Xavier Mayne

“ There is nothing, nothing, that any man can teach me of what is one's life with it all. How well I know it! That inborn mysterious, frightful sensitiveness to whatever is the man—that eternal vague yearning and seeking for the unity that can never come save by a love that is held to be a crime and a shame! The instinct that makes us cold toward the woman, even to hating her, when one thinks of her as a sex. And the mask, the eternal mask! to be worn before our fellowmen for fear that they should spit in our faces in their loathing of us! ”

“ The gloom seemed to have entered my soul—as Death into Life. Would Imre ever speak?
His voice came at last. Never had I heard it so moved, so melancholy. A profound tenderness was in every syllable.
"If I could. . . my God! if I only could!. . say to thee what I cannot. Perhaps . . . some time. . . . Forgive me, but thou breakest my heart!. . . . Not because I care less for thee as my friend. . . . no, above all else, not that reason! We stay together, Oswald!. . . We shall always be what we have become to each other! Oh, we cannot change, not through all our lives! ”

“ Platen's residence in Italy became an unadmitted fact. He was now famous in his German Northland. But he hated its social atmosphere. Only for business, or to meet a few friends, or to visit his beloved mother (settled in Munich—a widow) had he ever inclination now to return to Germany. He found in Italy (as have found there generations of like exiles) a people who have long possessed, who ever will possess, more true, human, conceptions—nay, let us say more divine impulses and theories—as to life and love than any Protestant Teutonia or Anglia can understand or tolerate. ”

“ But the military profession is really one that is highly aesthetic and nervous, as well as one that throws the Uranian into intimate, exclusive, and admiring relations with men. It fosters philarrenism, frequently dignifying it. Aesthetics are to the Uranian the breath of life. No wonder that we find him as authour, painter, sculptor, composer, singer, actor; whatever demands nerves and concentrated idealism, pouring forth his genius from one epoch of the world to the next. Genius and madness are old allies. We need not be surprised to find that the Uranian often confirms that painful mystery. ”

“ Not in death, not in anything! Oh, Oswald! that thou couldst think, for an instant, that I—I—would dream of turning away from thee. . .suffer a break for us two. . .because thou art made in thy nature as God makes mankind—as each and all, or not as each and all! We are what we are! . . . This terrible life of ours . . . this existence that men insist on believing is almost all to be understood nowadays—probed through and through—decided! . . . but that ever was and will be just mystery, all!. . . . . . Friendship between us? Oh, whether we are near or far! Forever! Forever, Oswald! ”

“ Everywhere are the ties absolutely embodying the antique, eternal sentiment; yet trembling at revelation of it to the outside world. The link is a marriage of the body as well as of the soul. It is a love: not a friendship. It is the supremely virile love, expressing itself as human nature, naturally and inevitably, ever has expressed itself in a vast proportion of all races and grades of mankind. But such physical erotism in multitudinous instances has not a jot impaired the high spiritual quality of the relation. It has often enriched it. ”

“ The surges of spiritual and bodily passion that swept over his heart, even the lighter currents of sexual admirations, the chances and changes of his ideals and his yearnings, the fleeting happinesses of love that fell to him, its jealousies, its concealments, its struggles for attainment, its uncertainties, its renunciations—always some man is the object and end of these matters; never a woman. And as he matured, more and more unequivocally sexual became their fire. Whole groups of his poems sprang into being solely through these homosexual inspirations. ”

“ For, Imre, it was as if that dead schoolmate of mine, not merely as death had taken him; but matured, a man in his beauty and charm... it was as if every acquaintance that ever had quickened within me the same unspeakable sense of a mysterious bond of soul and of body... the Man-Type which owned me and ever must own me, soul and body together—had started forth in a perfect avatar. ”

“ Let us quit this part of a realm of melancholy; this demesne of human agony, of distraught souls, of infamy, of vice, of martyrdoms, of false social and legal positions—all so largely as pects of the Uranian when indeed decadent, criminal or victim. He is a human being, first of all. No social station, no philosophy, no statutes, no dangers, will hold his sexual physique in check when the passionate appetite is awake. Happy or unhappy, evil or good, he is a human fact. ”

“ But always, over and over, I realized that, in the kernel, at the very root and fibre of myself, there was the throb and glow, the ebb and the surge, the seeking as in a vain dream to realize again that passion of friendship which could so far transcend the cold modern idea of the tie; the Over-Friendship, the Love-Friendship of Hellas—which meant that between man and man could exist—the sexual-psychic love. ”

“ He can be the object of sympathy to even the outside world; for his secret can be guessed by it without disgrace on any ground of "unnatural" emotion. But the Uranian must often "go through" the most overwhelming, soul-prostrating of loves, finding his nerves and mind and body beaten down under the passion, his days and nights vivified or poisoned by it, all without his doing anything so persistently as to hide his sentiment forever from the object of it! ”

“ Those, those, terrified me, Imre! To think of them shamed me; those types of man-loving-men who, by thousands, live incapable of any noble ideals or lives. Ah, those patently depraved, noxious, flaccid, gross, womanish beings! perverted and imperfect in moral nature and in even their bodily tissues! Those homosexual legions that are the straw-chaff of society; good for nothing except the fire that purges the world of garbage and rubbish! ”

“ But frequently the woman-hater, outspoken or tacit, is neither an eccentric nor a misanthrope; but a gynophobe by his inborn, unchangeable nature. With such women-haters, when men of finer mould and character, we are likely to meet often an interesting special type, the man born for friendship, for "friendship" only; with his own sex only. We discern that his emotional nature is anchored to that, is satisfied with that. Such a man's innermost soul is created to thrill in that masculine atmosphere, as in no other. "Friendship" becomes the secret fire and spirit-throb of his social existence. ”

“ Life—Love—Death !...
"Oswald, you will never go away from me!"
"Imre, I will never go away from thee. Thy people shall be mine. Thy King shall be mine. Thy country shall be mine,—thy city mine! My feet are fixed! We belong together. We have found what we had despaired of finding... the friendship which is love, the love which is friendship'. Those who cannot give it accept it—let them live without it. It can be 'well, and very well' with them. Go they their ways without it! But for Us, who for our happiness or unhappiness cannot think life worth living in lacking it... ”

“ So super-male, so utterly unreceptive of what is not manly, so aloof from any feminine essences, that we cannot tolerate woman at all as a sexual factor! Are we not the extreme of the male? its supreme phase, its outermost phalanx?—its climax of the aristocratic, the All-Man? And yet if love is to be only what the narrow, modern, Jewish-Christian ethics of to-day declare it, if what they insist upon be the only natural and pure expression of "the will to possess, the wish to surrender" .. oh, then is the flouting world quite right! For then we are indeed not men! ”

“ Homosexualism is a symphony running through a marvellous range of psychic keys, with many high and heroic (one might say divine) harmonies; but constantly relapsing to base and fantastic discords!... Is there really now, as ages ago, a sexual aristocracy of the male? A mystic and hellenic Brotherhood, a sort of super-virile man? A race through which hearts never to be kindled by any woman; though, it once aglow, their strange fires can burn not less ardently and purely than ours? ”

“ We plough the globe's roughest seas as men, we rule its States as men, we direct its finance and commerce as men, we forge its steel as men, we grapple with all its sciences as men, we triumph in all its arts as men, we fill its gravest professions as men, we fight in the bravest ranks of its armies or we plan out its fiercest and most triumphant battles as men ... ”

“ If I served you as a man should serve such beings as you, this town should know your story tomorrow! Society needs more policemen than it has, to protect itself from such lepers as you! I will keep your hideous secret. Only remember never to speak to me!.... never to look my way again! Never! From henceforward I have never known you and never will think of you!—if I can forget anything so monstrous in this world!"
"So passed he out of my life, Imre. Forever! Over the rupture of our friendship not much was said, nevertheless. ”

“ Scarcely yet quite aware of each other's existence and Ego, a mutuality still unreasoned-out, a flower of passion, vague or absolute, germinated and ripened like the Hindoo juggler's mango-tree illusion, such an emotion crystallizes to one of the most beautiful psychologic situation that human nature experiences. This suddenness, of friendship, as a thing illogical as sudden love, is an every-day phenomenon. The men concerned in it are of every class and type. ”

“ The temperament which I had thought to put to sleep, the invisible nature I had believed I could strangle—it had awakened with the lava-seethe of a volcano. It burned in my spirit and body, like a masked crater."
"Imre, I sought the friendship of this man, of my ideal who had re-created for me, simply by his existence, a world of feeling; one of suffering and yet of delight. And I won his friendship! Do not suppose that I dared to dream, then or ever, of more than a common place, social intimacy. Never, never! Merely to achieve his regard toward myself a little more than toward others ”

“ It is the constant resource—the sharp Sword of Damocles that the average homosexual prostitute points against his client, wherever the country's laws invite it. No arm is so powerful—so silent, so safe. No female blackmailer, however audacious and cruel, ever has shown herself quite so torturing in shattering nerves, happiness, fortune, courage, social quietude and life as has the methodical, homosexual, blackmailing demon proved himself, time and again, the world round. ”

“ And yet, Imre, thousands, thousands, hundreds of thousands, of such human creatures as I am, have not in body, in mind, nor in all the sum of our virility, in all the detail of our outward selves, any openly womanish trait! Not one! It is only the ignoramus and the vulgar who nowadays think or talk of the homosexual as if he were an—hermaphrodite! In every feature and line and sinew and muscle, in every movement and accent and capability, we walk the world's ways as men. We hew our ways through it as men, with vigour, success, honour... ”

“ The physical thrill is not of it, no matter how ardent may the friendship be. Logically and clearly, friendship is divorced from the sexual attraction so inseparable from love, and from love's great master-principle of attraction. Our intense admiration of the mere beauty of a man or woman, that is to say of what seems to us their beauty, is not determining in friendship. Hence friendship can never be as vivid and masterful a power, not to say passion, as love. The latter ever remains the most vivid, mysterious and elementary emotion of the human race. ”

“ We may often be misled by one trait external to such mysterious passion in similisexual intimacies—the attitude of one or both friends toward women. Damon is not a woman-hater, not a mere woman-tolerator, perhaps: but a woman-amateur, even to being a coureur des femmes at least by repute. Pythias often plays his social role of woman-enthusiast, with the finest touches of art and nature. But the two friends knows what we do not know. Their comedy can be smiled at or deplored by them, according to its difficulties and necessities. Marriage can hide the real situation of the similisexual love. ”

“ Or else he surrenders himself to some woman who bears his name, loves him—to her who perhaps in innocence and ignorance believes that she dominates every instinct of his sex!—making her a wife that she may bear to him children; or thinking that marriage may screen him, or even (vain hope!) "cure" him! But oftenest, he flies from any woman, as her sexual self; wholly shrinks from her as from nothing else created; avoids the very touch of a woman's hand in his own, any physical contact with woman, save in a calm cordiality, in a sexless and fraternal reserve, a passionless if yet warm... ”