Page:Psychopathia Sexualis (tr. Chaddock, 1892).djvu/319

cynicism, that he has congenital contrary sexual instinct. When only five years old, it was his greatest pleasure to get sight of a penis, and he hung about appropriate places, in order to enjoy that pleasure. Even before puberty he practiced masturbation. At the time of puberty he noticed an inward feeling for friends. An obscure impulse pointed out to him the way his love would take. He was actually impelled to kiss young men, and now and then to caress their genitals. When twenty-six years old, he first began to have sexual intercourse with men, toward whom he felt like a woman. Even as a child, it was his greatest delight to put on female attire. He was often chastised by his father because, in the effort to satisfy this impulse, he put on his sister’s clothing. If he happened to see a ballet, only the male dancers interested him. Since he could remember, he had had a horror feminæ. If he happened to visit a brothel, it was only to see young men. He was, indeed, a rival of prostitutes. If he saw a young man, he just looked at his eyes; in case these pleased him, then came the mouth—whether it was well formed for kissing; then he would look at the genitals—whether they were well developed. G. pointed, with great feeling of self-satisfaction, to his poetical works, and tried to make it appear that persons with natures like his were poetically endowed. He gave as examples Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Eugene of Savoy, and Plato, as well as numerous distinguished men of the present, who, according to his opinion, were urnings. His greatest pleasure was to have a sympathetic young man read his verses to him. During the last summer he had had such a lover. When he had to part with him, he was quite undone, and he did not eat or sleep until gradually he had regained his former condition. He said that the love of urnings was a passionate, inner fire. According to his statement, in Naples the effeminelli lived in a quarter together, just as in Paris the grisettes live with their lovers. They sacrifice themselves for their lovers, and care for the household, just as the grisettes do. On the other hand, an urning repels an urning, “just as one prostitute does another—that is the curse.”

The need of intercourse with males occurs about once a week with G. He is happy in his peculiar sexuality, which he, it is true, considers peculiar, but which he will not regard as abnormal or wrong. He thinks that nothing remains for him and those like him but to raise what is unnatural in themselves to the supernatural. He looks upon the love of urnings as the higher, the ideal, as godlike, an abstract love. When shown that such a love is far from the purpose of Nature and the preservation of the race, he expresses the pessimistic thought that the world should die out, and the earth turn round its axis without men, who were on it only for trouble. As reason and explanation of his unnatural sexual feeling, G. refers to Plato, “who certainly was no beast.” Plato expressed allegorically the idea that men were originally balls. The gods had divided these into two hemispheres. For the most part,