Coda

Abstract

What became of ‘inversion’? In the early 1930s The Urologic and Cutaneous Review, a specialist medical journal, ran a regular feature devoted to the subject of sexology. The anonymous, largely homophobic column mostly introduced recent empirical research in the field of sexuality such as the studies of an unnamed female anthropologist who spent a year in Melanesia where she observed heterosexual promiscuity but apparently no same-sex sexual acts, which led her to argue that Western societies should encourage free opposite-sex sexual relations in order to ‘prevent’ homosexuality.¹ Less predictably, a pair of related columns, published in 1933 also explored the links between sexology, literature and sexual identity. Specifically, they focused on the historical theorisation of sexuality in relation to the modern scientia sexualis. The first one of these considered the position of sexologist as author, briefly discussing the homoeroticism of Shakespeare’s sonnets (concluding that the poet’s allusions to malemale love were mere expressions of friendship), before moving on to compare Havelock Ellis to Ovid. The author argues that Ellis is ‘concerned with artistry in sex’, praising his ‘unrighteousness’, and claiming that it ‘has done more to show men the way to sanity and decency than all the righteousness of his outraged detractors’.²