Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/192

 delicately esthetic or rankly gross. The school-study of classic literature has a close connection with boyish similisexualism. To explain honestly many episodes in the best poets and historians of GreceGreece [sic] and Rome is to teach homosexuality, unavoidably. Close companionships out of the classroom between impressionable lads and their tutors; sociable hours in the teacher's apartments; quiet excursions with lads into the country, beget many romantically pédérastie ties. Painful tragedies occasionally spring out of them. Criminal statistics annually are filled with the stories of educators, secular audand [sic] clerical, guilty of debauching of boys; by no means always in satisfaction of brutal and vulgar sexualism, but carried along by aesthetic uranianism; sometimes with despairing moral contest. When an intimacy is not known to the outer world, but takes a calm mutual course between lad and guardian, the latter may change colour in the boy's nature and in his concepts of sexual love, as he outgrows his "derived" uranistic tendencies; or it can bring grave consequences if he remains homosexual.

I have following from a teacher in a Continental institution for lads, a secular one. "No words can tell what I have suffered, morally and physically, through my passion for generous-minded, high-natured and beautiful lads. I was in continual warfare with the sense that I must not betray myself; not only because at that time I did not understand homosexual love and natural right to the emotion, but because of feeling strongly, as a sexual and moral duty, that I must avoid encouraging such ideas in any boy's nature. I was very often greatly troubled. I had two or three such passions. One, for a lad named D— nearly drove me insane … My position in a large public-school, a homosexual and boy-loving teacher, attractive to his charge, sometimes is terrible now … During the latter part of my stay in W—, I gave up the moral