Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/53

 possible shade of effeminacy, or of a degeneracy of mind or body in such men-types.

Nor are impressive and fine homosexual and similisexual "friendships" the property of cultivated natures only. The humblest circles of a country village, the rudest regiment of foot-soldiery, the ship, the factory, the shop, the prison-pen and the chain-gang, tell the same tale of one man's heart meeting another's heart, with a regard that the Scriptural words long ago ranked truthfully as "passing the love of women." And in natures otherwise immature we find striking examples of a ripened and profound sentiment. Between mere lads, youths in schools and colleges, are evolved sex-dramas of tragical force; the child the father of the man in this, as in other things.

In a large proportion of such typical "homosexual friendships" no third party is in a position to perceive the real origin and quality of the sentiment. The world takes for granted that it is based in a strictly intellectual process. It is regarded as a mental affiliation, primarily a result of tastes and circumstances more or less matter of fact. That it can be an absolutely or partially erotic impulse, an irresistible sexual attraction, a love, a sexual desire of the man, either completely or fractionally, this is frequently not perceived. Nor is popularly admitted that logical ground for such a construction of it can exist in normal and moral human natures. Little is the fact understood that while many, many such friendships do, indeed begin and progress as relatively spiritual and dispassionate relations, they can develop into a similisexual love: which love is their mystic raison d'être, without quite obvious attributes of it in natures concerned. Certainly into similisexual, homosexual loves, qualified as "friendships" can be fused much that is wholly intellectual, and unsexual. But when the subtle erotic quality wakens,