Everyone
of Hirschfeld's three classes may well contain a majority of genuinely
homosexual or bisexual persons. The prostitutes and even the blackmailers
are certainly genuine inverts in very many cases. Those persons, again,
who allow themselves to be the recipients of homosexual attentions may
well possess traces of homosexual feeling, and are undoubtedly in very
many cases lacking in vigorous heterosexual impulse. Finally, the persons
who turn to their own sex when forcibly excluded from the society of the
opposite sex, can by no means be assumed, without question, to be normal
heterosexual persons. It is only a small proportion of heterosexual
persons who experience these impulses under such conditions. There are
always others who under the same conditions remain emotionally attracted
to the opposite sex and sexually indifferent to their own sex. There is
evidently a difference, and that difference may most reasonably be
supposed to be in the existence of a trace of homosexual feeling which is
called into activity under the abnormal conditions, and subsides when the
stronger heterosexual impulse can again be gratified.
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