Inversion or homosexuality can be traced to the child's love life. As infants we are bi-sexual in our pre-dispositions. Children display sentimental friendships for members of their own sex, as we all know. Even in later life in each sex there are remnants of the other stunted sex, breasts on the man and hairy faces on women. Freud has given us a very interesting but by no means full explanation of the origin of inversion. The abnormal development is favoured by the disappearance of a strong father in early childhood, and by the overattachment to the mother at the same or earlier time. The love for the mother is soon repressed and the boy identifies himself with her and loves other boys like himself. He returns to that self-love which is a second stage after auto-eroticism in the infant, and is known as narcissism. He wishes to love those boys as his mother has loved him. He may like women but he transfers the excitation evoked by them to a male object, for they remind him of his mother and he flees from them in order to be faithful to her. He repeats through life the mechanism by which he became an invert.
The fact then is that homosexualism is an abnormal development from the infant's love life. It is in the germ in all normal people, especially in those capable of intense friendships. It is naturally abhorrent to us when it vents itself in any abnormal relations.
The sublimated homosexualism which we find in literature is that which gives way to outbursts of friendly devotion, and intense and passionate grief at the loss of a friend; it is at the root of the idea that a man should lay his life down for his friend. Then there is the real inversion which the world rightly stamps as immoral.
A few examples of literature where the homosexualism of the author's unconscious is present are Shakespeare's Sonnets, Tennyson's In Memoriam and Whitman's Calamus. These works show what capacities their authors had for friendship. It is the habit of some intellectual homosexuals to try to interpret these works as indicative of homosexual practices, as an excuse and consolation to them in their own unfortunate condition. Whitman wrote to John Addington Symonds in response to an enquiry about the Calamus poems that he would prefer never to have written them if they gave any one the inference that he either practised or tolerated homosexualism.
Two poets of recent years who, we know, practised homosexualism, each of whom also served jail terms, were Paul Verlaine and Oscar Wilde. There were critics who saw that certain passages in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, published about five years before he went to jail, pointed to the homosexual proclivities of the author. His curious interpretation of Shakespeare's sonnets also shows these. It is possible that some of the love poems written by Verlaine and which are supposed to be addressed to women were really written to Arthur Rimbaud, the poet he loved. This is a practice indulged in by homosexual poets to avoid suspicion.
The classic stories of ideal friendship are those of David and Jonathan, and Damon and Pythias; the most widely known essays in ancient literature discussing homosexual love as a legitimate pursuit are in the dialogues on love by Plutarch and by Plato. Theocritus and the Greek Anthology authors refer to homosexual love.
The only interest the subject has for the psychoanalytic critic of literature is in tracing the connection between the works of authors where homosexual remnants in the form of extreme friendships are present and their infantile sex life.
Freud's monograph on Leonardo da Vinci is the best study we have of a homosexual artist.
It appears then that the bisexual tendency which is in infancy in all of us, in later life may lead, where it does not become absolutely normal, to actual homosexuality, or to a sublimation of this early inverse tendency; one of the manifestations of this sublimation being literary products in which friendship is exalted.