Prison life develops and fosters the homosexual tendency of criminals; but there can be little doubt that that tendency, or else a tendency to sexual indifference or bisexuality, is a radical character of a very large number of criminals. We may also find it to a considerable extent among tramps, an allied class of undoubted degenerates, who, save for brief seasons, are less familiar with prison life. I am able to bring forward interesting evidence on this point by an acute observer who lived much among tramps in various countries, and largely devoted himself to the study of them.[48] The fact that homosexuality is especially common among men of exceptional intellect was long since noted by Dante:-- "In somma sappi, che tutti fur cherci E litterati grandi, et di gran fama D'un medismo peccato al mondo lerci."[49] It has often been noted since and remains a remarkable fact.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that intellectual and artistic abilities of the highest order have frequently been associated with a congenitally inverted sexual temperament. There has been a tendency among inverts themselves to discover their own temperament in many distinguished persons on evidence of the most slender character. But it remains a demonstrable fact that numerous highly distinguished persons, of the past and the present, in various countries, have been inverts. I may here refer to my own observations on this point in the preface. Mantegazza (_Gli Amori degli Uomini_) remarks that in his own restricted circle he is acquainted with "a French publicist, a German poet, an Italian statesman, and a Spanish jurist, all men of exquisite taste and highly cultivated mind," who are sexually inverted. Krafft-Ebing, in the preface to his _Psychopathia Sexualis_, referring to the "numberless" communications he has received from these "step-children of nature," remarks that "the majority of the writers are men of high intellectual and social position, and often possess very keen emotions." Raffalovich (_Uranisme_, p. 197) names among distinguished inverts, Alexander the Great, Epaminondas, Virgil, the great Condé, Prince Eugène, etc. (The question of Virgil's inversion is discussed in the _Revista di Filologia_, 1890, fas. 7-9, but I have not been able to see this review.) Moll, in his _Berühmte Homosexuelle_ (1910, in the series of _Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens_) discusses the homosexuality of a number of eminent persons, for the most part with his usual caution and sagacity; speaking of the alleged homosexuality of Wagner he remarks, with entire truth, that "the method of arguing the existence of homosexuality from the presence of feminine traits must be decisively rejected." Hirschfeld has more recently included in his great work _Die Homosexualität_ (1913, pp. 650-674) two lists, ancient and modern, of alleged inverts among the distinguished persons of history, briefly stating the nature of the evidence in each case. They amount to nearly 300. Not all of them, however, can be properly described as distinguished. Thus we end in the list 43 English names; of these at least half a dozen were noblemen who were concerned in homosexual prosecutions, but were of no intellectual distinction. Others, again, are of undoubted eminence, but there is no good reason to regard them as homosexual; this is the case, for instance, as regards Swift, who may have been mentally abnormal, but appears to have been heterosexual rather than homosexual; Fletcher, of whom we know nothing definite in this respect, is also included, as well as Tennyson, whose youthful sentimental friendship for Arthur Hallam is exactly comparable to that of Montaigne for Etienne de la Boëtie, yet Montaigne is not included in the list. It may be added, however, that while some of the English names in the list are thus extremely doubtful, it would have been possible to add some others who were without doubt inverts.
It has not, I think, been noted--largely because the evidence was insufficiently clear--that among moral leaders, and persons with strong ethical instincts, there is a tendency toward the more elevated forms of homosexual feeling. This may be traced, not only in some of the great moral teachers of old, but also in men and women of our own day. It is fairly evident why this should be so. Just as the repressed love of a woman or a man has, in normally constituted persons, frequently furnished the motive power for an enlarged philanthropic activity, so the person who sees his own sex also bathed in sexual glamour, brings to his work of human service an ardor wholly unknown to the normally constituted individual; morality to him has become one with love.[50] I am not prepared here to insist on this point, but no one, I think, who studies sympathetically the histories and experiences of great moral leaders can fail in many cases to note the presence of this feeling, more or less finely sublimated from any gross physical manifestation.
If it is probable that in moral movements persons of homosexual temperament have sometimes become prominent, it is undoubtedly true, beyond possibility of doubt, that they have been prominent in religion. Many years ago (in 1885) the ethnologist, Elie Reclus, in his charming book, _Les Primitifs_,[51] setting forth the phenomena of homosexuality among the Eskimo Innuit tribe, clearly insisted that from time immemorial there has been a connection between the invert and the priest, and showed how well this connection is illustrated by the Eskimo _schupans_. Much more recently, in his elaborate study of the priest, Horneffer discusses the feminine traits of priests and shows that, among the most various peoples, persons of sexually abnormal and especially homosexual temperament have assumed the functions of priesthood. To the popular eye the unnatural is the supernatural, and the abnormal has appeared to be specially close to the secret Power of the World. Abnormal persons are themselves of the same opinion and regard themselves as divine. As Horneffer points out, they often really possess special aptitude.[52] Karsch in his _Gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Naturvölker_ (1911) has brought out the high religious as well as social significance of castes of cross-dressed and often homosexual persons among primitive peoples. At the same time Edward Carpenter in his remarkable book, _Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk_ (1914), has shown with much insight how it comes about that there is an organic connection between the homosexual temperament and unusual psychic or divinatory powers. Homosexual men were non-warlike and homosexual women non-domestic, so that their energies sought different outlets from those of ordinary men and women; they became the initiators of new activities. Thus it is that from among them would in some degree issue not only inventors and craftsmen and teachers, but sorcerers and diviners, medicine-men and wizards, prophets and priests. Such persons would be especially impelled to thought, because they would realize that they were different from other people; treated with reverence by some and with contempt by others, they would be compelled to face the problems of their own nature and, indirectly, the problems of the world generally. Moreover, Carpenter points out, persons in whom the masculine and feminine temperaments were combined would in many cases be persons of intuition and complex mind beyond their fellows, and so able to exercise divination and prophecy in a very real and natural sense.[53] This aptitude of the invert for primitive religion, for sorcery and divination, would have its reaction on popular feeling, more especially when magic and the primitive forms of religion began to fall into disrepute. The invert would be regarded as the sorcerer of a false and evil religion and be submerged in the same ignominy. This point has been emphasized by Westermarck in the instructive chapter on homosexuality in his great work on Moral Ideas.[54] He points out the significance of the fact, at the first glance apparently inexplicable, that homosexuality in the general opinion of medieval Christianity was constantly associated, even confounded, with heresy, as we see significantly illustrated by the fact that in France and England the popular designation for homosexuality is derived from the Bulgarian heretics. It was, Westermarck believes, chiefly as a heresy and out of religious zeal that homosexuality was so violently reprobated and so ferociously punished.
In modern Europe we find the strongest evidence of the presence of what may fairly be called true sexual inversion when we investigate the men of the Renaissance. The intellectual independence of those days and the influence of antiquity seem to have liberated and fully developed the impulses of those abnormal individuals who would otherwise have found no clear expression, and passed unnoticed.[55] Muret, the Humanist, may perhaps be regarded as a typical example of the nature and fate of the superior invert of the Renaissance. Born in 1526 at Muret (Limousin), of poor but noble family, he was of independent, somewhat capricious character, unable to endure professors, and consequently he was mainly his own teacher, though he often sought advice from Jules-César Scaliger. Muret was universally admired in his day for his learning and his eloquence, and is still regarded not only as a great Latinist and a fine writer, but as a notable man, of high intelligence, and remarkable, moreover, for courtesy in polemics in an age when that quality was not too common. His portrait shows a somewhat coarse and rustic but intelligent face. He conquered honor and respect before he died in 1585, at the age of 59. In early life Muret wrote wanton erotic poems to women which seem based on personal experience. But in 1553 we find him imprisoned in the Châtelet for sodomy and in danger of his life, so that he thought of starving himself to death. Friends, however, obtained his release and he settled in Toulouse. But the very next year he was burnt in effigy in Toulouse, as a Huguenot and sodomist, this being the result of a judicial sentence which had caused him to flee from the city and from France. Four years later he had to flee from Padua owing to a similar accusation. He had many friends but none of them protested against the charge, though they aided him to escape from the penalty. It is very doubtful whether he was a Huguenot, and whenever in his works he refers to pederasty it is with strong disapproval. But his writings reveal passionate friendship for men, and he seems to have expended little energy in combating a charge which, if false, was a shameful injustice to him. It was after fleeing into Italy and falling ill of a fever from fatigue and exposure that Muret is said to have made the famous retort (to the physician by his bedside who had said: "Faciamus experimentum in anima vili"): "Vilem animam appellas pro qua Christus non dedignatus est mori."[56] A greater Humanist than Muret, Erasmus himself, seems as a young man, when in the Augustinian monastery of Stein, to have had a homosexual attraction to another Brother (afterward Prior) to whom he addressed many passionately affectionate letters; his affection seems, however, to have been unrequited.[57] As the Renaissance developed, homosexuality seems to become more prominent among distinguished persons. Poliziano was accused of pederasty. Aretino was a pederast, as Pope Julius II seems also to have been. Ariosto wrote in his satires, no doubt too extremely:-- "Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti."[58] Tasso had a homosexual strain in his nature, but he was of weak and feminine constitution, sensitively emotional and physically frail.[59] It is, however, among artists, at that time and later, that homosexuality may most notably be traced. Leonardo da Vinci, whose ideals as revealed in his work are so strangely bisexual, lay under homosexual suspicion in his youth. In 1476, when he was 24 years of age, charges were made against him before the Florentine officials for the control of public morality, and were repeated, though they do not appear to have been substantiated. There is, however, some ground for supposing that Leonardo was imprisoned in his youth.[60] Throughout life he loved to surround himself with beautiful youths and his pupils were more remarkable for their attractive appearance than for their skill; to one at least of them he was strongly attached, while there is no record of any attachment to a woman. Freud, who has studied Leonardo with his usual subtlety, considers that his temperament was marked by "ideal homosexuality."[61] Michelangelo, one of the very chief artists of the Renaissance period, we cannot now doubt, was sexually inverted. The evidence furnished by his own letters and poems, as well as the researches of numerous recent workers,--Parlagreco, Scheffler, J.A. Symonds, etc.,--may be said to have placed this beyond question.[62] He belonged to a family of 5 brothers, 4 of whom never married, and so far as is known left no offspring; the fifth only left 1 male heir. His biographer describes Michelangelo as "a man of peculiar, not altogether healthy, nervous temperament." He was indifferent to women; only in one case, indeed, during his long life is there evidence even of friendship with a woman, while he was very sensitive to the beauty of men, and his friendships were very tender and enthusiastic. At the same time there is no reason to suppose that he formed any physically passionate relationships with men, and even his enemies seldom or never made this accusation against him. We may probably accept the estimate of his character given by Symonds:-- Michelangelo Buonarotti was one of those exceptional, but not uncommon men who are born with sensibilities abnormally deflected from the ordinary channel. He showed no partiality for women, and a notable enthusiasm for the beauty of young men...He was a man of physically frigid temperament, extremely sensitive to beauty of the male type, who habitually philosophized his emotions, and contemplated the living objects of his admiration as amiable, not only for their personal qualities, but also for their esthetical attractiveness.[63] A temperament of this kind seems to have had no significance for the men of those days; they were blind to all homosexual emotion which had no result in sodomy. Plato found such attraction a subject for sentimental metaphysics, but it was not until nearly our own time that it again became a subject of interest and study. Yet it undoubtedly had profound influence on Michelangelo's art, impelling him to find every kind of human beauty in the male form, and only a grave dignity or tenderness, divorced from every quality that is sexually desirable, in the female form. This deeply rooted abnormality is at once the key to the melancholy of Michelangelo and to the mystery of his art.
Michelangelo's contemporary, the painter Bazzi (1477-1549), seems also to have been radically inverted, and to this fact he owed his nickname Sodoma. As, however, he was married and had children, it may be that he was, as we should now say, of bisexual temperament. He was a great artist who has been dealt with unjustly, partly, perhaps, because of the prejudice of Vasari,--whose admiration for Michelangelo amounted to worship, but who is contemptuous toward Sodoma and grudging of praise,--partly because his work is little known out of Italy and not very easy of access there. Reckless, unbalanced, and eccentric in his life, Sodoma revealed in his painting a peculiar feminine softness and warmth--which indeed we seem to see also in his portrait of himself at Monte Oliveto Maggiore--and a very marked and tender feeling for masculine, but scarcely virile, beauty.[64] Cellini was probably homosexual. He was imprisoned on a charge of unnatural vice and is himself suspiciously silent in his autobiography concerning this imprisonment.[65] In the seventeenth century another notable sculptor who has been termed the Flemish Cellini, Jérôme Duquesnoy (whose still more distinguished brother François executed the Manneken Pis in Brussels), was an invert; having finally been accused of sexual relations with a youth in a chapel of the Ghent Cathedral, where he was executing a monument for the bishop, he was strangled and burned, notwithstanding that much influence, including that of the bishop, was brought to bear in his behalf.[66] In more recent times Winkelmann, who was the initiator of a new Greek Renaissance and of the modern appreciation of ancient art, lies under what seems to be a well-grounded suspicion of sexual inversion. His letters to male friends are full of the most passionate expressions of love. His violent death also appears to have been due to a love-adventure with a man. The murderer was a cook, a wholly uncultivated man, a criminal who had already been condemned to death, and shortly before murdering Winkelmann for the sake of plunder he was found to be on very intimate terms with him.[67] It is noteworthy that sexual inversion should so often be found associated with the study of antiquity. It must not, however, be too hastily concluded that this is due to suggestion and that to abolish the study of Greek literature and art would be largely to abolish sexual inversion. What has really occurred in those recent cases that may be studied, and therefore without doubt in the older cases, is that the subject of congenital sexual inversion is attracted to the study of Greek antiquity because he finds there the explanation and the apotheosis of his own obscure impulses. Undoubtedly that study tends to develop these impulses.
While it is peculiarly easy to name men of distinguished ability who, either certainly or in all probability, have been affected by homosexual tendencies, they are not isolated manifestations. They spring out of an element of diffused homosexuality which is at least as marked in civilization as it is in savagery. It is easy to find illustrations in every country. Here it may suffice to refer to France, Germany, and England.
In France in the thirteenth century the Church was so impressed by the prevalence of homosexuality that it reasserted the death penalty for sodomy at the Councils of Paris (1212) and Rouen (1214), while we are told that even by rejecting a woman's advances (as illustrated in Marie de France's _Lai de Lanval_) a man fell under suspicion as a sodomist, which was also held to involve heresy.[68] At the end of this century (about 1294) Alain de Lille was impelled to write a book, _De Planctu Naturæ_, in order to call attention to the prevalence of homosexual feeling; he also associated the neglect of women with sodomy. "Man is made woman," he writes; "he blackens the honor of his sex, the craft of magic Venus makes him of double gender"; nobly beautiful youths have "turned their hammers of love to the office of anvils," and "many kisses lie untouched on maiden lips." The result is that "the natural anvils," that is to say the neglected maidens, "bewail the absence of their hammers and are seen sadly to demand them." Alain de Lille makes himself the voice of this demand.[69] A few years later, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, sodomy was still regarded as very prevalent. At that time it was especially associated with the Templars who, it has been supposed, brought it from the East. Such a supposition, however, is not required to account for the existence of homosexuality in France. Nor is it necessary, at a somewhat later period, to invoke, as is frequently done, the Italian origin of Catherine de Medici, in order to explain the prevalence of homosexual practices at her court.
Notwithstanding its prevalence, sodomy was still severely punished from time to time. Thus in 1586, Dadon, who had formerly been Rector of the University of Paris, was hanged and then burned for injuring a child through sodomy.[70] In the seventeenth century, homosexuality continued, however, to flourish, and it is said that nearly all the numerous omissions made in the published editions of Tallement des Reaux's _Historiettes_ refer to sodomy.[71] How prominent homosexuality was, in the early eighteenth century in France, we learn from the frequent references to it in the letters of Madame, the mother of the Regent, whose husband was himself effeminate and probably inverted.[72] For the later years of the century the evidence abounds on every hand. At this time the Bastille was performing a useful function, until recently overlooked by historians, as an _asile de sureté_ for abnormal persons whom it was considered unsafe to leave at large. Inverts whose conduct became too offensive to be tolerated were frequently placed in the Bastille which, indeed "abounded in homosexual subjects," to a greater extent than any other class of sexual perverts. Some of the affairs which led to the Bastille have a modern air. One such case on a large scale occurred in 1702, and reveals an organized system of homosexual prostitution; one of the persons involved in this affair was a handsome, well-made youth named Lebel, formerly a lackey, but passing himself off as a man of quality. Seduced at the age of 10 by a famous sodomist named Duplessis, he had since been at the disposition of a number of homosexual persons, including officers, priests, and marquises. Some of the persons involved in these affairs were burned alive; some cut their own throats; others again were set at liberty or transferred to the Bicêtre.[73] During the latter part of the eighteenth century, also, we find another modern homosexual practice recognized in France; the rendezvous or center where homosexual persons could quietly meet each other.[74] Inversion has always been easy to trace in Germany. Ammianus Marcellinus bears witness to its prevalence among some German tribes in later Roman days.[75] In mediæval times, as Schultz points out, references to sodomy in Germany were far from uncommon. Various princes of the German Imperial house, and of other princely families in the Middle Ages, were noted for their intimate friendships. At a later date, attention has frequently been called to the extreme emotional warmth which has often marked German friendship, even when there has been no suspicion of any true homosexual relationship.[76] The eighteenth century, in the full enjoyment of that abandonment to sentiment initiated by Rousseau, proved peculiarly favorable to the expansion of the tendency to sentimental friendship. On this basis a really inverted tendency, when it existed, could easily come to the surface and find expression. We find this well illustrated in the poet Heinrich von Kleist who seems to have been of bisexual temperament, and his feelings for the girl he wished to marry were, indeed, much cooler than those for his friend. To this friend, Ernst von Pfuël (afterward Prussian war minister), Kleist wrote in 1805 at the age of 28: "You bring the days of the Greeks back to me; I could sleep with you, dear youth, my whole soul so embraces you. When you used to bathe in the Lake of Thun I would gaze with the real feelings of a girl at your beautiful body. It would serve an artist to study from." There follows an enthusiastic account of his friend's beauty and of the Greek "idea of the love of youths," and Kleist concludes: "Go with me to Anspach, and let us enjoy the sweets of friendship...I shall never marry; you must be wife and children to me."[77] In all social classes and in all fields of activity, Germany during the nineteenth century produced a long series of famous or notorious homosexual persons. At the one end we find people of the highest intellectual distinction, such as Alexander von Humboldt, whom Näcke, a cautious investigator, stated that he had good ground for regarding as an invert.[78] At the other end we find prosperous commercial and manufacturing people who leave Germany to find solace in the free and congenial homosexual atmosphere of Capri; of these F.A. Krupp, the head of the famous Essen factory, may be regarded as the type.[79] In England (and the same is true today of the United States), although homosexuality has been less openly manifest and less thoroughly explored, it is doubtful whether it has been less prevalent than in Germany. At an early period, indeed, the evidence may even seem to show that it was more prevalent. In the Penitentials of the ninth and tenth centuries "natural fornication and sodomy" were frequently put together and the same penance assigned to both; it was recognized that priests and bishops, as well as laymen, might fall into this sin, though to the bishop nearly three times as much penance was assigned as to the layman. Among the Normans, everywhere, homosexuality was markedly prevalent; the spread of sodomy in France about the eleventh century is attributed to the Normans, and their coming seems to have rendered it at times almost fashionable, at all events at court. In England William Rufus was undoubtedly inverted, as later on were Edward II, James I, and, perhaps, though not in so conspicuous a degree, William III.[80] Ordericus Vitalis, who was himself half Norman and half English, says that the Normans had become very effeminate in his time, and that after the death of William the Conqueror sodomy was common both in England and Normandy. Guillaume de Nangis, in his chronicle for about 1120, speaking of the two sons of Henry and the company of young nobles who went down with them, in the _White Ship_, states that nearly all were considered to be sodomists, and Henry of Huntingdon, in his _History_, looked upon the loss of the _White Ship_ as a judgment of heaven upon sodomy. Anselm, in writing to Archdeacon William to inform him concerning the recent Council at London (1102), gives advice as to how to deal with people who have committed the sin of sodomy, and instructs him not to be too harsh with those who have not realized its gravity, for hitherto "this sin has been so public that hardly anyone has blushed for it, and many, therefore, have plunged into it without realizing its gravity."[81] So temperate a remark by a man of such unquestionably high character is more significant of the prevalence of homosexuality than much denunciation.
In religious circles far from courts and cities, as we might expect, homosexuality was regarded with great horror, though even here we may discover evidence of its wide prevalence. Thus in the remarkable _Revelation_ of the Monk of Evesham, written in English in 1196, we find that in the very worst part of Purgatory are confined an innumerable company of sodomists (including a wealthy, witty, and learned divine, a doctor of laws, personally known to the Monk), and whether these people would ever be delivered from Purgatory was a matter of doubt; of the salvation of no other sinners does the Monk of Evesham seem so dubious.
Sodomy had always been an ecclesiastical offense. The Statute of 1533 (25 Henry VIII, c. 6) made it a felony; and Pollock and Maitland consider that this "affords an almost sufficient proof that the temporal courts had not punished it, and that no one had been put to death for it, for a very long time past."[82] The temporal law has never, however, proved very successful in repressing homosexuality. At this period the Renaissance movement was reaching England, and here as elsewhere it brought with it, if not an increase, at all events a rehabilitation and often an idealization of homosexuality.[83] An eminent humanist and notable pioneer in dramatic literature, Nicholas Udall, to whom is attributed _Ralph Roister Doister_, the first English comedy, stands out as unquestionably addicted to homosexual tastes, although he has left no literary evidence of this tendency. He was an early adherent of the Protestant movement, and when head-master of Eton he was noted for his love of inflicting corporal punishment on the boys. Tusser says he once received from Udall 53 stripes for "fault but small or none at all." Here there was evidently a sexual sadistic impulse, for in 1541 (the year of _Ralph Roister Doister_) Udall was charged with unnatural crime and confessed his guilt before the Privy Council. He was dismissed from the head-mastership and imprisoned, but only for a short time, "and his reputation," his modern biographer states, "was not permanently injured." He retained the vicarage of Braintree, and was much favored by Edward VI, who nominated him to a prebend of Windsor. Queen Mary was also favorable and he became head-master of Westminster School.[84] An Elizabethan lyrical poet of high quality, whose work has had the honor of being confused with Shakespeare's, Richard Barnfield, appears to have possessed the temperament, at least, of the invert. His poems to male friends are of so impassioned a character that they aroused the protests of a very tolerant age. Very little is known of Barnfield's life. Born in 1574 he published his first poem, _The Affectionate Shepherd_, at the age of 20, while still at the University. It was issued anonymously, revealed much fresh poetic feeling and literary skill, and is addressed to a youth of whom the poet declares:-- "If it be sin to love a lovely lad, Oh then sin I."
In his subsequent volume, _Cynthia_ (1595), Barnfield disclaims any intention in the earlier poem beyond that of imitating Virgil's second eclogue. But the sonnets in this second volume are even more definitely homosexual than the earlier poem, though he goes on to tell how at last he found a lass whose beauty surpassed that "of the swain Whom I never could obtain."