beginning of her period of “agony” coincided with Kate’s withdrawal, is too apt to be dismissed as absurdly biased special pleading. CHAPTER VI. TWENTIETH CENTURY Introduction The early twentieth century has already been cited as relatively tolerant of homosexuality. To the extent that it prevailed, this tolerance was due to popular acceptance of hereditary theory. We have noted Karl Ulrichs’ defense of male homosexuals in the 1860’s on the ground that their proclivities were innate. Within the next three or four decades, scores of case studies, current and historical, were accumulated to support or to oppose this claim. On the one hand there were exclusively homosexual histories of persons whose physical traits approached those of the other sex. On the other were records of homosexuals cured by hypnosis in the clinics of Charcot and Magnan. The majority of cases fell between these two extremes. Many were bisexual. Many persons reporting obsessive homosexuality were somatically normal. Following the lead of the biological sciences, students of the problem attempted to classify homosexuals. The subjects were variously divided into “true” or born and “pseudo-” or elective; “masculine” and “feminine” in general appearance; active and passive in the sexual role; homosexual and bisexual. But the determining data were less objective than is desirable for close classification. And although each dichotomy was independently more or less sound, there was little correlation among the logically related groups from the several divisions. The resulting confusion seems now to argue against, rather than for, the claim of somatic causation of variance. But at the time the recent or current publications of Darwin, Mendel and Galton provided rich soil for the cultivation of any hereditary theory; so the men best remembered today for their work on homosexuality are Krafft-Ebing, Moll and Hirschfeld in Germany, and in England Symonds, Ellis and Carpenter, all of them strongly inclined toward a hereditary explanation of the phenomenon. By 1900 most of these men’s contributions to the subject were in print and widely disseminated, so that in scientific and intellectual circles there was much talk of an intermediate sex whose condition was referred to as _inversion_—Ellis’s term, as noted earlier.