Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/659

 sexualism is of the mixture. The, enormous purely, or fractionally, Germanic population of Eastern or Western districts and cities has a special bearing on similisexualism in North America. The wide agricultural "West," a welter of old races, representatives quite fresh from their European homes, is pervaded with uranian tendencies. In the Southern States, the Creole type is not lacking the impulse, in spite of all its heterosexuality. The American negro has ever been similisexual, though the easy morality of the negro female is a is counteractive. The North American Indian has also always inclined to practical homosexualism, as we learn from such valuable studies as the "Narrations" of the early Jesuits, and the modern observations of such writers on the topic as Karsch.

The latin, or aboriginal uranianism of Mexico, Central America, of South America and of the West-Indian Archipelago has been noted in the pages of our study.

Reverting to large cities of chiefly an American population (so far as their really yet exists an "American race") no matter how suppressed is the homosexual topic, they are centers of uranianism. One finds the same practicalities as in Berlin, or Paris, or Vienna, except that there is far less generally an open male prostitution of civilian sort, and only in certain centers any military prostitution. Also we note that allusions to scandals, crimes, legal incidents connected with homosexuality are far less frequently printed that,in Europe. There are blackmail-affairs and other scandals, tragedies or comedies, of Uranian sort. But they are not reported in the press as in Germany, or Italy or France, etc. In fact they seem to be the only personal scandals shunned by American journals.

The small military-element in most American cities, the difficulty and legal danger of making practical uses of resorts of many sorts for homosexual rendezvous, the fact that the American soldier is much better paid than any European one, much remove transatlantic military life from activity in prostitution.

Heredity, race-instinct, æsthetic sensitiveness, and the temperament—nervous and imaginative—of the high-class American tend to make him similisexual; or to experiment in the instinct, even when no hereditary impulse exists. This is not the case or cause with the Englishman, though it is somewhat such with the Keltic Breton. Again, the failure legally to regulate female prostitution in the United States increases the dread of diseases and makes the inclination to homosexuality more direct.

The thousand-and-one homosexual ties in social life—of all grades—between high-natured, respectable and moral types of American young men, or between types lower in the intellectual and ethical