Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/54

 either earlier or later in the bond, often it never loses its dominant chemical force in the tie till the bodily powers and sex-emotion alike decline with declining life, quite as in the case of alterosexual love. But let us observe that merely to suggest the presence of sexual passion on the part of either friend, the workings of a conscious or sub-conscious sexual nature, "the desire of beauty," is to meet a shocked, a disgusted incrudelity. "Surely we know better than that!" No, no! In such a friendship as So-and So with So-So, no such abominable perversion exists." So cries, perhaps, the reader of these lines, as he reflects on examples of close and tender masculine intimacies that he feels sure he "knows inside-out," either historic ones or as mere instances about him that are pertinent; or as he recalls his own friendships. The suggestion of physical impulses in them sets the average observer vis-à-vis with what he calls vile, monstrous and unnatural. In fact, the idea of a physical passion between man and man, as between women and women, he cannot "understand," cannot conceive its concrete satisfaction. It seems to him to outrage all sexualism, the logic of virility and femininity; especially virility. There will be time presently to discuss whether in masculine friendships the element of a satisfied physical desire offers anything unnatural and abnormal. With the study of the Uranian and Uraniad Intersexes we come upon that matter.

Meantime, however displeasing to the reader, let it be affirmed that all real friendships between men have a sexual germ. Also can one declare it as a perfectly assured fact, in hundreds of instances of noble and honoured friendships, those suggesting the "model," the "ideal" sort, between men, that the concrete sexual tie and its satisfaction, have been of the first importance in the relation. That has been originally its master-factor. That has rendered such