response, and at
one time the lad thought he could give it. He was then nearing
20. 'I have never been so happy in my life,' he said. It was a
blow to me when I found he had mistaken his own feelings, but I
was quite ready to accept what love he could give. I also never
dreamed of any sort of insistence on sexual expression. With such
love as he could give I was quite ready to make myself content.
'The true measure of love,' wrote a uranian schoolmaster to me
once, 'is self-sacrifice'; not 'What will you give?' but 'What
will you give up?' Not 'What will you do for him?' but 'What will
you forego for his sake?' I quote this gladly, for the
conventional English moralists regard an invert as a kind of
deformed beast. I can only say that I tried to realize the ideal
which these words express. No 'moralist' would have helped me one
whit. The parents, also, separated us. They have done much harm
by their mistake. How difficult it is for parents to allow
freedom to their children! Their ideal is successful constraint,
not free self-discovery. But in spite of them, and in spite of
the separation, I know that my friend and I have helped each
other.

"There is one fear parents have which I believe is unwarranted.
As far as I have seen, I do not conclude that the early
expression of homosexual love prevents heterosexual love from
developing later. Where this love is a part of the individual's
inborn nature, it will show itself. I do, however, believe that a
noble homogenic love in early life will sometimes help a lad to
avoid a low standard of heterogenic attachment. The Greeks did
well, at their best time, in cultivating and ennobling the
homogenic love. Amongst us, as can be understood by all who know
the working of society taboos, it is the baser forms that are
unhindered, the noblest forms that are debased.

"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 live