Havelock Ellis

Independent activity

1859–1939 ○ Natural causes

English sexologist, co-author of Sexual Inversion, the first English medical text not to treat homosexuality as a crime

When the English edition of Sexual Inversion, written with John Addington Symonds, appeared in 1897, a bookseller was prosecuted for stocking it.

A physician and sexologist from Croydon, England. Sexual Inversion, written with John Addington Symonds in 1897, was the first English medical textbook to treat homosexuality as neither disease, immorality nor crime. He published the seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, influenced psychoanalysis with his concepts of autoeroticism and narcissism, and distinguished transgender phenomena from homosexuality. He supported eugenics. He became one of the first presidents of the World League for Sexual Reform in 1928 and died in 1939.

Also known as: Henry Havelock Ellis

Activities and affiliations

1883–1939

Independent activityMain
Science and technology

Related historical events

1897.05.15–1935.09.01The German Sexual Reform Movement and Its Destruction by the Nazis (1897–1935)President of the World LeagueOne of the league’s first presidents in 1928.

Studies in the psychology of sex

Born in Croydon, the son of a sea captain, he taught in Australia from 1875 to 1879, then returned to study medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London with the aim of studying sex. In 1883 he joined the Fellowship of the New Life, where he met Eleanor Marx, Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw. Sexual Inversion, written with John Addington Symonds and published in English in 1897, was the first English medical textbook on homosexuality and did not treat it as disease, immorality or crime; a bookseller was prosecuted for selling it. His seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex appeared from 1897 to 1928, and his concepts of autoeroticism and narcissism were taken up by psychoanalysis. With Hirschfeld he distinguished transgender phenomena from homosexuality, coining the term eonism in 1920. A supporter of eugenics, he was a vice-president of the Eugenics Society from 1909 to 1912. In 1891 he married the lesbian writer Edith Lees in an open marriage. He was elected one of the first presidents of the World League for Sexual Reform in 1928, becoming honorary president in 1930, and died in Suffolk in 1939.