Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/188

 genial atmospheres for it. But even the school-life which throws young lads together for only stated daytime hours is a lively factor.

Indeed the general categories of schools for lads of all ages, including impressionable æsthetic natures of tender years, are the seedling-houses of uranistic impulses. The types of young Uranians mentioned above concentrate themselves on the school-friendships of this time. These become real passions. The sexual relations that spring out of them are not merely misdirected boyish impulses, as one is so often told. They are unities rooted in the elementary temperaments of many of the lads. As the boy grows up, the instinct may keep him a pederastic homosexualist for all his life, or he may experience its mutations toward mere idealism. But, first and last, it is likely to be the same aesthetic passion for masculine beauty of body, in preference over the feminine; a sense of the psychic superiority of the male, a "drawing" toward him, as the expression of sexual desirableness; of personal charm, trustworthiness, and "completeness". From the first days that the lad looks into the world, distinguishes a man from a woman, a boy from a girl, the youthful Uranian makes his choice instinctively. He knows where his heart leads. Professor Kuno Fischer gives a striking reference to this quality of school-friendships in his allusion to the famous Karlschule, at Stuttgart. Many Englishmen could duplicate such reminiscences.

Sometimes the sexual relation of young lads is not mutually uranistic, but (as in riper years) a dionistic lad is drawn to an uranistic mate. He grows bound to him; is sexually intimate with him, while puzzled or ashamed. Such young Dionians when maturer, often lose all taste for similisexual intercourse, look back on it with consternation