Chapter XIX).

=Dr. Steinach's Experiments= show the close relationship between homosexualism and the secretions of the interstitial cells of the genital glands.

After castrating young rats which, after the operation, remained in an infantile stage of development, Steinach transplanted into their inguinal region male or female gonads.

Males into which female gonads had been implanted, developed all the physical characteristics and all the mannerisms of the female, paid no attention to females at mating time and, on the contrary, attracted the rutting males and were attracted to them.

Castrated females in whose body he implanted testicles, showed the hardier hair growth of males, tried to mate with females and remained indifferent to males.

Prof. Brandes, director of the Zoological Garden in Darmstadt, has repeated those experiments on deer with identical results. The female in which testicles were implanted behaved like a male and grew antlers. The male's mammary glands grew very fast after the implantation of female gonads.

It is said that Steinach has successfully transformed homosexuals into normal men but the last statement of his on the "Histology of the Gonads in homosexual Men," (Vol. 46, No. 1, Archiv für Entwickelungsmechanismus der Organismen) contains no mention of such results.

=Perverse Birds.= If we now turn to experiments reported by William Craig in the _Journal of Animal Behavior_, we see an apparently different process at work. Young male birds kept for a year in a cage with females and away from all males, will at mating time ignore entirely the females, and offer themselves to males in the mating position of the female.

The same process is observable in females brought up with males exclusively.

Imitation in this case seems to give exactly the same results which Steinach obtained thru castration and transplantation of gonads.

If we now leave the physiologists and consult the psychoanalysts, Freud, Ferenczi, Stekel and Adler will show us that homosexualism can be produced by "purely" psychic factors.

=Freud Rejects the Hypothesis of a Third Sex=: "Homosexual men who have started in our times an energetic action against the legal limitations of the sexual activity," Freud writes, "are fond of representing themselves, thru theoretical spokesmen, as evincing a sexual variation, which may be distinguished from the very beginning, as an intermediate stage or sex, a third sex. In other words, they maintain that they are men who are forced by organic determinants originating in the germ to find in a man the pleasure which they cannot find in a woman. As much as one would wish to subscribe to their demands, out of humane considerations, one must nevertheless exercise reserve regarding their theories which were formulated without regard for the psychic genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis offers the means to fill the gap and to put to test the assertions of the homosexuals. It is true that psychoanalysis has fulfilled that task in only a small number of people, but all the investigations thus far undertaken have brought the same surprising results.

"In all our male homosexuals, there was a very intense erotic attachment to a feminine person, as a rule to the mother, which was manifested in the very first period of childhood and later entirely forgotten by the individual. This attachment was produced or favored by too much love from the mother herself, but was also furthered by the retirement or absence of the father during the childhood period. Sadger emphasises the fact that the mothers of his homosexual patients were often masculine women, or women with energetic traits of character who were able to crowd out the father from the place allotted to him in the family. I have sometimes observed the same thing, but I was more impressed by those cases in which the father was absent from the beginning or disappeared early so that the boy was altogether under feminine influence."

"It almost seems that the presence of a strong father would assure for the son the proper decision in the selection of his love object from the opposite sex.

"Following this primary stage, a transformation takes place whose mechanism we know but whose motive forces we have not yet grasped. The love of the mother cannot continue to develop consciously so that it merges into repression. The boy represses his love for the mother by putting himself into her place, by identifying himself with her, and by taking his own person as a model thru the similarity of which he is guided in the selection of his love object. He thus becomes homosexual; as a matter of fact, he returns to the stage of autoerotism, for the boys whom the growing adult now loves are only substitute persons or revivals of his own childish person, whom he loves in the same way as his mother loved him. We say that he finds his love object on the road to narcism, after the Greek legend of Narcissus to whom nothing was more pleasing than his own mirrored image.

"Deeper psychological discussions justify the assertion that the person who becomes homosexual in this manner remains fixed in his unconscious on the memory of his mother. By repressing the love for his mother, he conserves the same in his consciousness and henceforth remains faithful to her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus runs away from women who could cause him to be faithless to his mother."

=Active and Passive Types.= Ferenczi draws a distinction between the active and the passive types of homosexuals, that is, between the man who, in love acts like a woman, in a submissive way, and the man who loves men as he would women, in an agressive way.

"A man who in his love relations with men feels himself to be a woman," he writes, "is inverted in respect to his own ego (homo-erotism thru subject inversion, or, more shortly, subject-homo-erotism). He feels himself to be a woman, and this not only in the love relationship but in all relations of life.

"It is quite otherwise with the true active homosexual. He feels himself a man in every respect, is as a rule very energetic and active, and there in nothing effeminate to be discovered in his bodily or mental organisation. The object of his inclination alone is exchanged, so that one might call him homo-erotic thru exchange of the love object, or more shortly, object-homo-erotic.

"A further and striking difference between the subjective and the objective homo-erotic consists in the fact that the former (the invert) feels himself attracted by more mature, powerful men, and is on friendly terms, as a colleague, one might say, with women; the second type, on the contrary, is almost exclusively interested in young, delicate boys with an effeminate appearance, but meets a woman with pronounced antipathy, and not rarely with hatred which is badly or not at all concealed. The true invert is hardly ever impelled to seek medical advice, he feels at complete ease in the passive rôle and has no other wish than that people should put up with his peculiarity and not interfere with the kind of satisfaction that suits him. He is not very passionate and chiefly demands from his lover the recognition of his bodily and other merits.

"The object-homo-erotic, on the other hand, is uncommonly tormented by the consciousness of his own abnormality; sexual intercourse never completely satisfies him; he is tortured by qualms of conscience and overestimates his sexual object to the uttermost.

"The subject-homo-erotic is a member of the intermediate sex, in the sense of Magnus Hirschfeld and his followers. The object-homo-erotic, is the victim of an obsessional neurosis."

The distinction between active and passive homosexuals is convenient but slightly arbitrary. Certain homosexuals are at times passive and at times active. Both types become at times the victims of obsessions and seek the help of psychotherapists. Active as well as passive homosexuals may be married and heterosexually potent.

=The Homosexual Neurosis.= Dr. Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna calls homosexualism the homosexual neurosis. He summarises the genesis of homosexualism as follows:

"As a child the homosexual is very precocious sexually and can only repress his cravings by developing fear, hatred and disgust at the thought of heterosexual relations. The result of that repression is a flight from normal into abnormal forms of sexual gratification."

=A Safety Device.= To Adler, homosexualism is a detail of the neurotic picture, a compromise and a safety device.

"Every neurotic," he writes, "experiences at some time during his childhood doubts as to whether he will ever attain complete virility. Giving up the hope of being a real man, is, for a child, synonymous with being a woman. This carries in its wake a whole cycle of childish valuations: aggression, activity, power, freedom, wealth, sadism are male attributes; inhibitions, cowardice, obedience, poverty are female attributes.

"The child plays for a while a dual part, being submissive to his parents and teachers but indulging in dreams which express his craving for independence, freedom and importance.

"This duality in the child's psyche, the forerunner of a split in his consciousness, can have varying results in later years. The individual will oscillate between the male and the female poles with a constant striving toward the unification of those two tendencies.

"The masculine component prevents a complete assumption of the feminine rôle, the feminine component is an obstacle to complete virility. Hence a compromise: feminine behavior thru masculine means: a timid submissive male, masculine masochism, homosexuality. Or masculine behavior thru feminine devices."

=Above and Below.= A series of comparisons has established itself in the human mind, owing to the enslavement of the female by the male, starting with the antithesis: male-female: good and bad, right and left, HIGH, and LOW, ABOVE and BELOW.

In every female neurotic, according to Adler, there is a refusal to be a female, that is, to be BELOW (socially as well as sexually).

The female who is inferior in looks or intelligence or position and cannot either compensate for that inferiority by displaying superiority in some other way (artistic or scientific accomplishment), or reconcile herself to her inferior position, wishes consciously and unconsciously to be a man. Consciously she makes herself as masculine as possible. Unconsciously, she dreams herself into a male personality, physically, mentally, socially AND sexually. Her wish to be ABOVE makes her play a man's part in love as well as in the world's life.

=A Way Out.= Homosexualism is, like every neurotic symptom, a way out of life's difficulties.

A male homosexual I treated associated the idea of woman with "trouble, sickness, expense, lack of freedom." "Every" woman was to him a "leg puller," a "gold digger," a liar, insatiable in her demands, spying on her husband, constantly suffering from "female trouble."

This man had never been married and his only sexual experiences, which were of the most ephemeral type, had been gained in the few hours of his life which he spent with a woman much older than himself, a cabaret singer and a prostitute. Yet, he was convinced that "women are too much trouble."

An unconsciously homosexual male who is married, and quite potent and who consulted me after a serious "breakdown," had a dream in which he saw himself at the top of a mountain in Africa (flight from reality and his present environment). Six large negroes (powerful male sexuality) carried away his wife's coffin, (flight from the sexual partner). A long line of negroes then walked past him and he felt that as long as he would be on friendly terms with them, he would not want for anything (line of least effort).

Female homosexuals who had never had any normal heterosexual experience ranted along the same line of thought: "A husband is too much trouble." "The idea of submitting to a brute of a man," "I don't wish to be a slave to a man," etc.

All this voices what Adler terms the "masculine protest."

=The Escape from Biological Duties.= Kempf also considers homosexualism as a compromise and a convenient escape from biological duties.

"Heterosexual potency," he writes "judging from the behavior of many psychopaths and normals of both sexes, varies in its vigor and is never quite secure from the possibility of disintegration in the face of depressing influences, such as disease, a frigid, unkind, terrifying, neurotic or disgusting mate, hopeless economic burdens, fear of pregnancy, or venereal diseases, social scandals, an inaccessible or unresponsive love-object, death of the mate or a too fixed mother-attachment.

The intrigues and usurpations of power by the family of the mate, suppressing the idealised wishes of the individual, often cause the regression to the lower level of homo-sexuality, where, at least, parental sacrifices need not be made."