xed in a heterosexual or homosexual direction at a very early period in
life, it becomes difficult to see how we can any longer speak with
certainty of a definitely spurious class of homosexual persons. Everyone
of Hirschfeld's three classes may well contain a majority of genuinely
homosexual or bisexual persons. The prostitutes and even the blackmailers
are certainly genuine inverts in very many cases. Those persons, again,
who allow themselves to be the recipients of homosexual attentions may
well possess traces of homosexual feeling, and are undoubtedly in very
many cases lacking in vigorous heterosexual impulse. Finally, the persons
who turn to their own sex when forcibly excluded from the society of the
opposite sex, can by no means be assumed, without question, to be normal
heterosexual persons. It is only a small proportion of heterosexual
persons who experience these impulses under such conditions. There are
always others who under the same conditions remain emotionally attracted
to the opposite sex and sexually indifferent to their own sex. There is
evidently a difference, and that difference may most reasonably be
supposed to be in the existence of a trace of homosexual feeling which is
called into activity under the abnormal conditions, and subsides when the
stronger heterosexual impulse can again be gratified.

The real distinction would seem, therefore, to be between a homosexual
impulse so strong that it subsists even in the presence of the
heterosexual object, and a homosexual impulse so weak that it is eclipsed
by the presence of the heterosexual object. We could not, however,
properly speak of the latter as any more "spurious" or "pseudo" than the
former. A heterosexual person who experiences a homosexual impulse in the
absence of any homosexual disposition is not today easy to accept. We can
certainly accept the possibility of a mechanical or other non-sexual
stimulus leading to a sexual act contrary to the individual's disposition.
But usually it is somewhat difficult to prove, and when proved it has
little psychological significance or importance. We may expect, therefore,
to find "pseudo-homosexuality," or spurious homosexuality, playing a
dwindling part in classification.

The simplest of all possible classifications, and that which I adopted in
the earlier editions of the present _Study_, merely seeks to distinguish
between those who, not being exclusively attracted to the opposite sex,
are exclus