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Last edited: January 01, 2005
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1892: Homosexuality in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Irving C. Rosse
From Gay American History
By Jonathan Ned Katz
Meridian, New York, 1976, 1992
"Two male elephants … entwined their probosces together."
In a paper read at a meeting of the Medical Society of Virginia, at
Allegheny Springs in September 1892, Dr. Rosse spoke on ". ..Perversion
of the Genesic [procreative] Instinct." Rosse, a professor of nervous
diseases at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., warns of .the wide
"prevalence and spread of sexual crime:" that is, sexual activity
other than "normal [heterosexual] coitus." Dr. Rosse maintains that
such "crimes of sexuality" are not confined to humans, and refers to
"the biological beginnings of crime as observed in curious instances of
criminality in animals." Since
we are warranted in saying that as many of the lower beings in the
zoölogical scale show virtues having analogy to those of man, we must expect
to find parallel vices. It is an error to suppose that aberration of the
genesic instinct is confined to our species, time or race. ...I have observed
common instances of sexual perversion in dogs and turkeys. A short time since,
at the Washington races, a celebrated stallion was the favorite on whom the
largest bets were made. A friend of mine, having ascertained from the groom
the day before the race that the horse had procured an ejaculation by flapping
his penis against the abdomen, accordingly risked his pile on another horse,
who, by the way, came in ahead. Only a few days ago, to escape a shower, I
took refuge in the elephant house in the Washington Zoölogical Gardens, where
are confined the two male elephants, "Dunk" and "Gold
Dust." To my astonishment, they entwined their probosces together in a
caressing way; each had simultaneous erection of the penis, and the act was
finished by one animal opening and allowing the other to tickle the roof of
his mouth with his proboscis, after the manner of the oscula more Columbino,
mentioned, by the way, in some of the old theological writings, and
prohibited by the rules of at least one Christian denomination.41
Dr. Rosse speaks of a case, known to the Washington police, of
a well-connected man with a very pallid complexion, who enticed messenger
boys to a hotel, and after getting them under the influence of drink
accomplished his fell purpose. A friend in the Department of Justice tells me
of the trial in Philadelphia of a noted pederast who communicated syphilis to
a dozen or more of his victims.
Rosse says that the observation of venereal disease symptoms,
even [in] the mouth, calls for the consideration of a hideous act that
marks the last abjection of vice. So squeamish are some English-speaking
people on this point that they have no terms to designate the "nameless
crime" that moves in the dark. Many of the Continental writers, however,
make no attempt to hide the matter under a symbolic veil, and deal with it in
terms as naked and unequivocal as those used by the old historians, from whom
hundreds of citations might be made. ...42
Turning to the present, Rosse says that as an indication of the
state of immorality we have only to call to mind the unclean realism of
Zola and Tolstoi, and the French lesbian novels, Mademoiselle Giraud ma
Femme, by A. Belot, and Mademoiselle de Maupin, by Th. Gautier,
whose point of departure is tribadism. ... In our own country
the surreptitious sale of such publications is carried to such an extent that
agents of the Post Office Department yearly destroy tons of pornographic
literature.43
Rosse continues:
A Washington physician, whom I see almost daily, tells me of a case of
venereal disease of the buccal [oral] cavity in an old soldier whom he is
treating. The patient with unblushing affrontery did not hesitate to say how
it was contracted.
From a judge of the District police court I learned that frequent
delinquents of this kind have been taken by the police in the very commission
of the crime, and that owing to defective penal legislation on the subject he
is obliged to try such cases as assaults or indecent exposure. The lieutenant
in charge of my district, calling on me a few weeks ago for medical
information on this point, informs me that men of this class give him far more
trouble than the prostitutes. Only of late the chief of police tells me that
his men have made, under the very shadow of the White House, eighteen arrests
in Lafayette Square alone (a place by the way, frequented by Guiteau) in which
the culprits were taken in flagrante delicto. Both white and black were
represented among these moral hermaphrodites, but the majority of them were
negros.44
But such men, says Rosse, do not hold a monopoly on
"perversion,"
having had a neurotic patient whose conversation showed an extreme erotic
turn of mind, I learned from her some particulars as to the existence and
spread of saphism.
I know the case of a prostitute who from curiosity visited several women
that make a specialty of the vice, and on submitting herself by way of
experiment to the lingual and oral manœuvers of the performance, had a
violent hystero-cataleptic attack from which she was a long time in
recovering.
Through one of my patients of the opposite sex another case has come to my
knowledge of a woman who practices the orgies of tribadism with other women
after getting them under the influence of drink. ...
...I take it for granted that what is true of Washington as regards sexual
matters applies more or less to other American large cities."45
Footnotes
41. Irving C. Rosse, "Sexual Hypochondriasis and Perversion of the
Genesic Instinct," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (N.Y.),
whole ser. vol. 19, new ser., val. 17, no.11 (Nov. 1892), p. 799.
42. Rosse, p.803. Rosse also cites a New York Herald report (n.d.)
of a New York homosexual bar, the Slide, being closed by the police.
43. Rosse, p. 805. The two classic French Lesbian novels Rosse mentions
were fir published in English translation, in the U.S., in the 1890s:
Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin; A Romance of Love and Passion;
Illustrated . . . from designs by Toudouze (Chicago: Laird &
Lee, 1890); other eds.: N.Y.: 1897; London, 1930 [trans., revised, and amended
by Alvah C. Bessie]; see Foster p. 64-66, 76, 82; Adolphe Belot, Mademoiselle
Giraud, My Wife (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1891); see Foster, p. 81-83,
97, 114, 220, 331, 363, 376. Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Betty (Boston:
Dana Estel 1901), trans. by James Waring; see Foster p. 63-64, 218, 362.
[Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin was first published in French in 1835,
the same year as Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes, another Lesbian
novel.] (Jeannette H. Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature, [N.Y.:
Vantage, 1956]).
44. Rosse, p. 806.
45. Rosse, p. 807.
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