Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/437

 In the case of that amazing oriental, one by no means wholly homosexual, the Emperor Elagabalus (or Heliogabalus) we have an Uranian monumental in even juvenile degeneracy. His effeminate beauty of person was so remarkable that he seems to have deserved his adopted name of the Sun-God; a suitable priest to such a deity in his bisexual loveliness. The growth of his delusions and degeneracies was swift, reaching their highest point when he succeeded Macrinus as Emperor, for his short reign of mania and folly. The "marriage" of Elagabalus'to the Moon, his insane expenditures, his sexual debauches as "man and woman", his caprices, fêtes and follies have become history. They lacked almost every element of dignity, elegance or common-sense; being mostly grotesquely-mad efforts to enjoy the impossible in every form. Cruelty however is not a distinguishing trait in Elagabalus, as it was in many predecessors on the Roman Imperial throne. He had rather the weaknesses of a girl, including a girl's aversion to seeing' what is truculently painful.

Prince Eugene of Savoy, had a side to his nature that was indisputably degenerate,—especially from the military-uranian's typic point of view. He was not only known as a pederast, but was given to prostituting himself ( he was a passivist) for money, disguised, like a sort of soldier-Messalina. The letters of Elizabeth-Charlotte, the shrewd Duchess of Orléans, have odd references to these disgraceful proclivities of the bold hero of Oudenarde and Malplaquet. Philippe d'Orléans (1640-1701) the womanish, depraved and homosexual brother of Louis XIV, is a remarkable instance of degeneracy not marked by cruelty, in a man not a poltron and not intellectually deficient.