“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.

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