Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/52

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Michelangelo.

man's wife. But even if Cæsar had offspring, he would merely be proved a psychic hermaphrodite.

Cæsar was always clean-shaven, if not naturally beardless. He even had his body depilated—as is customary to-day with "fairies." Like the latter also, he was, in dress, notoriously fussy and feminine—in order to prove attractive to his lieutenants. He was an instinctive female-impersonator. His entourage were accustomed to refer to him as "the queen." Of all historic characters, Cæsar excels in respect to the sensational stories of homosexual excesses found in contemporary authors still extant.

Cæsar was a great conqueror merely because circumstances, largely beyond his control, placed him at the head of an army. As in the case of Alexander, Cæsar's genius enabled him to plan successful campaigns. Others, however, had to expose life and limb, while he kept himself safe in the rear passing his days and nights as an extreme voluptuary.

Michelangelo, with the renaissance of civilization after the Dark Ages, heads the list of the mildly androgynous. He never married or was known to have a mistress. He left behind many hitherto unpublished homosexual sonnets of such merit that his nephewexecutor gave them to the world after radical expurgation. Angelo's statues and paintings are pre-eminent in their consummate, although sensual, outlines of the nude adult male, the principal subject of his art. His statues of the nude youthful Bacchus, Cupid, and David of his middle twenties point the direction of his sexuality . Before thirty he also produced the picture, "The Battle of Cascina," 288 square feet crowded with