Page:Lovers Legends - The Gay Greek Myths.pdf/52

LOVERS’ LEGENDS of desire and unites one to the other in accordance with the healthy requirement of need, so that, each remaining within its natural bounds, the woman will not pretend improbably to have become a man, nor will the man wax indecently effeminate. Thus it is that the unions of men with women have perpetuated to this day the human race through an undying chain of inheritance, instead of some man claiming the glory of being uniquely the product of another man. Quite the contrary, all honor two names as equally respectable, for all have a mother and at the same time a father.

In the beginning, when men were imbued with feelings worthy of heroes, they honored the virtue that makes us akin to the gods; they obeyed the laws fixed by nature and, conjoined with a woman of fitting age, they became fathers of virtuous children. But little by little the race fell from those heights into the abyss of lust, seeking pleasure along new and errant paths. Finally, lechery, overstepping all bounds, transgressed the very laws of nature. Moreover, how could the man who first eyed his peer as though a woman not have resorted to tyrannical violence, or deceit? Two beings of one sex met in one bed; when they looked at one another they blushed neither at what they did to each other, nor at what each suffered to be done to him. Sowing their seed (as the saying goes) upon barren rocks, they traded slight delight for great disgrace. Nerve and tyranny have gone so far as to mutilate nature with a sacrilegious steel, discovering, by ripping from males their very manhood, a way to prolong their use. However, in order to remain like young boys, these unfortunates are no longer men. They are nothing but ambiguous enigmas of dual gender, having lost the one into which they were born, but not having attained the one they aspired to. The flower of childhood, having thus lingered a while into their youth, wilts into a premature old age. But we still count as boys those already old, for they know not real maturity. Thus vile lust, mistress of all evils, contriving ever more shameful pleasures and stooping eagerly to any baseness, has slid all the way to the vice that cannot decently be mentioned.

If all obeyed the laws given us by Providence, relations with women would satisfy us, and the world would be washed clean of all crime. Animals can not corrupt anything through depravity, so the 38