Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/237

 though naturally more cautiously, and at a "professional" tariff perceptibly high, but not always sexually quite logical. In England, France, Spain, Russia, Italy, South-Eastern and Oriental Europe, a good number of impecunious petty officers, and others not such—lieutenants, second-lieutenants, captains—maintain sexual relations with uranian friends of wealth, to add to their pay. The "tariff" is, we will say, from twenty shillings upward, per "rendezvous", or else a special (often largo) subsidy carries them past tailor's-bills, mess-expenses and so on. There is, of course, an element in officer-prostitution due to the officer's real homosexuality. But if he can make money by the secret, he is quite likely to do so. In Vienna, several young officers of elegant appearance, and of distinguished but impoverished stock, have recently become known as "accessible". The "relations" of sundry military-men, removed members of a reigning house, awhile ago were commented satirically. One officer of a great royal Guard carries his cynicism so far that ho systematically haunts baths and public resorts where rich foreign clients are to be met. In Berlin, there is much of the same thing. Under-officers to be "had" abound. To give only one instance, a certain young Bavarian officer in Munich is said to have met paid almost his living expenses and debts, by "cultivation" of homosexual foreigners of wealth. He travelled some months, a few years ago, on this sort of basis with a wealthy Englishman. In another capital lives a certain gallant Hauptmann Z—, whose lavishness, always an object of wonder to his unsuspecting comrades, is explicable by the relation he sustains to Prince X—, a well-known figure in local aristocratic and military life. In Florence, a young officer of distinguished family and looks was long known as an entretenu, and was a topic of frequent gossip, until his suicide a few seasons ago.