Xavier Mayne

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Blackmailer!—the blackmailed!—tyrant and writhing victim! In all sorts of relations where human rashness, passion, folly, weakness, carelessness, sordid mercenariness or vengeance attack the individual, we meet this dark process. But nowhere else does blackmail operate with such terrible alertness as in the uranian world. We have reserved it as the concluding portion of this survey of homosexual decadence and criminality, because of its all-important bearings on the social and legal status of the uranian intersex in so many contemporary civilizations. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ... ”

“ 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! ”

“ As sculpture advanced in idealism, and as a preferential sense of the beauty of a youth intensified, as Greek social culture, Greek athletics, the Greek religion (with the very gods as homosexualists and pederasts) progressed, also developed philarrhenism. So was it in Rome. The Renaissance brought into the studio of marble-carver or painter, at the potency of the uranian impulses, all the plastic beauty of the naked male. In Italy especially, the Renaissance art took pederastic tinges; and a beautiful, budding youth became even more sensitively admired and desired than a virile young man. ”

“ A common situation is shown in a letter to Ulrichs, from a married Uranian:
"... I am well married, and to a wife who loves me passionately, and I am the father of a charming two-year old girl. But what I feel for my wife is friendship. Circumstances other than love made our match. At the mere sight of a handsome young man, I instantly feel that passionate sexual excitement (which is the only really sexual one for me) so genuinely, that since my youngest years, I have always felt the most ardent wish that marriages between men were possible. I long in vain for the man whom I secretly love. ”

“ We are all of us familiar, from youth up, with the attitude of the world, intolerant, horrified, arbitrary, toward any mature phases of it. We have heard it mocked in our boyish school-days, often with boyish hypocrisy. We have grown to manhood and to womanhood, accepting it as a vice and perversion, rightfully opposed by law, by all sound social morality. We have turned marvelling from the examples incessantly coming to light, existing all the world over, of especially a man's sexual love for another man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We know—the wisest, the best of us—too little of man, we guess to cloudily at a God, we are too uncertain of any abstract Right, of any abstract Wrong, of finalities in heights or depths in this life or any other, to determine such a complex and profound human and social problem. In exploring the long chain of creation that stretches out between Perfection and Imperfection, let us he willing to leave as superfluous our certitude of the relationships of the Uranian as to what is ultimate in the vast scheme of cosmic organization. ”

“ Outwardly as a man, inwardly in so much a man! Able to keep my character and sex as a man before the world and yet with this sexual nature of a woman in me. Why am I cursed thus? What ails me? Am I sick, mad?" So cries some 'inborn' Uranian, bewildered and wretched, when he is alone and can throw down the Mask. So demands he of the confidential physician, if he has decided to visit one, hoping to be "cured" of his psychologic disorder. Too frequently the doctor, ignorant but confident, talks to him as were he indeed "diseased", "to be cured"; often advises marriage. ”

“ King, prince, pope, cardinal, duke, statesman, tradesman, soldier, sailor, man of letters, of science, of art, of religion, workman in field or factory, nature has given to him his sexual organs and those tastes that command their use. They must be pacified, or mischief and misery result. One might as well require the Uranian to be stone, as not to yield; even if a life of cruel and unjust expiation is to be met, or death faced—as the price. ”

“ For, in the more aesthetic walks of life occur striking temperamental inconsistencies from any perfect moulds of virility. There is the poet whose verse shakes the world with its vigor but who cannot look you in the eyes, and who relishes perfumes and sweets like a cocotte: the painter of roses and lilies whose greatest recreation is a prize-ring or a guillotining ”

“ So could we proceed through a thousand examples of inconsistent male making-up; met in all civilizations, and of record in every public library. We begin to wonder, after we have thus reflected, exactly what is the proportion of really manly, masculine, symmetrical men in the world; if there ever has been so large a proportion of them as we have taken for granted. Does Nature so often stand up and say of her normal, usual male product, "This is a man!?" The achieved male, whether as to his bodily structure, or his mental and moral and temperamental equipment appears suddenly to grow vague. ”

“ We find the great statesman who turns from the working-out of a treaty, or the fight over a great parliamentary measure, to adore his mirror, or to concoct a wash for his complexion. We smile at the brave soldier who hates to go to bed in the dark, who quivers before a cat or a dentist. We come upon the eloquent divine, apparently much nearer heaven than earth, who has avance as a master-passion, and to whom a gourmand's table is a necessity. The philosopher who loses his temper as he loses his game of cards ”

“ Accounted a diseased human thing, an outcast from men, a beast, if his secret be probed; hopeless often of its toleration for an instant by the being that, often under the name of friendship, he loves with all the fire of intersex; fighting the emotion in himself in bewilderment or shame; perhaps living, side by side with some stranger that is more than any mere friend to him; playing his part like a man, frequently without one human confidant in the wide world, so can pass his social life! ”

“ 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! ”

“ Under the mask of spiritually loathing it, the finer society of the mediaeval Italian, Teutonic and Gallic world was riddled-through with similisexual love. Except when deteriorated to a vulgar pederasty, or when associated with moral and physical offence and danger to the individual, thoughtful laic minds held back from attack upon a passion that, if refined, never could injure the moral and spiritual nature any more than could the heterosexual love. How rebuke an impulse which indeed was often part of the finest idealism and altruism? ”

“ Do you feel yourself in the "dominant" role, when yielding to sexual desire with another person?
Are you more conscious of the wish to "surrender" yourself in it?—to be the caressed rather than the caresser?—the object rather than the subject? Or the contrary?
Are you happier in the passion that you receive or that which you feel and vent?
Is this instinct unvaryingly toward the male or female sex now? or do you take pleasure (or would you experience it) with now a man, now with a woman? ”

“ Woman, as typified by the Virgin, was held up as the ideal of the world-heart. Mariolatry, the fine flower of feminine concepts became the special policy of the Roman Church, in shrewd concession to human, aesthetic impulses, and in a perpetual combat of male sexualism. Just as Christianity had darkened existence with the gloom and gore of the Cross, so the sentiment-of Mary-worship was to effeminize the social and sexual life of the male. ”

“ Having, discovered, through intimacy with Karvaly, how a warm friendship on the part of the homosexual temperament, over and over takes to itself the complexion of homosexual love—the one emotion constantly likely to rise in the other and to blend itself inextricably into its alchemy—Imre had simply sworn to make no intimate regimental friendship again! ”

“ Again, in creating out of marble or on canvas the beauty of the male physique, the uranian utters his sexual creed. Generally he cannot publish it to the world any more plainly, and not more sympathetically. He turns to his chisel, to his palette, to his score, to his pianoforte, as a refuge. His physique is often adapted to only such a life. The relative unintellectuality and emotionality of several of the arts are consonant with his type, be what inspires him valuable or trivial, a jewel or paste. ”

“ The shame of a gross blunder falls to the psychiater who promises a "cure" of what is not a disease. Too many a doctor, otherwise intelligent and honest, advises marriage as a "remedy"; or experimentally commits his patient to courses of useless "normal" sexuality. In vain does the real, innate Uranian seek to feel as to woman the absorbingly aesthetic, the intellectual, the sexual drawing awakened in him by a male. ”