The Prevention of Homosexuality—­The Influence of the
School—­Coeducation—­The Treatment of Sexual
Inversion—­Castration—­Hypnotism—­Associational
Therapy—­Psycho-analysis—­Mental and Physical Hygiene—­Marriage—­The
Children of Inverts—­The Attitude of Society—­The Horror Aroused by
Homosexuality—­Justinian—­The Code Napoleon—­The State of the Law in
Europe Today—­Germany—­England—­What Should be our Attitude toward
Homosexuality?

Having now completed the psychological analysis of the sexual invert, so far as I have been able to study him, it only remains to speak briefly of the attitude of society and the law.  First, however, a few words as to the medical and hygienic aspects of inversion.  The preliminary question of the prevention of homosexuality is in too vague a position at present to be profitably discussed.  So far as the really congenital invert is concerned, prevention can have but small influence; but sound social hygiene should render difficult the acquisition of homosexual perversity, or what has been termed pseudo-homosexuality.  It is the school which is naturally the chief theater of immature and temporary homosexual manifestations, partly because school life largely coincides with the period during which the sexual impulse frequently tends to be undifferentiated, and partly because in the traditions of large and old schools an artificial homosexuality is often deeply rooted.

Homosexuality in English schools has already been briefly referred to in chapter iii.  As a precise and interesting picture of the phenomena in French schools, I may mention a story by Albert Nortal, Les Adolescents Passionnes (1913), written immediately after the author left college, though not published until more than twenty-five years later, and clearly based on personal observation and experience.  As regards German schools, see, e.g., Moll, Untersuchungen ueber die Libido Sexualis, p. 449 et seq., and for sexual manifestations in early life generally, the same author’s Sexual Life of the Child; also Hirschfeld, Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. v, 1903, p. 47 et seq., and, for references, Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, p. 46 et seq.

While much may be done by physical hygiene and other means to prevent the extension of homosexuality in schools,[243] it is impossible, and even undesirable, to repress absolutely the emotional manifestations of sex in either boys or girls who have reached the age of puberty.[244] It must always be remembered that profoundly rooted organic impulses cannot be effectually combated by direct methods.  Writing of a period two centuries ago, Casanova, in relating his early life as a seminarist trained to the priesthood, describes the precautions taken to prevent the youths entering each other’s beds, and points out the folly of such precautions.[245] As that master of the human heart remarks, such prohibitions intensify