a homosexual is a terribly potent factor. Such motives are assiduously "hushed-up." But the sexual truth is often not buried with the victim.
Before the writer of these pages there lay, not long ago, a blotted letter. Here is a transcription of part of it:
"… I cannot stand it any longer. I am what I am, and I can't change myself, and nothing can. So I am not going to try to keep up the fight any more. Sooner or later the thing would leak out about me, just as it did about poor W. S. [This referred to a homosexual scandal in the same city that had ended in the social ostracism of the person indicated.] I could never face such a disgrace and it would surely kill my father …… I have had two narrow escapes already that you know of … I am that way, and there is nothing to help me … It is no use to talk to me about "God and religion." "God" could not make a man so and then let him suffer as I have, trying to crush it out of me, never to any use … I know perfectly well now that to marry any girl ever made would not change that in me … it would only make things worse … You must not mind if people talk about what I've decided to do, if only they don't say that it is because I was [—] But I don't think it will be much suspected …… You have not suspected it, at least I am almost sure you have not. Now you know everything …… They will say I am crazy but I never was clearer-headed. For anybody in my situation there is only one thing to do, that is to end it before matters are worse. Do not let G— know, I don't think he has ever guessed anything …"
The young professional man who wrote the foregoing letter poisoned himself a few years ago, in consequence of deep sexual bewilderment as an Uranian, and because of dread of an exposure of his homosexualism, through some possible misadventure in the future. He had been of strongly religious temper; his sexual struggles had left him almost bitterly atheistic. No word of scientific, humane interpretation of his intersexual nature had met his eyes or ears—but instead everything had darkened his views of himself and of his sex-impulses, to the final step—suicide.
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