The treatment of homosexuality and The Well of Loneliness

Abstract

‘Why am I as I am - and what am I?’1 For decades men and women who experience homosexual desire have asked themselves this. Underlying the seemingly infinite number of questions concerning the aetiology of homosexuality is one fundamental opposition - that of nature versus nurture - and bound up with this opposition are the questions of responsibility and treatment. This issue lies at the centre of any rationalisation of censorship and homosexuality - as the debates around Section 28 of the Local Authorities Act (1988) demonstrated. In 1928 the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness caused the same questions to be asked. Radclyffe Hall was unequivocal about the propagandist nature of The Well; however, her stated aim was to promote an understanding of the ‘true’ nature of the homosexual, not homosexuality itself. Hall’s understanding of homosexuality came, primarily, from the work of Havelock Ellis who defined ‘inversion’ as ‘congenital’, and who perceived the female invert as a male mind trapped within a female body. This description of the aetiology of homosexuality was integral to Hall’s defence of her novel: I claim emphatically that the true invert is born and not made…. Only when this fact is fully grasped can we hope for the exercise of that charitable help and compassion that will assist inverts to give of their best and contribute to the good of the whole.2 As congenital inversion was a part of the body corporeal so congenital inverts were a part of the body politic; both conditions were ‘natural’, according to Hall, and needed to be recognised and accepted as such to ensure the health of the bodies they inhabited.