"Anyone who realizes what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others..."
One of the earliest advocates of freedom for the people he termed "Homogenic", Edward Carpenter set the stage over one hundred years ago for what would become today's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Freedom Movement.
At a time when same-sex men were imprisoned for their desire, he lived openly for nearly 40 years with his dear "boy", George Merrill.
Originally published in 1908, The Intermediate Sex presents early observations about gender fluidity in both men and women: that there are those who hold an intermediate position between male and female and may have an inner sex in their mind that is quite different from their biological sex.
Carpenter's notion of an "intermediate sex," has to be seen as one of the most influential ways of understanding sexuality in the early twentieth century. His observations, which translated anthropology, sexology, and many spiritual speculations into more acceptable forms, were far more influential than any one of those viewpoints alone in defining what was meant by homosexuality, and how it might belong in the world.