was a mistake. A more complete expression might have helped him.
"All my life I had been hungry for a complete response, and at one time the lad thought he could give it. He was then nearing 20. 'I have never been so happy in my life,' he said. It was a blow to me when I found he had mistaken his own feelings, but I was quite ready to accept what love he could give. I also never dreamed of any sort of insistence on sexual expression. With such love as he could give I was quite ready to make myself content. 'The true measure of love,' wrote a uranian schoolmaster to me once, 'is self-sacrifice'; not 'What will you give?' but 'What will you give up?' Not 'What will you do for him?' but 'What will you forego for his sake?' I quote this gladly, for the conventional English moralists regard an invert as a kind of deformed beast. I can only say that I tried to realize the ideal which these words express. No 'moralist' would have helped me one whit. The parents, also, separated us. They have done much harm by their mistake. How difficult it is for parents to allow freedom to their children! Their ideal is successful constraint, not free self-discovery. But in spite of them, and in spite of the separation, I know that my friend and I have helped each other.
"There is one fear parents have which I believe is unwarranted. As far as I have seen, I do not conclude that the early expression of homosexual love prevents heterosexual love from developing later. Where this love is a part of the individual's inborn nature, it will show itself. I do, however, believe that a noble homogenic love in early life will sometimes help a lad to avoid a low standard of heterogenic attachment. The Greeks did well, at their best time, in cultivating and ennobling the homogenic love. Amongst us, as can be understood by all who know the working of society taboos, it is the baser forms that are unhindered, the noblest forms that are debased.
"We urnings are, I think, dependent upon individual love. Many of us, I know, need to work for an individual to do our best. Is this the outcome of the woman in the uranian temperament? And the tragedy of our fate is that we whose souls vibrate only to the touch of the hand of Eros are faced with the fiercest taboo of all that can give our lives meaning. The other taboos have been given up one by one. Will not this, the last of the taboos, soon vanish? I have known lives darkened by it, weakened by it, crushed out by it. How long are the western moralists to maim and brand and persecute where they do not understand?"
The next case belongs to a totally different class from all the preceding histories. These--all British or American--were obtained privately; they are not the inmates of prisons or of asylums, and in most cases they have never consulted a physician concerning their abnormal instincts. They pass through life as ordinary, sometimes as honored, members of society. The following case, which happens to be that of an American, is acquainted with both the prison and the lunatic asylum. There are several points of interest in his history, and he illustrates the way in which sexual inversion can become a matter of medico-legal importance. I think, however, that I am justified in believing that the proportion of sexually inverted persons who reach the police-court or the lunatic asylum is not much larger in proportion to the number of sexually inverted persons among us than it is among my cases. For the documents on which I have founded the history of Guy Olmstead I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. Talbot, of Chicago, well known from his studies of abnormalities of the jaws and face, so often associated with nervous and mental abnormality. He knew the man who addressed to him the letters from which I here quote:-- HISTORY XXVI.--On the twenty-eighth of March, 1894, at noon, in the open street in Chicago, Guy T. Olmstead fired a revolver at a letter-carrier named William L. Clifford. He came up from behind, and deliberately fired four shots, the first entering Clifford's loins, the other three penetrating the back of his head, so that the man fell and was supposed to be fatally wounded. Olmstead made little attempt to escape, as a crowd rushed up with the usual cry of "Lynch him!" but waved his revolver, exclaiming: "I'll never be taken alive!" and when a police-officer disarmed him: "Don't take my gun; let me finish what I have to do." This was evidently an allusion, as will be seen later on, to an intention to destroy himself. He eagerly entered the prison-van, however, to escape the threatening mob.
Olmstead, who was 30 years of age, was born near Danville, Ill., in which city he lived for many years. Both parents were born in Illinois. His father, some twenty years ago, shot and nearly killed a wealthy coal operator, induced to commit the crime, it is said, by a secret organization of a hundred prominent citizens to whom the victim had made himself obnoxious by bringing suits against them for trivial causes. The victim became insane, but the criminal was never punished, and died a few years later at the age of 44. This man had another son who was considered peculiar.
Guy Olmstead began to show signs of sexual perversity at the age of 12. He was seduced (we are led to believe) by a man who occupied the same bedroom. Olmstead's early history is not clear from the data to hand. It appears that he began his career as a schoolteacher in Connecticut, and that he there married the daughter of a prosperous farmer; but shortly after he "fell in love" with her male cousin, whom he describes as a very handsome young man. This led to a separation from his wife, and he went West.
He was never considered perfectly sane, and from October, 1886, to May, 1889 he was in the Kankakee Insane Asylum. His illness was reported as of three years' duration, and caused by general ill-health; heredity doubtful, habits good, occupation that of a schoolteacher. His condition was diagnosed as paranoia. On admission he was irritable, alternately excited and depressed. He returned home in good condition.
At this period, and again when examined later, Olmstead's physical condition is described as, on the whole, normal and fairly good. Height, 5 feet 8 inches; weight, 159 pounds. Special senses normal; genitals abnormally small, with rudimentary penis. His head is asymmetrical, and is full at the occiput, slightly sunken at the bregma, and the forehead is low. His cephalic index is 78. The hair is sandy, and normal in amount over head, face, and body. His eyes are gray, small, and deeply set; the zygomæ are normal. The nose is large and very thin. There is arrested development of upper jaw. The ears are excessively developed and malformed. The face is very much lined, the nasolabial fissure is deeply cut, and there are well-marked horizontal wrinkles on the forehead, so that he looks at least ten years older than his actual age. The upper jaw is of partial V-shape, the lower well developed. The teeth and their tubercles and the alveolar process are normal. The breasts are full. The body is generally well developed; the hands and feet are large.
Olmstead's history is defective for some years after he left Kankakee. In October, 1892, we hear of him as a letter-carrier in Chicago. During the following summer he developed a passion for William Clifford, a fellow letter-carrier about his own age, also previously a schoolteacher, and regarded as one of the most reliable and efficient men in the service. For a time Clifford seems to have shared this passion, or to have submitted to it, but he quickly ended the relationship and urged his friend to undergo medical treatment, offering to pay the expenses himself. Olmstead continued to write letters of the most passionate description to Clifford, and followed him about constantly until the latter's life was made miserable. In December, 1893, Clifford placed the letters in the postmaster's hands, and Olmstead was requested to resign at once. Olmstead complained to the Civil Service Commission at Washington that he had been dismissed without cause, and also applied for reinstatement, but without success.
In the meanwhile, apparently on the advice of friends, he went into hospital, and in the middle of February, 1894, his testicles were removed. No report from the hospital is to hand. The effect of removing the testicles was far from beneficial, and he began to suffer from hysterical melancholia. A little later he went into hospital again. On March 19th he wrote to Dr. Talbot from the Mercy Hospital, Chicago: "I returned to Chicago last Wednesday night, but felt so miserable I concluded to enter a hospital again, and so came to Mercy, which is very good as hospitals go. But I might as well go to Hades as far as any hope of my getting well is concerned. I am utterly incorrigible, utterly incurable, and utterly impossible. At home I thought for a time that I was cured, but I was mistaken, and after seeing Clifford last Thursday I have grown worse than ever so far as my passion for him is concerned. Heaven, only knows how hard I have tried to make a decent creature out of myself, but my vileness is uncontrollable, and I might as well give up and die. I wonder if the doctors knew that after emasculation it was possible for a man to have erections, commit masturbation, and have the same passion as before. I am ashamed of myself; I hate myself; but I can't help it. I have friends among nice people, play the piano, love music, books, and everything that is beautiful and elevating; yet they can't elevate me, because this load of inborn vileness drags me down and prevents my perfect enjoyment of anything. Doctors are the only ones who understand and know my helplessness before this monster. I think and work till my brain whirls, and I can scarce refrain from crying out my troubles." This letter was written a few days before the crime was committed.
When conveyed to the police station Olmstead completely broke down and wept bitterly, crying: "Oh! Will, Will, come to me! Why don't you kill me and let me go to him!" (At this time he supposed he had killed Clifford.) A letter was found on him, as follows: "Mercy, March 27th. To Him Who Cares to Read: Fearing that my motives in killing Clifford and myself may be misunderstood, I write this to explain the cause of this homicide and suicide. Last summer Clifford and I began a friendship which developed into love." He then recited the details of the friendship, and continued: "After playing a Liszt rhapsody for Clifford over and over, he said that when our time to die came he hoped we would die together, listening to such glorious music as that. Our time has now come to die, but death will not be accompanied by music. Clifford's love has, alas! turned to deadly hatred. For some reason Clifford suddenly ended our relations and friendship." In his cell he behaved in a wildly excited manner, and made several attempts at suicide; so that he had to be closely watched. A few weeks later he wrote to Dr. Talbot: "Cook County Gaol, April 23. I feel as though I had neglected you in not writing you in all this time, though you may not care to hear from me, as I have never done anything but trespass on your kindness. But please do me the justice of thinking that I never expected all this trouble, as I thought Will and I would be in our graves and at peace long before this. But my plans failed miserably. Poor Will was not dead, and I was grabbed before I could shoot myself. I think Will really shot himself, and I feel certain others will think so, too, when the whole story comes out in court. I can't understand the surprise and indignation my act seemed to engender, as it was perfectly right and natural that Will and I should die together, and nobody else's business. Do you know I believe that poor boy will yet kill himself, for last November when I in my grief and anger told his relations about our marriage he was so frightened, hurt, and angry that he wanted us both; to kill ourselves. I acquiesced gladly in this proposal to commit suicide, but he backed out in a day or two. I am glad now that Will is alive, and am glad that I am alive, even with the prospect of years of imprisonment before me, but which I will cheerfully endure for his sake. And yet for the last ten months his influence has so completely controlled me, both body and soul, that if I have done right he should have the credit for my good deeds, and if I have done wrong he should be blamed for the mischief, as I have not been myself at all, but a part of him, and happy to merge my individuality into his."
Olmstead was tried privately in July. No new points were brought out. He was sentenced to the Criminal Insane Asylum. Shortly afterward, while still in the prison at Chicago, he wrote to Dr. Talbot: "As you have been interested in my case from a scientific point of view, there is a little something more I might tell you about myself, but which I have withheld, because I was ashamed to admit certain facts and features of my deplorable weakness. Among the few sexual perverts I have known I have noticed that all are in the habit of often closing the mouth with the lower lip protruding beyond the upper. [Usually due to arrested development of upper jaw.] I noticed the peculiarity in Mr. Clifford before we became intimate, and I have often caught myself at the trick. Before that operation my testicles would swell and become sore and hurt me, and have seemed to do so since, just as a man will sometimes complain that his amputated leg hurts him. Then, too, my breasts would swell, and about the nipples would become hard and sore and red. Since the operation there has never been a day that I have been free from sharp, shooting pains down the abdomen to the scrotum, being worse at the base of the penis. Now that my fate is decided, I will say that really my passion for Mr. Clifford is on the wane, but I don't know whether the improvement is permanent or not. I have absolutely no passion for other men, and have begun to hope now that I can yet outlive my desire for Clifford, or at least control it. I have not yet told of this improvement in my condition, because I wished people to still think I was insane, so that I would be sure to escape being sent to the penitentiary. I know I was insane at the time I tried to kill both Clifford and myself, and feel that I don't deserve such a dreadful punishment as being sent to a State prison. However, I think it was that operation and my subsequent illness that caused my insanity rather than passion for Clifford. I should very much like to know if you really consider sexual perversion an insanity."
When discharged from the Criminal Insane Asylum, Olmstead returned to Chicago and demanded his testicles from the City Postmaster, whom he accused of being in a systematized conspiracy against him. He asserted that the postmaster was one of the chief agents in a plot against him, dating from before the castration. He was then sent to the Cook Insane Hospital. It seems probable that a condition of paranoia is now firmly established.
The following cases are all bisexual, attraction being felt toward both sexes, usually in predominant degree toward the male:-- HISTORY XXVII.--H.C., American, aged 28, of independent means, unmarried, the elder of two children. His history may best be given in his own words:-- "I am on both sides distantly of English ancestry, the first colonists of my name having come to New England in 1630. Both my mother's and my father's families have been prolific in soldiers and statesmen; my mother's contributed one president to the United States. So far as I am aware, none of my antecedents have betrayed mental vagaries, except a maternal uncle, who, from overstudy, became for a year insane.
"I am a graduate of two universities with degrees in arts and medicine. After a year as physician in a hospital, I relinquished medicine altogether, to follow literature, a predilection since early boyhood.
"I awoke to sexual feeling at the age of 7, when, at a small private school, glimpsing bare thighs above the stockings of girl schoolmates, I dimly exulted. This fetishism, as it grew more definite, centered at last upon the thighs and then the whole person of one girl in particular. My first sexually tinged dream was of her--that while she stood near I impinged my penis upon a red-hot anvil and then, in beatific self-immolation, exhibited the charred stump to her wondering, round eyes. This love, however, abated at the coming of a new girl to the school, who, not more beautiful, but more buxom, made stronger appeal to my nascent sexuality. One afternoon, in the loft of her father's stable, she induced me to disrobe, herself setting the example. The erection our mutual handlings produced on me was without conscious impulse; I felt only a childish curiosity on beholding our genital difference. But the episode started extravagant whimsies, one of which persistently obsessed me: with these obviously compensatory differences, why might not the girl and I effect some sort of copulation? This fantasy, drawn exclusively from that unique experience, charmed with its grotesqueness only, for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my knowledge of it was nothing. The bizarre conceit, submitted to the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to surprising and pleasurable consummation.
"In the four ensuing years I repeated the act not seldom with this girl and with others.
"When I was 11 my sister and I were taken by our parents to Europe, where we remained six years, attending school each winter in a different city and, during the summer, travelling in various countries.
"Abroad my lust was glutted to the full: the amenable girl-playmate was ubiquitous, whom I plied with ardor at Swiss hotels, German watering-places, French pensions,--where not? Toward puberty I first repaired at times to prostitutes.
"Masturbation, excepting a few experiments, I never resorted to. Few of my schoolmates avowedly practised it.
"Of homosexuality my sole hearing was through the classics, where, with no long pondering, I opined it merely our modern comradery, poetically aggrandized, masquerading in antique habiliments and phraseology. It never came home to me; it attuned to no tone in the scale of my sympathies; I possessed no touchstone for transmitting the recitals of those ambiguous amours into fiery messages. The relation to my own sex was, intellectually, an occasional friendship devoid of strong affection; physically, a mild antagonism, the naked body of a man was slightly repellant. Statues of women evoked both carnal and esthetic response; of men, no emotions whatever, save a deepening of that native antipathy. Similarly in paintings, in literature, the drama, the men served but as foils for the delicious maidens, who visited my aërial seraglios and lapped me in roseate dreamings.
"In my eighteenth year we returned to America, where I entered the university.
"The course of my love of women was now a little erratic; normal connection began to lose fascination. As long ago I had formulated untutored the _rationale_ of coitus, so now imagination, groping in the dark, conceived a fresh fillip for the appetite--_cunnilinctus_. But this, though for a while quite adequate, soon ceased to gratify. At this juncture, Christmas of my first college year, I was appointed editor of a small magazine, an early stricture of whose new conduct was paucity of love stories. Such improvident neglect was in keeping with my altering view of women, a view accorded to me by self-dissipation of the glamour through which they had been wont to appear. I had wandered somehow behind the scenes, and beheld, no footlights of sex intervening, the once so radiant fairies resolved into a raddled humanity, as likable as ever, but desirable no longer.
"Soon after this the Oscar Wilde case was bruiting about. The newspaper accounts of it, while illuminating, flashed upon me no light of self-revelation; they only amended some idle conjectures as to certain mystic vices I had heard whispered of. Here and there a newspaper allusion still too recondite was painstakingly clarified by an effeminate fellow-student, who, I fancy now, would have shown no reluctance had I begged him to adduce practical illustration. I purchased, too, photographs of Oscar Wilde, scrutinizing them under the unctuous auspices of this same emasculate and blandiloquent mentor. If my interest in Oscar Wilde arose from any other emotion than the rather morbid curiosity then almost universal, I was not conscious of it.
"Erotic dreams, precluded hitherto by coition, came now to beset me. The persons of these dreams were (and still are) invariably women, with this one remembered exception: I dreamed that Oscar Wilde, one of my photographs of him incarnate, approached me with a buffoon languishment and perpetrated _fellatio_, an act verbally expounded shortly before by my oracle. For a month or more, recalling this dream disgusted me.
"The few subsequent endeavors, tentative and half-hearted, to repristinate my venery were foredoomed, partly because I had feared they were, to failure: erection was incomplete, ejaculation without pleasure.
"There seemed a fallacy in this behavior. Why coitus without sensual desire for it? No sense of duty impelled me, nor dread of sexual aberration. The explanation is this: attraction to females was not expunged, simply sublimed; my imagination, no longer importing women from observation, created its own delectable sirens, grown exacting and transcendental, petitioned reality in vain. Substance had receded for good now, and soon even these tormenting shadows of it became ever dimmer and dimmer, until they too at length faded into nothingness.
"The antipodes of the sexual sphere turned more and more toward the light of my tolerance. Inversion, till now stained with a slight repugnance, became esthetically colorless at last, and then delicately retinted, at first solely with pity for its victims, but finally, the color deepening, with half-conscious inclination to attach it to myself as a remote contingency. This revolution, however, was not without external impetus. The prejudiced tone of a book I was reading, Krafft-Ebing's _Psychopathia Sexualis_, by prompting resentment, led me on to sympathy. My championing, purely abstract though it was to begin with, none the less involved my looking at things with eyes hypothetically inverted,--an orientation for the sake of argument. After a while, insensibly and at no one moment, hypothesis merged into reality: I myself was inverted. That occasional and fictitious inversion had never, I believe, superposed this true inversion; rather a true inversion, those many years dormant, had simply responded finally to a stimulus strong and prolonged enough, as a man awakens when he is loudly called.
"In presenting myself thus sexually transformed, I do not aver having had at the outset any definitive inclination. The instinct so freshly evolved remained for a while obscure. Its primary expression was a feebly sensuous interest in the physical character of boys--in their feminine resemblances especially. To this interest I opposed no discountenance; for wantonness with women under many and diverse conditions having long ago medicined my sexual conscience to lethargy, no access of reasons came to me now for its refreshment. On the other hand, intellectual delight in the promises of the new world, as well as sensuality, conduced to its deliberate exploration. Still, for a year, the yearning settled with true lust upon no object more concrete than youths whose only habitation was my fancy.
"A young surgeon, having read my copy of _Psychopathia Sexualis_, fell one evening to discussing inverts with such relish that I inquired ingenuously if he himself was one. He colored, whether confirmatively or otherwise I could not guess, in spite of his vehement no. Presently he very subtly recanted his denial. But to his counter-question I maintained my own no, lest he propose some sexual act, a point the esthetics of my developing inversion would not yet concede, the boys of my imagination being still predominant.
"One evening, soon after this, he convoyed me to several of the café's where inverts are accustomed to foregather. These trysting places were much alike: a long hall, with sparse orchestra at one end, marble-topped tables lining the walls, leaving the floor free for dancing. Round the tables sat boys and youths, Adonises both by art and nature, ready for a drink or a chat with the chance Samaritan, and shyly importunate for the pleasures for which, upstairs, were small rooms to let. One of the boys, supported by the orchestra, sang the 'Jewel Song' out of '_Faust_.' His voice had the limpid, treble purity of a clarinet, and his face the beauty of an angel. The song concluded, we invited him to our table, where he sat sipping neat brandy, as he mockingly encountered my book-begotten queries. The boy-prostitutes gracing these halls, he apprised us, bore fanciful names, some of well-known actresses, others of heroes in fiction, his own being Dorian Gray. Rivals, he complained, had assumed the same appellation, but he was the original Dorian; the others were jealous impostors. His curly hair was golden; his cheeks were pink; his lips, coral red, parted incessantly to reveal the glistening pearliness of his teeth. Yet, though deeming him the beautifulest youth in the world, I experienced no sexual interest either in him or in the other boys, who indeed were all beautiful--beauty was their chief asset. Dorian, further, dilated on the splendor of his female attire, satin corsets, low-cut evening gowns, etc., donned on gala nights to display his gleaming shoulders and dimpled, plump, white arms. Thus arrayed, he bantered, he would bewitch even me, now so impassive, until I should throw myself, in tears of happiness, into his loving embrace.
"My first venture upon _fellatio_ was a month later, with the young surgeon. I confessed the whim to try it, and he acceded. Though this nauseous and fatiguing act, very imperfectly performed, was prompted mostly by curiosity, there arose soon a passional hankering for repetition. In short, appetence for _fellatio_ grew slowly from the night of that mawkish fiasco and waxed eventually into a sovereign want.
"Perhaps miscarriage of that initiatory experiment was due to precipitance, incubation of my perverse instinct being not yet complete. A hiatus of a month now supervened, in which, while further _fellatio_ was not attempted, my mind came always nearer to a reconcilement with the grossness of the act, and began to discover for its creatures some correlation in pretty boys beheld in the flesh. One evening, in Broadway, I conceived suddenly a full-fledged desire for a youth issuing from an hotel as I passed. Our glances met and dwelled together. At a shop-window he first accosted me. He was an invert. With him, in his room at the hotel whence I had seen him emerge, I passed an apocalyptic night. Thereafter commerce with boys only in the spirit ceased to be an end; the images were carnalized, stepped from their framework into the streets. That boy, that god out of the machine, I see him clearly: his brown, curling hair; his eyes blue as the sea; his chest both arched and so plump, his rounded arms, his taper waist, the graceful swell of his hips and full, snowy thighs; I recall as of yesterday the dimples in his knees, the slenderness of his ankles, the softness of his little feet, with insteps pink like the inside of a shell. How I gloated over his ample roundness, his rich undulations!
"In the last eight years I have performed _fellatio_ (never _pedicatio_) with more than three hundred men and boys. My preference is for boys between 15 and 20, refined, pretty, girlish, and themselves homosexual.
"Personally, barring this love for males, I am in all ways masculine, given to outdoor sports, and to smoking and drinking moderately. In appearance I am but a boy of 18. My face and figure are generally considered beautiful: I am clean-shaved, with black, curling hair, red cheeks and brown eyes; features delicate and regular; body, of medium height, everywhere practically hairless. By years of training I have attained alike great strength and classic proportions, the muscular contours smoothly rounded with adipose tissue. My hands and feet are small. My penis, though perfectly shaped, is rather enormous--erect, ten and a half inches in length, seven and a quarter inches in circumference.