism, homosexualism and metatropism, however, deserve careful consideration.

=The Transvestites= are men who experience a craving to go about dressed as women, women who are anxious to dress themselves as men.

Hirschfeld considers them as closely related to the male androgynes who crave to have breasts like women and are ashamed of facial or bodily hair, and to the female androgynes who are ashamed of their breasts and wish to have a beard and body hair.

Transvestites generally explain that they do not feel free except in the garb of the opposite sex. "In men's clothes," a male transvestite said, "I have the feeling of wearing a uniform." "In feminine clothes," a female transvestite said, "I feel inhibited and hampered. It is only when wearing masculine garments that I feel energetic and efficient."

The late Dr. Mary Walker, the French painter Rosa Bonheur, the French explorer Madame Dieulafoy, were characteristic examples of energetic women who felt compelled to abandon the garb of their sex and to dress themselves as men.

=Are Transvestities Homosexual?= Dr. Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna objects to drawing a line between transvestites and homosexuals. But we must make a distinction. Hirschfeld is right in stating that there are no more homosexuals among transvestites than among normal individuals. He means, of course, _conscious_ homosexuals practicing their abnormal form of love. We know however, that there are thousands of men and women who, while _consciously_ experiencing the greatest disgust at the thought of homosexual practices are _unconscious_ homosexuals. Their dreams leave no doubt as to the nature of their cravings. We may reconcile the Stekel view with the Hirschfeld view by saying that transvestites are in the majority of cases unconscious homosexuals. They may _consciously_ lead a most normal life: Madame Dieulafoy was married and apparently very devoted to her husband whom she followed on all his voyages of exploration.

_Unconsciously_, however, and for reasons which we shall examine later, transvestites crave a change of sex.

=Metatropism= is masculine behavior in women, feminine behavior in men. Normal man is physiologically aggressive in love, normal woman is submissive. In cases of metatropism, those characteristics are reversed.

=The Metatropic Man= prefers tall, strong, powerful women, often of a different nationality or race, at times, women with some physiological handicap, lameness or deformity (the French philosopher Descartes was attracted to women suffering from strabism). He generally selects a woman older than himself, either very intellectual or very low ethically. In one case he is dominated by her mental superiority, in the other he feels that he is sacrificing his principles or his social standing. Professional or business women appeal to him especially. He is often a shoe fetishist. Clothing which denotes power, authority, impresses him.

=The Metatropic Woman= seeks feminine, beardless men, with perhaps a good head of long hair (poets, artists). Madame Dudevant, the French novelist, adopted the masculine name George Sand and had affairs with two sickly artists, Musset, the poet, and Chopin, the composer.

The metatropic woman is often a professional or business woman who, in her love relation, assumes a very independent, dictatorial attitude to men. She favors young men whom she can dominate better.

In what Hirschfeld calls metatropists, we recognise parent-fixation men and women, obsessed by a conscious or unconscious incest fear, a complication which has been discussed in another chapter.

Krafft-Ebing and Albert Eulenburg classify metatropic men with masochists (see Chapter XX) and metatropic women with sadists (see