Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2: Sexual InversionEllis, Havelock
Science
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2: Sexual Inversion
Ellis, Havelock
Sex; Sex (Psychology)
"We urnings are, I think, dependent upon individual love. Many of
us, I know, need to work for an individual to do our best. Is
this the outcome of the woman in the uranian temperament? And the
tragedy of our fate is that we whose souls vibrate only to the
touch of the hand of Eros are faced with the fiercest taboo of
all that can give our lives meaning. The other taboos have been
given up one by one. Will not this, the last of the taboos, soon
vanish? I have known lives darkened by it, weakened by it,
crushed out by it. How long are the western moralists to maim and
brand and persecute where they do not understand?"
The next case belongs to a totally different class from all the preceding
histories. These--all British or American--were obtained privately; they
are not the inmates of prisons or of asylums, and in most cases they have
never consulted a physician concerning their abnormal instincts. They pass
through life as ordinary, sometimes as honored, members of society. The
following case, which happens to be that of an American, is acquainted
with both the prison and the lunatic asylum. There are several points of
interest in his history, and he illustrates the way in which sexual
inversion can become a matter of medico-legal importance. I think,
however, that I am justified in believing that the proportion of sexually
inverted persons who reach the police-court or the lunatic asylum is not
much larger in proportion to the number of sexually inverted persons among
us than it is among my cases. For the documents on which I have founded
the history of Guy Olmstead I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. Talbot,
of Chicago, well known from his studies of abnormalities of the jaws and
face, so often associated with nervous and mental abnormality. He knew the
man who addressed to him the letters from which I here quote:--
HISTORY XXVI.--On the twenty-eighth of March, 1894, at noon, in
the open street in Chicago, Guy T. Olmstead fired a revolver at a
letter-carrier named William L. Clifford. He came up from behind,
and deliberately fired four shots, the first entering Clifford's
loins, the other three penetrating the back of his head, so that
the man fell and was supposed to be fatally wounded. Olmstead
made little attempt to escape, as a crowd rushed up with the
usual cry of "Lynch him!" but waved his revolver, exclaiming:
"I'll never be taken alive!" and when a police-officer disarmed
him: "Don't take my gun; let me finish what I have to do." This
was evidently an allusion, as will be seen later on, to an
intention to destroy himself. He eagerly entered the prison-van,
however, to escape the threatening mob.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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