Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/525

 One readily collects such suggestive items in the newspapers as the following—typified by extracts:

Such are the frequent phrases of suicides not accompanied by obvious facts. Too often, not money, not disease, not woman, anxieties, disappointments nor any other reasons are at the root of the action, so much as sheer weariness of a lonely, restless or conscience-burdened homosexual life. Or perhaps dread of a blackmailer's persecution due to some imprudence; or fear of unpardonable social scandal.

Indeed the pallid conventionality of terms in reporting suicides must often have struck readers of such dolorous items. In certain countries, especially teutonic ones, there has come into usage a stock of phrases that deceive nobody who appreciates the wide prevalence of homosexualism; for these phrases have now set, if recondite, meanings; "chronic disease"—"incurable malady"—"severe nervous weakness"; and above all (a conventionalism almost ludicrous)—"on account of