Studies in the psychology of sex, volume 2 by Havelock Ellis. - HTML preview

PLEASE NOTE: This is an HTML preview only and some elements such as links or page numbers may be incorrect.
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.

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.

Olmstead, who was 30 years of age, was born near Danville, Ill.,

in which city he lived for many years. Both parents were born in

Illinois. His father, some twenty years ago, shot and nearly

killed a wealthy coal operator, induced to commit the crime, it

is said, by a secret organization of a hundred prominent citizens

to whom the victim had made himself obnoxious by bringing suits

against them for trivial causes. The victim became insane, but

the criminal was never punished, and died a few years later at

the age of 44. This man had another son who was considered

peculiar.

Guy Olmstead began to show signs of sexual perversity at the age

of 12. He was seduced (we are led to believe) by a man who

occupied the same bedroom. Olmstead's early history is not clear

from the data to hand. It appears that he began his career as a

schoolteacher in Connecticut, and that he there married the

daughter of a prosperous farmer; but shortly after he "fell in

love" with her male cousin, whom he describes as a very handsome

young man. This led to a separation from his wife, and he went

West.

He was never considered perfectly sane, and from October, 1886,

to May, 1889 he was in the Kankakee Insane Asylum.

His illness

was reported as of three years' duration, and caused by general

ill-health; heredity doubtful, habits good, occupation that of a

schoolteacher. His condition was diagnosed as paranoia. On

admission he was irritable, alternately excited and depressed. He

returned home in good condition.

At this period, and again when examined later, Olmstead's

physical condition is described as, on the whole, normal and

fairly good. Height, 5 feet 8 inches; weight, 159

pounds. Special

senses normal; genitals abnormally small, with rudimentary penis.

His head is asymmetrical, and is full at the occiput, slightly

sunken at the bregma, and the forehead is low. His cephalic index

is 78. The hair is sandy, and normal in amount over head, face,

and body. His eyes are gray, small, and deeply set; the zygomæ

are normal. The nose is large and very thin. There is arrested

development of upper jaw. The ears are excessively developed and

malformed. The face is very much lined, the nasolabial fissure is

deeply cut, and there are well-marked horizontal wrinkles on the

forehead, so that he looks at least ten years older than his

actual age. The upper jaw is of partial V-shape, the lower well

developed. The teeth and their tubercles and the alveolar process

are normal. The breasts are full. The body is generally well

developed; the hands and feet are large.

Olmstead's history is defective for some years after he left

Kankakee. In October, 1892, we hear of him as a letter-carrier in

Chicago. During the following summer he developed a passion for

William Clifford, a fellow letter-carrier about his own age, also

previously a schoolteacher, and regarded as one of the most

reliable and efficient men in the service. For a time Clifford

seems to have shared this passion, or to have submitted to it,

but he quickly ended the relationship and urged his friend to

undergo medical treatment, offering to pay the expenses himself.

Olmstead continued to write letters of the most passionate

description to Clifford, and followed him about constantly until

the latter's life was made miserable. In December, 1893, Clifford

placed the letters in the postmaster's hands, and Olmstead was

requested to resign at once. Olmstead complained to the Civil

Service Commission at Washington that he had been dismissed

without cause, and also applied for reinstatement, but without

success.

In the meanwhile, apparently on the advice of friends, he went

into hospital, and in the middle of February, 1894, his testicles

were removed. No report from the hospital is to hand. The effect

of removing the testicles was far from beneficial, and he began

to suffer from hysterical melancholia. A little later he went

into hospital again. On March 19th he wrote to Dr.

Talbot from

the Mercy Hospital, Chicago: "I returned to Chicago last

Wednesday night, but felt so miserable I concluded to enter a

hospital again, and so came to Mercy, which is very good as

hospitals go. But I might as well go to Hades as far as any hope

of my getting well is concerned. I am utterly incorrigible,

utterly incurable, and utterly impossible. At home I thought for

a time that I was cured, but I was mistaken, and after seeing

Clifford last Thursday I have grown worse than ever so far as my

passion for him is concerned. Heaven, only knows how hard I have

tried to make a decent creature out of myself, but my vileness is

uncontrollable, and I might as well give up and die.

I wonder if

the doctors knew that after emasculation it was possible for a

man to have erections, commit masturbation, and have the same

passion as before. I am ashamed of myself; I hate myself; but I

can't help it. I have friends among nice people, play the piano,

love music, books, and everything that is beautiful and

elevating; yet they can't elevate me, because this load of inborn

vileness drags me down and prevents my perfect enjoyment of

anything. Doctors are the only ones who understand and know my

helplessness before this monster. I think and work till my brain

whirls, and I can scarce refrain from crying out my troubles."

This letter was written a few days before the crime was

committed.

When conveyed to the police station Olmstead completely broke

down and wept bitterly, crying: "Oh! Will, Will, come to me! Why

don't you kill me and let me go to him!" (At this time he

supposed he had killed Clifford.) A letter was found on him, as

follows: "Mercy, March 27th. To Him Who Cares to Read: Fearing

that my motives in killing Clifford and myself may be

misunderstood, I write this to explain the cause of this homicide

and suicide. Last summer Clifford and I began a friendship which

developed into love." He then recited the details of the

friendship, and continued: "After playing a Liszt rhapsody for

Clifford over and over, he said that when our time to die came he

hoped we would die together, listening to such glorious music as

that. Our time has now come to die, but death will not be

accompanied by music. Clifford's love has, alas!

turned to deadly

hatred. For some reason Clifford suddenly ended our relations and

friendship." In his cell he behaved in a wildly excited manner,

and made several attempts at suicide; so that he had to be

closely watched. A few weeks later he wrote to Dr.

Talbot: "Cook

County Gaol, April 23. I feel as though I had neglected you in

not writing you in all this time, though you may not care to hear

from me, as I have never done anything but trespass on your

kindness. But please do me the justice of thinking that I never

expected all this trouble, as I thought Will and I would be in

our graves and at peace long before this. But my plans failed

miserably. Poor Will was not dead, and I was grabbed before I

could shoot myself. I think Will really shot himself, and I feel

certain others will think so, too, when the whole story comes out

in court. I can't understand the surprise and indignation my act

seemed to engender, as it was perfectly right and natural that

Will and I should die together, and nobody else's business. Do

you know I believe that poor boy will yet kill himself, for last

November when I in my grief and anger told his relations about

our marriage he was so frightened, hurt, and angry that he wanted

us both; to kill ourselves. I acquiesced gladly in this proposal

to commit suicide, but he backed out in a day or two. I am glad

now that Will is alive, and am glad that I am alive, even with

the prospect of years of imprisonment before me, but which I will

cheerfully endure for his sake. And yet for the last ten months

his influence has so completely controlled me, both body and

soul, that if I have done right he should have the credit for my

good deeds, and if I have done wrong he should be blamed for the

mischief, as I have not been myself at all, but a part of him,

and happy to merge my individuality into his."

Olmstead was tried privately in July. No new points were brought

out. He was sentenced to the Criminal Insane Asylum.

Shortly

afterward, while still in the prison at Chicago, he wrote to Dr.

Talbot: "As you have been interested in my case from a scientific

point of view, there is a little something more I might tell you

about myself, but which I have withheld, because I was ashamed to

admit certain facts and features of my deplorable weakness. Among

the few sexual perverts I have known I have noticed that all are

in the habit of often closing the mouth with the lower lip

protruding beyond the upper. [Usually due to arrested development

of upper jaw.] I noticed the peculiarity in Mr.

Clifford before

we became intimate, and I have often caught myself at the trick.

Before that operation my testicles would swell and become sore

and hurt me, and have seemed to do so since, just as a man will

sometimes complain that his amputated leg hurts him.

Then, too,

my breasts would swell, and about the nipples would become hard

and sore and red. Since the operation there has never been a day

that I have been free from sharp, shooting pains down the abdomen

to the scrotum, being worse at the base of the penis. Now that my

fate is decided, I will say that really my passion for Mr.

Clifford is on the wane, but I don't know whether the improvement

is permanent or not. I have absolutely no passion for other men,

and have begun to hope now that I can yet outlive my desire for

Clifford, or at least control it. I have not yet told of this

improvement in my condition, because I wished people to still

think I was insane, so that I would be sure to escape being sent

to the penitentiary. I know I was insane at the time I tried to

kill both Clifford and myself, and feel that I don't deserve such

a dreadful punishment as being sent to a State prison. However, I

think it was that operation and my subsequent illness that caused

my insanity rather than passion for Clifford. I should very much

like to know if you really consider sexual perversion an

insanity."

When discharged from the Criminal Insane Asylum, Olmstead

returned to Chicago and demanded his testicles from the City

Postmaster, whom he accused of being in a systematized conspiracy

against him. He asserted that the postmaster was one of the chief

agents in a plot against him, dating from before the castration.

He was then sent to the Cook Insane Hospital. It seems probable

that a condition of paranoia is now firmly established.

The following cases are all bisexual, attraction being felt toward both

sexes, usually in predominant degree toward the male:--

HISTORY XXVII.--H.C., American, aged 28, of independent means,

unmarried, the elder of two children. His history may best be

given in his own words:--

"I am on both sides distantly of English ancestry, the first

colonists of my name having come to New England in 1630. Both my

mother's and my father's families have been prolific in soldiers

and statesmen; my mother's contributed one president to the

United States. So far as I am aware, none of my antecedents have

betrayed mental vagaries, except a maternal uncle, who, from

overstudy, became for a year insane.

"I am a graduate of two universities with degrees in arts and

medicine. After a year as physician in a hospital, I relinquished

medicine altogether, to follow literature, a predilection since

early boyhood.

"I awoke to sexual feeling at the age of 7, when, at a small

private school, glimpsing bare thighs above the stockings of girl

schoolmates, I dimly exulted. This fetishism, as it grew more

definite, centered at last upon the thighs and then the whole

person of one girl in particular. My first sexually tinged dream

was of her--that while she stood near I impinged my penis upon a

red-hot anvil and then, in beatific self-immolation, exhibited

the charred stump to her wondering, round eyes. This love,

however, abated at the coming of a new girl to the school, who,

not more beautiful, but more buxom, made stronger appeal to my

nascent sexuality. One afternoon, in the loft of her father's

stable, she induced me to disrobe, herself setting the example.

The erection our mutual handlings produced on me was without

conscious impulse; I felt only a childish curiosity on beholding

our genital difference. But the episode started extravagant

whimsies, one of which persistently obsessed me: with these

obviously compensatory differences, why might not the girl and I

effect some sort of copulation? This fantasy, drawn exclusively

from that unique experience, charmed with its grotesqueness only,

for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my

knowledge of it was nothing. The bizarre conceit, submitted to

the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal

hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to surprising and

pleasurable consummation.

"In the four ensuing years I repeated the act not seldom with

this girl and with others.

"When I was 11 my sister and I were taken by our parents to

Europe, where we remained six years, attending school each winter

in a different city and, during the summer, travelling in various

countries.

"Abroad my lust was glutted to the full: the amenable

girl-playmate was ubiquitous, whom I plied with ardor at Swiss

hotels, German watering-places, French pensions,--

where not?

Toward puberty I first repaired at times to prostitutes.

"Masturbation, excepting a few experiments, I never resorted to.

Few of my schoolmates avowedly practised it.

"Of homosexuality my sole hearing was through the classics,

where, with no long pondering, I opined it merely our modern

comradery, poetically aggrandized, masquerading in antique

habiliments and phraseology. It never came home to me; it attuned

to no tone in the scale of my sympathies; I possessed no

touchstone for transmitting the recitals of those ambiguous

amours into fiery messages. The relation to my own sex was,

intellectually, an occasional friendship devoid of strong

affection; physically, a mild antagonism, the naked body of a man

was slightly repellant. Statues of women evoked both carnal and

esthetic response; of men, no emotions whatever, save a deepening

of that native antipathy. Similarly in paintings, in literature,

the drama, the men served but as foils for the delicious maidens,

who visited my aërial seraglios and lapped me in roseate

dreamings.

"In my eighteenth year we returned to America, where I entered

the university.

"The course of my love of women was now a little erratic; normal

connection began to lose fascination. As long ago I had

formulated untutored the _rationale_ of coitus, so now

imagination, groping in the dark, conceived a fresh fillip for

the appetite--_cunnilinctus_. But this, though for a while quite

adequate, soon ceased to gratify. At this juncture, Christmas of

my first college year, I was appointed editor of a small

magazine, an early stricture of whose new conduct was paucity of

love stories. Such improvident neglect was in keeping with my

altering view of women, a view accorded to me by self-dissipation

of the glamour through which they had been wont to appear. I had

wandered somehow behind the scenes, and beheld, no footlights of

sex intervening, the once so radiant fairies resolved into a

raddled humanity, as likable as ever, but desirable no longer.

"Soon after this the Oscar Wilde case was bruiting about. The

newspaper accounts of it, while illuminating, flashed upon me no

light of self-revelation; they only amended some idle conjectures

as to certain mystic vices I had heard whispered of.

Here and

there a newspaper allusion still too recondite was painstakingly

clarified by an effeminate fellow-student, who, I fancy now,

would have shown no reluctance had I begged him to adduce

practical illustration. I purchased, too, photographs of Oscar

Wilde, scrutinizing them under the unctuous auspices of this same

emasculate and blandiloquent mentor. If my interest in Oscar

Wilde arose from any other emotion than the rather morbid

curiosity then almost universal, I was not conscious of it.

"Erotic dreams, precluded hitherto by coition, came now to beset

me. The persons of these dreams were (and still are) invariably

women, with this one remembered exception: I dreamed that Oscar

Wilde, one of my photographs of him incarnate, approached me with

a buffoon languishment and perpetrated _fellatio_, an act

verbally expounded shortly before by my oracle. For a month or

more, recalling this dream disgusted me.

"The few subsequent endeavors, tentative and half-hearted, to

repristinate my venery were foredoomed, partly because I had

feared they were, to failure: erection was incomplete,

ejaculation without pleasure.

"There seemed a fallacy in this behavior. Why coitus without

sensual desire for it? No sense of duty impelled me, nor dread of

sexual aberration. The explanation is this: attraction to females

was not expunged, simply sublimed; my imagination, no longer

importing women from observation, created its own delectable

sirens, grown exacting and transcendental, petitioned reality in

vain. Substance had receded for good now, and soon even these

tormenting shadows of it became ever dimmer and dimmer, until

they too at length faded into nothingness.

"The antipodes of the sexual sphere turned more and more toward

the light of my tolerance. Inversion, till now stained with a

slight repugnance, became esthetically colorless at last, and

then delicately retinted, at first solely with pity for its

victims, but finally, the color deepening, with half-conscious

inclination to attach it to myself as a remote contingency. This

revolution, however, was not without external impetus. The

prejudiced tone of a book I was reading, Krafft-Ebing's

_Psychopathia Sexualis_, by prompting resentment, led me on to

sympathy. My championing, purely abstract though it was to begin

with, none the less involved my looking at things with eyes

hypothetically inverted,--an orientation for the sake of

argument. After a while, insensibly and at no one moment,

hypothesis merged into reality: I myself was inverted. That

occasional and fictitious inversion had never, I believe,

superposed this true inversion; rather a true inversion, those

many years dormant, had simply responded finally to a stimulus

strong and prolonged enough, as a man awakens when he is loudly

called.

"In presenting myself thus sexually transformed, I do not aver

having had at the outset any definitive inclination.

The instinct

so freshly evolved remained for a while obscure. Its primary

expression was a feebly sensuous interest in the physical

character of boys--in their feminine resemblances especially. To

this interest I opposed no discountenance; for wantonness with

women under many and diverse conditions having long ago medicined

my sexual conscience to lethargy, no access of reasons came to me

now for its refreshment. On the other hand, intellectual delight

in the promises of the new world, as well as sensuality, conduced

to its deliberate exploration. Still, for a year, the yearning

settled with true lust upon no object more concrete than youths

whose only habitation was my fancy.

"A young surgeon, having read my copy of _Psychopathia Sexualis_,

fell one evening to discussing inverts with such relish that I

inquired ingenuously if he himself was one. He colored, whether

confirmatively or otherwise I could not guess, in spite of his

vehement no. Presently he very subtly recanted his denial. But to

his counter-question I maintained my own no, lest he propose some

sexual act, a point the esthetics of my developing inversion

would not yet concede, the boys of my imagination being still

predominant.

"One evening, soon after this, he convoyed me to several of the

café's where inverts are accustomed to foregather.

These trysting

places were much alike: a long hall, with sparse orchestra at one

end, marble-topped tables lining the walls, leaving the floor

free for dancing. Round the tables sat boys and youths, Adonises

both by art and nature, ready for a drink or a chat with the

chance Samaritan, and shyly importunate for the pleasures for

which, upstairs, were small rooms to let. One of the boys,

supported by the orchestra, sang the 'Jewel Song'

out of

'_Faust_.' His voice had the limpid, treble purity of a

clarinet, and his face the beauty of an angel. The song

concluded, we invited him to our table, where he sat sipping neat

brandy, as he mockingly encountered my book-begotten queries. The

boy-prostitutes gracing these halls, he apprised us, bore

fanciful names, some of well-known actresses, others of heroes in

fiction, his own being Dorian Gray. Rivals, he complained, had

assumed the same appellation, but he was the original Dorian; the

others were jealous impostors. His curly hair was golden; his

cheeks were pink; his lips, coral red, parted incessantly to

reveal the glistening pearliness of his teeth. Yet, though

deeming him the beautifulest youth in the world, I experienced no

sexual interest either in him or in the other boys, who indeed

were all beautiful--beauty was their chief asset.

Dorian,

further, dilated on the splendor of his female attire, satin

corsets, low-cut evening gowns, etc., donned on gala nights to

display his gleaming shoulders and dimpled, plump, white arms.

Thus arrayed, he bantered, he would bewitch even me, now so

impassive, until I should throw myself, in tears of happiness,