Another exciting cause of inversion is seduction.  By this I mean the initiation of the young boy or girl by some older and more experienced person in whom inversion is already developed, and who is seeking the gratification of the abnormal instinct.  This appears to be a not uncommon incident in the early history of sexual inverts.  That such seduction—­sometimes an abrupt and inconsiderate act of mere sexual gratification—­could by itself produce a taste for homosexuality is highly improbable; in individuals not already predisposed it is far more likely to produce disgust, as it did in the case of the youthful Rousseau.  “He only can be seduced,” as Moll puts it, “who is capable of being seduced.”  No doubt it frequently happens in these, as so often in more normal “seductions,” that the victim has offered a voluntary or involuntary invitation.

Another exciting cause of inversion, to which little importance is usually attached, but which I find to have some weight, is disappointment in normal love.  It happens that a man in whom the homosexual instinct is yet only latent, or at all events held in a state of repression, tries to form a relationship with a woman.  This relationship may be ardent on one or both sides, but—­often, doubtless, from the latent homosexuality of the lover—­it comes to nothing.  Such love-disappointments, in a more or less acute form, occur at some time or another to nearly everyone.  But in these persons the disappointment with one woman constitutes motive strong enough to disgust the lover with the whole sex and to turn his attention toward his own sex.  It is evident that the instinct which can thus be turned round can scarcely be strong, and it seems probable that in some of these cases the episode of normal love simply serves to bring home to the invert the fact that he is not made for normal love.  In other cases, it seems,—­especially those that are somewhat feeble-minded and unbalanced,—­a love-disappointment really does poison the normal instinct, and a more or less impotent love for women becomes an equally impotent love for men.  The prevalence of homosexuality among prostitutes may be, to a large extent, explained by a similar and better-founded disgust with normal sexuality.[242]

These three influences, therefore,—­example at school, seduction, disappointment in normal love,—­all of them drawing the subject away from the opposite sex and concentrating him on his own sex, are exciting causes of inversion; but they require a favorable organic predisposition to act on, while there are a large number of cases in which no exciting cause at all can be found, but in which, from earliest childhood, the subject’s interest seems to be turned on his own sex, and continues to be so turned throughout life.