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at the books in it. Anyway, they didn’t look very interesting. They were fat blue and brown volumes, without even any
dust jackets to make them fit in with all that newness, hardly worth a glance.
    One day, though, I paused in my envious contemplation of this exclusive piece of furniture, and noticed the titles. It was a day – I must have been twelve – when my reading life was
to change forever, a day after which reading was to become my major source of excitement and delight. The titles of those dull looking books, once focused on, though admittedly puzzling and
obscure, had something to recommend them: Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing, Sexual Anomalies and Perversions by Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexual Aberrations by Wilhelm Stekel,
MD. Sex, all sex! Anomalies (I looked it up) and Perversions? Bliss.
    A chirpy ‘ Can I borrow this, dad, it looks pretty interesting? ’ was not likely to withdraw these books from their appointed shelf. If I wanted to read them I would have to be
sneaky. That, it was to turn out, was part of the fun. Reading them was going to be exciting and dangerous, like a Hardy Boys adventure with nefarious foreigners. The entry of these books
into my life coincided with the onset of puberty – indeed, they probably caused it – and they were to fuel my imagination for the next few years. I was so intensely stimulated that it
was embarrassing just to be me. Surely, anyone would be able to tell? Mom would be able to tell. She would know. I was in a cringingly explosive cycle of lust, shame, delight and abandon. Nothing
could better exemplify Carlyle’s dictum that ‘the best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.’
    I liked Hirschfeld the best. The plots certainly weren’t up to much, there was too much medical jargon, and a deeply frustrating amount of the text dropped into Latin at key moments, but
there was plenty to hold my attention. The characters were distinctly interesting, and each had a little story to tell. Not enough detail, of course: the stories were reprehensibly succinct, but
there was sufficient to fire the imagination. Anyway I only wanted the dirty bits.
    Rereading the texts, fifty years later, I was astonished how much I remembered . Oh my God, it’s her! It’s him! It’s that !
    His first spontaneous sexual excitement occurred when, at the beginning of puberty, he saw himself for the first time full length in a mirror . . . There was an
     instantaneous erection and he grew excited. Excusing himself he pressed his lips to the mirror and covered his mirrored lips with kisses . . . He made the following statement in writing: my
     sexual appetite is directed towards myself and to lick my own member would give me the greatest pleasure .
    There were further reports of an American girls’ boarding school where there was ‘a veritable epidemic of lesbianism’, an account of a thirty-year-old doctor much given to
bottom kissing, a Parisian inventor of an electrical flagellating machine, and a serious and stern woman given to ‘punishing and cherishing’ her male lovers, while riding them about the
bedroom. Though chapters on masturbation reassured me that it was not proven that it led to ‘softening of the brain’, nevertheless Hirschfeld did not recommend that one lathered
one’s penis (like one of his masturbators) and carried on gaily. No, ‘the principal effect of masturbation is depression which may change to melancholia, leading to thoughts of suicide
or even actual suicide.’ That didn’t scare me: as long as my brain stayed unsoftened so could my penis, lathered or unlathered.
    Though unimaginably distant in time and place, Hirschfeld’s people were not, by-and-large, freaks or monsters. A few were distinctly to be avoided – chapters on Sadism and Sexual
Murder required quick skipping over (who’d want to read about that ?) – but many of these obscure mittel-Europeans became exemplars of human possibility. Who