Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/243

 is widely manifested in the professionally athletic occupations. It is common to circus-riders, tumblers, acrobats, to men who are devoted to sports and professions of high physical dexterity. The "super-virile" theory may be recognized here, the male so emphatically masculine as to repudiate instinctively the feminine. Among "ring" gymnasts often.exist lasting intimacies of this sort. In athletic circles of all social grades, there is more or less uranianism. The Uranian who is not athletic is almost always attracted to the manly symmetry and masterful strength of the circus-acrobat. Sometimes this in inverted. In the professional pairings of acrobatic associates a vivid psychic interdependence is common. The reader will recall its study in the pair of brothers, united by a passionate affection, in the de Goncourts' "Les Frères Zemganno." A homosexual circus-performer who had also a career of transient literary brilliancy, was the lively Viennese novelist, Emil Mario Vacano. His fictions are now three or four decades old, and the personality of their extraordinary authiour is only a memory to a few admirers; but his sparkling and audacious pages offer some examples of truth stranger than fiction. A clear depiction of homosexual intimacy between two young men, one of them an Eastern acrobat, occurs in a novelette by Vacano, entitled "Humbug". But we need not turn to novels. One of the most distinguished of "strong men" and wonder-athletes of the day, whose physique is famed the world over, is similisexual, almost to complete indifference to women. Another great "physical culturist", as also a renowned professional wrestler and athlete, are uranian in their sexual life. In athletic-clubs, scandals of the homosexual kind are not rare. In London, Paris and Berlin, especially, some such have made social convulsions. In "Turnverein" organizations, for gymnastics and social intercourse, that are so much an institution of German and Austrian town-life, there have been many such episodes.