Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/117

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

efforts to have sexual intercourse with prostitutes, in order to bring his desires into a healthful!er state. Up to that time he had believed his abnormal inclinations were only a youthful confusion of impulses. He tried coit. cum mulier. but felt wholly unsatisfied, by it, and so returned to his relations with men. He inclines to young men, from 18 to 20 years old. Older men are not sympathetic. He finds his social situation painful. He constantly fears the discovery of his perversion, and he asserts that he could not long survive such a shame. Nothing whatever in his aspect or demeanour betrays the contrary-sexualist. Genitalia normal; particularly no signs of degeneration. Mr. H— does not believe that there is any possibility of his changing his sexual abnormality. The female sex has not the slightest interest for him".

Instance.

"Mr. E—, thirty-one years old, is the son of a father exceedingly potent sexually. Otherwise there is nothing that signifies hereditary traits in the sexual instincts of the family. Mr. E— grew up in a solitary village. When he was six years old, he felt special pleasure in being with bearded men. After he was eleven, he used to blush when he met handsome men, and did not trust himself to look at them. In the company of women he was wholly unmoved. Till E— was seven years old, he was dressed in girl's clothing. He was unhappy at having to lay it aside. At this time, too, his favorite amusements were helping in the housekeeping-matters, in the kitchen, etc. His school-days passed calmly. Now and then he had a deep but not lasting sentimental interest in a fellow-pupil. By night, he used to dream rather often of men "with blue clothes, and mustaches". Growing up, Mr. E— went into the gymnastic classes, so as to be with men, and for the same reason he attended balls, not to look at the girls who were wholly a matter of indifference to him, but at the male participants, imagining himself in their arms. He continued to feel that

— 99 —