Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/658



For English-reading students of homosexuality there is relatively little literary material specializing aspects and statistics of homosexualism in the United States. This is somewhat singular, as important explorers or commentators in the similisexual instinct have been American; including Hammond, Crawford, Hamilton, and others. As to popular literature in the vernacular, to aid the American Uranian to understand his own case, or to understand conditions of similisexualism in other countries, this is still eminently lacking. The topic of similisexuality is tabu in the United States and in Canada, except through observations by and for medical students and physicians. In North America the notions of similisexual instincts are ludicrously (or pitiably) incorrect.among intelligent laity, as a rule. Homosexualism is generally regarded as a "diseased," and "abnormal" state of the individual; as relatively a "rare" matter; as a moral, religious and anti-natural offense of the foulest sort among masculine adults; as inevitably part of complete or partial "degeneracy". The North American, of native Anglo-Saxon descent and type, is usually as ignorant scientifically before whatever in philarrenism comes to his notice, if he be layman or even physician, as is—the Englishman. In the United States, some useful German literature circulates, hazardously and sparsely; and not with any real currency in social life. Even in order to own works of a medico-psychiatric sort, as the "Psychopathia Sexualis" of Dr. von Krafft-Ebing, or Dr. Moll's "Conträre Sexualität," or Dr. Hirschfeld's studies, the vdlumes must be procured strictly on a physician's certificate!

Nevertheless of the enormous diffusion of Uranianism and of similisexual intercourse in the United States of America and in Canada, no possible doubt can exist, if the intelligent observer has resided there and has moved about in various social grades and circles of the larger cities. In the American, of East or West, there is a fusion of racial types and propensities not so immediately the case with his British cousin, who is more a type of pure long-transmitted Anglo-Saxon blood. In North Americans, the bloods of the Latin, Anglo-Saxon the Teutonic, the Scandinavian, the Slavic, the Magyar, and many other races blend to-day—more or less.