Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/92

 have been earlier current, had not the error been made of thinking that sex while it is qualified by intellectual characteristics must be determined by the body, and its organs instead of by the sexual instinct. A more correct idea places even an athlete, or a soldier, or a porter, six feet high, built like a Hercules, virile enough in every muscle and nerve, as a creature apart from strictly male human beings, if his sexual desires and admirations incline him to man, not woman. Not fully a man, not fully a woman, he is an Uranian or Urning. In like manner a brilliant jurist, philosopher, physician, ecclesiastic, a prince of finance or of trade, a titanic worker in the literary or aesthetic professions, if strictly-classed, may be semi-male. His sexualism demands completeness of his individuality through a man. His passional admirations, his physical instincts, draw him to men, not to women, and so define him as Uranian, or Urning.

Of the racial distribution of the-Uranian, in relation to "normal population whether at past epochs of social history, or now, there are conflicting ideas. One is likely to think that in ancient social epochs, with their open showing of the uranistic nature, especially in Greek and Roman civilizations, there were more similisexual men than nowadays, in proportion to normal. This idea is constantly met as especially an English conventionalism. But the notion cannot be well sustained. The Orient is not more or less similisexual now than of old. The Latin races certainly are now not less Uranistic than long ago, in classic and Renaissance periods, when the impulse was less hid. The concealment of homosexualism, by fear of social disgrace and legal punishment does not mean its being now a whit less common, the world round, as a human instinct, invincible and inevitable; especially in connection with esthetic, military and nervously-sensitive peoples. We cannot make it definitely the cause of national