u, dear youth, my
whole soul so embraces you. When you used to bathe in the Lake of Thun I
would gaze with the real feelings of a girl at your beautiful body. It
would serve an artist to study from." There follows an enthusiastic
account of his friend's beauty and of the Greek "idea of the love of
youths," and Kleist concludes: "Go with me to Anspach, and let us enjoy
the sweets of friendship.... I shall never marry; you must be wife and
children to me."[77]

In all social classes and in all fields of activity, Germany during the
nineteenth century produced a long series of famous or notorious
homosexual persons. At the one end we find people of the highest
intellectual distinction, such as Alexander von Humboldt, whom Naecke, a
cautious investigator, stated that he had good ground for regarding as an
invert.[78] At the other end we find prosperous commercial and
manufacturing people who leave Germany to find solace in the free and
congenial homosexual atmosphere of Capri; of these F.A. Krupp, the head of
the famous Essen factory, may be regarded as the type.[79]

In England (and the same is true today of the United States), although
homosexuality has been less openly manifest and less thoroughly explored,
it is doubtful whether it has been less prevalent than in Germany. At an
early period, indeed, the evidence may even seem to show that it was more
prevalent. In the Penitentials of the ninth and tenth centuries "natural
fornication and sodomy" were frequently put together and the same penance
assigned to both; it was recognized that priests and bishops, as well as
laymen, might fall into this sin, though to the bishop nearly three times
as much penance was assigned as to the layman. Among the Normans,
everywhere, homosexuality was markedly prevalent; the spread of sodomy in
France about the eleventh century is attributed to the Normans, and their
coming seems to have rendered it at times almost fashionable, at all
events at court. In England William Rufus was undoubtedly inverted, as
later on were Edward II, James I, and, perhaps, though not in so
conspicuous a degree, William III.[80]

Ordericus Vitalis, who was himself half Norman and half English, says that
the Normans had become very effeminate in his time, and that after the
death of William the Conqueror sodomy was common both in England and
Normandy. Guillaume de Nangis, in his chronicle for about 1120, speaking
of the two sons of Henry and the company of you