Professor X: "a natural, pure and sound passion," 1897

James Mills Pierce: Militant Homosexual of Harvard

by Jonathan Ned Katz. Copyright (c) by Jonathan Ned Katz. All rights reserved. Reedited by Katz from Gay American History (1976).

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The first English edition of Sexual Inversion (1897) also contains a "Letter from Professor X.," a scientist and "American of eminence!' His statement, described as “representing the farthest point to which the defense of sexual inversion has gone,…” disappeared from the book after the edition of 1901. The professor defends homosexuality as one pole of a "normal," "natural" bisexuality. Havelock Ellis writes:

Professor X., in a letter to Symonds (who described him as "an American of eminence, who holds a scientific professorship in one of the h a t universities of the world"), has carried to the furthest extent the theory of the sexual indifference of the genital impulse, and the consequently normal nature of homosexuality. He writes: "I have considered and enquired into this question for many years; and it has long been my settled conviction that no breach of morality is involved in homosexual love; that, like every other passion, it tends, when duly understood and controlled by spiritual feeling, to the physical and moral health of the individual and the race, and that it is only its brutal perversions which are immoral. I have known many persons more or less the subjects of this passion, and I have found them a particularly high-minded, upright, refined, and (I must add) pure minded class of men. In view of what everybody knows of the vile influence on society of the intersexual [heterosexual] passion, as it actually exists in the world, making men and women sensual, low-minded, false, every way unprincipled and grossly selfish, and this especially in those nations which self-righteously reject homosexual love, it seems a travesty of morality to invest the one with divine attributes and denounce the other as infamous and unnatural.

"There is an error in the view that feminine love is that which is directed to a man, and masculine love that which is directed to a woman. That doctrine involves a begging of the whole question. It is a fatal concession to vulgar prejudice, and a contradiction to all you have so firmly adduced from Greek manners, and, indeed, I may say, to dl the natural evolution of our race. Passion is in itself a blind thing. It is a furious pushing out, not with calculation or comprehension of its object, but to anything which strikes the imagination as fitted to its need. It is not characterized or differentiated by the nature, of its object, but by its own nature. Its instinct is to a certain form of action or submission. But how that instinct is determined is largely accidental. Sexual passion is drawn by certain qualities which appeal to it. It may see them, or think that it sees them, in a man or a woman. But it is in either case the same person. The controlling influence is a certain spiritual attraction, and that may lie in either. The two directions are equally natural to unperverted man, and the abnormal form of love is that which has lost the power of excitability in either the one or the other of these directions. It is unisexual love (a love for one sexuality) which is a perversion. The normal men love both.

"It is true enough that in primitive society all passion must have been wholly or mainly animal, and spiritual progress must have been conditioned on subduing it. But there is no reason why this subjugation should have consisted in extirpating, or trying to extirpate, one of the two main forms of sexual passion, and cultivating the other. The actual reasons were, I take it, two: ( 1 ) to reserve all sexual energy for the increase of the race; (2) to get the utmost merely fleshly pleasure out of the exercise of passion. Whether either of these reasons adds to the spiritual elevation of love may be doubted. Certainly not the second, which is now the moving influence in the matter. It is true enough that all passion needs to be unceasingly watched, because the worst evils for mankind lie hidden in its undisciplined indulgence. But this is quite as true of intersexual as of homosexual love. I clearly believe mat the Greek morality on this subject was far higher than ours, and truer to the spiritual nature of man; that our civilization suffers for want of the pure and noble sentiment which they thought so useful to the state; and that we ought to think and speak of homosexual love, not as 'inverted' or 'abnormal,' as a sort of color-blindness of the genital sense, as a lamentable mark of inferior development, or as an unhappy fault, a 'masculine body with a feminine soul,' but as being in itself a natural, pure and sound passion, as worthy of the reverence of a11 fine natures as the honorable devotion of husband and wife, or the ardor of bride and groom."

I present this statement of Prof. X.'s as representing the furthest point to which the defense of sexual inversion has gone, or, indeed, could go, unless anyone were bold enough to assert that homosexuality is the only normal impulse, and heterosexual love a perversion…

Bibliography

Kennedy, Hubert. Six Articles on James Mills Peirce. Concord, CA: Peremptory Publications, 2003. On line. See especially: "The Case for James Mills Peirce" (1978); "Towards a Biography of James Mills Peirce" (1979); "James Mills Peirce, Fierce & Quixotic Ally" (1982).

Pencak, William (1951-. Pennsylvania State University.) "The Peirce Brothers, John Addington Symonds, Horatio Brown, and the Boundaries of Defending Homosexuality in Late-Nineteenth-Century Anglo-America." Journal of the History of Sexuality. Volume 15, Number 2, May 2007, p. 153-168. University of Texas Press.

Excerpt:

On 11 April 1895 The Nation published one of its many anonymous reviews of recent scholarly books, Horatio Brown's biography of John Addington Symonds. Both the biography and the review are unusual. The biography, consisting to a large extent of lengthy passages from Symonds's letters and journals, says little about the great books on Renaissance art responsible for Symonds's reputation as one of the world's great art historians. Brown deals almost exclusively with Symonds's struggle to overcome inner demons and physical illnesses, find peace and satisfaction, and do his important work. The review in turn only evaluates in passing the quality of the book itself, near its conclusion. It centers instead on the reviewer's fascination with Symonds's life and discovery of Walt Whitman as the transforming influence that unleashed his genius and permitted him a modicum of happiness. Why this matters for the history of sexuality is that the author of the review can be. . . .

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