After anguishing over his homosexual impulses for years, Symonds suffered from one physical malady after another as he tried to suppress them. At thirty-six, he finally hired "a brawny young solider" to have sex with him at a male brothel in London. Symonds wrote, That the experience "exercised a powerful effect upon my life." It did not cure his physical maladies in fact, he suffered a severe relapse of lung disease shortly afterward - but it set him on the road to coming to grips with his real nature.