CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

Homosexuality Among Animals--Among the Lower Human Races--The
Albanians--The Greeks--The Eskimos--The Tribes of the Northwest United
States--Homosexuality Among Soldiers in Europe--Indifference Frequently
Manifested by European Lower Classes--Sexual Inversion at
Rome--Homosexuality in Prisons--Among Men of Exceptional Intellect and
Moral Leaders--Muret--Michelangelo--Winkelmann--Homosexuality in English
History--Walt Whitman--Verlaine--Burton's Climatic Theory of
Homosexuality--The Racial Factor--The Prevalence of Homosexuality Today.


Sexual inversion, as here understood, means sexual instinct turned by
inborn constitutional abnormality toward persons of the same sex. It is
thus a narrower term than homosexuality, which includes all sexual
attractions between persons of the same sex, even when seemingly due to
the accidental absence of the natural objects of sexual attraction, a
phenomenon of wide occurrence among all human races and among most of the
higher animals. It is only during recent years that sexual inversion has
been recognized; previously it was not distinguished from homosexuality in
general, and homosexuality was regarded as a national custom, as an
individual vice, or as an unimportant episode in grave forms of
insanity.[1] We have further to distinguish sexual inversion and all other
forms of homosexuality from another kind of inversion which usually