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Homosexuality

Homosexuality

It seems to be almost universal that with the increase in wealth, increase in leisure by an ever growing class, coupled with a departure on the part of hundreds of thousands of people from the old fashioned domestic life—as lived by our parents and grandparents—there is a corresponding increase in abnormal sexual relations.

Homosexuality is tremendously on the increase in this country. This is even more flagrant in such capitals as Berlin, Paris, London, and Vienna. In this country sexual relations between women, either by mutual friction of the clitoris—some of which organs are developed in their turgid condition almost to the size of one's little finger—and the other phase, known as sapphism, or lesbianism (so-called from the Greek poetess Sappho, who lived on the Isle of Lesbis), are extraordinarily common.

It is claimed by those who have had experience, that in certain professions—notably the theatrical or musical comedy professions—a very large percentage practice abnormal sexual relations.

Boarding Schools a Hotbed of Homosexuality

It is also claimed that in boarding schools and similar institutions—in which young people of either sex may live, unrestrained by any parental influence—homosexual and sapphic relations are extraordinarily common.

The same thing is true where many men are brought together for an extended period of time, and deprived of contact with the opposite sex. In penal institutions, in the navy, in mining and lumber camps where men find it difficult to seek the society of women, this vice is exceedingly prevalent.

Curiously enough, this love between man and man (uranism) or between woman and woman (tribadism), while exceedingly common, does not seem to be associated with any marked decline in physical powers. Many of these individuals are thoroughly healthy, and not in any other way to be distinguished from normal human beings.

Is There a Third Sex?

Many writers, in recent years, have ventured to depict what pretends to be a biographical study of the lives of certain individuals who are classed among what is known as the “third sex.” One novel, “The Well of Loneliness,” which appeared a few years ago, purports to describe the reactions and emotions of a woman homosexual. The book was, in effect, a defense of the intimate lives of two women, and created a considerable degree of interest at the time.

As we in this country well know, many homosexuals among men are splendid musicians, capable writers, adept hairdressers, and designers, and perhaps the best of all interior decorators. In fact, many of these individuals take a certain pride in what normal people would term their un-normality, claiming that their practice is far to be preferred to the old-fashioned, and to them obsolete relations that exist between normal men and women.

Something of this character has prompted Professor von Krafft-Ebbing to say: “That contrary sexual sensation cannot thus be necessarily regarded as physical degeneration , or even as a manifestation of disease, is shown by various considerations, one of the principal of which is that these variations of the sexual life may actually be associated with mental superiority. The proof of this is the existence of men of all nations whose contrary sexuality is an established fact, and who, none the less, are the pride of their nation as authors, poets, leaders of armies, and statesmen.

“A further proof of the fact that contrary sexual sensation is not necessarily disease, nor necessarily a vicious self-surrender to the immoral, is to be found in the fact that all the noble activities of the heart which can be associated with heterosexual love can equally be associated with the homosexual love . . . in the form of noble-mindedness, self-sacrifice, philanthropy, artistic sense, poetic activity, etc., but also the passions and defects of love (jealousy, suicide, murder, unhappy love, with its deleterious influence on soul and body, etc.).”

The opinion is quite general that there is no definite stigmata of degeneration among these individuals. Nor do they inherit any tendency toward hereditary taint. On the contrary, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who perhaps is the greatest living authority on this subject claims that at least seventy-five percent of homosexuals are born of healthy parents and of happy marriages, and that the nervous and mental disorders, alcoholism, close interbreeding and syphilis are not more common among the ancestors of homosexuals than among the ancestors of those of normal sexual desire.

It is doubtful whether the fondness on the part of boys for girls' games, or such occupations as crocheting or knitting, or on the part of girls for tom-boy practices, can be regarded as any evidence of the existence of, or the development of, homosexuality. Nevertheless, these apparent abnormal interests seem to play a great part in the autobiography of members of the third sex.

In these cases in which the traits persist after puberty suspicion well may be aroused. If it should develop that the boy at the age of puberty still retains an abnormal fondness for doing fancy work, or if girls should exhibit a desire to dress in boys' clothing, and to indulge in boyish games, it might be well to make a physical and endocrinological examination of these children. For, not infrequently, the entire trouble may be absolutely corrected by merely aiding the thymus gland to regress normally, and allow normal development of the sexual organs of the boy or the girl to be completed.

In which event, all traces of abnormal yearnings for those of his or her own sex will be removed, and the true heterosexual function will be restored.

from Eugenics and Sex Harmony by Herman H. Rubin, M.D., published by United Publishers Service, New York, 1933, pages 129-131.