Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/314

 with full publication of diaries, letters, and so on, held back for a greater or longer period (by accident or by dread of publicity) have such homosexual individualities became incontestable. A special chapter,of this study is given to the brilliant poet and dramatist August von Platen, whose remarkable diary has only lately been accessible.

It is a salient fact that in no other language is annually published so much distinctive literature of the similisexual instincts—novels, essays, poems, dramas—as in German. No other presses are as occupied with the topic as are those of Germany and Austria-Hungary. This belleslettres element is to be distinguished from the wide output of scientific publications, which are of first importance to an up-to-date knowledge of the subject. Leipzig, Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, are centers for such books and reviews. The Germanic belles-lettres publication in a homosexual key, while often anonymous or under pseudonyms, and of qualified merit, have always included, and still include, the names of authours of first distinction; the classics not absent.

To both Goethe and Schiller tinges of uranianism attach themselves. An incident in "Wilhelm Meister" suggests Goethe's literary willingness to recognize homosexualism, and a personal incident in Goethe's later years (to which his verse bears witness) his mysterious feeling for a young Italian ephebus who crossed his path, caused his moral compatriots some uneasiness. Such an impulse would be part of Goethe's hellenism, Schiller was somewhat more distinctly an intersexual. Always cold to women, he was an enthusiast in his friendships with men. In the Marquis Posa, the chief figure of one of his best dramas, "Don Carlos", he has fairly embodied homosexual devotion and altruism. It is also significant, that among the unfinished works of Schiller was a drama intended to be based essentially on homosexualism, "The