Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/228

 be noted many delicate suggestions of the uranian emotion in young and soldierly comrades. Indeed the accent of a manly similisexualism of psychic quality pervades the record. To many Anglo-Saxons it will make a peculiarly subtle appeal, even if its sub-uranistic accent may not be intelligently appreciated. Especially in its elegiac passages, it is eloquent of the homosexual thrill in young hearts that beneath uniforms can beat so passionally for each other.

In the novelette "Imre: A Memorandum", by the present writer, a homosexual romance that has something of a military atmosphere—the hero of the little tale being a young Hungarian officer who is an inborn Uranian—there occur several references to the struggles of a soldier nature, unclear as to just what may be the troublous sexual quality of its regard for other comrades-in-arms, dreading detection of the mysterious feeling, hiding all its promptings day by day in regimental life; and finally tormented by an almost insupportable struggle with a passion for a brother-officer who never suspects the character of the younger man's regard for him. Hourly terror lest his homosexuality should be guessed, makes Lieutenant Imre von N— seem unemotional, reserved and unappreciative. The following passage is near the close of the story, where is reviewed Lieutenant Imre's difficult social policy toward warm friendships:

"Twice Imre had been on the point of suicide. And though there had been experiences in the Military Academy, and certain much later ones, to teach him that he was not unique in Austria-Hungary, or elsewhere in the world, still Imre unluckily had got from them (as is too often the hap of the Uranian) chiefly the sense of how widely despised, mocked, and loathed is the Uranian Race. Also how sordid and debasing are the average associations of the homosexual kind; how likely to be wanting in idealism, in exclusiveness, in those pure and manly influences which ought to be bound up in them and to radiate from them! He had grown to have a horror of similisexual types, of all contacts with them.