Various external signs may betray a strong homosexual trend or mark a sudden outbreak of it. Men suddenly decide to cut or shave off their beard. They unexpectedly turn their interests to sports which give them the opportunity of watching men undressed. They become passionate fans around prize rings, are seen at sun bathing establishments and sporting places, or rave about the culture of nakedness as a hygienic fad, etc. Women suddenly find that they cannot possibly wear their long hair and decide to cut it short. Sometimes they do it without telling their husband so as to ‘pleasantly’ surprise him. They change fashions, take readily to English jackets, tight coats and Girardi hats and begin to show tremendous interest in the emancipation of women.
Joint suicide as a mask is a subject to which I can only refer briefly. Persons who do not have the courage to live together are the ones likely to commit suicide jointly. The suicide of two friends, male or female, is often due to unsatisfied homosexuality, however ideal, apparently, the motives may be. A life which does not yield to the full gratification craved by the unconsciously operating instincts, loses its zest. Frenssen states: “Sun, moon and stars no longer carry any message to one who has lost interest in them; a thing degenerates unless cultivated assiduously; it is so with everything. Indifference deadens; love breathes life into everything.”
I have already pointed out in my treatise on Onanism that those who have not given up the habit may give expression to tendencies distinctly homosexual through their autoerotic acts. The feeling of guilt is due in part, although only in part, to this cause. The greater hold the habit has upon the individual the stronger also seems the homosexual trait back of it. Many onanists are asocial in their inclinations and avoid group life. But I know a number who are enthusiastic ‘joiners,’ belonging to numerous organisations and always eager to assume honorary membership in all sorts of clubs. That female lawyers are particularly apt to show homosexual tendencies is well known and the fact is often exploited in the comic papers under slight disguise.
Lastly, I must mention another important form of masked homosexuality: the artistic. Poets whose preference is the delineation of female characters are partly homosexual. They perceive accurately the female emotions, they are able to portray with fidelity the life of that sex, because they carry within their breast, as it were, a goodly portion of womanhood. Chamisso described so wonderfully womanly love, because he himself was largely woman, as his portrait is enough to indicate. Painters may also show the reverse tendency. They paint preferably male scenes or, as sculptors, create statues of men. Their appraisal of esthetic values betrays their hidden homosexuality. Some artists find the male figure much more beautiful than the female, others find the male body repulsive. An overstressed aversion betrays the homosexual trend as clearly as an emotionally overstressed preference.
The choice of a pseudonym may also prove a characteristic sign. Just as the transvestites (wearers of clothes of opposite sex) clearly show their homosexual peculiarities thereby so do men choosing a female pseudonym for their contributions or writings, often betray their homosexuality by the act. Of course, in the case of women, the choice of a male nom de plume is determined partly by the well known common notion that works obtain a wider circulation if attributed to male authorship. At any rate, it betrays a desire to be taken for a man, by the readers, at least. A woman writer whom I know and who is active under a male nom de plume has told me, as an objection to this view, that she is decidedly interested in men. She confessed herself a Messalina. But back of such an unsatisfied craving, there stands, as I have already mentioned, homosexuality, the blind instinct, ungratified. This woman preferred relations with well known “women killers,” typical Cassanovas. Obviously, the thought of the numerous female conquests must have furnished here the chief attraction. Such men carry about them the aroma of many women. They must be proven masters of the art of love and a woman is disposed to expect of them special thrills and, possibly, new refinements of the art; but the heroes, as a rule, when tried fail to come up to the expectations lodged in them; they in turn become easily tired of their new conquest. The unsatisfied homosexual male is incapable of gratifying completely the love hungry homosexual woman. (That is the tragedy back of many unhappy marriages.) It is also significant that this woman, who otherwise had allowed herself an unusual degree of freedom about sexual matters, looked upon homosexuality as Tabu.
I have mentioned only a small number of the possible masks of homosexuality. Some of the screens are so transparent they cannot but be noticed even by those who are still novices in psychoanalytic matters. One marries a girl, for instance, after falling in love with that girl’s brother; or a girl marries the brother of her homosexual choice, as I have clearly shown in connection with the highly instructive case history No. 93, in my study of Anxiety States.
For this reason a friend’s wife may be a very dangerous person and this mediation of homosexuality through a third person has often been the cause of terrific household dramas. I know men who are regularly prone to fall in love with their friends’ sweethearts, naturally, without suspecting that back of this proclivity there stands the hidden passion for their friend.
In conclusion I may point out another very significant mask of homosexuality. I refer to psychic impotence, which shows itself particularly during attempted intercourse with respectable women. Men potent with prostitutes but unable to carry out coitus with a ‘decent’ woman, are latent homosexuals whose libido is sufficiently roused in the presence of the prostitute by the realisation that the woman has been used before by another man. Of course, a relative impotence of this character has many other determinants. But the factor here mentioned is never absent.
The study of this cryptic form of homosexuality alone will enable us to appreciate the inestimable role of bisexuality in the mental life of modern man.
Other forms of masked homosexuality, manifested in phobias and compulsion, I must mention only superficially. There are men who become extremely uneasy if some other man walks directly behind them, men who are unable to remain with another man alone in a room, men who always dream of scenes in which some man points a revolver or knife at them, or who have the uncomfortable feeling that some hard substance, perhaps nothing more than an indurated cylindrical mass of fæces, is pressing within their rectum. With these peculiarities such men betray their homosexuality, just as the paranoiacs do with their delusions of persecution.