the nature of cruelty had not then appealed to me. (I except the original dream of my childhood, which seems to me still to stand fantastically apart.) In the inventions to which I now gave myself the sense of being passed across limbs of different texture and color was subtle and pleasurable. I think the note of constructive cruelty which now followed arose from an imagined rivalry among my lovers for possession of me; the idea that I was desired made me soon take a delight in imagining myself torn and snatched about by the contending parties. Presently out of this I began constructing definite scenes of violence. I was able in imagination to lie in the thick and stress of conglomerated deliciousness of thighs struggling to hold me; I was able to imagine at least six bodies encircling me with passionate contact. At the same time I had an ingrained feeling of my own physical smallness in relation to the limbs whose contact threw me into such paroxysms of delight. A new and sufficiently ludicrous invention took possession of me; I imagined myself strapped to the thigh (always, I think, the right one) of the man on whom I chose, for the time, to concentrate my desires, and so to be worn by him during his day's work, hidden beneath his garments. I was not conscious of any difficulty due to my size. The charm of bondage and compulsion was here, again, in the ascendant. I fancy that it was in this connection that I first anticipated whipping as the delightful climax to my emotions, administered when my possessor, at the end of his day's work, unclothed himself for rest.
"Up to this stage my attraction to the male organ of generation had been slight and vague. Two things now contributed to bring thought of it into prominence. On two or three occasions when I accompanied farm laborers to their occupations I saw them pause by the way to relieve nature. My extreme shyness as regards such matters in my own person made this performance in my presence like an outrage on my modesty; it had about it the suggestion of an indecent solicitation to one whose inclination was to headlong and delirious surrender. I stood rooted and flushing with downcast eyes till the act was over and was conscious for a considerable time of stammering speech and bewildered faculties. When I afterward reviewed the circumstances they had the same attraction for me that amorous cruelty was just then beginning to exercise on my imagination. My mind secretly embraced the fearful sweetness of the newly discovered sensation, surrounding the performance of the function with all sorts of atrocious and bizarre inventions. For a time my intellect hung back from accepting this as the central and most fiery secret of the male attraction; but shortly afterward, when out walking with my father, I saw him perform the same act; I was overwhelmed with emotion and could barely drag my feet from the spot or my eyes from the damp herbage where he had deposited the waters of secrecy. Even today, when my mind has been long accustomed to the knowledge of generative facts, I cannot dissociate myself from the shuddering charm that moment had for me. The attraction my father's person had always had for me was now increased tenfold by the performance I had witnessed (though I had not seen the penis in any of these cases).
"For a considerable time only those lovers were dominant in my imagination whom I had witnessed in the act that had so poignantly affected me. My delight now took the form of imagining myself strapped to the thighs of the person while this function was in progress.
"By this time I must have been 8 years old. The cold and secret relationship of which I have given an account had continued without instructing me in any of the ardent possibilities it might have suggested; no force or cruelty was used upon me, no warmth was lavished. It made little difference that my companion had now discovered the act of masturbation; it had no meaning to me, since it led to no warmth of embrace. His method was to avert himself from me; I had to fawn upon him from the rear and also to invent indecent stories to stimulate his imagination. I felt myself a despised instrument, the mere spectator of an act which, if directed toward me with any warmth, would have aroused the liveliest appetite. At this time, as I have since seen, my companion was gaining knowledge from the ancient classics. For a time some charm was imparted by his instructing me to adopt a superincumbent face-to-face embrace. The beginning of his puberty was enormously attractive to me; had he been less cold-blooded I could have responded passionately to his endearments; but he always insisted on rigorous passivity on my part, and he explained nothing. One day, by a small gratuity, he induced me to offer him my mouth, though I still had no comprehension of the result I was helping to attain. Once the orgasm occurred, and the effect was extremely nauseous; after that he was more careful. My companion was approaching manhood, and his demands became more frequent, his exactions more humiliating.
"At the same time my passion for male love was growing stronger. I was able to construct from the unsatisfactory bondage in which I was held images of bodily embrace which I had not before had sufficient sense of human contact to form, though I seldom imagined any of the acts that in actual experience repulsed me. One day, however, I shirked a particularly repulsive humiliation which my companion had forced upon me. He discovered the deception, rose from the prone position in which he lay, and throwing me across his knees thrashed me violently. I submitted without a struggle, experiencing a curious sensation of pleasure in the midst of my pain. When he repeated his order I found its accomplishment no longer repulsive. One of the few pleasurable memories this intimacy, extending over years, has left for me is that moment of abject abasement to one who, with no warmth of feeling, had yet once had sufficient energy to be brutal to me.
"It must have been from this incident that the calculated effect of flagellation began to have weight with me when I indulged my imagination. A wish to be repulsed, trampled, violated by the object of my passion took hold of my instincts. Even then--and, indeed, up to my 13th year--I had no idea of normal sexual connection. I knew vaguely that children were born from women's bodies; I did not know--and when told I did not believe--the true facts of the marital relationship. All that I had experienced--both in fact and imagination--was to me so highly individual that I had no notion anything kindred to it could exist outside of my own experience. I had no notion of sex as the basis of life. Even when I came gradually to realize that men and women were formed in a way that argued connection with each other, I still believed it to be a dissolute sort of conduct, not to be indulged in by those who had claims to respectability.
"I had, however, by this time arrived at a strong attraction toward the organs of generation and all aspects of puberty, and my imagination spent Itself in a fantastic worship of every sign of masculinity. My enjoyment now was to imagine myself forced to undergo physical humiliation and submission to the caprice of my male captors, and the central fact became the discharge of urine from my lover over my body and limbs, or, if I were very fond of him, I let it be in my face. This was followed usually by a half-caressing castigation, in which the hand only was instrumental.
"The period of which I am now writing was that of my entry into school life. My imaginary lovers immediately became numerous; all the masters and all the boys above a certain age attracted me; for two I had in addition a feeling of romantic as well as physical attachment. Indeed, from this time onward I was never without some heroes toward whom I indulged a perfectly separate and tenderly ideal passion. The announcement that one was about to leave surprised me into a passionate fit of weeping; yet my reserve was so great and my sense of isolation so crushing that I made no effort at intimacy, and to one for whom I felt inexhaustible devotion I barely spoke for the first three years, though meeting him daily. At this time the subjects of my contemplation had distinctly individualized methods of approach. Thus in one case I imagined we stood face to face in our night-gear; suddenly mine was stripped from me; I was seized and forcibly thrust under his and made to hang with my feet off the ground by my full weight on the erect organ which inserted itself between my thighs; so suspended--my body enveloped in the folds of his linen and my face pressed upon his heart--I underwent a castigation which continued until I was thrown down to receive a discharge of urine over my prostrate body. Such images seemed to come independently of my will.
"It was at this time that I found a large pleasure in imagining contact with people whom I disliked; the prevailing note of these intimacies was always cruelty, to which I submitted with acute relish. I discovered, however, from the ordinary school experiences of corporal punishment, that it had no charm to me when administered for school offenses, even from the hands under which at other times I imagined myself as delighting to receive pain. The necessary link was lacking; had I perceived on the part of my judge any liking for the operation, there would probably have been a response on my side. On one occasion I was flogged unjustly; conscious as I was of its cruel instead of judiciary character, this was the only castigation I received which had in it an element of gratification for my instincts. At the same time I never forgave the hand that administered it; it is the only instance I remember in myself of a grudge nourished for years.
"Meanwhile, amid this chaos of confused love and hatred, of relish for cruelty and loathing for injustice, my first thoroughly romantic and ideal attachment was developing itself. I may say, of those to whom romance as well as physical attachment bound me, that they have remained unchangeable parts of my nature. Today, as it was twenty years ago, when I think of them the blood gushes to my brain, my hands tingle and moisten with an emotion I cannot subdue: I am at their feet worshipping them. Of them my dreams were entirely tender; the idea of cruelty never touched the conception I had of them. But I return to that one who was the chief influence of my youth: older than myself by only three years, he was of fine build and athletic, with adolescence showing in his face; my tremulous beginnings of worship were confirmed by a word of encouragement thrown to me one day as I went to receive my first flogging; no doubt my small, scared face excited his kind pity. I made it my concern afterward to let him know that I had not cried under the ordeal, and I believe he passed the word around that I had taken my punishment pluckily. So little contact had I with him that beyond constant worship on my part I remember nothing till, about three years later, I received from him a kind, half-joking solicitation, spoken in clean and simple language. So terrific was my shyness and secrecy that I had even then no idea that familiarity of the sort was common enough in schools. I was absolutely unable to connect my own sensations with those of the world at large or to believe that others felt as I did. On this occasion I simply felt that some shrewd thrust had been made at me for the detection of my secret. He had drawn me upon his knee; I sat there silent, flushing and dumbfounded. He made no attempt to press me; he had, as he thought, said enough if I chose to be reciprocal; beyond that he would not tempt me. A few years ago I heard of him married and prosperous.
"In following up my emotions in this direction I have far outstripped the period up to which I have given a complete exposition of my development. I must have been more than 12 years old before school life persuaded me to face (as taught by sniggering novices) the actual facts of sexual intercourse. At the same time I learned that I had means of extracting enjoyment from my own body in a definite direction which I had not till then suspected. A growing resistance on my part to his cold desires had led to a break with my former intimate; to the last he had taught me nothing, except distaste for himself. I now found ready teachers right and left of me. One of my schoolfellows invited me to watch; him in the process of masturbation; the spectacle left me quite unmoved; the result appeared to me far less exciting than the discharge of urine which, until then, I had associated with male virility. I was so accustomed to my own lone amorous broodings that the effort and action required for this process, when I attempted to imitate it, disconcerted my thoughts and interfered with concentration on my own inventions. I had never experienced the pleasure accompanying the spasm of emission, and there seemed to be nothing worth trying for along that road. I desisted and returned to my reveries. I was now in a perfect maze of promiscuity; there must have been at least fifty people who attracted me at that time. I developed a liking for imagining myself between two lovers, generally men who were physical contrasts. It was my habit to analyze as minutely as possible those who attracted me. To gain intimacy with what was below the surface I studied with attention their hands, the wrists where they disappeared (showing the hair of the forearm), and the neck; I estimated the comparative size of the generative organs, the formation of the thighs and buttocks, and thus constructed a presentment of the whole man. The more vividly I could do this, the keener was the pleasure I was able to obtain from their contemplated embraces.
"Till now I had been absolutely untouched by any moral scruples. I had the usual acquiescence in the religious beliefs in which I had been trained; it did not enter my head that there was any divine law, one way or the other, concerning the allurements of the imagination. From my thirteenth year slight hints of uneasiness began to creep into my conscience. I began perhaps to understand that the formulas of religion, to which I had listened all my life with as little attention as possible, had some meaning which now and then touched the circumstances of my own life. I had not yet realized that my past foretold my future, and that women would be to me a repulsion instead of an attraction where things sexual were concerned. I had the full conviction that one day I should be married; I had also some fear that as I grew to manhood I might succumb to the temptations of loose women. I had an incipient revulsion from such a fate, and this seemed to me to indicate that moral stirrings were at work within me. One night I was amorously attacked in my bedroom by two of the domestics. I experienced an acute horror which I hid under laughter; my resistance was so desperate that I escaped with a tickling. I had been accustomed to sit on the servants' knees, a habit I had innocently retained from childhood; I can now recall in detail the approaches these women had been used to make me. At the time I was utterly oblivious that anything was intended.
"I was equally oblivious to things that had a nearer relation to my own feelings. In passing along a side-street one night I was overtaken by a man who began conversation on the weather. He asked me if I were not cold, began passing his hand up and down my back; then came a question about caning at school, whether certain parts of me were not sore, leading to an investigating touch. I put his hand aside shyly, but did not resent the action. Presently he was for exploring my trousers pockets and I began to think him a pickpocket; repulsed in that direction, he returned, to rubbing my back. The sensation was pleasant. I now took him for a pimp who wished to take me to a prostitute, and as at that time I had begun to realize that such pleasures were not to my taste I was glad to find myself at my destination, and said good-bye sharply, leaving him standing full of astonishment at his failure with one who had taken his advances so pleasantly. I could not bring myself to believe that others had the same feelings as myself. Later I realized my escape, not without a certain amount of regret, and constructed for my own pleasure a different termination to the incident.
"I was now so possessed by masculine attraction that I became a lover of all the heroes I read of in books. Some became as vivid to me as those with whom I was living in daily contact. For a time I became an ardent lover of Napoléon (the incident of his anticipation of the nuptials with his second wife attracting me by its impetuous brutality), of Edward I, and of Julius Cæsar. Charles II I remember by a caressing cruelty with which my imagination gifted him. Jugurtha was a great acquisition. Bothwell, Judge Jefferies, and many villains of history and fiction appealed to me by their cruelty.
"I had become an adept in the mental construction necessary for the satisfaction of my desires. And yet up to that date I had never seen the nude body of a full-grown adult. I had no knowledge of the extent to which hair in certain instances develops on the torso; indeed, my efforts at characterization centered, for the most part, around the thighs and generative organs. At this time one of my schoolfellows saw a common workman, known to me by name, bathing in a stream with some companions; all his body was, my informant told me, covered with hair from throat to belly. In face the man was coarse and repulsive, but I now began to regard him as a lovely monstrosity, and for many nights embraced the vision of him passionately, with face buried in the jungle growth of hair that covered his chest. I was, for the first time, conscious of deliberately (and successfully) willing not to see his face, which was distasteful to me. At the same time another schoolfellow told me, concerning a master who bathed with the boys, that hair showed above his bathing-drawers as high as the navel. I now began definitely to construct bodies in detail; the suggestion of extensive hairiness maddened me with delight, but remained in my mind strongly associated with cruelty; my hairy lovers never behaved to me with tenderness; everything at this period, I think, tended to draw me toward force and violence as an expression of amativeness. A schoolfellow, a few years my senior, of a cruel, bullying disposition, took a particular delight in inflicting pain on me: he had particularly pointed shoes, and it was his custom to make me stand with my back to him while he addressed me in petting and caressing tones; just when his words were at their kindliest he would inflict a sharp stroke with the toe of his boot so as to reach the most tender part of my fundament; the pain was exquisite; I was conscious that he experienced sexual pleasure (I had seen definite signs of it beneath his clothing), and, though loathing him, I would, after I had suffered from his kicks, throw myself into his imaginary embraces and indulge in a perfect rage of abject submission. Yet all the time I would gladly have killed him.
"At the age of 14 I went, for a time, to a farm-house, where I was allowed to mingle familiarly with the farm-laborers, a fine set of muscular young men. I became a great favorite, and, having childish, caressing manners a good deal behind my real age, I was allowed to take many liberties with them. They all lived under the farmer's roof in the old-fashioned way, and in the evening I used to sit on their knees and caress and hug them to my heart's content. They took it phlegmatically; it apparently gave them no surprise. One of the men used to return my squeezes and caresses and once allowed me to put my hand under his shirt, but there were no further liberties.
"It was not until I was nearly 15 that the event happened which made me, for the first time, restless in my enforced solitude. I was verging on puberty, and perhaps in the hope that I should find my own development met by a corresponding warmth I again came into intimate relations with the companion whose frigid performances had caused me weariness and disgust. He was now a man, having reached majority. He put me into his bed while he undressed himself and came toward me in perfect nudity. In a moment we were in each other's arms and the deliciousness of that moment intoxicated me. Suddenly, lying on the bed, I felt attacked, as I thought, by an imperative need to make water. I leaped up with a hurried excuse, but already the paroxysm had subsided. No discharge came to my relief, yet the need seemed to have passed. I returned to my companion, but the glamour of the meeting was already over. My companion evidently found more pleasure in my person than when I was a mere child; I felt moved and flattered by the pleasure he took in pressing his face against certain parts of my body. On a second occasion, one day, I seemed involuntarily about to transgress decency, but again, as before, separated myself, and remained ignorant of what it was on which I had verged in my excitement. At another meeting, however, I had been allowed to prolong my embrace and to act, indeed, upon my full instincts. Once more I felt suddenly the coming of something acutely impending; I took my courage in my hands and went boldly forward. In another moment I had hold of the mysterious secret of masculine energy, to which all my years of dilirious imaginings had been but as a waiting at the threshold, the knocking on a closed door.
"It was inevitable that from that day our intimacy should dwindle into dissolution (though other causes anticipated this natural decay), but I no longer found masturbation a dry and wearisome formula. In my novitiate I was disheartened to find how long it took me to dissociate myself from the contemplative and attach myself to the active form of self-gratification. But I presently found myself committed to the repetition of the act three times a day. On almost the last occasion I met my intimate he showed an exceptional ardor. At that meeting he proposed to attempt an act I had not previously considered possible, far less had I heard that it was considered the worst criminal connection that could take place. I had a slight fear of pain, but was willing to gratify him, and for the first time found in my submission a union of the two amative instincts which had before disputed sway in me: the instinct for tenderness and the instinct for cruelty. _Pedicatio_ failed to take place, but I received an embrace which for the first time gave me full satisfaction. My delight was enormous; I was filled with emotions. I have no words to describe the extraordinary charm of the warm, smooth flesh upon mine, and the rougher contact of the hairy parts. Yet I was conscious, even at the time, that this was but the physical side of pleasure, and that he was not and never could be one whom I might truly be said to love.
"I was now in my sixteenth year, and under the influence of these and many other emotions then, for the first time, beginning to seize me, a sense of literary power and a desire to express myself through imaginative channels began to take hold of me. I feared that my indulgence was having an enfeebling power on my faculties (I had begun to experience physical languor and depression), and certain religious scruples, the result of my early training, took hold of me. For the first time I became conscious that the ardors I felt toward my own sex were a diversion of the sex-instinct itself, and to my astonishment and consternation I found by chance the practices I had already indulged in definitely denounced in the Bible as an abomination. From that moment began a struggle which lasted for years. I made a final breach with my former intimate, and thereupon a long dispute took place between the conflicting influences that strove for possession of my body. For a time I broke off the habit of masturbation, but I could not so easily rid myself of the mental indulgence, which was now almost an essential sedative for inducing sleep. At this time a visit to the seaside, where, for the first time, I was able to see men bathing in complete nudity, frankly, in the full light of day, plunged me again for a time headforemost into imaginative amours, and my scruples and resolutions were flung to the winds. But, on the whole, I had now entered a stage which, for want of a better term, I must describe as the emotionally moral. To whatever depth of indulgence I descended I carried a sense of obliquity with me; I believed that I was a rebel from a law, natural and divine, of which yet no instinct had been implanted in me. I still held unquestioned the truth of the religion I had been brought up in, and my whole life, every thought of my brain, every impulse of my body, were in direct antagonism to the will of God. At times physical desire broke down these barriers, but I practised considerable restraint physically, though not mentally, and made great efforts to conquer my aversion from women and extreme devotion for men, without the slightest success. I was 30, however, before I found a companion to love me in the way my nature required. I am quite a healthy person, and capable of working at very high pressure. Under sexual freedom I have become stronger."
HISTORY XXII.--T.J., aged 50; man of letters. Height 5 feet 7 inches; weight 10 stone, but formerly much less. Belongs to an entirely normal family, all married and with children.