Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/196

 because of the present tendency to neglect dignified drama in favour of burlesques, operettas, musical farces, parodies, and so. These demand that young men play trivial female roles, in female costume, as imitatively as they possibly can. The more perfectly a young undergraduate, beardless and graceful, can assume a womanish personality as a "chorus-girl", or soubrette, in public, so much the more is he praised. "You cannot tell him from a girl, when he is on the stage" … "I am the prettiest ballet-girl that ever you saw in a theater!" … These are common sayings when talk is of the college-performance in rehearsal, or just given in some town-theater, to smart audiences. Stage-dancing by young men in female dress, has been made a "feature" by promoters and patrons of "college-shows". Undergraduates have acquired national reputations for grace in short skirts, and for female softness of contours highly attractive to audiences. Curious bits of inner college-history hinge on the admirations that result. Here is one such confession:

"I had never felt any clear sexual emotion for another man till one Spring, when we rehearsed and gave in X—a musical farce, under fashionable patronage, for the benefit of our University boat-club. I had always been athletic, and had not thought much of my looks; certainly not as being femininely attractive. I had the part of "a beautiful princess" in this piece. What with the talk of the "régisseur" and the dresser and of my chums, and the constant fuss made over my dancing, I took the rôle more and more seriously. There was a great deal in the papers about my "wonderful female beauty" in the costume, my producing the "perfect illusion of a lovely girl", and such stuff. We had several costume-rehearsals, and we gave the piece six or seven times. Soon after the rehearsals in dress came, I began to notice how some of my classmates, even the most masculine, began to "fall in love" with me when en scène Some of them