ir perverted passions
without running much danger. _They willingly choose a career suitable
for their degenerate purposes, and especially that of attendant in
lunatic asylums. In the latter case they take advantage of the mental
condition of the patients and their incapacity to make complaints. In
public baths inverts can freely enjoy the sight of naked men._

So far we have only spoken of complete inversion; but there are
transitional stages. Many individuals are neutral, animated by
sensations floating between the two sexes. Krafft-Ebing even speaks
of psycho-sexual hermaphrodites, who are equally attracted by either
sex, and cohabit sometimes with one, sometimes with the other. I knew
a married man who was very capable with his wife but in spite of this
was unfaithful to her, both with men and with other women. He was
convicted several times for pederasty with men and young boys, and
confessed to me that he had more pleasure from homosexual intercourse
than from normal connection with women, but could satisfy himself
either way. An incomplete invert declared to me that his ideal would
be a man.

Along with these cases there is a series of homosexuals in whom it is
assumed that inversion has been acquired, because they commenced with
a normal sexual desire for women. After being seduced by homosexuals,
who initiate them in mutual onanism or pederasty, they are suddenly or
gradually disgusted with women and become inverts (vide _Suggestion_).
In reality, these are only relatively cases of acquired inversion. If
we except the cases which depend on pure suggestion of which we shall
speak later, there is a latent hereditary disposition to inversion,
which is awakened on the first occasion and then develops strongly. It
is easy to prove that men with normal sexual instincts immediately
abandon the habits of onanism or pederasty which they have contracted
through bad example or seduction, or by compensation for the want of
the normal object, as soon as they can obtain normal sexual
intercourse with one or more women. It is, therefore, false to regard
homosexual sensations as depending on vice and depravity: they are a
pathological product of abnormal hereditary sexual dispositions. At
any rate, this is a general rule which has few exceptions.

Sexual inversion is so widespread that in certain countries, for
instance Brazil, and even in some European towns, there are brothels
with men instead of women.

I will mention h