The Scented Garden

24 we suspect) author of ‘ White Stains ’, and the nameless Aristophanes who wrote the ‘ Nameless Novel ’, nobody in modern times has dared to voice openly the supreme sanity, the splendid athletic- ism, and the unutterable spirituality of the male rapture of the passion between man and man. In treating of this matter I must first premise that by paederasty I mean actual sodomy as de- fined by British law1 — immissio penis in corpus vivum. “ Arse makes life golden, want of it dull yellow ; The rest is only leather and prunella.” At least, the rest is but preliminaires. An acute observer of my acquaintance remarked to me re- cently that it was the actual mess caused by emis- sion, and the necessity of cleaning it up, that, by allowing time for passion to cool, prevented a great deal of copulation which would otherwise take place. There is a great gulf fixed between the ‘ short time ’ and the ‘ all night ’, and that great gulf is filled with Condy’s Fluid ! This applies equally to Sodomy. If the semen is safely bestowed in mouth or anus of the beloved one, the temptation is to begin all over again ; bar the trifle of fatigue, one is in the same position as at first ; its loss between the legs or in the hand rouses a sentiment of dis- gust2 which is fatal to passion. Even the mouth, like the vagina, remains in a somewhat greasy condition after it has achieved the holy task, and we have no hesitation in plumping the anus as the one vase into which the perfumed oil of manhood may be poured without exciting a reaction.3 This point being established, let me further4 make a distinction between the two great classes of sodomites. Ulrichs has pedantically christened them Urning and Uranodioning : for the former we have no colloquial name : the latter we term Bime-