conscious sexual attraction toward a person of the opposite sex.
His warmest friendships have, indeed, been with women and much,
perhaps most, of the happiness he has enjoyed has been furnished
by those friendships. But passion has only been aroused by
persons of his own sex, generally by men much younger than
himself. He feels shy and uncomfortable in the presence of men
of his own age. But even at his present age, a touch of a man or
boy may cause the liveliest gratification.

Shortly after the incident in boyhood, already narrated, A.H.
induced a little boy companion to go to a quiet spot, where, at
A.H.'s suggestion, each placed the other's penis in his mouth by
turns. A.H. had never heard of such a proceeding. It was a
natural instinct. He began to masturbate at an early age. But he
soon found a companion to share his passion. An older man,
especially, married and with a family, became his accomplice on
every possible opportunity, and they would manipulate each other.
At the age of 21, _fellatio_ began to be practised with this man.
It became a lifelong practice, and the preferred method of sexual
gratification. He likes best to have it performed on himself, but
he has never asked anyone to do for him what he would not himself
do for the other if desired. There has never been _pedicatio_.
The penis, it may be added, is of good size, and the testicles
rather large.

No one has ever suspected A.H.'s sexual perversion, not even his
physician, with whom he has long had a close friendship, until at
a time of great mental distress A.H. voluntarily revealed his
state. He is accustomed to refined society, has always read much,
abhorred athletic pursuits, and loved poetry, children, and
flowers. His love of nature amounts, indeed, to a passion.
Wherever he has been he has made friends among the best people.
He confesses to occasional periods of addiction to intoxicants,
induced by sociable companionship, and only controlled by force
of will.

For business he has not the slightest aptitude, and cannot look
after his own affairs. He is always dreading poverty and
destitution. He believes, however, that he passes among his
friends as fairly capable.

He considers that inversion is natural in his case and that he
has a perfect right to gratify his own natural instincts, though
he also admits they may be vices. He has never sought to
influence an innocent person toward his own tendencies.


HISTORY XI.--T.D., knows of nothing abnormal in his ancestry. His
brother has homosexual tendencies, but is also attracted to
women. A sister, who is very religious, states that she has
little or no sexual inclinations. They were all of a dreamy
disposition when young, to the disgust of their teachers. He sent
the following account of himself from the University at the age
of 20:--

"When I was a child (before I went to school at 9)," he writes,
"I was already of an affectionate disposition, an affection
turned readily to either sex. No boy was the cause of my
inclinations, which were quite spontaneous. (No doubt, part of
the cause may be found in our social system, by which ladies are
rather drawing-room creatures to be treated with distant
respect.) When I was 10, at a preparatory school, I first began
to form attachments with other boys of my own age, in which I
always had regard to physical beauty. It is this stage, in which
the sexual element is latent, that Shelley speaks of as preceding
love in ardent natures.

"At 12 I learned masturbation, apparently by instinct, and, I
regret to say, practised it to excess for the next seven years,
always secretly and with shame, and often with the accompaniment
of prurient imaginings which did not prevent my relations with
those I loved being of a very spiritual nature. Masturbation was
often practised daily, with bursts of repentance and abstinence,
latterly more rarely. But until I was 15 I really knew nothing of
sexual matters, and it was not till I was at least 17 that I was
conscious of sexual desire, which I repressed with shame.

"Owing to excessive self-abuse, I am unable to emit except
manually, but desire is strong. I think naked contact would
suffice, and in any case intercrural connection. _Pedicatio_ and
_fellatio_ I abhor. I love boys between the ages of 12 and 15;
they must be of my own class, refined, and lovable. I only desire
the active masculine part. I now regard my inclinations as
natural and normal to me. The difficulty is that of leading the
other party to regard it as such, besides the young age required
and clandestine nature of proceedings necessary. The moral
difficulties of circumstances are so strong that I have little
hope of ever gratifying my passion fully. I have found myself
deceived in the character of the boy twice. The last friendship
lasted three years, during which time I only saw him naked two or
three times (this caused erection), never touched him pruriently,
and only kissed him once.

"I have never found a satisfactory object of my affections, and
my happiness, perhaps my health, have been seriously injured. At
my public school a master helped me to a truer understanding of
these things. The merely animal sodomy which exists in many
public schools was unknown. What I learned of sex I learned for
myself. I am recommended to turn my aspirations to the abstract
universal maid; but so far at least I cannot do it.

"Male Greek statuary and the _Phoedrus_ of Plato have had a
great, though only confirmatory, influence on my feelings. My
ideal is that of Theocritus XIII, wherein Hercules was bringing
Hylas to the perfect measure of a man. My first thought is the
good of my friend, but, except for the good subjective influence
of passion, I have failed utterly.

"I am very tall, dark, rather strong, fond of games, though I do
not excel, owing to short sight. I am English, though I have
French blood, which may account for an unreservedly passionate
disposition. Though unlike other people, I am not in the least
feminine, nor has anyone thought so to my knowledge. I can
whistle easily and well. I am so masculine that I cannot even
conceive of passive sexual pleasure in women, much less in men.
(That is one of the difficulties in boy-love.) My affections are
inextricably bound up in the ideals of protection of one weaker
than myself. In the earlier days, when sexuality was less
conscious, this was a great source of romantic feeling, the
glamour of which is rather departing. I cannot understand love of
adult males, much less if they are of lower class, and the idea
of prostitution is nauseous to me.

"I think I may say that I have the esthetic and moral sense very
strongly ingrained. Indeed, they are largely synonymous with me.
I have no dramatic aptitude, and, though I flatter myself that my
taste is good in music, I have no knowledge of music. If I have a
favorite color, it is a dark crimson or blue, of the nature of
old stained glass. I derive great pleasure from all literary and
pictorial art and architecture; indeed, art of all kinds. I have
facility in writing personal lyrical verse; it affords me relief.

"I think my inversion must be congenital, as the desire of
contact with those boys I loved began before masturbation and has
lasted through private and public resorts and into university
life. The other sex does not attract me, but I am very fond of
children, girls as well as boys. (If there is sexuality in this,
which I trust there is not, it is latent)."

This statement is of interest because it may well lead us to
suppose that the writer, who is of balanced mind and sound
judgment, possesses a confirmed homosexual outlook on life.
While, however, it is the rule for the permanent direction of the
sexual impulse to be decided by the age of 20, that age is too
early to permit us to speak positively, especially in a youth
whose adolescent undifferentiated or homosexual impulses are
fostered by university life. This proved to be! the case with
T.D., who, though doubtless possessing a psychically anomalous
strain, is yet predominantly masculine. On leaving the university
his heterosexuality asserted itself normally. About six years
after the earlier statement, he wrote that he had fallen in love.
"I am on the eve of marrying a girl of nearly my own age. She has
sympathy as well as knowledge in my fields of study; it was thus
easier for me to explain my past, and I found that she could not
understand the moral objections to homosexual practices. My own
opinion always was that the moral objections were very
considerable, but might in some cases be overcome. In any case I
have entirely lost my sexual attraction toward boys; though I am
glad to say that the appreciation of their charm and grace
remains. My instincts, therefore, have undergone a considerable
change, but the change is not entirely in the direction of
normality. The instinct for sodomy in the proper sense of the
word used to be unintelligible to me; since the object of
attraction has become a woman this instinct is mixed with the
normal in my desire. Further, an element which much troubled me,
as being most foreign to my ideal feelings, has not quite left
me--the indecent and often scatologic curiosity about immature
girls. I can only hope that the realization of the normal in
marriage may finally kill these painful aberrations. I should add
that the practice of masturbation has been abandoned."


HISTORY XII.--Aged 24. Father and mother both living; the latter
is of a better social standing than the father. He is much
attached to his mother, and she gives him some sympathy. He has a
brother who is normally attracted to women. He himself has never
been attracted to women, and takes no interest in them nor in
their society.

At the age of 4 he first became conscious of an attraction for
older males. From the ages of 11 and 19, at a large
grammar-school, he had relationships with about one hundred boys.
Needless to add, he considers homosexuality extremely common in
schools. It was, however, the Oscar Wilde case which first opened
his eyes to the wide prevalence of homosexuality, and he
considers that the publicity of that case has done much, if not
to increase homosexuality, at all events to make it more
conspicuous and outspoken.

He is now attracted to youths about 5 or 6 years younger than
himself; they must be good-looking. He has never perverted a boy
not already inclined to homosexuality. In his relationship he
does not feel exclusively like a male or a female: sometimes one,
sometimes the other. He is often liked, he says, because of his
masculine character.

He is fully developed and healthy, well over middle height,
inclined to be plump, with full face and small moustache. He
smokes many cigarettes and cannot get on without them. Though his
manners are very slightly if at all feminine, he acknowledges
many feminine ways. He is fond of jewelry, until lately always
wore a bangle, and likes women's rings; he is very particular
about fine ties, and uses very delicate women's handkerchiefs. He
has always had a taste for music, and sings. He has a special
predilection for green; it is the predominant color in the
decoration of his room, and everything green appeals to him. He
finds that the love of green (and also of violet and purple) is
very widespread among his inverted friends.


HISTORY XIII.--Artist, aged 34. "The earliest sex impression that
I am conscious of," he writes, "is at the age of 9 or 10 falling
in love with a handsome boy who must have been about two years my
senior. I do not recollect ever having spoken to him, but my
desire, so far as I can recall, was that he should seize hold of
and handle me. I have a distinct impression yet of how
pleasurable even physical pain or cruelty would have been at his
hands. (I have noticed that in young children it is often
difficult to differentiate the sexual emotions from what in the
grown up would be definite cruelty.)

"It must have been at about this time that I discovered--entirely
by myself--the act of masturbation. The process grew up quite
naturally, though I cannot but think that the cooped-up life in a
London street and a London school, with want of physical
exercise, as well as want of landscape, color, and beautiful
form, had much to do with it. The tone of the school I was at was
singularly clean, but I question whether the vaunted cleanliness
of tone of day-schools can compensate for the open life and large
discipline of an English public school.

"How far the rather frequent masturbation between the ages of 10
and 13 may have had to do with weakly health I do not know, but
when I was 12 I was taken by my mother to a famous doctor. He
made no inquiries of a sexual nature, but he advised that I
should be sent away from London. He had a sentimental horror of
violent games, etc., for boys, and put aside various suggested
public schools. Finally I was sent to a private school at the
seaside.

"The private school was clean and wholesome. The plunge into the
sexual cocytus of the great public school that followed was
effectually sudden. In my day ---- was a perfect stew of
uncleanness. There was plenty of incontinence, not much cruelty,
no end of dirty conversation, and a great deal of genuine
affection, even to heroism, shown among the boys in their
relations to one another. All these things were treated by
masters and boys alike as more or less unholy, with the result
that they were either sought after or flung aside, according to
the sexual or emotional instinct of each. No attempt was made at
discrimination. A kiss was as unclean as the act of _fellatio_,
and no one had any gauge or principle whatever on which to guide
the cravings of boyhood.

"My first initiation into the mysteries of sex was at the hands
of the dormitory servant, who showed me his penis when he woke me
in the mornings, and masturbated me when he gave me my hot bath
on a Saturday night. This old reprobate of 45 committed the act
of _fellatio_ with most of the boys in turn as he went the
dormitory rounds. For the older lads I cannot speak, but over us
younger ones of 14 and 15 he exercised a sort of unholy terror
and fascination. He was very popular; we came to him like doves
to a snake. When I revisited my old school many years later he
was occupying a very responsible position in the college chapel,
and I noticed that he wore that expression of sly reverence which
I think I can now instantly detect when I see it in a man.

"For the rest the dormitory was boisterous and lewd, and there
was a good deal of bullying, which probably did little harm. My
principal recollection now is of the filthy mystery of foul talk,
that I neither cared for nor understood. What I really needed,
like all the other boys, was a little timely help over the
sexual problems, but this we none of us got, and each had to work
out his own principle of conduct for himself. It was a long,
difficult, and wasteful process, and I cannot but believe that
many of us failed in the endeavor. We had come unprepared with
any advice. The principle upon which we were apparently trained
was the repression of every instinct. My mother was ignorant from
innocence, my father from indifference, and so between them I was
sent out helpless. A mother incurs great responsibility in
sending her child away unprepared. A parent should not seek to
shift his responsibility upon the schoolmaster. Love alone should
be the fount from which revelations should flow; the master, from
the very nature of his position, cannot reveal.

"An imminent breakdown in health--due, it would now appear, to
quite obvious causes--relieved me from the purgatory of the
college dormitory, and I was removed to one of the private
houses. These establishments were considered more select and less
'rough.' The social atmosphere was, however, perhaps more
unwholesome, because more effeminate, and was full of noble young
sucklings. The nominal head of the house under normal conditions
might have been a real leader; as it was, the real head of the
house was a gilded young pariah, fairly low down in the school
and full of hypocrisy and unnatural lusts. The boy who occupied
the cubicle next to mine was also a bad case of sexual
misdirection, though he had not the social distinction to make
him quite so refined a terror. I had every opportunity of
watching him until, two years later, he was fortunately asked to
leave. He talked bawd from morning till night, got drunk on one
or two occasions, masturbated constantly without concealment, had
several of the younger boys _inter femora_, though without
evincing any care or affection for them, and gave one the
impression of having been born for a brothel. His one redeeming
quality was an element of good nature: a characteristic one often
finds among such as are selfish and irresponsible. I have since
been told that he has gone completely to the dogs. Whether this
young cub's sexual instincts could have been turned or guided I
do not know; but in a rougher and simpler life than that of a
public school, in a more open and less hypocritical atmosphere,
he might, perhaps, have been licked into better shape. Hypocrisy
is a vice, however, that schoolboys themselves are fortunately
free from. It comes later. The tone among the boys was frankly
and violently unclean, though unclean not from instinct, but from
want of direction and from repression.

"I have not a single happy recollection of this period of my
school life. Yet out of this morass of misbegotten virtues I
plucked my first blossom of genuine affection. I call it a
blossom because it never ripened even to flower. I had been given
the extreme of filth to feed upon at the outset, and now I found
for myself the extreme of chastity. It will be a matter of
lifelong regret to me that the love which was the lodestar of my
school years was never fulfilled or set upon a sound basis of
comradeship.

"When I was about 16½ years old there came into the house a boy
about two years younger than myself, and who became the absorbing
thought of my school days. I do not remember a moment, from the
time I first saw him to the time I left school, that I was not in
love with him, and the affection was reciprocated, if somewhat
reservedly. He was always a little ahead of me in books and
scholarship, but as our affection ripened we spent most of our
spare time together, and he received my advances much as a girl
who is being wooed, a little mockingly, perhaps, but with real
pleasure. He allowed me to fondle and caress him, but our
intimacy never went further than a kiss, and about that even was
the slur of shame; there was always a barrier between us, and we
never so much as whispered to one another concerning those things
of which all the school obscenely talked. Any connection between
our own emotions and the sexual morals of the school never
occurred to us. In fact, we lived a dream-life of chastity that
could not relate itself to any human conditions. This was
suddenly broken in upon. My friend was very beautiful and an
object of attraction to others. That some of the elder boys had
made offers of sexual intercourse to him I knew, but to him, as
to me, that was unspeakable wickedness. One day I heard that four
or five of these suitors of his had mishandled him; they had, I
believe, taken off his trousers and attempted to masturbate him.
The offense was probably horse play of an animal nature; to me it
seemed an unpardonable offense. The matter had been reported to
the master by a servant, but confirmatory evidence was needed
before punishment could follow. I was torn asunder by passions I
could not then analyze and in the end committed the greatest of
schoolboy crimes,--I sneaked. The action under the circumstances
was courageous, but I was indifferent so long as the boy I loved
judged me rightly. The result was that at the close of the term
four or five of the senior boys were 'asked to leave.' The
remaining brief period of my school life, which had previously
been a living hell, became really happy. That this should have
been brought about to the harm of four or five boys whose sin,
after all, was but a misdirected impulse for which the system was
responsible, seems to me now all very wrong. Of the boys sent
away, however, certainly three have made honorable careers. For
my friend and I, we became more afraid of each other than before;
as our affections increased, so our fear of them increased also.
The friendship was too ethereal to live; but even yet we still
have a deep respect for one another.

"When at the age of 19 I left school I was allowed to knock about
for a year before entering college. During this time I picked up
a sexual experience that may or may not have been a valuable one,
I certainly look back upon it now, with regret, if not with
horror. My father had discovered, some months before this date,
that I was in the habit of masturbating, and he gave me what he
conceived to be the right counsel under the circumstances: 'If
you do this,' he said, 'you will never be able to use your penis
with a woman. Therefore your best plan will be to go with a
prostitute. Should you do this, however, you will probably pick
up a beastly disease. Therefore the safest way would be to do it
abroad if you get the chance, for there the houses are licensed.'
Having delivered himself of this advice he troubled himself no
further in the matter, but left me to work out my own destiny.
The great physician, to whom I was taken about this time, also
gave me his advice on this point. 'Masturbation,' he said, 'is
death. A number of young men come to me with the same story. I
tell them they are killing themselves, and you will kill
yourself, too.' The doctor's hope was apparently to frighten his
young patients into what he conceived to be natural conditions of
life, and one went away from him with the impression that every
sexual manifestation in one's self was a physical infirmity, due
to one's own moral weakness. It took me some time before I could
make up my mind to follow my father's advice, but after a period
of real moral agony I deliberately and entirely in cold blood
acted upon it. I sought out a scarlet woman in the streets of
---- and went home with her. From something she said to me I know
that I gave her pleasure, and she asked me to come to her again.
This I did twice, but without any real pleasure. The whole thing
was too sordid and soulless, and the man who decides to take an
evil medicine regularly has first to make up his mind that he
really needs it.

"At about the same time I chanced to be, for a few months, in a
German university town, and I determined, as I had the
opportunity, to carry the parental advice to the logical
conclusion. I tried a licensed house. The place was clean and
decent, and the conditions, I take it, such as one would normally
find in any properly regulated continental city; but to me the
whole thing appeared unspeakably horrible. It was a purely
commercial transaction, and it had not even the redeeming element
of risk to one's self, or of offense against a social or
disciplinary code. I came away feeling that I had touched bottom
in my sexual experiences, and I understood what it was that Faust
saw when the red mouse sprang from the mouth of the witch in the
Walpurgis dance.

"These were the only occasions upon which I have had sexual
intercourse with women. Looking back to them now, they appear to
me to have been almost inevitable; but if I had my life over
again I would shun them as I would a lethal draught. I believe I
came out of the fire unscathed; probably, indeed, it did me good,
in the sense that it made it possible for me to look deeper into
life; though to what extent seeing the torments of the damned
makes us do this, perhaps only a Dante could tell. To gain
knowledge at the expense of the shame and misery of others I hold
to be fundamentally wrong and immoral. What is to me, however,
the chief and bitterest thought is that I flung away the first
spring of manhood where I got no love in return. His virginity
is, or should be, as glorious and sacred a possession to a youth
as to a maiden; to be guarded jealously; to be given only at the
call of love, to one who loves him--be it comrade, mistress, or
wife--and whom he can love in return.

"The full university life into which I now entered at the age of
20 brought with it a flood of new ideas, feelings and sensations.
The friendships I made there will always remain the central ones
in my life. Up to my last term at college at the age of 24 I
still wore my chain-mail of artificial chastity; but then a
change gradually set in, and I began to understand the
relationship of the physical phenomena of sex to its intellectual
and imaginative manifestations. (I was not destined to fully
realize this for some years and then exclusively through and out
of my own personal experience.) It was the study of Walt
Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ that first brought me light upon this
question. Hitherto I had kept the two things locked up, as it
were, in two separate air-tight compartments,--my friendships in
one, my sex instincts in another,--to be kept under and repressed
by the public-school code as I conceived it.

"It is needless to say that I was continually troubled by the
customary sex phenomena: erotic dreams, loss of semen,
troublesome erections at night, etc. These I repressed as best I
could, by habitual masturbation and by the regular diet and
exercise which academic life made possible. At one time, for the
period of a year I should say, I tried to overcome the desire for
masturbation by gradual stages, on the principle of the
drunkard's cure by which he took every day less tipple by the
insertion of one pebble more in his bottle. I marked on my
calendar the erotic dreams and the nights on which I masturbated,
and sought gradually to extend the intervening periods. Six
weeks, however, was the longest time for which I was able to
abstain."

A few years later the writer of this communication formed an
intimate relationship (in which he did not make the first
advances) with a youth, some years younger than himself and of
lower social class, whose development he was able to assist. "But
for my part," he remarks, "I owe him as much as I gave him, for
his love lighted up the gold of affection that was in me and
consumed the dross. It was from him that I first learned that
there was no such thing as a hard-and-fast line between the
physical and the spiritual in friendship." This relationship
lasted for some years, when the young man married; its effects
are described as very beneficial to both parties; all the sexual
troubles vanished, together with the desire to masturbate.
"Everything in life began to sing with joy, and what little of
real creative work I may have done I attribute largely to the
power of work that was born in me during those years."


HISTORY XIV.--Scotchman, aged 38. His paternal ancestors were
normal, so far as he knows. His mother belonged to a very
eccentric old Celtic family. Soon after 5 he became so enamored
of a young shepherd that the boy had to be sent away. He
practised masturbation many years before the age of puberty, and
attaches importance to this as a factor in the evolution of his
homosexual life.

He has had erotic dreams rarely about men, about women more
frequently. While indifferent to women, he has no repulsion
toward them. He has had connection with women two or three times,
but without experiencing the same passionate emotions as with
men.

He would like a son, but he has never been able to get up the
necessary amount of passion to lead to marriage.

He has always had a sentimental and Platonic affection for men.
Of late years he has formed two friendships with adults of an
affectionate and also erotic character. He cares little for
anything beyond mutual masturbation and kissing; what he desires
is the love of the male.

In appearance there is nothing abnormal about him except an air
of youth. He is vigorous both in body and mind, and has enormous
power of resisting fatigue. He is an excellent man of business.
Is a patient student. He sees no harm in his homosexual passions.
He is averse to promiscuity. His ideal is a permanent union which
includes sexual relations.


HISTORY XV.--T.S., artist, aged 32. "I was born in England. My
father was a Jew, the first to marry out of his family and to
marry a Christian. My great-grandparents were cousins; he was a
German and she was a Dane. My grandparents were also cousins; he
was a Swede and she was a Dane.

"My maternal grandfather was an English Protestant, and my
maternal grandmother was Irish, fanatically Roman Catholic, and a
very eccentric woman.

"In my father's family there have been many members of note. In
my mother's family there were many renowned lawyers.

"My father had an elder brother who was homosexual. He was
already, at 31 years of age, a prominent author, when he died of
consumption. I have also a second cousin on my father's side who
is a very good tenor; he is also homosexual. In my mother's
family I know of nothing abnormal.

"In neither family is there or has there been any insanity, but
rather an overwealth of brain.

"My parents were an ideally happy couple. They were engaged after
knowing each other six days, and after being separated three
months they married. They were married thirty-five years without
a quarrel. I have a brother three years older, born a year after
their marriage, and a sister seven years younger.

"My brother takes after his father in appearance. He is a great
lover of women and much spoiled by them. He is quite normal and
abstemious.

"My sister is a very womanly woman. As a girl she disapproved
very much of girl friendships and always confided in her mother.
At 13 years of age she met the man she is now married to. They
waited ten years before marrying and are now an ideally happy
couple. My sister is perfectly normal and very abstemious.

"I lived my first ten years in England, eighteen years in Sweden,
two years in Denmark, two years in Bavaria, Austria, and Italy,
and am now living in Berlin. I consider myself English. I am
mentally a man, but all my physical feelings and desires are
those of a woman.

"I am middle height and very slight. Weigh 106 English pounds,
without clothes. My hands and feet are small and well-shaped.
Head of normal size. Features small. Eyes green. Have worn
glasses since I was 7 years old. Complexion fair. Appearance not
Jewish. The skin of my body is very white, without blemish. Very
little hair on my face. Hair on head and abdomen luxuriant. No
hair whatever on stomach and chest. Color of hair auburn
everywhere except below navel, that black. (My father's,
mother's, and brother's hair was brown. My sister has auburn
hair, and so had the aforementioned uncle.) My breasts are
slightly round; my hips are normal. I do not gesticulate much.
From my material self it would be difficult to draw the
conclusion that I was homosexual. My sexual organs are normal.

"My disposition is apparently bright, but in reality melancholy.
Have very little love for human nature, but have a partiality for
the British and Jewish races. Hate business, politics, sports,
and society. Love music, art, literature, and nature. Deep
interest in mysticism. Am clairvoyant. Have been used many times
as a medium. Lead two separate lives, an outer and inner psychic
life. Am a fatalist and a theosophist. Profound belief in
reincarnation, always have had, because when I was a little child
I could 'remember' so much. Have an excellent memory, dating back
to my third year. Have always been too self-analytical. Have from
my earliest childhood felt myself an alien. Am very sensitive,
physically and psychically. Have no wish to wear woman's clothing
or do woman's work. As to clothes for myself, I prefer black and
not much jewelry.

"I could only love a perfectly manly man from 21 to 40 years of
age. He must be physically beautiful and well made. Size of
sexual organs plays no part. The muscles must be developed and
the hands must be especially well shaped. Hands are my fetish. (I
could never love anyone with ugly hands.) He must have no odor
issuing from his body (though I do not dislike faint perfume when
clothed), and, above all, never have a bad breath. He must be
intelligent, love music, art, literature, and nature. He must be
refined and cultured and have been about the world. He must have
simplicity in behavior, dress, and manner, and, above all, be
clean-bodied as clean-minded. Cynicism I cannot stand. (Here I
may state I once owned a St. Bernard dog which reminded me much
of my ideal. He was always sedate, always loving, and faithful;
generally quiet. He only got excited when out in the elements.) I
have not been able to get on with people who have no sense of
humor. From my birth I was physically weak. First I suffered from
eczema. Being born with a double squint, I was operated on at 2½
and again at 3½ years of age, with excellent result. From 4 to 12
years of age I had convulsions (often), and all the illnesses of
childhood. At the age of 12½ years I took scarlet fever, followed
by a weak heart, which grew stronger after a year, and Bright's
disease, which lasted fifteen years with hardly a break. This
illness had its wonted effect of producing melancholia and
upsetting the whole nervous system. Bright's disease stopped
suddenly but was followed by a succession of illnesses. Then I
had neuritis very badly. I then removed to Bavaria, and to regain
nervous strength I was treated by Freud's psychoanalytical
method, with great success. I had a very bad relapse, as my
brother, who had just heard I was homosexual, came to visit me
and threatened to have me put under guardians, if my father
should die. It took me weeks to recover from the shock. We broke
off all intercourse and though my brother has been several times
in the same town where I have been, we remain strangers. At this
time my father died suddenly. Last spring four suicides of
friends in so many weeks had a very bad effect on my nerves. I am
now in Berlin in better spirits, but the cramp continues badly at
times.

"To this I must add that since my fourteenth year, independent of
any illness, I have suffered mentally and physically from
menstrual pains recurring every twenty-eight days and lasting
from six to eight days. That these were the equivalent pains to a
woman's menstruation periods I could get no doctor to admit till
I was treated for a length of time by a German nerve specialist.

"The physical pains begin abruptly. Sudden congestions of blood
in the brain and in the abdomen. Sudden perspirations, heat and
cold. Great nervous pains in the small of the back, also in the
nerve-centers of abdomen and stomach. Sharp, shooting pains in
the breasts and especially the nipples. Sudden toothache which
stops as suddenly. The skin becomes darker, sometimes mottled. I
have the whole time a taste of blood in my mouth and often
everything I eat tastes of blood. I have great difficulty at that
time in eating meat. Physical longings for erotic adventure,
counterbalanced by mental nausea at the bare idea.

"The mental symptoms are: sudden feeling of deep depression,
suicidal tendencies, alternating with sudden inexplicable
lightheartedness. Capriciousness and great dissatisfaction with
myself and life generally. Horror at my own incompleteness of sex
and sudden fits of hatred toward women and a great longing to be
loved by men. This condition changes slowly back to the normal
one. It takes several days for me to lose my physical weakness
owing to it.

"Physically I was developed at 16 years of age. Mentally I was
developed at a very early age, but I kept my inner life quite
dark, always playing the innocent. Nobody at home believed me to
know anything about life. They were at times very surprised when
I fell out of the rôle I had planned for myself. Up till I was 17
years of age nothing to do with other people's morals was ever
discussed before me. I looked so pure, and do now, that people
are always careful in front of me. My father never discussed such
things with me. From my earliest childhood I loved men dearly,
though I was always at daggers drawn with my father and brother.
I worshipped my mother then, as I do now. My sister and I did not
at all get on as children, though we are the best of friends now.
She and her husband as well as my mother have been kindness
itself ever since they knew of my condition. Not till I was over
30 years did I meet a man I loved as well as my mother, and he is
heterosexual. I must have loved my father and brother at first,
but continual conflicts, incompatible temperaments and mutual
misunderstandings and want of sympathy made life at home
horrible. I must admit from my earliest childhood I had a certain
contempt for my father and brother because I found them so
materialistic. I had all my childhood rows with my brother. My
father took his part, my mother mine. After I had recovered from
my father's sudden death (my first words were after reading the
letter: 'Thank God it isn't mother!') I felt a great relief, but
it took a long time for me to grasp that I was really free.

"I have always liked women's society and, as a youth, I was very
fond of gossip, which I by no means am now. I have many women
friends, more than men friends. These women friends are all
heterosexual except one. I very often like elderly women; I
suppose I see mother in such women. A woman never could make me
blush, but a man I admired could easily.

"I was 23 years of age when a married woman of good family asked
me to come and spend the night with her. I went, and though she
was beautifully built, cleanly, and though her garments and
apartments were of the utmost good taste, I did not have any
erection. On the other hand, I felt myself to be most unclean and
bathed three times each of the following three days. Since then I
have never tried to have sexual intercourse with women.

"In Copenhagen I tried to excite my feelings with every class of
woman, in vain. I suppose it is that my nature is so like woman's
that there can be no reaction. With men I am often very shy and
nervous, tongue-tied, and my hands perspire. Never so with women.

"As a child I loved men and used to fall desperately in love with
some who came to the house. I would, when no one was there, kiss
their hats, or gloves, or even their sticks.

"I can remember, when I was about 6 years, how I fell in love
with a very good-looking 26-year-old German. He had very curly
hair and his hands were very beautiful. He was very fond of me
and I used to call him 'my Boy.' When visiting us he often used
to 'tuck me in' after the nurse had gone down. He always had
sweets or something for me. I can remember how I used to fling my
arms round his neck and cover his face with kisses. I would then
draw his head down on my pillow and he would tell me fairy-tales
and I would go off to sleep quite happy.

"At 7 years of age, while staying in the country, a very
good-looking groom, about 25 years of age, misbehaved himself
with me. I often used to visit him in the stables, as this man
had a strange attraction for me. One day he tickled me. While
doing so he produced my penis and also his own, which was in full
erection. He tried in every way to excite my feelings, in vain.
For him the occasion terminated in an ejaculation. He forbade me
to tell anyone, and I did not do so, but tried to find out all I
could on the subject, with little or no result. From that day I
hated the groom and I felt a sort of guilt, as if I had 'lost
something.' Not till I was 12 years did I understand.

"From my earliest childhood I had one ideal of a man. From that
ideal I have never swerved. At the age of 30 I found a friend
who, though quite heterosexual, has, without giving me any sexual
intercourse, given me the love I have always needed. He has been
for the last couple of years a second mother, father, sister,
brother, and lover. Through him I have regained my health, my
love of nature, and he has helped to deaden my hatred toward
human nature and my bitterness. A better friend I never wish to
find. It has made up for all the years of mental and physical
suffering. One strange thing is that the feeling is mutual. He
has had a tragic life, for his wife, whom he loved beyond
everything, died under very sad circumstances. He says I am the
best male friend he has ever had. While with him, much of the