Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/312

 pederastic poets, classic and popular; especially from one famous bard, Abu-Nuwas, an incorrigible boy-adorer; whose stanzas waver between line idealism and—none whatever; including sundry particularly outspoken passages as to boy-prostitutes, a class to which Abu-Nuwas was incorrigibly partial.

Homosexuality, especially pederasty, is met in a vast mass of classic and modern Japanese romance and poetry. No class of novel has been.more popular in Japan; none more grotesquely and obscenely supplied. Few of these books have found their way to European acquaintance. They are sold in great quantities all over Japan. A limited proportion only are better than pornographic.

The scanty belles-lettres of the very early Christian epochs of Europe, do not long detain us. In Dante, we find references enough to his renascent Italy as a land filled with uranianism. The "Divina Commedia" consigns certain personages to infernal fires on account of sodomy, sometimes with plain language from the virulent Alighieri. We know nothing of Dante himself as being homosexual. Beatrice represented largely a symbolic, disembodied sort of love; but Dante had sexual intimacies with several women. Advancing to the Renaissance in Italy, and to the novellieri (whose tales, more or less were derived from social facts)—Bandello, Firenzuola and countless others, we have frequent references to homosexual intrigues and to homosexual men, of many callings. Bandello has several such stories—all of them coarsely comic, rather ridiculing the sentiment than blaming it. The famous "Ermafrodito" by Beccadelli,—a collection of epigrams composed in Latin, resembling those by