The order in which the following histories appear is not, therefore, to be regarded as possessing any significance.

It may be proper, at this point, to say a few words as to the reliability of the statements furnished by homosexual persons.  This has sometimes been called in question.  Many years ago we used to be told that inverts are such lying and deceitful degenerates that it was impossible to place reliance on anything they said.  It was also usual to say that when they wrote autobiographical accounts of themselves they merely sought to mold them in the fashion of those published by Krafft-Ebing.  More recently the psychoanalysts have made a more radical attack on all histories not obtained by their own methods as being quite unreliable, even when put forth in good faith, in part because the subject withholds much that he either regards as too trivial or too unpleasant to bring forward, and in part because he cannot draw on that unconscious field within himself wherein, it is held, the most significant facts in his own sexual history are concealed.  Thus Sadger ("Ueber den Wert der Autobiographien Sexuell Perverser,” Fortschritte der Medizin, nos. 26-28, 1913) vigorously puts forward this view and asserts that the autobiographies of inverts are worthless, although his assertions are somewhat discounted by the fact that they accompany an autobiography, written in the usual manner, to which he attributes much value.

The objection to homosexual autobiographic statements dates from a period when the homosexual were very little known, and it was supposed that their moral character generally was fairly represented by a small section among them which attracted more attention than the rest by reason of discreditable conduct.  But, in reality, as we now know, there are all sorts of people, with all varieties of moral character, to be found among inverts, just as among normal people.  Sadger (Archiv fuer Kriminal-Anthropologie, 1913, p. 199) complains of the “great insincerity of inverts in not acknowledging their inversion;” but, as Sadger himself admits, we cannot be surprised at this so long as inversion is counted a crime.  The most normal persons, under similar conditions, would be similarly insincere.  If the homosexual differ in any respect, under this aspect, from the heterosexual, it is by exhibiting a more frequent tendency to be slightly neuropathic, nervously sensitive, and femininely emotional.  These tendencies, while on the one hand they are liable to induce a very easily detectable vanity, may also lead to an unusual self-subordination to veracity.  On the whole, it may be said, in my own experience, that the best histories written by the homosexual compare favorably for frankness, intelligence, and power of self-analysis with those written by the heterosexual.

The ancient allegation that inverts have written their own histories on the model, or under the suggestion, of those published in