explained to him.  Sleeping with him I had found peaceful and helpful, and more than once he told me that it greatly helped him.  But after we were forbidden to sleep together, I found the passion in me more difficult to control, and it suddenly leaped out in him.  We were still, however, rather ascetic, though we used to kiss each other, and we used to embrace naked.  This produced emission not infrequently with me, but only once with him, though always powerful erection.  I would not allow any friction.  Perhaps this was a mistake.  A more complete expression might have helped him.

“All my life I had been hungry for a complete response, and at one time the lad thought he could give it.  He was then nearing 20.  ‘I have never been so happy in my life,’ he said.  It was a blow to me when I found he had mistaken his own feelings, but I was quite ready to accept what love he could give.  I also never dreamed of any sort of insistence on sexual expression.  With such love as he could give I was quite ready to make myself content.  ‘The true measure of love,’ wrote a uranian schoolmaster to me once, ‘is self-sacrifice’; not ‘What will you give?’ but ’What will you give up?’ Not ‘What will you do for him?’ but ’What will you forego for his sake?’ I quote this gladly, for the conventional English moralists regard an invert as a kind of deformed beast.  I can only say that I tried to realize the ideal which these words express.  No ‘moralist’ would have helped me one whit.  The parents, also, separated us.  They have done much harm by their mistake.  How difficult it is for parents to allow freedom to their children!  Their ideal is successful constraint, not free self-discovery.  But in spite of them, and in spite of the separation, I know that my friend and I have helped each other.

“There is one fear parents have which I believe is unwarranted.  As far as I have seen, I do not conclude that the early expression of homosexual love prevents heterosexual love from developing later.  Where this love is a part of the individual’s inborn nature, it will show itself.  I do, however, believe that a noble homogenic love in early life will sometimes help a lad to avoid a low standard of heterogenic attachment.  The Greeks did well, at their best time, in cultivating and ennobling the homogenic love.  Amongst us, as can be understood by all who know the working of society taboos, it is the baser forms that are unhindered, the noblest forms that are debased.

“We urnings are, I think, dependent upon individual love.  Many of us, I know, need to work for an individual to do our best.  Is this the outcome of the woman in the uranian temperament?  And the tragedy of our fate is that we whose souls vibrate only to the touch of the hand of Eros are faced with the fiercest taboo of all that can give our lives meaning.  The other taboos have been given up one by one.  Will not this, the last of the taboos, soon vanish?