Why should the invert sigh for intercourse with normal men, where mutual confidences and sympathies and love would be out of the question?  Personally, I decline to commit fellatio with a man who is given to women; the thought of it is repugnant to me.  And this is the attitude with every invert I have questioned.  The nearest approach to confirmation of your correspondent’s theory has been when an extremely feminine invert here and there has admitted the wish that a certain normal man were inverted.  Indeed, the temperamental gamut of inversion is itself broad enough to embrace the most widely divergent ideals.  As my furthest-reaching demands attain fruition in the gentle and pretty boy, so his own robuster affinity resides in me.  If inverts were actually women, then indeed the normal male would be their ideal.  But inverts are not women.  Inverts are males capable of passionate friendship, and their ideal is the male who will give them passionate friendship in return.”

In at least 24, probably many more, of my male cases there is a marked contrast, and in a still larger number a less-marked contrast, between the subject and the individuals he is attracted to; either he is of somewhat feminine and sensitive nature, and admires more simple and virile natures, or he is fairly vigorous and admires boys who are often of lower social class.  Inverted women also are attracted to more clinging feminine persons.[203] A sexual attraction for boys is, no doubt, as Moll points out, that form of inversion which comes nearest to normal sexuality, for the subject of it usually approaches nearer to the average man in physical and mental disposition.  The reason of this is obvious:  boys resemble women, and therefore it requires a less profound organic twist to become sexually attracted to them.  Anyone who has watched private theatricals in boys’ schools will have observed how easy it is for boys to personate women successfully, and it is well known that until the middle of the seventeenth century women’s parts on the stage were always taken by boys, whether or not with injury to their own or other people’s morals.[204] It is also worthy of note that in Greece, where homosexuality flourished so extensively, and apparently with so little accompaniment of neurotic degeneration, it was often held that only boys under 18 should be loved; so that the love of boys merged into love of women.  About 18 of my cases are most strongly attracted to youths,—­preferably of about the age of 18 to 20,—­and they are, for the most part, among the more normal and healthy of the cases.  A preference for older men, or else a considerable degree of indifference to age alone, is more common, and perhaps indicates a deeper degree of perversion.