Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/428

 a perfect external womanliness and unwomanliness. It characterizes the high and debased. It is an ingredient that often unites to no determinative externals. It is not strictly, psychologically, a definitely "contra-sexual" impulse. It refers to no hard-and-fast logic of individualisais, in innumerable instances. It has no necessary and inevitable relationship to any disease, to any distortion of the intellectual aesthetic, ethical or physical types. It is a product and an impulse by itself, the nature-right of distinct, or of indistinct and medial sexes; the semi-tones of the psychic and sexual gamut. Each intersex sounds the melody of its own string, in the mysterious human instrument of which it is arbitrarily made a part. It completes, as an indispensable, Nature's calm cycles. In fact, as to the term "degenerate" one of the very first principles in studying homosexualism is to remember that a similisexual man is not necessarily demonstrable as a decadent man or woman.

"Not necessarily", has been written. Nevertheless, it is not remarkable that decadence has been so placarded on the homosexual, that to the mass of educated people not uranistic, and even to the Uranian himself, the terms have become synonymous. For—unfortunately—there are obviously large elements of debasement in the legion of Uranians and Uraniads. They depress the observer by salient degeneracy of mind, soul, heart, and body. To analyze such phases is our least agreeable task. But the true Nature-student has no right to shirk Nature's problems, nor must he be deflected by what is ugly, grotesque, unclean or vile.

Compared with some other aspects of Uranian degeneracy, we find that downright bodily effeminacy, corporeal imperfections or abnormalities do not play a peculiarly large role in homosexualism, even when linked with weakness, disgrace, vice and crime. Often the "worst" type of homosexual differs