Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/189

 and disgust. Unfortunately the really uranistic partner undergoes no such change. The first abandonments to a male love, the first physical expressions of it will have been subtly educative. The gout of it is forever fixed.

Indications of passional, abnormal friendships ships between boys as boys, and girls as are worth precautions. Friendships which seem to take a strong nervous hold of the boy's character, to dominate his psychic life, to possess a distinctively sentimental colouring, are to be discouraged by the parents and guardians, however sympathetic they may be to such intimacies on general grounds. Diversion, separation, diplomatic obstacles, should be utilized. Especially so, when the lads are of the weaker, more idealistic classes described. There is small use in explicitly reasoning on the topic with a boy; not more than there is use in such a course with the adult Uranian. One meets only denials and evasions of all sorts; a deeper self-inclusiveness. The curious and painful topic of juvenile suicide is by no means unconnected with precocious similisexual instincts. In a German city, a year ago, a lad of fourteen hanged himself. It was found that he had committed the act, not on account of a failure in his school-examinations (as was mentioned) but because he had lost the intimacy of another lad, homosexual as himself, and was "too miserable" without it. A young English boy, not fifteen, attempted suicide at a summer-resort recently, leaving behind him a note for a mate, which said that the death of a young tutor in his school with whom, as was presently discovered, he had had sexual relations, "made life a blank" to him. "I loved him and he loved me and, I cannot live without him".

I cite from a comunication [sic] that is made to me by a friend, whose term was long