The doctor who did not condemn homosexuality

On 2 February 1859, Henry Havelock Ellis was born in Croydon, England. He became a doctor, but practising medicine interested him little. What captivated him was a question that hardly anyone in Victorian society talked about openly: human sexuality.

The impetus for his best-known work came from the writer John Addington Symonds. He himself loved men and had suggested to Ellis that they write about homosexuality together. Symonds died before the book was finished. It appeared first in German, then in English in 1897 under the title "Sexual Inversion". It is regarded as the first English-language medical textbook on the subject.

What was new above all was the tone. Ellis described same-sex love not as a vice or a crime, but as a natural variation that had always existed. He drew on case histories told by those affected themselves and argued against prosecution.

The book did not stay on the market for long. Symonds's literary executor bought up the first edition and had it destroyed. In 1898, a bookseller in London was prosecuted for selling it. The judge dismissed its scientific claims as a mere pretext for selling a filthy work. After that, further volumes appeared only in the United States, and for a long time only for professionals.

In his private life, too, Ellis lived beyond convention. His wife Edith Lees loved women, and the two had an open marriage. Later he studied people who felt they belonged to the opposite sex, and was one of the first to clearly distinguish this phenomenon from homosexuality.

Ellis died in 1939. His view that love between people of the same sex is no matter for the courts only prevailed in Britain decades later.