Dr. S. K., physician, 32 years of age, relates that he has a pronounced heterosexual past. At any rate his longing previously was purely physical and psychically he was completely indifferent. As ship surgeon he acquired a severe gonorrhea in a port and this trouble lasted some six months. He suffered all possible complications: epididymitis, a posterior prostatitis and finally, a gonorrheal rheumatism of the joints. Since that trouble he has felt a terrific disgust for women. In Alexandria while entering a cabin he saw one of the ship lieutenants committing pederasty with a local boy. He knew that at the various ports young boys visited the ships and offered themselves to the homosexual officers. The scene evoked in him a terrific nausea and he wanted to drop that officer from among his acquaintances. But the latter spoke up frankly confessing that he became homosexual after being seduced and since then he was completely impotent in the company of a woman. He begged the physician to keep his secret and not to betray him. He was the only intellectual man on board that ship with whom it was pleasant to have relations. In a few weeks the two men became intimate with each other: “Then, for the first time, I learned what love was and I had never before been as happy as that. My heterosexual past now seemed unbelievable. But in Platen’s diary I came across a passage telling that as a young man he too had been in love with a girl named Euphrasia and that he learned only later the true direction of his sexual instinct. It was the same with me. I was born a homosexual although I had to go through some experiences before my eyes opened.”
In this case the gonorrheal infection and the trivial incident during the journey through the Orient furnished the occasion for the outbreak of homosexuality. But is not the subject in error regarding the strength of his homosexual predisposition? It is interesting to note that his homosexual attitude is promptly beatified and idealized through the addition of psychic factors. Indeed, the homosexuals display a greater love intoxication than the heterosexuals. Such a degree of love frenzy as is displayed by the homosexuals is hardly ever seen among the heterosexuals. Homosexuality represents a harbor of refuge, an attempt to lose one’s self exclusively in one direction, which must be conceived as an attempt on the part of the psyche to neutralize all other tendencies by the overemphasis of that supreme passion.
We find frequently that the homosexuals contend that their previous heterosexual leanings were exclusively physical.[42] Psychically their love relations must be exclusively homosexual. In fact it is common to find men sublimating into friendship their craving for psychic love while woman remains with them merely an instrument for sin (instrumentum diaboli).
A certain homosexual whose history is of particular interest because he recalls clearly his heterosexual period told Bloch:
“At what age my sexual feelings first arose I am unable to recall. My sexual desires are directed towards the male. Before and during my puberty the actual direction of my desire was not clear, in fact I believe I did entertain at the time a wish to have once intercourse with a girl. But it was not love, what I felt was merely a physical longing,—the psychic counterpart of the instinct was entirely absent at the time. Now I feel myself inclined exclusively towards young boys. I have had no intercourse thus far either with males or females, but I believe I would be able to carry out the sexual act in a normal way; I know, however, that it would not be pleasurable to me, it would not amount to more than masturbation so far as I am concerned. Towards the female sex I am completely indifferent, I feel neither disgust nor any dislike. My love dreams are always concerned with persons of my own sex.” (Bloch, l.c., p. 566.)
Homosexuality often develops also in women following an infection:
Miss Erna, 42 years of age, writer, shows preeminent male features, behaves peculiarly like a male, smokes, drinks, is a preeminent champion of women’s rights. She claims to be innately homosexual, even as a child she assumed a male role, and was wilder than her brothers. She always passed for an uncontrollable tomboy. Had no intimation about her homosexual condition. Masturbated very early and already at the age of 15 she maintained clandestine relations with an army officer who had seduced her. But she claims that her experience was exclusively physical. She has experienced orgasm with men. At 19 years of age another army officer gave her a venereal disease. Since that time she feels a tremendous dislike for all men. At 22 years of age she conceived a romantic love for a woman friend. They kept up a relationship during which she maintained the male role. She even procured for herself an artificial phallus and wore male clothes in the house. It was like a genuine marriage. “I know only since then what love really means. Formerly I only felt a liking for men. It was merely a physical attraction. But for the past 20 years my love has been exclusively for women.” After the first “homosexual marriage,” which lasted only three years because her friend deserted her and married, she had numerous relations with other women.