Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/59

 We turn to primitive man; or at least to far-away periods of human social and racial existence. What was the attitude of individuals or nations toward similisexual passion when men were uninfluenced by artificial cultures, and followed the lead of plain natural impulses?

That it was a primitive, natural predisposition in human nature, is hardly contestable, even if the scrawls of troglodytes and lacustrine savages do not speak of it. The oldest Oriental and Latin and Hellenic writers found it active in the barbarous nations with whom they came into contact, in war or peace. Today, the explorers in the wilds of the savage-world have found it rooted, contrary to theories of its relation to advanced esthetic life. The savage still regards it largely as of no import, morally or physiologically. Similisexual love, the will to satisfy it, has among its paradoxes this one, that it pervades quite uncultured natures, while also appearing to be to be a direct consequent of aesthetic and intellectual cultivation. To refined civilizations it is almost an inevitable accompaniment, ever working along the nervous lines of aesthetic susceptibility. But also it occurs distinctly where all society's concepts are rudimentary. The savages of Asia, Central Africa and East-Indian islands, the Esquimaux, the Patagonian and Red Indian tribesmen, the barbaric dwellers in the archipelagoes of the Pacific, are all given to similisexual practices, whether between men and men or between women and women, but especially in its male phases. Among that mystic and ever-primitive race, the Gipsies, the passion of the male for the male, and its frankest physical gratification is current, especially in Central-European Zigeunerthum. The ancient Scythians so accepted the instinct of sexual relations between males that a special class of well-conducted male prostitutes was organized by that warlike people. The primitive German and Gothic races were given to it, coincidental