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the most part with his usual caution and sagacity; speaking of
the alleged homosexuality of Wagner he remarks, with entire
truth, that "the method of arguing the existence of homosexuality
from the presence of feminine traits must be decisively
rejected." Hirschfeld has more recently included in his great
work _Die Homosexualität_ (1913, pp. 650-674) two lists, ancient
and modern, of alleged inverts among the distinguished persons of
history, briefly stating the nature of the evidence in each case.
They amount to nearly 300. Not all of them, however, can be
properly described as distinguished. Thus we end in the list 43
English names; of these at least half a dozen were noblemen who
were concerned in homosexual prosecutions, but were of no
intellectual distinction. Others, again, are of undoubted
eminence, but there is no good reason to regard them as
homosexual; this is the case, for instance, as regards Swift, who
may have been mentally abnormal, but appears to have been
heterosexual rather than homosexual; Fletcher, of whom we know
nothing definite in this respect, is also included, as well as
Tennyson, whose youthful sentimental friendship for Arthur Hallam
is exactly comparable to that of Montaigne for Etienne de la
Boëtie, yet Montaigne is not included in the list. It may be
added, however, that while some of the English names in the list
are thus extremely doubtful, it would have been possible to add
some others who were without doubt inverts.
It has not, I think, been noted--largely because the evidence was
insufficiently clear--that among moral leaders, and persons with strong
ethical instincts, there is a tendency toward the more elevated forms of
homosexual feeling. This may be traced, not only in some of the great
moral teachers of old, but also in men and women of our own day. It is
fairly evident why this should be so. Just as the repressed love of a
woman or a man has, in normally constituted persons, frequently furnished
the motive power for an enlarged philanthropic activity, so the person
who sees his own sex also bathed in sexual glamour, brings to his work of
human service an ardor wholly unknown to the normally constituted
individual; morality to him has become one with love.[50] I am not
prepared here to insist on this point, but no one, I think, who studies
sympathetically the histories and experiences of great moral leaders can
fail in many cases to note the presence of this feeling, more or less
finely sublimated from any gross physical manifestation.
If it is probable that in moral movements persons of homosexual
temperament have sometimes become prominent, it is undoubtedly true,
beyond possibility of doubt, that they have been prominent in religion.
Many years ago (in 1885) the ethnologist, Elie Reclus, in his charming
book, _Les Primitifs_,[51] setting forth the phenomena of homosexuality
among the Eskimo Innuit tribe, clearly insisted that from time immemorial
there has been a connection between the invert and the priest, and showed
how well this connection is illustrated by the Eskimo _schupans_. Much
more recently, in his elaborate study of the priest, Horneffer discusses
the feminine traits of priests and shows that, among the most various
peoples, persons of sexually abnormal and especially homosexual
temperament have assumed the functions of priesthood. To the popular eye
the unnatural is the supernatural, and the abnormal has appeared to be
specially close to the secret Power of the World. Abnormal persons are
themselves of the same opinion and regard themselves as divine. As
Horneffer points out, they often really possess special aptitude.[52]
Karsch in his _Gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Naturvölker_ (1911) has
brought out the high religious as well as social significance of castes of
cross-dressed and often homosexual persons among primitive peoples. At the
same time Edward Carpenter in his remarkable book, _Intermediate Types
among Primitive Folk_ (1914), has shown with much insight how it comes
about that there is an organic connection between the homosexual
temperament and unusual psychic or divinatory powers. Homosexual men were
non-warlike and homosexual women non-domestic, so that their energies
sought different outlets from those of ordinary men and women; they became
the initiators of new activities. Thus it is that from among them would in
some degree issue not only inventors and craftsmen and teachers, but
sorcerers and diviners, medicine-men and wizards, prophets and priests.
Such persons would be especially impelled to thought, because they would
realize that they were different from other people; treated with reverence
by some and with contempt by others, they would be compelled to face the
problems of their own nature and, indirectly, the problems of the world
generally. Moreover, Carpenter points out, persons in whom the masculine
and feminine temperaments were combined would in many cases be persons of
intuition and complex mind beyond their fellows, and so able to exercise
divination and prophecy in a very real and natural sense.[53]
This aptitude of the invert for primitive religion, for sorcery and
divination, would have its reaction on popular feeling, more especially
when magic and the primitive forms of religion began to fall into
disrepute. The invert would be regarded as the sorcerer of a false and
evil religion and be submerged in the same ignominy. This point has been
emphasized by Westermarck in the instructive chapter on homosexuality in
his great work on Moral Ideas.[54] He points out the significance of the
fact, at the first glance apparently inexplicable, that homosexuality in
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