| Englishman
Havelock Ellis published the first edition of his Sexual
Inversion as Das Konträre Geschlechtsgefühle
in Leipzig, Germany because
English publishers turned him away for fear of obscenity
charges. Ellis was not an invert himself, and the
book is neither polemical nor salacious, but the book's
many case studies gave inverts a chance to speak for
themselves. The theory that Ellis propounded - that
inversion is a congenital variation but not a disease - added to the
controversy. When an English judge reviewed the
book, he found it filthy and returned a guilty verdict
against a man caught selling a copy to an undercover
policeman.
Ellis rejected both the
notion that inversion is a crime and the views of Ulrichs,
Westphal, and Hirschfeld who all
agreed that male inverts are effeminate. Instead, he
presented a variety of case studies that showed that
inverts are as variable in personality as
"normal" men. By 1903, Ellis work was
accepted by a respected American publisher and enjoyed
many English language editions.
Ellis was an explorer of
sexuality rather than a systematic thinker and never
gained the following or notoriety of his contemporary
Sigmund Freud who rejected Ellis' congenital theories
in 1905.
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