day and
dreamed about them at night, but was too convinced that I was a
hopeless monstrosity ever to make any effectual advances. Later
on it was much the same, but gradually, though slowly, I came to
find that there were others like myself. I made a few special
friends, and at last it came to me occasionally to sleep with
them and to satisfy my imperious need by mutual embraces and
emissions. Before this happened, however, I was once or twice on
the brink of despair and madness with repressed passion and
torment.

"Meanwhile, from the first, my feeling, physically, toward the
female sex was one of indifference, and later on, with the more
special development of sex desires, one of positive repulsion.
Though having several female friends, whose society I like and to
whom I am sincerely attached, the thought of marriage or
cohabitation with any such has always been odious to me.

"As a boy I was attracted in general by boys rather older than
myself; after leaving school I still fell in love, in a romantic
vein, with comrades of my own standing. Now,--at the age of
37,--my ideal of love is a powerful, strongly built man, of my
own age or rather younger--preferably of the working class.
Though having solid sense and character, he need not be specially
intellectual. If endowed in the latter way, he must not be too
glib or refined. Anything effeminate in a man, or anything of the
cheap intellectual style, repels me very decisively.

"I have never had to do with actual pederasty, so called. My
chief desire in love is bodily nearness or contact, as to sleep
naked with a naked friend; the specially sexual, though urgent
enough, seems a secondary matter. Pederasty, either active or
passive, might seem in place to me with one I loved very
devotedly and who also loved me to that degree; but I think not
otherwise. I am an artist by temperament and choice, fond of all
beautiful things, especially the male human form; of active,
slight, muscular build; and sympathetic, but somewhat indecisive
character, though possessing self-control.

"I cannot regard my sexual feelings as unnatural or abnormal,
since they have disclosed themselves so perfectly naturally and
spontaneously within me. All that I have read in books or heard
spoken about the ordinary sexual love, its intensity and