“Nous sommes les enfants des anciennes Sodomes;
Puisque l’on nous voit beaux, laissons-nous nous aimer.
Notre sort est le plus désirable: charmer,
Nous sommes adorés des femmes et des hommes!”
Rachilde.
[“We are children of the ancient Sodom;
Since people regard us as beautiful, let us continue to love one another;
Our lot is the most desirable: to charm,
We are adored both by women and by men.”]
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XX
Connexion between pseudo-homosexuality and bisexuality — Great antiquity of the idea of bisexuality — Magnus Hirschfeld’s treatise on bisexuality — Bisexuality of the time of puberty — Pseudo-homosexual tendencies at this period of life — Examples (Gutzkow, Grillparzer) — On the large scale — Analogy to the pseudo-heterosexuality of youthful homosexuals — Persistence of bisexuality — The “Junores” — Delusion of sexual metamorphosis — Cultivation of pæderasts — Women-men and men-women — Brouardel’s type of effeminate Parisian street-arab — Homosexuality in the state of trance — Pseudo-homosexuality owing to the lack of heterosexual intercourse — Anal masturbators — Pseudo-homosexuality of prostitutes — Temporary pseudo-tribadism in Paris — Pseudo-uranism as a popular custom — Explanation of the Greek love of boys — Its fundamental difference from modern true homosexuality — Value of the noble asexual friendship of men for men — A letter of Gutzkow’s — The Platonic Eros and Græco-Oriental pæderasty — Bisexuality in German romanticism — Explanation of this — Hermaphroditism — Previous under-estimation of the importance of hermaphroditism — Recent researches — True hermaphroditism — Pseudo-hermaphroditism — Male and female apparent hermaphrodites.
CHAPTER XX
The dispute whether homosexuality is a congenital or an acquired phenomenon was one hitherto impossible to settle, because the whole province of those homosexual manifestations for which I suggest the name of “pseudo-homosexuality” had not been separated with sufficient clearness from true homosexuality for the essential difference between the two classes to receive accurate expression. True homosexuality is congenital. It is an original, permanent, essential outflow of the personality: pseudo-homosexuality, on the contrary, is either a homosexual sensibility suggested from without, transient, and not associated with the essence of the personality; or else it is merely apparent homosexuality, the illusion being dependent upon hermaphroditism or upon some other physical or mental abnormality.
The pseudo-homosexuality of the former category is explicable only by means of the fact of “bisexuality,” the existence of which has been scientifically proved only within recent years. By bisexuality we understand the possibility of two distinct modes of sexual perception occurring in one and the same person; and this, again, finds its explanation in the bisexual germinal vestiges which exist in every individual. There remains in every man a vestige of woman, in every woman a vestige of man, in a sense in a state of potential energy, which, however, is capable, by the action of various external influences, of being transformed into kinetic energy; but this vestige always plays a small part in comparison with the true specific sexual nature. This bisexuality was discussed in an earlier chapter of this book ([pp. 39], [40] and [70], [71]), and was there characterized as a phenomenon secondary in every respect, to which no great importance could be attached. The idea of bisexuality is not new; neither Fliess nor Weininger was its discoverer. It was already known to the ancients.[567] Heinse, in “Ardinghello,” gives expression to the idea in almost the same words as Weininger (see [p. 40]). Recently Magnus Hirschfeld[568] has collected the historical and literary details of the subject of bisexuality.