Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/454

 not so compromising in looks, or not so personally dangerous, that he cannot be taken to his respectable client's bachelor-lodgings, or saluted in a café of good grade. In due professional ascent of scale, comes the aristocracy of homosexual love-making—the young man, or lad of attractive manners and good-breeding enough, who is kept by some rich Uranian; or the mature, high grade élégant who "receives" in his own apartments a list of regular clients—a true male cocotte. Frequently the real sources of support, the real vocation or avocation—of this type, is not discerned by many friends outside the secret. In pederastic homosexualism there is met often the boy of fifteen to seventeen, of the beauty that has Sodoma's Saint Sebastian; who is ostensibly even legally adopted and put on a filial or nepotal footing by a well-to.do bachelor Uranian, or by a married one. This sort of "adoption" occurs often, even when Uranians must marry for such practical reasons as money, or for achieving a lawful heir—while thoroughly averse to sexual connection with the wife. We encounter other degrees social or intellectual, as among demoiselles galantes. Such are the handsome actor, the stage-singer, the studio-model, the poet, journalist, student and good-looking clerk; each simply a kept male-mistress, or clandestinely an homme de joie. Wealthy Jews and countless opulent non-semites, are mainstays of such well-conducted he-hetairas. The sexual nature of the intimacy can be kept below the surface of ordinary social notice. Such entretenu youth can readily be seen in the Bois de Boulogne, the Prater, the Pincio, Hyde Park, or Riverside Drive in their own automobiles. Their handsome apartments can be a luxurious rendezvous of dionysian society, as well as of Uranians known or not known as such.

In this regiment of masculine harlotry of course are met all dramas of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, disinterestedness or venality, comedies and tragedies, jealousies,