Dawning Doubts as to Sinfulness.
Shortly afterward, in a letter to my family physician, I wrote as follows:
“I would like to know if you think there is any possibility of my ever following my instincts without sin? It is right for the normal individual to appease natural craving in wedlock. Is it not also right for me to do the same if the opportunity should offer? For instance, I will suppose an almost impossible case. If I should ever come across a young man whom I loved and who would marry me, would it be right for me to live with him as his wife? This supposition is probably highly repulsive to you, but absolutely, looking at it philosophically, it is no more unseemly and monstrous for me to be joined in wedlock with the man I would love above everything else in the world, than for a normal individual to enter into the state of matrimony.
“I long to be made the pet of my classmates. Would it be unbecoming to show my girlishness to them occasionally, and welcome and encourage their caresses which I sometimes receive? I still often pray God to deaden these desires to receive tokens of a reciprocated passion on the part of those whom I sexually worship, but I am beginning to add, ‘If it be Thy will;’ because maybe it is for my highest good and happiness to have these feelings toward my associates.
“I desire to know the mysteries of my peculiar life. It seems to me I have a right to know. I spent several days recently in ransacking the college library for the information I desire, but found almost nothing. If the science of medicine knows anything about my peculiarity, I demand of you to know it.
First Knowledge of Other Adult Inverts.
“Lately from a conversation of some students that I heard, I chanced to learn more about my peculiar affliction than I ever knew before. I heard brief accounts of four persons cursed as I am, ‘With their procreative instincts centered in their heads instead of in the usual organs,’ as one of the students expressed it. These four victims were all intellectual men; one, a young clergyman; one, an elderly judge; and two, principals of schools. They were found out by their communities. The clergyman committed suicide, and the others had to flee from the stern hand of the law....
“You thus see that I may some day have to flee from the wrath of men by suicide, or by self-imposed exile in a distant land, where I doubt if I could stand the misery I would suffer, forever removed from all my dear ones, and worse than dead to them. No one would have any mercy on me, and my name would be held up as that of a consummate hypocrite and the most degraded of men. But more than anything I would suffer, I would bring my parents in sorrow to the grave.”
About this time I read the eminent theologian Lange’s comments on St. Paul’s teaching about marriage, and through these, as well as through my own deep reflections, I was becoming more than ever persuaded that since it was God who had planted these instincts in me at birth, they could not be so horribly sinful as I had been led to believe. Nevertheless I was not finally convinced. A month later I stayed up all of one night in order to reconsider the question, desiring and purposing to convince myself of the sinfulness of an invert’s harboring the suggestions of instinct to the slightest degree. I weighed carefully all the passages of sacred scripture bearing on the case, and finally determined to fight harder than ever to annihilate in myself all the movings of the sexual nature. In the following weeks, I occasionally did not leave my room all day, fasting, praying, and studying the scriptures.