Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/475

 resource—the sharp Sword of Damocles that the average homosexual prostitute points against his client, wherever the country's laws invite it. No arm is so powerful—so silent, so safe. No female blackmailer, however audacious and cruel, ever has shown herself quite so torturing in shattering nerves, happiness, fortune, courage, social quietude and life as has the methodical, homosexual, blackmailing demon proved himself, time and again, the world round.

The police-annals of all countries witness these melancholy episodes. Broken careers, shipwrecked lives, disappearances, interrupted marriages, inexplicable money-embarrassments, murders, suicides by hundreds are to be so explained. The incessant examples of "unaccountable affairs" too often mean that some intersexual victim, persecuted by a grasping enemy, threatened with exposure as an Uranian, can hold out no longer. Perhaps early in the attack he has seen no way out. Suicide especially will cheat the blackmailer of his blood-tax, or hide from the world the motive to drive the unfortunate into the tomb. Or else murder will be a deliverance, and flight a hope.

In blackmailing homosexuality at present, and Law-Codes the blackmailer, in too many countries, has not only social disgrace as his basis of attack on some victim whose, secret is known to the rascal. To a certain extent this powerful appui is at his service, without regard to actual legislation. He uses then the arm of only social scandal. But very widely in Europe, the blackmailer has now in his power not merely a man that will be thought disgraced, depraved; for in Great Britain and its Colonies, in Germany, in the United States of America, in the Austria-Hungary States, in the Scandinavian Monarchies, in some parts of the Swiss Confederation, and under certain