Homosexual love has played a much greater part in the world's history than is generally believed. The Count de Platen and Sapho were inverts. The inverts themselves maintain that it was the same with Plato, Frederick the Great, Socrates, etc.; but this is not proved. In the East and in Brazil, homosexual love is very common.
My experience agrees with that of Krafft-Ebing, that homosexual love is pathological in nature, and that nearly all inverts are in a more or less marked degree psychopaths or neurotics, whose sexual appetite is not only abnormal but usually also exalted. Insane inverts, such as King Louis II of Bavaria, a great number of the insane, affected, for example, with Pseudologia phantastica (pathological swindlers), and who are also homosexual, show the intimate relationship which exists between sexual inversion (also called "uranism") and the psychoses.
I agree with Rudin that the psycho-pathological phenomena presented by the majority of inverts are primitive and hereditary, and that they are hardly ever the effect of their tormented life, as Hirschfeld, Ulrich and their disciples maintain. The vexations, anxieties and other torments that they suffer may no doubt play a part in developing certain nervous conditions previously latent, but they can never create hereditary taints. We may admit that sexual inversion corresponds to a kind of partial hermaphrodism, in which the sexual glands and copulatory organs have the characters of one of the sexes, while the brain has, to a great extent, those of the other sex; but the phenomenon is none the less pathological.
The inverts with whom we have most to do, especially in public asylums and at the courts of justice, are cynics and debauchees in spite of the ideal which they parade; but we should be wrong in concluding that this is always the case. The cynics make themselves heard because they do not restrain themselves. In my private practice I have known many very well-conducted inverts, possessing the most delicate sentiments, who had become pessimists owing to the shame and grief of a state of mind which they hid from the world.
Inverts of this class often commit suicide, after having carried on in silence a desperate struggle against their morbid appetite, because they prefer death to defeat, which they consider a dishonor. The victims of these tragedies deserve all our pity, and sometimes our respect. Such individuals generally hold aloof from the brotherhood of inverts which they look upon with fear or disgust.
In the picture of homosexuals there are two lamentable shadows, which are largely due to the severity with which most legislations track and condemn these unfortunate beings.
(1). As soon as an invert realizes his abnormal and dangerous situation in society, in which he feels a pariah, he often makes up his mind to follow the advice of ignorant friends, and even, alas, of ignorant doctors, and try and cure himself by marriage. Sometimes he begins by visiting a brothel to see if he is capable of normal coitus with a woman. In this he often succeeds, if he is able to picture to himself a man in the person of the prostitute. He tries to persuade himself that the disgust which he felt at this experimental coitus was due to the fact that the "love" was bought; and he then decides to enter into conjugal life. This is at the same time the greatest absurdity and the worst action possible for him to commit, for his wife becomes a martyr and soon feels herself deceived, abandoned and despised. The invert treats her as a servant; he rarely has sexual intercourse with her, sometimes not at all, and only performs it with repugnance with a view to the procreation of young inverts, who will rise to his ideal. He invites his male lovers to his house and they indulge in orgies, especially when the wife, despised and neglected, has separated from him. Such marriages, which are fortunately less common since this question has been better understood, generally end in divorce, preceded by bitter and mutual deceptions. It is really criminal to favor them when we know what they lead to. (It is against such unions, and against sexual indulgence of this nature, that the law ought to exert itself.)
(2). A second very grave result of homosexual love is the continual blackmail which is levied on inverts by all kinds of scamps. Public urinals are common meeting places for inverts. The blackmailers, who know this very well, follow them there and offer themselves for money; but as soon as they find out the name of their victim and his financial position, they begin to extort hush-money, threatening to prosecute him if he does not pay what they ask. If the invert is rich or of high position he has only to yield to the extortion, emigrate or commit suicide. In this way the life of most well-to-do inverts is ruined by perpetual anxieties, emotions and torments, because their morbid appetite instinctively urges them to abandon themselves to men who feel differently to themselves.
Moll, Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld have written at great length on sexual inversion. The law takes a just point of view and is generally severe as regards this anomaly, especially in Germanic countries. Even homosexual love that does not affect minors nor insane persons, is a sign of degeneracy, but produces no offspring and consequently dies out by means of selection. We hope, therefore, that this type may be extinct some day, although it is still decidedly numerous, principally in the larger cities of the world. When a normal man is tormented by an invert, it is much easier to get rid of him than for a young girl to protect herself against the importunities of a man.
It is quite another thing when the invert pays his attentions to minors, or when his appetites are complicated with dangerous sexual paræsthesias, such as sadism. Not long ago the terrible case of a sadist invert, Dippold, startled civilized Europe. By the aid of cruelty and intimidation this wretch martyrized two young boys confided to him for their education to such a degree that one of them died. Legal protection of the two sexes against sexual abuses of all kinds should be extended at least to the age of seventeen or eighteen.