Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/457

, from the management to the chiropodists, is by homosexuals, be it more or less so. On entrance, the first detail of striking suggestiveness, is the huge piscina full of tepid water. On special days of the week, such as Sundays and holidays, it is also full of a most mixed multitude of homosexuals, all naked (the ironical towel being made into an equation of nothing) and all immersed in the water up to their shoulders,—decorously enough. All are promenading together, in a sort of friendly cotillon; their hands kept under water, not for swiming [sic], but for—mutual investigations, which are to be expected when one enters the pool. They are of course well-taken, unless some heterosexual, a stranger to the ways of the place, creates a scene, by being surprised, coy and insulted. Boys and men, youths and elders, tradesmen's clerks and archdukes, actors and musicians, officers of the army and common soldiers, hundreds of male prostitutes of all grades—these all meet in this amazing mélange. Various steam and hot-air rooms afford other, but less direct, opportunities for cultivating acquaintances. Friends meet known friends; new intimacies are ever in the air. The dressing-rooms, all private, have vague surveillance—by express absence of guardians. Each bather has his cabin; for the afternoon' or evening it is his castle. He can take whom he pleases to it, and he can do what he pleases in it; always provided thereb [sic] be no open indecorum, no tapage. There seldom is such. The partitions of many of the rooms are of groundglass, in part, but do not interfere much with freedom of proceedings; besides which most occupants are too busy to attend in curiosity to their neighbours. A prostitute—boy or man—is always to be had for a couple of florins. But if such a youth attempt extortion with any approach to disturbance, the bath-attendants at once are aware of it with surprising quickness, and come to the spot. The indiscreet party is ejected, and is told not to come again—a privilege that most of his profession in the city do not care to lose. So he usually