A few years later I saw him again. He had followed my advice, and his wife, who loved him devotedly, had finally consented, because he could not attain erection otherwise, and she required the fulfilment of marital relations. Since she “gave in” to her husband’s peculiar request, she is able to rouse him to coitus as often as she desires it. She only needs to put on tights.... He experiences the greatest satisfaction while his wife wears tights and they assume the situs inversus. Through such a small compromise, by meeting some specific phantasy, it is often possible to turn an incompatible marriage into a happy one.
This is not the only case of its kind of which I know. I know men who, when going to houses of prostitution request the women to retain their drawers when undressing. Others actually demand that the girls should put on male trousers. These latent homosexuals are well known to the prostitutes. They remain passive and expect the woman to be aggressive. This shows they maintain the fiction that they are females and they require relatively but little in the form of overt acts to maintain this fiction in their mind. Many an instance of love at first sight is induced in the same way.
Case. Z. I. A man, 48 years of age, had several light love affairs, was twice unhappily married. After the second separation—some six years previously—he left women severely alone because he had a poor opinion of them. He used to say: all women are worthless decoys and it is a pity to turn a single hair grey on their account. In the circle of women haters he was known for that reason as the decoy-man. His physical sexual needs he satisfied with prostitutes or street acquaintances. Beyond that he avoided women and sought only the company of men. It was obvious that he was drifting away from heterosexuality and leaning towards psychic homosexuality. Then it happened that he agreed once to sit as a model for a woman artist. The sculptress was in ordinary clothes and had made no particular impression on him. She asked him to wait a few moments and then she stepped out to put on her working clothes. When she reappeared, a few moments later, he was astonished. She wore a long white coat, which covered her whole dress, a pleasing little cap, under which she had tucked her hair to protect it against the dust, and a pair of glasses which she wore only when working. She appeared so attractive that he fell in love with her that moment. He did not hide his feelings but immediately hastened to make up on the spot what he had lost in six years of opportunities to worship at the shrine of womanhood. She accepted his compliments good-naturedly. He fell in love with her as he had never been in love before. A few weeks later he proposed marriage, but she politely refused. She had made up her mind never to marry. But he did not give her up; on the contrary he pursued her with his attentions and tendernesses. His club and all his cronies he abandoned. He was head over heels in love, like a frisky boy, and held that now he knew the meaning of love. One of his friends proposed to cure him of his infatuation and told him in confidence that he had heard the sculptress was a homosexual who maintained relations with a chorus girl wearing tights. The whole town knew about it. It was an open secret. This information had the contrary effect upon him. His passion reached such a point that life seemed to him worthless without her. He struggled with thoughts of suicide and told the beloved about it. This made a strong impression upon her and she stated frankly: she would agree to be his sweetheart, but his wife, never. For a time he fought against accepting this compromise, desiring nothing short of a union for life. Finally he acquiesced. She was a virgin no longer and told him that she had already been her instructor’s sweetheart. That is why she did not want to consider marriage. With her instructor, however, she had never achieved orgasm. His embrace left her cold. She could achieve satisfaction and orgasm only with the aid of manipulatio cum digito.
Z. I. remained faithful to her for a few years and during that time tried several times to induce her to consider marriage. He was always most excited when he saw her wearing the apparel which had first roused his love for her. They always met in her studio while she was wearing her working clothes. Finally his love cooled and he returned to the society of his woman-hating companions. An attempt to have intercourse with a girl in his employ failed him and he called for advice.
He believed himself impotent. But it was merely the homosexual trait which comes to the fore at this age in various manifestations which physicians call the climacterium of man.
Analysis disclosed that the woman sculptor was the cousin of one of his favorite old school mates, whom she resembled closely. This young man also wore, while at work in his laboratory, a white coat, like the sculptress. It was this similarity that roused his libido so tremendously. The young man had become engaged a few weeks previously. He disapproved the young man’s step on various grounds. (A young man should not jeopardise his scientific career on account of a woman.) He was in love with the young man without realising it. The transference of the feeling into a heterosexual one was mediated through the fact that the woman looked like her cousin and the costume also helped to transfer some of the homosexual tendencies into the heterosexual channel.
In connection with this case I may make a few remarks about the so-called climacterium of man and about woman’s critical period. The psychic process is well known, in so far as it involves a parting from one’s youth, and it has been repeatedly outlined and described. The whole love instinct of man rebels against growing old and fosters the utilization to the utmost of the opportunities during the few remaining years. The milder the sexual life in the past, the greater and more stormy becomes the need of making up for lost opportunities “while there is time.”
But the significance of homosexuality during this critical period is a matter which most investigators have overlooked. It may be that the involution of the sexual glands brings the opposite sex into stronger relief at this period. One who conceives bisexuality as a chemical process—and there are some data apparently supporting such a view—may speak of the conquest of man’s heterosexuality over homosexuality. Hirschfeld would say of a man: as he now produces less andrin the gynecin achieves upper hands. Perhaps many cases of so-called late homosexuality (Krafft-Ebing) may be explained in this manner. I have known a man who, up to the 50th year of his life, has had no sexual experiences and who was also unaware of his homosexuality. At that age he happened to drift into the company of homosexuals and now he is a confirmed member of the third (intermediate) sex. Possibly the outbreak of homosexuality leading all the way to paranoia—a subject which I shall take up more fully in another chapter—depends on changes in the sexual glands, these changes leading to characteristic psychic expression.
In the last case disappointment after marriage (both women proved unfaithful to the man) induced the breaking forth of the homosexual tendencies.