For the sake of the possible offspring, also, marriage is to be avoided.  It is sometimes entirely for the sake of children that the invert desires to marry.  But it must be pointed out that homosexuality is undoubtedly in many cases inherited.  Often, it is true, the children turn out fairly well, but, in many cases, they bear witness that they belong to a neurotic and failing stock;[261] Hirschfeld goes so far as to say that it is always so, and concludes that from the eugenic standpoint the marriage of a homosexual person is always very risky.  In a large number of cases such marriages prove sterile.  The tendency to sexual inversion in eccentric and neurotic families seems merely to be nature’s merciful method of winding up a concern which, from her point of view, has ceased to be profitable.

As a rule, inverts have no desire to be different from what they are, and, if they have any desire for marriage, it is usually only momentary.  Very pathetic appeals for help are, however, sometimes made.  I may quote from a letter addressed to me by a gentleman who desired advice on this matter:  “In part, I write to you as a moralist and, in part, as to a physician.  Dr. Q. has published a book in which, without discussion, hypnotic treatment of such cases was reported as successful.  I am eager to know if your opinion remains what it was.  This new assurance comes from a man whose moral firmness and delicacy are unquestionable, but you will easily imagine how one might shrink from the implantation of new impulses in the unconscious self, since newly created inclinations might disturb the conditions of life.  At any rate, in my ignorance of hypnotism I fear that the effort to give the normal instinct might lead to marriage without the assurance that the normal instinct would be stable.  I write, therefore, to explain my present condition and crave your counsel.  It is with the greatest reluctance that I reveal the closely guarded secret of my life.  I have no other abnormality, and have not hitherto betrayed my abnormal instinct.  I have never made any person the victim of passion:  moral and religious feelings were too powerful.  I have found my reverence for other souls a perfect safeguard against any approach to impurity.  I have never had sexual interest in women.  Once I had a great friendship with a beautiful and noble woman, without any mixture of sexual feeling on my part.  I was ignorant of my condition, and I have the bitter regret of having caused in her a hopeless love—­proudly and tragically concealed to her death.  My friendships with men, younger men, have been colored by passion, against which I have fought continually.  The shame of this has made life a hell, and the horror of this abnormality, since I came to know it as such, has been an enemy to my religious faith.  Here there could be no case of a divinely given instinct which I was to learn to use in a rational and chaste fashion, under the control of spiritual loyalty.