Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/81

 During all the social history of Asian and African and other Oriental civilizations, similisexual love, particularly between males, has flourished, side by side with alterosexual love; for the most part, accepted as a natural and lawful passion. It was never deemed a matter for legal rebuke under the finest Persian, Arabic, Saracenic, Turkish and other epochs. It was frequently disparaged and satirized, by the Eastern poets of alterosexual passion; but never was it morally taken to task except by severer, distinctly religious, minds of Islam. The Arab and Persian gave himself up to it with the romantic and esthetic and voluptuous laissez-aller of his temperament. The full glow of military supremacy, and the most brilliant epochs of letters and art in the East were witnesses to it. Hafiz, Omar-Khayam, Nafsawih, Abu-Nuwas, and others, have enshrined it in poetry of intense romanticism, of delicate or gross eroticism. But notably in the East, male similisexualism acquired early and ever has kept its pederastic tinge. The beautiful boy, the fair-bodied cup-bearer of the wine-shop, the youth just passing into puberty, rather than the mature male, rivalled the woman in the Oriental heart. Thus accented, the sentiment became early so open that half of the mass of Persian and Arabic lyric love-verse makes the lover and the object of passion "He" and "Him", not "She" and "Her", a fact till lately carefully suppressed by English and other translators of Eastern poets. Today, the instinct is as much a part of the Orient as ever. Only nominally is it made an object of unfriendly social sentiment or legislation. The latter deals with the protection of minors and with public decency, where concerned at all.