During the swimming hour I watched the genitals of the boys, comparing them carefully in the most minute details. Circumcised organs affected me as being disagreeable, and men's hairy, coarse genitals I abhorred.
When 13 I became acquainted with the new mail-boy at the inn. He was a city "street-boy," and got me into smoking cigarettes occasionally. I did not definitely take up smoking until I was 16. He told me that a mason once offered him ten cents if he would masturbate the man in a cellar. The boy said that he refused. I slept a few times with an ill-favored boy of fine parentage. He was of my own age, and I had played with him in a natural way for several years, but my increasing sexual desires led me to mutually masturbate with him, and even unsuccessfully to attempt with him mutual pædicatio. On the morning after our nights of sensuality I felt "gone" and miserable, but not repentant. By afternoon I was myself again. My relations with G. were purely animal, for I disliked his jealous disposition, his horse-laugh, his features, his form, his withdrawn scrotum and his undersized penis. At home in the evening I often found myself inflamed with a mental picture of active fellatio with him, but I never performed this act, so far as I remember.
One of my great sexual desires was to walk along a fence on which a girl was seated. In order that I might feast my eyes on her pudenda she must not wear drawers.
When I turned 14 I had been, from my unusual size, in long trousers for several months. I entered a private day-school and progressed brilliantly in my studies. I kept up masturbation almost daily, sometimes twice a day, both in the water closet and in bed. I can remember ejaculating before urination in the school cabinet. At night I often found myself longing for the return of my sister, seven years my junior, in order that I might embrace her in bed and fondle her genitals. I had done these things during my Christmas vacation of the year before. I mildly reproached myself for such incestuous desires, but they recurred continually. I dreamed little. And I cannot remember the character of my dreams. My waking libido spent itself mostly in longings to embrace (without lustful acts) the forms of little boys of exquisite blonde beauty and thick hair. Narcissism may have been present, for in my twelfth year I had been told that at the age of 5 and 6 I was an extraordinarily beautiful little creature with long, lint-white hair. The preferable age was from 6 to 9. My eye was alert on the streets for boys answering to this description, and a street boy with long, white hair so won my passion that I followed him to his home and asked his mother if he might call on me and "play some games." As I did not even know the boy's name and had never seen him before, I was wonderingly refused. I sought in vain to find the whereabouts of another long-haired street boy whom I burned to embrace and load with benefits. I had a boundless desire for such a boy as this to idolize me—to look into my face out of big eyes and lose himself in love for me—to call me by endearing pet names—of his own accord to throw his arms around my neck. This second actual boy disappeared from my horizon by presumably moving away from the vast city neighborhood. I took a fancy to a small boy at school, who possessed the requisite delicacy, timidity, and sweetness, if not the physical requisites, of my beau ideal. I walked with him in the park and planned to have him at the house; but the matter was not arranged. At boarding-school I had associated much with younger and weaker boys, and had been ridiculed much for my cowardice in sports, but at the city school I moved with my equals and won their recognition. Our gymnasium director was middle-aged and of an indolent disposition. He liked to recall his youthful erections and to answer my sexual queries too fully, and cheerfully volunteered information on brothels. Yet I doubt whether he had an evil purpose in conversing with me. I thought I should never dare or want to enter one. I always conjured up the picture of a row of naked women from whom I could take my pick, and the smell of the women I imagined to be identical with the smell of my big friend A. at boarding-school. When I was traveling down town on an elevated train one afternoon the brakeman asked me whether I had ever been in a brothel, and told me that disorderly houses abounded in my neighborhood. "I have had connection with women," said this red-haired young man, waving his hand in greeting to a woman who nodded at him from a window, "since I was 15 years old. Not long ago a fine-looking, young woman in black offered to pay all my expenses if I would live with her and connect with her."
When a girl of perhaps 7, a distant cousin of mine, visited us for a few days, I gratified my lust by placing my hand under her genitals and swinging her to and fro. She giggled with pleasure. That summer I began to experience the evil effects of the masturbation which I had practiced daily for a year and a half. Pimples began to break out on my chin (my complexion up to this time had been white and delicate). The family ascribed my condition to digestive difficulties. In playing with the boys and girls I found myself seized with a terrible shyness and a tendency to look down and weep. I had lost all the courage I had—it had never been great—in the presence of a crowd of children. I was fairly at ease with a single companion. My self-consciousness was something more painful to me than I can convey in words. At home I wept in my room and cursed myself for a baby. I little realized the cause of my nervous collapse. Yet I had too robust a frame not to be able to sleep and to play hard. The sympathetic pleasure which I had found in swinging my girl-cousin to and fro I now doubled by letting a 7-year-old boy ride cock-horse on my feet. I experienced an erection during the process, and I almost induced ejaculation when I tickled the boy with my feet in the region of his genitals. To see his shrinking, giggling joy gave me an exquisite sexual thrill. I longed to sleep with the boy, but I was afraid of causing comment. At the new and large boarding school which I entered in the fall my most lustful dreams and ejaculations were concerned with standing this little boy on the footboard of a bed, taking down his knickerbockers, and performing fellatio on him. But I dreamed also of natural coitus. I fell in love with the handsome, 12-year-old son of the aged headmaster. The boy, O., sat next me at the table, and I never tired of gazing at him. It gave me a special sense of pleasure to look at him when he wore a certain flowing, scarlet, four-in-hand necktie. But O. was not attracted to me—for one thing I was in a disagreeably pimpled condition—and I could not induce him to linger in my room nor to sleep with me. My passion for O. did not diminish, and it rose to its supremacy on the evening when he appeared in our hallway (he roomed on the girls' side of the house and hinted at the sexual sights that he saw) in a costume of white satin, lace, and wings. He was ready for a costume party.
I now masturbated less frequently, for I was beginning to appreciate the horrible consequences of my indulgence. I had frequent pollutions, with dreams. My day was one long agony of fear. How I dreaded to go to sleep in the same bed with my older chum, who never made any advances beyond embracing me passively cum erectione while he was asleep. My day was one long agony of fear. At meal time my feet constantly writhed in agony for fear that the headmaster's grown up young ladies should make fun of me, or that my lack of facial composure and my inability to look people in the eye might be commented upon. I tingled with apprehension, especially in the region of my stomach. Every nerve was taut in the effort I made to appear composed. I masturbated with erections over nothing. Greek recitations were for me an auto da fe. My heart beat like a trip-hammer at the thought of getting up to recite, and once on my feet my voice shook and my mind wandered. I hated the thought of people behind me looking at me. I rarely summoned the courage to turn my head either one way or the other. I vastly admired the "bravery" of the small, 15-year-old boy who recited so calmly and so well. I was too cowardly to play foot-ball and base-ball, and I dreaded even my favorite tennis because the spectators put me in a state of scared self-consciousness. Knowing my own condition, I was yet so blind to it most of the time, and such a Jekyll-and-Hyde, that I actually pitied a boy of 19 who was an eccentric and a scared victim of masturbation. But in spite of my neuropathic condition I developed intellectually. I do not touch upon this aspect of my life, however, because I am trying to limit myself strictly to sexual manifestations. At the present time I have not the courage to continue the narrative.
HISTORY III.—The following narrative is written by a clergyman, age 40, unmarried:—
My childhood and early boyhood were unmarked by sexual phenomena, beyond occasional erections, which commenced when about 5 years of age, without any exciting causes. These were accompanied by some degree of excitement, of the same nature as that which I experienced in later years. I was absolutely ignorant of sexual matters, but always had an idea that the essential difference between man and woman was to be found in the genital organs. This was sometimes a matter for thought and curiosity.
Being for many years an only child I saw little of other children, and formed the habit of amusing myself with making things—boats, houses, etc.—and acquired a taste for science. When I could read I preferred biography, history, and poetry to anything else.
When I was 13 years old and at a large school I heard for the first time of coitus, but very imperfectly. For a few days it filled my thoughts and mind, but feeling it was too engrossing a subject and one which took me off better things, I put it out of my mind. Later, another boy gave me a fuller description of the matter, and I began to have a great desire to know more and to be old enough to practice it. I also discovered that boys masturbated, and about a year after tried the experiment for myself. This vice was largely indulged in by my school-fellows. It never occurred to me that it was sinful, until I was nearly 16, when I came across a passage in Kenns's Manual of Schoolboys, in which it was hinted such things were wrong morally and spiritually. Previously I had felt it was an indelicate and shameful thing, and bad for health. This last idea was held as a solemn fact by all my boy friends. Gradually religion began to exert an influence over my sexual nature, obtaining as years passed a greater and greater restraining power. It is simply impossible for me to write a history of my sexual development without also describing the action which Christianity has had in determining its growth. The two have been so intimately bound together that my life history would not be a faithful record of facts if I left religion out of it.