“I cannot regard my sexual feelings as unnatural or abnormal, since they have disclosed themselves so perfectly naturally and spontaneously within me. All that I have read in books or heard spoken about the ordinary sexual love, its intensity and passion, life-long devotion, love at first sight, etc., seems to me to be easily matched by my own experiences in homosexual form; and with regard to the morality of this complex subject, my feeling is that it is the same as should prevail in love between man and woman, namely: that no bodily satisfaction should be sought at the cost of another person’s distress or degradation. I am sure that this kind of love is, notwithstanding the physical difficulties that attend it, as deeply stirring and ennobling as the other kind, if not more so; and I think that for a perfect relationship the actual sex-gratifications (whatever they may be) probably hold a less important place in this love than in the other.”--_Ibid_, “case” vii., p. 58. “I grew older, I entered my professional studies, and I was very diligent with them. I lived in a great capital, I moved much in general society. I had a large and lively group of friends. But always, over and over, I realised 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 realise 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. That was still possible! I knew that now. I had read it in the verses or the prose of the Greek or Latin or Oriental authors who have written out every shade of its beauty or unloveliness, its worth or debasement--from Theokritos to Martial, or Abu-Nuwas, to Platen, Michel-Angelo, Shakespeare. I had learned it from the statues of sculptors--in those lines so often vivid with a merely physical male beauty--works which beget, which sprang from, the sense of it in a race. I had half-divined it in the music of a Beethoven and a Tschaikowsky before knowing facts in the life-stories of either of them--or of an hundred other tone-autobiographists. And I had recognised what it all meant to most people to-day--from the disgust, scorn, and laughter of my fellow-men when such an emotion was hinted at.”--_Imre: a memorandum_, by XAVIER MAYNE, p. 110. Naples, R. Rispoli, 1906.