“My wife was always looking for a reason. She believed that dressing up must have some cause, or must produce in me some effect, which I was unwilling to tell her. She was continually tormenting me about this; she would not believe that I spoke the truth, and she no longer felt any confidence in me. She believed that every one must perceive that I had this morbid impulse. She endeavoured to learn something about the matter from other women. Those whom she asked could only tell her evil and common things about men with tendencies like mine; some said I must be unconditionally an urning; others that I must have intercourse with other women behind my wife’s back; others that I wanted to lay aside men’s clothing in order to please girls under age, and so on. I suffered horribly from these false accusations.
“I endeavoured once again, in an essay I composed, which I entitled ‘The Junores,’ to make the matter clear to my wife. By junores I indicated men who wished to assume, or who did assume, the outward appearance of women in the matter of clothing, demeanour, and figure, but who sexually were masculine. All this was of no help to me. Our life together became continually more unbearable with the lapse of time; often there were scenes which had the most depressing effect on my mind. After violent scenes there occurred in me nocturnal pollutions, accompanied by no sensation of pleasure; also after these scenes erections were for a long time incomplete, so that a kind of impotence ensued.
“After every new accusation which my wife made against me I avoided going home in the evening. I wandered for hours in by-streets, overwhelmed by a feeling of futility and vacuity; my nerves all vibrated; sometimes I could not keep my limbs still. If I had had no children, or if I had known that they would be properly cared for, I should have known what to do in such a mood. One thing still torments me. Will my children be hereditarily tainted?”
I have myself seen both of these cases. The men concerned appear somewhat nervous, but they are otherwise quite healthy and manly, and both deny that they feel any sexual inclination towards men. The desire to wear women’s clothing, and to feel as a woman, may also make its appearance as a morbid phenomenon later in life, in the form of the “delusion of sexual metamorphosis” (metamorphosis sexualis paranoica); or it may be artificially induced, as among the ancient Scythians and among the Mexican “mujerados.” These latter are selected as men originally most powerful, and entirely free from any feminine appearance, and by incessant riding on horseback and by excessive masturbation they are made impotent (through atrophy of the genital organs) and effeminate, so that there may even occur a secondary development of the breasts (Hammond). All this belongs to the category of pseudo-homosexuality.
With regard to numerous historical women-men and men-women—such as, for example, the celebrated Chevalier d’Eon, Mademoiselle de Maupin (immortalized by Gautier in the romance of this name), and many other women going about in men’s clothing, or men going about in women’s clothing—it is, as a rule, no longer possible to determine whether they were genuinely homosexual, pseudo-homosexual, or bisexual.
I regard, however, the interesting type of effeminate Parisian street-arab, described by Brouardel at the Second Congress of Criminal Anthropologists at Berlin in the year 1889, as characteristically and originally homosexual.
“At the age from twelve to sixteen years the lad is still small, grasps ideas very slowly, and has little will-power. At the time of puberty he has experienced an inhibition of development, and his bodily growth has remained stationary. The penis is thin and flaccid, the testicles are small, the pubic hair is scanty, the skin is smooth, and the beard is very thin; the skeleton does not develop fully, like that of the normal male; the pelvis becomes wide, and the general outlines of the body become rounded (potelées) because there is an undoubted deposit of fat in the subcutaneous tissues, so that the breasts also become enlarged.”
This state persists. Brouardel found it still present in individuals of twenty-five to thirty years of age. These children of great towns are characterized by intellectual sterility and by incapacity for procreation. This type is found also among the well-to-do middle classes, and from such, according to Brouardel, the décadents are recruited, while the effeminate gamins either become professional pæderasts, or undertake the preparation of articles de Paris.[569]
It is not difficult, in this description, to recognize true homosexuality.
Magnus Hirschfeld gives an account of a peculiar form of pseudo-homosexuality occurring in an individual who in ordinary life was asexual.[570]