Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/310

 uraniastic verse-writers and prose authours, as frankly homosexual in their lives as in their writings. A vast majority of these late-classic or other littérateurs have come downto us only in names; the destruction of libraries having been so general in consequence of either carelessness or—more often—of religious fanaticisms. Few cities of the world to-day are more distinctively pederastic than Constantinople, the successor of the social center of Theodosius, Justinian and the Constantines; whose courts were turbulent with the cult of the Venus Urania, however ardent the zeal for Galilean mysticism.

Oriental literature, is continually uranistic. Like the Greek, we find it a pederastic uranism. One becomes somewhat weary of its accent of amorousness toward the beautiful boy-cupbearer, with cheeks just showing the bloom of puberty; as also weary of comparisons, hyperboles, allusions to wine, roses, lilies and so on, handed down from one Persian, or Arabic rhapsodist to another. We begin to wonder if no Oriental boy-lover ever was also a man-lover, capable of firmer sentiment, desiring the mature friend. Of course there is a large and important body of Oriental love-verse with the female sex as its inspiration—the 'normal' love. But the amours of Megnoun and Leila, are not more firmly a part of the Arab and Persian muse-erotic than the frenzy or melancholy of the pederastic Hafiz, Abu-Nuwas, Nizami, Djâmi, Ferid-ed-din-Attar, the world-famed Firdausi, Chakani-Haikaiki, Saadi, or the famous El Nefzaweh, the authour of the classic "Perfumed Garden"—which Sir Richard Burton translated—to have it destroyed by Lady Burton after her husband's decease. Omar Khayam has enough of the same sentiment to include that Anacreon of Nishapur in the same category. Many English readers of Persian and Arabic love-verse, through the "established"