The effect on homosexuals was naturally pronounced. From being generally regarded as moral lepers they felt themselves restored to human dignity, as biological sports, perhaps, and in a distinct minority, but no more reprehensible than albinos or color-blind people. Many were encouraged to write, many other authors took a more liberal view of them, and the public began to accept the new outlook in literature. Tolerance was by no means general, however, even in the great metropolitan centers where for years a certain degree of it had obtained. In the medical profession negative opinion was strong, and, of course, conservatives in all fields battled against the new “demoralizing” influence as long and bitterly as their predecessors had against Darwinian evolution. Geographic infiltration of tolerance was markedly uneven. France, where interest if not sympathy was already widespread, was comparatively hospitable to the new attitude. Germany, despite its being the birthplace of the hereditary viewpoint, was somewhat less so. Sentiment there might have developed more favorably if, in 1906, military interests had not used the charge of homosexuality as a weapon against Philip von Eulenberg, whose pacific influence on the Kaiser they wished to eliminate.[1] Even so, the effects of the Eulenberg affair were not so sweeping as those of the Oscar Wilde case in England a decade earlier. A retrospective glance at England shows that during the 1880’s the publisher, Vizetelly, had managed to get into circulation a million copies of current French fiction before legal battles with the censor impoverished him, and, also, that a number of major critics had supported his efforts.[2] All were fighting for greater general liberality in matters of sex, but after the Wilde scandal in 1895, the public reacted strongly against homosexual activity. Havelock Ellis had to publish his volume on sexual inversion (1896) in Germany, and even there its appearance was not welcomed; consequently, his other _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_ came out in America a decade before England would permit their publication. America was the scene of no dramatic inhibiting episodes; however, our intellectual isolation retarded awareness of relaxing European attitudes towards inversion until Freud’s influence had also been felt. While the wave of tolerance was spreading slowly from its continental origins, a counterforce was growing there. Sigmund Freud had begun his work with Breuer and Charcot before 1890 and was a practicing psychoanalyst by the turn of the century. The year 1905 saw the publication of his first important treatise; and in 1909 G. Stanley Hall, psychiatrist, and president of Clark University, invited Freud to lecture at a conference in celebration of that institution’s twentieth anniversary.