The Intermediate Sex

“The Urning denies not only the ‘unnaturalness’ of his leanings, but also their pathological character; he protests against comparison with the lame and the deaf. The occasional coincidence of sexual inversion with other really morbid conditions settles nothing, nor is the reminder that it is antagonistic to the purpose of race-propagation a proof; for who can assure us that Nature has intended all people for race-propagation? Even to the worker-bee Nature has not granted this function, although in her stunted female sex-organs there exists an undeniable indication or suggestion of sex-feeling.”—A. Moll, op. cit., p. 271. (From a letter by a sixty year old Urning.)

“Homosexuality, therefore, might be described as an abnormal variety of the sex-impulse, but hardly as a morbid variety. If you like, it might be termed an arrest of development or a kind of reversion. And this is quite in accord with the fact that the best experts in the subject have so far not discovered more psychic abnormalities among homosexuals than among heterosexuals—nor more degeneracy or signs of degeneracy.”—Consulting-Physician Dr. Paul Naecke, in Der Tag, 26th Oct., 1907.

“As a result of these considerations Ulrichs concludes that there is no real ground for the persecution of Urnings except such as may be found in the repugnance felt by the vast numerical majority for an insignificant minority. The majority encourages matrimony, condones seduction, sanctions prostitution, legalises divorce, in the interest of its own sexual proclivities. It makes temporary or permanent unions illegal for the minority whose inversion of instinct it abhors. And this persecution, in the popular mind at any rate, is justified, like many other inequitable acts of prejudice or ignorance, by theological assumptions and the so-called mandates of revelation.”—“A Problem in Modern Ethics,” p. 83.

“We understand by ‘homosexual’ a person who feels himself drawn to individuals of the same sex by feelings of real love. Whether or not he acts in accordance with this homosexual feeling is, from the scientific standpoint, beside the question. Just as there are normal folk who live chastely, so there are homosexual persons whose love bears a distinctly psychic, ideal and ‘platonic’ character.…

“The feminine impress, in the case of homosexual men, is in general best indicated by the presence of greater sensitiveness and receptivity, also by the dominance of the emotional life, by a strong artistic sense, especially in the direction of music, often too by a tendency to mysticism, and by various inclinations and habits feminine in the good or less good sense of the word. This blending of temperament, however, does not make the homosexual as such a less worthy person. He is indeed not of the same nature as the heterosexual, but he is of equal worth.”—Dr M. Hirschfeld’s evidence as medical specialist in the Moltké-Harden trial.

“One serious objection to recognising and tolerating sexual inversion has always been that it tends to check the population. This was a sound political and social argument in the time of Moses, when a small militant tribe needed to multiply to the full extent of its procreative capacity. It is by no means so valid in our age, when the habitable portions of the globe are rapidly becoming overcrowded. Moreover, we must bear in mind that society under the existing order sanctions female prostitution, whereby men and women, though normally procreative, are sterilized to an indefinite extent.”—J. A. Symonds, “A Problem in Modern Ethics,” p. 82.

“Before Justinian, both Constantine and Theodosius passed laws against sexual inversion, committing the offenders to ‘avenging flames.’ But these statutes were not rigidly enforced, and modern opinion on the subject may be said to flow from Justinian’s legislation. Opinion, in matters of custom and manners, always follows law. Though Imperial edicts could not eradicate a passion which is inherent in human nature, they had the effect of stereotyping extreme punishments in all the codes of Christian nations, and of creating a permanent social antipathy.”—Ibid, p. 13.

“Our modern attitude is sometimes traced back to the Jewish Law and its survival in St. Paul’s opinion on this matter. But the Jewish Law itself had a foundation. Wherever the enlargement of the population becomes a strongly-felt social need—as it was among the Jews in their exaltation of family life, and as it was when the European populations were constituted—there homosexuality has been regarded as a crime, even punishable with death.… It was in the fourth century at Rome that the strong modern opposition to it was formulated in law. The Roman race had long been decaying; sexual perversions of all kinds flourished; the population was dwindling. At the same time Christianity with its Judaic-Pauline antagonism to homosexuality was rapidly spreading. The statesmen of the day, anxious to quicken the failing pulses of national life, utilised this powerful Christian feeling. Constantine, Theodosius, Valentinian, all passed laws against homosexuality—the last, at all events, ordaining as a penalty the vindices flammæ.” Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 206.

“At the present time, shoemakers, who make shoes to measure, deal more rationally with individuals than our teachers and school-masters do, in their application to moral principles. The sexually intermediate forms of individuals are treated exactly as if they were good examples of the ideal male or female types. There is wanted an ‘orthopædic’ treatment of the soul, instead of the torture caused by the application of ready-made conventional shapes. The present system stamps out much that is original, uproots much that is truly natural, and distorts much into artificial and unnatural forms.”—O. Weininger, “Sex and Character,” ch. v.

“What is new in my view is that according to it homosexuality cannot be regarded as an atavism or as due to arrested embryonic development, or to incomplete differentiation of sex; it cannot be regarded as an anomaly of rare occurrence interpolating itself in customary complete separation of the sexes. Homosexuality is merely the sexual condition of those intermediate sexual forms that stretch from one ideal sexual condition to the other ideal sexual condition. In my view, all actual organisms have both homosexuality and heterosexuality.”—O. Weininger, “Sex and Character,” ch. iv.

“How is it then that in our age reputed so philanthropic, whole classes of men, on account of inborn mental abnormalities, are marked down and banned, frantically persecuted, publicly branded, and threatened with the severest legal penalties? Any one would hardly believe what gross cases of justiciary murder, morally speaking, still take place in this matter even at the end of the nineteenth century. To the pitiful ignorance of the judges, to the thousand inherited prejudices of public opinion, as well as to the mental slavery of legislative bodies, must it be ascribed that the penal code of most civilised states is still in great measure formulated in the gloomy spirit of the Middle Ages.”—O. de Joux, “Die Enterbten des Liebesglückes,” p. 16.

“Up till now homosexual humanity has found itself in a peculiar position. Its mouth was closed, it could not speak. It was bound hand and foot and could not move. But now there has come an important change. Science has taken the part of these folk and defended their honour … I protest therefore earnestly that these men, whether by means of the Law or any other means, should no longer be branded in the name of Christianity.”—From a letter written by a Catholic priest in reply to a circular sent by the Humane-Science Committee of Berlin. (See “Jahrbuch der Sexuellen Zwischenstufen,” vol. ii., p. 177.)

“Thus the very basest of all trades, that of chantage [blackmailing] is encouraged by the law.… The miserable persecuted wretch, placed between the alternative of paying money down or of becoming socially impossible, losing a valued position, and seeing dishonour burst upon himself and family, pays; and still the more he pays the greedier becomes the vampire who sucks his life-blood, until at last there lies nothing else before him except total financial ruin or disgrace. Who will be astonished if the nerves of an individual in this position are not equal to the horrid strain? In some cases the nerves give way altogether.… Alter the law and instead of increasing vice you will diminish it. The temptation to ply a disgraceful profession with the object of extorting money would be removed.”—“A Problem in Modern Ethics,” pp. 56 and 86.

“You will rightly infer that it is difficult for me to say exactly how I regard (morally) the homosexual tendency. Of this much, however, I am certain that even if it were possible I would not exchange my inverted nature for a normal one. I suspect that the sexual emotions and even inverted ones have a more subtle significance than is generally attributed to them; but modern moralists either fight shy of transcendental interpretations or see none, and I am ignorant and unable to solve the mystery these feelings seem to imply.”—Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 65, “case” ix.

“I cannot regard my sexual feelings as unnatural or abnormal, since they have disclosed themselves so perfectly naturally and spontaneously within me. All that I have read in books or heard spoken about the ordinary sexual love, its intensity and passion, life-long devotion, love at first sight, etc., seems to me to be easily matched by my own experiences in homosexual form; and with regard to the morality of this complex subject, my feeling is that it is the same as should prevail in love between man and woman, namely: that no bodily satisfaction should be sought at the cost of another person’s distress or degradation. I am sure that this kind of love is, notwithstanding the physical difficulties that attend it, as deeply stirring and ennobling as the other kind, if not more so; and I think that for a perfect relationship the actual sex-gratifications (whatever they may be) probably hold a less important place in this love than in the other.”—Ibid, “case” vii., p. 58.

“I grew older, I entered my professional studies, and I was very diligent with them. I lived in a great capital, I moved much in general society. I had a large and lively group of friends. But always, over and over, I realised that, in the kernel, at the very root and fibre of myself, there was the throb and glow, the ebb and the surge, the seeking as in a vain dream to realise again that passion of friendship which could so far transcend the cold modern idea of the tie; the Over-Friendship, the Love-Friendship of Hellas, which meant that between man and man could exist—the sexual-psychic love. That was still possible! I knew that now. I had read it in the verses or the prose of the Greek or Latin or Oriental authors who have written out every shade of its beauty or unloveliness, its worth or debasement—from Theokritos to Martial, or Abu-Nuwas, to Platen, Michel-Angelo, Shakespeare. I had learned it from the statues of sculptors—in those lines so often vivid with a merely physical male beauty—works which beget, which sprang from, the sense of it in a race. I had half-divined it in the music of a Beethoven and a Tschaikowsky before knowing facts in the life-stories of either of them—or of an hundred other tone-autobiographists. And I had recognised what it all meant to most people to-day—from the disgust, scorn, and laughter of my fellow-men when such an emotion was hinted at.”—Imre: a memorandum, by Xavier Mayne, p. 110. Naples, R. Rispoli, 1906.

“Presently, during that same winter, accident opened my eyes wider to myself. Since then, I have needed no further knowledge from the Tree of my Good and Evil. I met with a mass of serious studies, German, Italian, French, English, from the chief European specialists and theorists on the similisexual topic; many of them with quite other views than those of my well-meaning but far too conclusive Yankee doctor (who had recommended marriage as a cure). I learned of the much-discussed theories of ‘secondary sexes’ and ‘intersexes.’ I learned of the theories and facts of homosexualism, of the Uranian Love, of the Uranian race, of the ‘Sex within a Sex.’ … I came to know their enormous distribution all over the world to-day; and of the grave attention that European scientists and jurists have been devoting to problems concerned with homosexualism. I could pursue intelligently the growing efforts to set right the public mind as to so ineradicable and misunderstood a phase of humanity. I realised that I had always been a member of that hidden brotherhood and Sub-Sex, or Super-Sex. In wonder too I informed myself of its deep instinctive freemasonries—even to organised ones—in every social class, every land, and every civilisation.”—Ibid, pp. 134, 135.

“Thus in sexual inversion we have what may be fairly called a ‘sport’ or variation, one of those organic aberrations which we see throughout living nature, in plants and in animals.”… “All these organic variations which I have here mentioned to illustrate sexual inversion, are abnormalities. It is important that we should have a clear idea as to what abnormality is. Many people imagine that what is abnormal is necessarily diseased. That is not the case, unless we give the word disease an inconveniently and illegitimately wide extension. It is both inconvenient and inexact to speak of colour-blindness, criminality and genius as diseases in the same sense as we speak of scarlet fever, tuberculosis, or general paralysis as diseases.”—Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 186.

“I have had for some time past a theory about this ‘Homogenic’ business—I do not suppose it is new—but it is that when man reaches a certain stage of development and approaches the totality of Human Nature, there gets to exist in him, though subordinately at first, a female element as well as a male. That is to say that as he passes the various barriers, he passes the barrier of sex too, on his way to become the complete Human—the Universal.”—From a private letter.

“Great geniuses, men like Goethe, Shakespeare, Shelley, Byron, Darwin, all had the feminine soul very strongly developed in them.… As we are continually meeting in cities women who are one-quarter, or one-eighth, or so on, male … so there are in the Inner Self similar half-breeds, all adapting themselves to circumstances with perfect ease. The Greeks recognised that such a being could exist even in harmony with Nature, and so beautified and idealised it as Sappho.”—Charles G. Leland, “The Alternate Sex,” pp. 41, and 57. London, 1904.

“I have considered and inquired into this question for many years; and it has long been my settled conviction that no breach of morality is involved in homosexual love; that, like every other passion, it tends, when duly understood and controlled by spiritual feeling, to the physical and moral health of the individual and the race, and that it is only its brutal perversions which are immoral. I have known many persons more or less the subjects of this passion, and I have found them a particularly high-minded, upright, refined, and (I must add) pure-minded class of men.”—Communicated by Professor – in Appendix to Havelock Ellis’s “Sexual Inversion,” p. 240.

“What from the beginning struck me most, but now appears perfectly clear and indeed necessary is that among the homosexuals there is found the most remarkable class of men, namely, those whom I call supervirile. These men stand by virtue of the special variation of their soul-material, just as much above Man, as the normal sex man does above Woman. Such an individual is able to bewitch men by his soul-aroma, as they—though passively—bewitch him. But as he always lives in men’s society, and men, so to speak, sit at his feet, it comes about that such a supervirile often climbs the very highest steps of spiritual evolution, of social position, and of manly capacity. Hence it arises that the most famous names of the world and the history of culture stand rightly or wrongly on the list of homosexuals. Names like Alexander the Great, Socrates, Plato, Julius Cæsar, Michel Angelo, Charles XII. of Sweden, William of Orange, and so forth. Not only is this so, but it must be so. As certainly as a woman’s hero remains a spiritually inferior man, must a man’s hero—well be a man’s hero, if in any way he has the stuff for it.

“Consequently the German penal code, in stamping homosexuality as a crime, puts the highest blossoms of humanity on the proscription list.”—Professor Dr. Jaeger, “Die Entdeckung der Seele,” pp. 268, 269.

“The licentious or garrulous or morbid types of inverts have been so honoured with publicity that the other types are even yet little known. The latter, in the maturity of their intellectual and moral nature, cease to look upon sex as the pivot of the universe. They cease to repine about their lot. They have their mission to fulfil here below, and they try to fulfil it as best they can. In the same way we find there are heterosexual (or normal) folk who at a certain stage of their growth free themselves from the sexual life.—M. A. Raffalovich, “Uranisme et Unisexualité,” p. 74.

“The well-bred, highly-cultured Urning is a complete Idealist; matter is for him only a symbol of thought, and the actual only the living expression of the Invisible.”—De Joux, “Die Enterbten des Liebesglückes,” p. 46.

“As nature and social law are so cruel as to impose a severe celibacy on him his whole being is consequently of astonishing freshness and superb purity, and his manners of life modest as those of a saint—a thing which, in the case of a man in blooming health and moving about in the world, is certainly very unusual.”—Ibid, p. 41.

“If the soul of woman in its usual form represents a secret closed with seven seals, it is—when prisoned in the sturdy body of a man and fused with some of the motives of manhood, a far more enigmatic scripture of whose sibylline meaning one can never be really sure. Only the Urning can understand the Urning.”—Ibid, p. 63.

“Because they (Urnings) themselves are of a very complex nature and put together of opposing elements, they seek out and love the simple, plain, and straightforward natures. Because they continually suffer from the rebellion of their desires against good taste and morals, they often long for a barbaric freedom. And because their every emotion is cut short, distracted, and worn out by the thousand doubts and suspicions of their Urning-minds, they gather to themselves men who are wont to live straight from feeling to action, and who work from untamed masterly instincts, as sure as the animals.”—Ibid, p. 97.

“It is true that we are often inferior to normal men in force of will, worldly wisdom, and sense of duty; but on the other hand, in depth and delicacy of feeling and every virtue of the heart, we are far superior. We cannot love women, but we lament with them, and help them on the hearth and by the cradle, in need and loneliness, as their most unselfish friends.… We do not despise women because they are weak, for we are much clearer-sighted, much less prejudiced than the so-called lords of creation, much nobler, more helpful, and just-minded than they.… Anyhow, if either of the sexes has cause to withhold its respect in any degree from the other—which has the most cause? Say what you will of them, the second and third sexes—women and Urnings—are ever so much better than the brutal egotistical Men, who to-day are plunged in grossest materialism; for, with whatever corruption, both the former are still of purer heart, easier kindled towards whatever is good, and more capable of genuine enthusiasm and love of their fellows, than the latter.”—Ibid, p. 204.

“Embodying as he does Love, Patience, Renunciation, Humility and Mildness, the Urning should seek to soothe with his gentle hand all hurts, and to heal all wounds, which are the results of weak Man’s original sinfulness. The tender emotions in his breast, his all too soft and easily troubled heart, his delicate sensitiveness and receptiveness of all that is lofty and pure, his mildness, goodness and inexhaustible patience—all these divine gifts of his soul point clearly to the conclusion that the great framer of the world meant to create in Urnings a noble priesthood, a race of Samaritans, a severely pure order of men, in order to offer a strong counterpoise to the immoral tendencies of the human race, which increase with its increasing culture.”—Ibid, p. 253.

“When I review the cases I have brought forward and the mental history of the inverted I have known, I am inclined to say that if we can enable an invert to be healthy, self-restrained and self-respecting, we have often done better than to convert him to the mere feeble simulacrum of a normal man. An appeal to the paiderastia of the best Greek days, and the dignity, temperance, even chastity, which it involved, will sometimes find a ready response in the emotional enthusiastic nature of the congenital invert. The ‘manly’ love celebrated by Walt Whitman in ‘Leaves of Grass,’ although it may be of more doubtful value for general use, furnishes a wholesome and robust ideal to the invert who is insensitive to normal ideals. It is by some such method of self-treatment as this that most of the more highly intelligent men and women whose histories I have already briefly recorded have at last slowly and instinctively reached a condition of relative health and peace, physical and moral.”—Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion,” p. 202.

“From America a lady writes:—‘Inverts should have the courage and independence to be themselves, and to demand an investigation. If one strives to live honourably, and considers the greatest good to the greatest number, it is not a crime nor a disgrace to be an invert. I do not need the law to defend me, neither do I desire to have any concessions made for me, nor do I ask my friends to sacrifice their ideals for me. I too have ideals which I shall always hold. All that I desire—and I claim it as my right—is the freedom to exercise this divine gift of loving, which is not a menace to society nor a disgrace to me. Let it once be understood that the average invert is not a moral degenerate nor a mental degenerate, but simply a man or a woman who is less highly specialised, less completely differentiated, than other men and women, and I believe the prejudice against them will disappear, and if they live uprightly they will surely win the esteem and consideration of all thoughtful people. I know what it is to be an invert—who feels himself set apart from the rest of mankind—to find one human heart who trusts him and understands him, and I know how almost impossible this is, and will be, until the world is made aware of these facts.”—Ibid, p. 213.