Page:Homo-sexual Life by William John Fielding (1925).pdf/42

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HOMO-SEXUAL LIFE

or latent, is an imposing one. The Greek philosophers, playwrights and poets of the classic age have placed themselves on record as devotees of invertism. Some of them have been quoted on previous pages.

Among the men of genius and leadership accredited with being outright homosexuals or having a strong bisexual character, are Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Michael Angelo, Leonardi da Vinci, William of Orange, Charles XII of Sweden, William Rufus, James I, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Edward II, Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, etc.

The Uranian temperament has also been attributed to Marlowe, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Tennyson, Chopin, and other great poets and musicians.

Charles G. Leland (The Alternate Sex) states that "Great geniuses, men like Goethe, Shakespeare, Shelley, Byron, Darwin, all had the feminine soul very strongly developed in them. . . . As we are continually meeting in cities women who are one-quarter, or one-eighth, or so on, male, so there are in the Inner Self similar half-breeds, all adapting themselves to circumstances with perfect ease. The Greeks recognized that such a being could exist in nature, and so beautified and idealized it as Sappho."

Weininger remarked that Sappho was only the forerunner of a long line of famous women who were either homosexually or bisexually endowed. Among them may be mentioned Queen Christine of Sweden, Catherine II of Russia,