egiousness; it is for us primarily a disgusting
abomination, i.e., a matter of taste, of esthetics; and, while unspeakably
ugly to the majority, it is proclaimed as beautiful by a small minority. I
do not know that we need find fault with this esthetic method of judging
homosexuality. But it scarcely lends itself to legal purposes. To indulge
in violent denunciation of the disgusting nature of homosexuality, and to
measure the sentence by the disgust aroused, or to regret, as one English
judge is reported to have regretted when giving sentence, that "gross
indecency" is not punishable by death, is to import utterly foreign
considerations into the matter. The judges who yield to this temptation
would certainly never allow themselves to be consciously influenced on the
bench by their political opinions. Yet esthetic opinions are quite as
foreign to law as political opinions. An act does not become criminal
because it is disgusting. To eat excrement, as Moll remarks, is extremely
disgusting, but it is not criminal. The confusion which thus exists, even
in the legal mind, between the disgusting and the criminal is additional
evidence of the undesirability of the legal penalty for simple
homosexuality. At the same time it shows that social opinion is amply
adequate to deal with the manifestations of inverted sexuality. So much
for the legal aspects of sexual inversion.

But while there can be no doubt about the amply adequate character of the
existing social reaction to all manifestations of perverted sexuality, the
question still remains how far not merely the law, but also the state of
public opinion, should be modified in the light of such a psychological
study as we have here undertaken. It is clear that this public opinion,
molded chiefly or entirely with reference to gross vice, tends to be
unduly violent in its reaction. What, then, is the reasonable attitude of
society toward the congenital sexual invert? It seems to lie in the
avoidance of two extremes. On the one hand, it cannot be expected to
tolerate the invert who flouts his perversion in its face, and assumes
that, because he would rather take his pleasure with a soldier or a
policeman than with their sisters, he is of finer clay than the vulgar
herd. On the other, it might well refrain from crushing with undiscerning
ignorance beneath a burden of shame the subject of an abnormality which,
as we have seen, has not been found incapable of fine uses. Inversion is