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Prevalent Lay Opinion on Inverts.
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to live with the rest of mankind. They ought to have branded in their foreheads the word 'Unclean,' and as the lepers of old, they ought to cry 'Unclean! Unclean!' as they go about, and instead of the law making twenty years imprisonment the penalty for their crime, it ought to be imprisonment for life. Are they assaulted and blackmailed? They deserve to be. Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis know nothing about them if they say they are irresponsible. They are wilfully bad, and glory and gloat in their perversion. Their habit is acquired and not inborn. Why propose to have the law against them now on the statute books repealed? If this happened, there would be no way of getting at them. It would be wrong to make life more tolerable for them. Their lives ought to be made so intolerable as to drive them to abandon their vices."

This attitude of mind is a proper one toward possible male filles de joie who are fundamentally normal in their sexuality, but who through cupidity, or with the purpose of blackmailing those who seek them, offer themselves to take the passive rôle in paedicatio. Your author doubts whether any such males ever lived. But the true invert belongs to a different class, and should have the same standing before the law as the normal individual. He even should be dealt with more leniently, because his passion is often abnormally intense, and his mental eccentricities sometimes lead him into unwise though little harmful, or not at all harmful, acts. ******* In this autobiography, I may sometimes refer to my-