ing only by their atmosphere of delirious lust, the marvel is that they ever were put on paper. De Sade's extraordinary career is the subject of a considerable psychiatric literature, and need not be detailed here.
Fetichism, and
Other Phases
of Degenerate
Homosexualism.
Fetichism, or the growth of certain fantastic appetites, in connection with homosexual (as with heterosexual) emotion,. and as its stimulus, is fully reviewed in treatises by Moll, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Hirschfeld, and others. Masochistic flagellation, fetichistic sexual excitements awakened by objects not naturally suggestive, the cutting-off of hair, the shoe-fetich, etc., are in this category. But fetichism, like cruelty to children and lust-murder, seems less an attribute of homosexual depravation than of heterosexualism.
Uranianism and
Degeneracy in
the Aristocracy
and
Middle Classes.
As the readers of large daily newspapers well know, the world over, one need not revert to cases of degeneracy similisexualism in past civilizations and centuries. The data that contemporary law-courts, police-blotters and so on can offer, including the reserved "features" of divorce suits, furnish liberal studies. Great capitals, such as London, Paris, New York, Berlin, all large cities and many small ones of the world present (more or less to scandal and wonderment) the Uranian of diseased appetites, and of proportionately contemptible, brutal, vitiated and obscene practices. The "Cleveland Street" Scandal in London, and like affairs, in which distinguished professional men, high members of the aristocratic circles and eminent financiers figured as the debauchers of innocent lads, have born witness to undercurrents of English sexualism. In New York, only a few years ago, a similar scandal (in a popular club) cast the city into a quiver of nervous distress. This affair with difficulty was kept from full publicity, by the general flight of many persons involved.
— 423 —
