Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/465

 officer in active service, came several years ago in the person of Commander James R—, of Missouri. In 'hours of ease' he dressed as a lady, and at large expense. His feminine wardrobe was complete and fashionable. The writer of these pages knows an English colonel (a capital soldier, a firm disciplinarian and drill-master withal) who has the same eccentricity, and in most private circumstances can be seen as a majestic—dowager! A peculiarly noteworthy instance of this sartorial weakness, can be read in the "Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen" Vol. II; p. 332; an autobiographic statement written with queer naïveté. In that case the similisexual impulse is not apparent.

A young Uranian's adaptability to female dress jg sometimes wonderfully complete. In course or Ulrich's rambling but valuable diagnostics of Uranian types he gives the following autobiographic. account of two such young homosexuals of Vienna. They belonged to thoroughly respectable social life, and were dissociated from venal similisexuality:

"When I was seventeen, I had a friend of twenty, like myself a distinctively feminine Urning. We two used to help my sisters for hours at a time, in making their finery. Since we both had good taste in such toilette-matters, we were welcomed. If the girls' new clothes were very successful in their working-out, we two used to ask to try them on ourselves, which doings were the pleasure of everybody. But I knew better than anybody could suppose how to deport myself in such feminine costumes. I knew how to wear a train with such majesty and grace, and so to wield my umbrella or fan, that often my mother was sorry that I was not a daughter!

"But the desire awoke in my friend and me to show ourselves publicly in woman's dresses and to attract notice of men, as girls. So we decided to make a visit to one of the regular "Universum" dance-evenings; in company with a couple of our lovers; our escorts of course in male attire. We thought out how to manage the trick, and knew how to arrange it so that an old aunt in the family invited our parents and sisters, one Sunday, to drink coffee. We took our sister's maid into our confidence, and she promised to adjust our coiffures for us ……