to a return to the attitude of youth, the area of spurious or “pseudo” homosexuality seems to me to be very much restricted.  Most, perhaps all, authorities still accept the reality of this spurious homosexuality in heterosexual persons.  But they enter into no details concerning it, and they bring forward no minutely observed cases in which it occurred.  Hirschfeld, in discussing the diagnosis of homosexuality and seeking to distinguish genuine from spurious inverts,[134] enumerates three classes of the latter:  (1) those who practise homosexuality for purposes of gain, more especially male prostitutes and blackmailers; (2) persons who, from motives of pity, good nature, friendship, etc., allow themselves to be the objects of homosexual desire; (3) normal persons who, when excluded from the society of the opposite sex, as in schools, barracks, on board ship, or in prison, have sexual relations with persons of their own sex.  Now Hirschfeld clearly realizes that the mere sexual act is no proof of the direction of the sexual impulse; it may be rendered possible by mechanical irritation (as by the stimulation of a full bladder) and in women without any stimulation at all; such cases can have little psychological significance.  Moreover, he seems to admit that some subdivisions of his first class are true inverts.  He further mentions that some 75 per cent. of the individuals included in these classes are between 15 and 25 years of age, that is to say, that they have scarcely emerged from the period when we have reason to believe that, in a large number of individuals at all events, the sexual impulse is not yet definitely differentiated; so that neither its homosexual nor its heterosexual tendencies can properly be regarded as spurious.

If, indeed, we really accept the very reasonable view, that the basis of the sexual life is bisexual, although its direction may be definitely fixed in a heterosexual or homosexual direction at a very early period in life, it becomes difficult to see how we can any longer speak with certainty of a definitely spurious class of homosexual persons.  Everyone of Hirschfeld’s three classes may well contain a majority of genuinely homosexual or bisexual persons.  The prostitutes and even the blackmailers are certainly genuine inverts in very many cases.  Those persons, again, who allow themselves to be the recipients of homosexual attentions may well possess traces of homosexual feeling, and are undoubtedly in very many cases lacking in vigorous heterosexual impulse.  Finally, the persons who turn to their own sex when forcibly excluded from the society of the opposite sex, can by no means be assumed, without question, to be normal heterosexual persons.  It is only a small proportion of heterosexual persons who experience these impulses under such conditions.  There are always others who under the same conditions remain emotionally attracted to the opposite sex and sexually indifferent to their own sex.  There is evidently a difference, and that difference may most reasonably be supposed to be in the existence of a trace of homosexual feeling which is called into activity under the abnormal conditions, and subsides when the stronger heterosexual impulse can again be gratified.