Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/78

 idealism and altruism? as natural in demanding its expression as thirst and hunger and sleep!

Naturally the mediaeval period of Italy was outspoken both in civil and canon law, against the passion. But soon this attitude became nominal. The Renaissance especially revived the sentiment in the Italian soul, where it had never been lost, giving it renewed social force. The Italian-Hellenic psychos with its boundless aestheticism, declined to be coerced by any religious teachings as to this sort of love, or as to the other. It became a more or less open phase of Italy's social life in all classes, especially the aristocratic, in Tuscany, Rome, Apulia and Sicily. With such popes as the Borgias and such princes as the Medici it was very considerably pederastic. Laws against homosexual offences fell into disuse, or were abrogated. In the Statutes of Siena which set the most-cruel penalties for it, we find that their repeal was urged because otherwise "everybody" would suffer doom for it. Florence became enthusiastically pederastic: in vain Savonarola denounced it. Perugia, Verona, Venice, Milan, Naples, Rome, many towns of Sicily, were distinctively "Cities of Sodom" as they are to-day. And in Italy, at this time, it assumed frequently its ancient Greek dignity, its old-time heroic beauty; a sentiment, for life and death, between the two men bound together in it. Cloister and camp, palace and barrack, studio and shop, it nearly regained its old estate in Italy the Kind. There is somewhat of the ironical, too, in discovering that many indisputably similisexual loves have been glorified by biographers, poets and moralists for centuries, under the name of marvellous and warm "friendships", either in ignorance or in reluctance to look into and to confess their real complexions. Some of these instances we shall have occasion to clarity in later parts of this study.