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predominant.
"One evening, soon after this, he convoyed me to several of the
café's where inverts are accustomed to foregather. These trysting
places were much alike: a long hall, with sparse orchestra at one
end, marble-topped tables lining the walls, leaving the floor
free for dancing. Round the tables sat boys and youths, Adonises
both by art and nature, ready for a drink or a chat with the
chance Samaritan, and shyly importunate for the pleasures for
which, upstairs, were small rooms to let. One of the boys,
 supported by the orchestra, sang the 'Jewel Song' out of
'_Faust_.' His voice had the limpid, treble purity of a
clarinet, and his face the beauty of an angel. The song
concluded, we invited him to our table, where he sat sipping neat
brandy, as he mockingly encountered my book-begotten queries. The
boy-prostitutes gracing these halls, he apprised us, bore
fanciful names, some of well-known actresses, others of heroes in
fiction, his own being Dorian Gray. Rivals, he complained, had
assumed the same appellation, but he was the original Dorian; the
others were jealous impostors. His curly hair was golden; his
cheeks were pink; his lips, coral red, parted incessantly to
reveal the glistening pearliness of his teeth. Yet, though
deeming him the beautifulest youth in the world, I experienced no
sexual interest either in him or in the other boys, who indeed
were all beautiful--beauty was their chief asset. Dorian,
further, dilated on the splendor of his female attire, satin
corsets, low-cut evening gowns, etc., donned on gala nights to
display his gleaming shoulders and dimpled, plump, white arms.
Thus arrayed, he bantered, he would bewitch even me, now so
impassive, until I should throw myself, in tears of happiness,
into his loving embrace.
"My first venture upon _fellatio_ was a month later, with the
young surgeon. I confessed the whim to try it, and he acceded.
Though this nauseous and fatiguing act, very imperfectly
performed, was prompted mostly by curiosity, there arose soon a
passional hankering for repetition. In short, appetence for
_fellatio_ grew slowly from the night of that mawkish fiasco and
waxed eventually into a sovereign want.
"Perhaps miscarriage of that initiatory experiment was due to
precipitance, incubation of my perverse instinct being not yet
complete. A hiatus of a month now supervened, in which, while
further _fellatio_ was not attempted, my mind came always nearer
to a reconcilement with the grossness of the act, and began to
discover for its creatures some correlation in pretty boys beheld
in the flesh. One evening, in Broadway, I conceived suddenly a
full-fledged desire for a youth issuing from an hotel as I
passed. Our glances met and dwelled together. At a shop-window he
first accosted me. He was an invert. With him, in his room at the
hotel whence I had seen him emerge, I passed an apocalyptic
night. Thereafter commerce with boys only in the spirit ceased to
 be an end; the images were carnalized, stepped from their
framework into the streets. That boy, that god out of the
machine, I see him clearly: his brown, curling hair; his eyes
blue as the sea; his chest both arched and so plump, his rounded
arms, his taper waist, the graceful swell of his hips and full,
snowy thighs; I recall as of yesterday the dimples in his knees,
the slenderness of his ankles, the softness of his little feet,
with insteps pink like the inside of a shell. How I gloated over
his ample roundness, his rich undulations!
"In the last eight years I have performed _fellatio_ (never
_pedicatio_) with more than three hundred men and boys. My
preference is for boys between 15 and 20, refined, pretty,
girlish, and themselves homosexual.
"Personally, barring this love for males, I am in all ways
masculine, given to outdoor sports, and to smoking and drinking
moderately. In appearance I am but a boy of 18. My face and
figure are generally considered beautiful: I am clean-shaved,
with black, curling hair, red cheeks and brown eyes; features
delicate and regular; body, of medium height, everywhere
practically hairless. By years of training I have attained alike
great strength and classic proportions, the muscular contours
smoothly rounded with adipose tissue. My hands and feet are
small. My penis, though perfectly shaped, is rather
enormous--erect, ten and a half inches in length, seven and a
quarter inches in circumference.
"Some abetment of my apostasy from orthodox methods was, no
doubt, this hypertrophy of the penis, which already in my
twentieth year had acquired its present redundance, rendering
coitus impracticable with most women I essayed and painful where
insertion was effected. Since falling heir to inversion, a unique
recurrence of normal desire, six years ago, persuaded me to
attempt coitus with eleven or twelve prostitutes, and, strangely
enough, with much of the old-time salacity and full erection,
but, as it chanced, always with too great disparity of parts for
success."
A certain preciosity in the manner of this communication may be
put down partly to the nature of the literary avocations with
which the writer is by preference occupied, and partly, no doubt
 more fundamentally, to the special character of his predominantly
esthetic temperament and attraction to the exotic. An attraction
for exotic experiences will not, however, suffice to account for
the rather late development of homosexual tendencies, a late
development which may be held to place this case in the retarded
group of inverts. H.C. has himself pointed out to me that his
aversion to women, beginning to appear in the eighteenth year,
was already well pronounced before he had ever heard definitely [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]