CHAPTER IX.
The Uranian and Uraniad in the Distinctively Ethical, Religious and Intellectual Life: and in the Distinctively Æsthetic Professions and Environments: Types and Biographies.
In intellectual developments of civilization, through letters, science, philosophy, religion, in the liberal arts, in all phases of aesthetics, we find the Uranian to be either worker or amateur. Turning to homosexuals classically famous in such careers, as philosophers, religious teachers, scientists, poets, romancists, dramatists, musicians, painters sculptors, actors, architects, they are bewilderingly numerous. Readers who know only the more conventional sorts of biography, where all the vita sexualis of a man can be "edited away"—especially if abnormal—easily become skeptical when told that such and such a personage has been Uranian. But sooner or later one can satisfy himself that countless such statements are true.
Socrates and
Plato.
In philosophy and ethics, clarifying the profoundest principles of social and aesthetic life, Plato remains foremost; forever incorporated with Socrates. It is hardly needful to point out the Greek homosexuality pervading the Platonic-Socratic attitude toward love. An exalted pederasty, but manifestly pederasty; the physical passion for a beautiful youth, as well as the love for what in him wins intellectual and moral admiration—these are fundamental to the Socratic system. Platonism is anything but "platonic", as exhaled from the "Phædrus", the Lysis and the analytical "Banquet". Corresponding indifference to heterosexual love, the sense of its triviality compared with the man-to-man passion, are marked in Plato. The reader has only to take one of
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