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Literature—Medicine
47
convict establishments, military prisons, and the like.[1] With such a body of facts staring us in the face, it cannot be contended that "only tainted individuals are capable of homosexual feelings." Where females are absent or forbidden, males turn for sexual gratification to males. And in certain conditions of society sexual inversion may become permanently established, recognised, all but universal. It would be absurd to maintain that all the boy-lovers of ancient Greece owed their instincts to hereditary neuropathy complicated with onanism.
The invocation of heredity in problems of this kind is always hazardous. We only throw the difficulty of explanation further back. At what point of the
- ↑ A note upon this subject has to be written; and it may be introduced here as well as elsewhere. Balzac, in Une dernière incarnation de Vautrin, describes the morals of the French bagnes. Dostoieffsky, in Prison Life in Siberia, touches on the same topic. See his portrait of Sirotkin, p. 52, et seq., p. 120 (edn. J. & R. Maxwell, London). We may compare Carlier, op. cit., pp. 300, 301, for an account of the violence of homosexual passions in French prisons. The initiated are familiar with the facts in English prisons. There is a military prison on the Lido at Venice, where incorrigible lovers of their own sex, amongst other culprits, are confined. A man here said: "All our loves in this place are breech-loaders." Bouchard, in his Confessions (Paris, Liseux, 1881), describes the convict station at Marseilles in 1630. The men used to be allowed to bring women on board the galleys. At that epoch they "les besognoient avant tout le monde, les couchant sous le banc sur leur 'capot. Mais depuis quelques années en ca, le general a defendu entrée aux femmes. De sorte qu'il ne se pêche plus maintenant là-dedans qu'en sodomie, mollesse, irrumation, et autres pareilles tendresses" (p. 151). The same Frenchman, speaking of the Duc d'Orléans' pages at Paris, says that this was a "cour extrèmemen
