I were taken by our parents to Europe, where we remained six years, attending school each winter in a different city and, during the summer, travelling in various countries.
"Abroad my lust was glutted to the full: the amenable girl-playmate was ubiquitous, whom I plied with ardor at Swiss hotels, German watering-places, French pensions—where not? Toward puberty I first repaired at times to prostitutes.
"Masturbation, excepting a few experiments, I never resorted to. Few of my schoolmates avowedly practised it.
"Of homosexuality my sole hearing was through the classics, where, with no long pondering, I opined it merely our modern comradery, poetically aggrandized, masquerading in antique habiliments and phraseology. It never came home to me; it attuned to no tone in the scale of my sympathies; I possessed no touchstone for transmitting the recitals of those ambiguous amours into fiery messages. The relation to my own sex was, intellectually, an occasional friendship devoid of strong affection; physically, a mild antagonism, the naked body of a man was slightly repellant. Statues of women evoked both carnal and esthetic response; of men, no emotions whatever, save a deepening of that native antipathy. Similarly in paintings, in literature, the drama, the men served but as foils for the delicious maidens, who visited my aërial seraglios and lapped me in roseate dreamings.
"In my eighteenth year we returned to America, where I entered the university.
"The course of my love of women was now a little erratic; normal connection began to lose fascination. As long ago I had formulated untutored the rationale of coitus, so now imagination, groping in the dark, conceived a fresh fillip for the appetite—cunnilinctus. But this, though for a while quite adequate, soon ceased to gratify. At this juncture, Christmas of my first college year, I was appointed editor of a small magazine, an early stricture of whose new conduct was paucity of love stories. Such improvident neglect was in keeping with my altering view of women, a view accorded to me by self-dissipation of the glamour through which they had been wont to appear. I had wandered somehow behind the scenes, and beheld, no footlights of sex intervening, the once so radiant fairies resolved into a raddled humanity, as likable as ever, but desirable no longer.
"Soon after this the Oscar Wilde case was bruiting about. The newspaper accounts of it, while illuminating, flashed upon me no light of self-revelation; they only amended some idle conjectures as to certain mystic vices I had heard whispered of. Here and there a newspaper allusion still too recondite was painstakingly clarified by an effeminate fellow-student, who, I fancy now, would have shown no reluctance had I begged him to adduce practical illustration. I purchased, too, photographs of Oscar Wilde, scrutinizing them under the unctuous auspices of this same emasculate and blandiloquent mentor. If my interest in Oscar Wilde arose from any other emotion than the rather morbid curiosity then almost universal, I was not conscious of it.
"Erotic dreams, precluded hitherto by coition, came now to beset me. The persons of these dreams were (and still are) invariably women, with this one remembered exception: I dreamed that Oscar Wilde, one of my photographs of him incarnate, approached me with a buffoon languishment and perpetrated fellatio, an act verbally expounded shortly before by my oracle. For a month or more, recalling this dream disgusted me.
"The few subsequent endeavors, tentative and half-hearted, to repristinate my venery were foredoomed, partly because I had feared they were, to failure: erection was incomplete, ejaculation without pleasure.
"There seemed a fallacy in this behavior. Why coitus without sensual desire for it? No sense of duty impelled me, nor dread of sexual aberration. The explanation is this: attraction to females was not expunged, simply sublimed; my imagination, no longer importing women from observation, created its own delectable sirens, grown exacting and transcendental, petitioned reality in vain. Substance had receded for good now, and soon even these tormenting shadows of it became ever dimmer and dimmer, until they too at length faded into nothingness.
"The antipodes of the sexual sphere turned more and more toward the light of my tolerance. Inversion, till now stained with a slight repugnance, became esthetically colorless at last, and then delicately retinted, at first solely with pity for its victims, but finally, the color deepening, with half-conscious inclination to attach it to myself as a remote contingency. This revolution, however, was not without external impetus. The prejudiced tone of a book I was reading, Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, by prompting resentment, led me on to sympathy. My championing, purely abstract though it was to begin with, none the less involved my looking at things with eyes hypothetically inverted—an orientation for the sake of argument. After a while, insensibly and at no one moment, hypothesis merged into reality: I myself was inverted. That occasional and fictitious inversion had never, I believe, superposed this true inversion; rather a true inversion, those many years dormant, had simply responded finally to a stimulus strong and prolonged enough, as a man awakens when he is loudly called.
"In presenting myself thus sexually transformed, I do not aver having had at the outset any definitive inclination. The instinct so freshly evolved remained for a while obscure. Its primary expression was a feebly sensuous interest in the physical character of boys—in their feminine resemblances especially. To this interest I opposed no discountenance; for wantonness with women under many and diverse conditions having long ago medicined my sexual conscience to lethargy, no access of reasons came to me now for its refreshment. On the other hand, intellectual delight in the promises of the new world, as well as sensuality, conduced to its deliberate exploration. Still, for a year, the yearning settled with true lust upon no object more concrete than youths whose only habitation was my fancy.
"A young surgeon, having read my copy of Psychopathia Sexualis, fell one evening to discussing inverts with such relish that I inquired ingenuously if he himself was one. He colored, whether confirmatively or otherwise I could not guess, in spite of his vehement no. Presently he very subtly recanted his denial. But to his counter-question I maintained my own no, lest he propose some sexual act, a point the esthetics of my developing inversion would not yet concede, the boys of my imagination being still predominant.
"One evening, soon after this, he convoyed me to several of the café's where inverts are accustomed to foregather. These trysting places were much alike: a long hall, with sparse orchestra at one end, marble-topped tables lining the walls, leaving the floor free for dancing. Round the tables sat boys and youths, Adonises both by art and nature, ready for a drink or a chat with the chance Samaritan, and shyly importunate for the pleasures for which, upstairs, were small rooms to let. One of the boys, supported by the orchestra, sang the 'Jewel Song' out of 'Faust.' His voice had the limpid, treble purity of a clarinet, and his face the beauty of an angel. The song concluded, we invited him to our table, where he sat sipping neat brandy, as he mockingly encountered my book-begotten queries. The boy-prostitutes gracing these halls, he apprised us, bore fanciful names, some of well-known actresses, others of heroes in fiction, his own being Dorian Gray. Rivals, he complained, had assumed the same appellation, but he was the original Dorian; the others were jealous impostors. His curly hair was golden; his cheeks were pink; his lips, coral red, parted incessantly to reveal the glistening pearliness of his teeth. Yet, though deeming him the beautifulest youth in the world, I experienced no sexual interest either in him or in the other boys, who indeed were all beautiful—beauty was their chief asset. Dorian, further, dilated on the splendor of his female attire, satin corsets, low-cut evening gowns, etc., donned on gala nights to display his gleaming shoulders and dimpled, plump, white arms. Thus arrayed, he bantered, he would bewitch even me, now so impassive, until I should throw myself, in tears of happiness, into his loving embrace.
"My first venture upon fellatio was a month later, with the young surgeon. I confessed the whim to try it, and he acceded. Though this nauseous and fatiguing act, very imperfectly performed, was prompted mostly by curiosity, there arose soon a passional hankering for repetition. In short, appetence for fellatio grew slowly from the night of that mawkish fiasco and waxed eventually into a sovereign want.
"Perhaps
