Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/473

 proportion of Uranians who patronize masculine prostitutes are not athletic and not stout-hearted. They are aware that they are contravening the laws, in many countries where similisexuals are enormously numerous, with male whoredom a vast social class. Uranian strangers, in a town where they are looking for sexual adventures, are likely to carry considerable sums. Such travellers are often foolish in confidences, unprepared for being victimized. Even if the treacherous catamite be timid, or a weakling, he is likely to have close at hand a robust partner to use immediate violence, as a wind-up to a sexual episode. In Berlin, Paris, Naples, and so on, effeminately attractive he-prostitutes often have their "ponces", their souteneurs, in call; as do she-prostitutes. This muscular aid de-camp is quick to make the most of a "row". The small-boy prostitute, in Germany or France, almost always "works" under the protection of a stout exploiter, who does not baulk at knocking down, or plundering, or killing—or all three. Mysterious crimes, unexplained disappearances, are part of this record. Of such extremes another word, presently. Before it, let us consider that redoubtable phase of debased and criminal-minded homosexualism, known as the "chanteur", the "Preller" the "Erpresser", and by many other terms summed up in the formidable English one—"blackmailer."

Blackmailer!—the blackmailed!—tyrant and writhing victim! In all sorts of relations where human rashness, passion, folly, weakness, carelessness, sordid mercenariness or vengeance attack the individual, we meet this dark process. But nowhere else does blackmail operate with such terrible alertness as in the uranian world. We have reserved it as the concluding portion of this survey of homosexual decadence and criminality, because of its all-important bearings on the social and legal status of the uranian intersex in so many contemporary civilizations.