Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/80

 nervous organism, the impulse toward similisexual love between, especially, men has been a most vehement one. This in spite of all obstacles that religious, moral, social legal obstructions against it. In no country of Europe today (contrary to a general notion) is it more an undercurrent of masculine social life, whether elevated or deteriorated in its phases. Subterfuges and conventional hypocrisies do not alter the plain facts before medico-psychiaters. To the sensuous and sensual English organism homosexuality is innate. The iron-bound British social conventions and the perpetuated errors regarding it, whether from the spiritual or physical standpoints, sternly denounce it. The tendency of the Englishman to suppress or hide all emotions in him, makes easier his denial of it. Religion, moral convictions and strong statutory laws unite for this status in Britain. We find it denounced, from the first British-Christian period, as one of the supreme moral offences, and punished under the old laws of the land with death. In Scotland, where the instinct ever was and is strong, the formal death-penalties were abolished only recently. The Victorian Statutes are more human, as we shall see. But still the British, law knows no philosophic and questioning attitude toward homosexuality, such as we shall presently remark in the cases of other European States. Social England is horrified (or pretends to be) at the very existence of homosexual passion. The Englishman affects not to "understand" how classic and aesthetic Greece and Rome gave place to the feeling. Often he really refuses to believe that the references to it, which he reads in schooldays or in his study, refer to a concrete similisexual emotion, physically gratified. He construes the verses of Propertius and Tibullus and the Greek poets, he reads the sonnets of Michael Angelo or Shakespeare, as mere "idealism" or "allegory"! He declares the homosexual man to be a monstrosity, a freak of Nature, or un-nature, a vileness out of name; all this in solemn and grotesque ignorance or hypocrisy.