Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/535

 their theories of homosexualism and their ideas of its social accountability and of aspects of legal tolerance may differ. A tentative to legal reform became organized in Germany in the latter decade of the nineteenth century. It has steadily grown. Cooperation in it is in no sense particular to the homosexual, i. e. marking its participants as necesarily [sic] homosexuals; a valued proportion of the men united in the movement are heterosexual. They act simply on conviction that humanity and knowledge demand changes in forms of Statutory Law; demand sounder public notions of the case of the homosexual as a profound, urgent, appealing problem in Nature and philosophic humanism.

By the suppression in Germany of one single paragraph of the Criminal Code (often referred to here as "Paragraph 175") at some general revision of the Statute-Book, the most formidable aid to the blackmailer,—that worst barrier to the worthy and respectable Uranian's peace—will be removed, and yet no social harm will be wrought. Other changes may follow, as legal and public sentiment are clarified on the whole psychic-physic aspects of similisexualism. But the removal of express statutory clauses affecting natural, decent and private homosexualism will be a humane and legitimate gain.

The formation in Germany of a large General Committee to such ends followed, about the middle of the last nineties. From Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, Breslau and Vienna a vigorous propaganda began—in present force. An Austrian-Hungarian movement exists; less organized and aggressive than the German one, making no clearly vigorous advance toward striking-out even the particular "Paragraph 129," in the Austrian Code, that corresponds with Germany's "Paragraph 175." (In the Hungarian Statute-Book it is represented by another law even more severe and definite).