Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/234

 generally gains a fine physique. Often he has distinct beauty of face and figure. In Italy where lower classes are strikingly beautiful, to which attraction is to be added the refinement of the Italian proletariat and the pleasure that many a young Italian soldier takes in homosexual intercourse, the military prostitute is specially engaging. He is a marked contrast to the dingy, chlorotic male prostitute of civilist kind, who is hanging about the homosexual's steps. The soldier is physically magnetic. He is a logical complement to the average Uranian. He is often attractive by his boyish candour, or what passes for it, by a pleasant manner and companion ability. Even sophistication does not always destroy these traits; the young soldier realizes that to assume them is an alluring part of his evening-profession. Again, he is not a pickpocket or thief, as a rule; he can be brought into the lodging of his hirer without danger of petty losses. The soldier, too, is usually satisfied with a small sum for an hour's surender [sic] of himself,—"for any thing you like to do"; while even more decent civilian male-prostitutes are as greedy of money as their female concurrents. The soldier is clean in person, as part of his military education, if not of his instincts. When he is emphatically homosexual himself, then he is almost certain to be free from sexual diseases. Thus the specters of syphilis and its like do not haunt the philostratic patron.

But above all reasons, at least in a large part of Europe, why the Uranian chooses a soldier-prostitute are the facts that the soldier is likely not to be brutal, and not a blackmailer. (See a succeeding chapter.) The soldier has the wholesome fear of military disgrace if he compromises himself. True, he may wish that he could get "something extra", little or much, by threatening his client with scandal; and he does sometimes attempt it. But such a disagreeable surprise is not usual. The soldier knows that he has as much to lose by "a row"