Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/104

 " emotion. But the Uranian must often "go through" the most overwhelming, soul-prostrating of loves, finding his nerves and mind and body beaten down under the passion, his days and nights vivified or poisoned by it, all without his doing anything so persistently as to hide his sentiment forever from the object of it! To hide it from his closest friends, from suspicion by the world! Hide it he must. Accounted a diseased human thing, an outcast from men, a beast, if his secret be probed; hopeless often of its toleration for an instant by the being that, often under the name of friendship, he loves with all the fire of intersex; fighting the emotion in himself in bewilderment or shame; perhaps living, side by side with some stranger that is more than any mere friend to him; playing his part like a man, frequently without one human confidant in the wide world, so can pass his social life! Ever the Mask, the shuddering concealment, the anguish of hidden passion that burns his life away! Not always; for sometimes, as if by a Divine grace, the Uranistic love is accepted; or at least its psychical side is pardoned and tolerated by the man to whom it goes out. But this pre-supposes either a peculiarly deep regard and broad-minded nature in the dionian object—if he be decidedly dionistic, as is likely to be the ease in the finer grades of uranian loves; or else he is (most luckily for the Uranian) imbued with an uranistic element himself. Fortunate then is the Uranian, or half-fortunate! He can at least be honest. For he can at least receive sympathy and brotherly pity—human respect and regard. Perhaps he wins more, and so becomes unspeakably blessed. But often he is hopeless as he is helpless, and wears his mask with the smiling hypocrisy of anxious self-protection. He sits in his club and hears similisexualism, not merely in gross and unworthy forms but in manly ideals, mocked as infamy. He listens to the coarsest jests, at the expense of the Uranian nature, when some accident brings a "case" to public notice. He must deny his ability to