Page:Autobiography of an Androgyne 1918 book scan.djvu/20

viii 1883, states: "Nor must the hereditary nature of such crimes be overlooked."

To quote from Beranger:

Mantegazza, in his Hygiene of Love, published in 1877, mentions the subject and states that these cases generally are not due to congenital aberration, thus admitting that some of them are. I think that it was in 1877 when Krafft-Ebing first drew attention to the psycho-pathology of certain forms of homosexuality; since that time forty years have passed, and still the laws fail to differentiate between the vicious pederasts and the unfortunate passive pæderasts. The distinction between those in whom homosexual practices are a vice and in whom they are a misfortune, is, it seems to me, generally very easily made. The vicious homosexualist acts the part of a male. The unfortunate, insane or congenital homosexualist acts the part of a female. The one is active, the other passive.

That the passive homosexualist is a victim of nature, an unfortunate who is generally despised and hounded, seems however not to be enough, for he is also considered legitimate prey of the underworld, who blackmail these