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
expressio