physical training, which includes massage of the gluteal regions to favor development, dilatation of the anus, and epilation (which is not, however, practised by Chinese women).  At the same time, they are taught music, singing, drawing, and the art of poetry.  The waiters at the restaurants always know where these young gentlemen are to be found when they are required to grace a rich man’s feast.  They are generally accompanied by a guardian, and usually nothing very serious takes place, for they know their value, and money will not always buy their expensive favors.  They are very effeminate, luxuriously dressed and perfumed, and they seldom go on foot.  There are, however, lower orders of such prostitutes.[26]

Homosexuality is easily traceable in India.  Dubois referred to houses devoted to male prostitution, with men dressed as women, and imitating the ways of women.[27] Burton in the “Terminal Essay” to his translation of the Arabian Nights, states that when in 1845 Sir Charles Napier conquered and annexed Sind three brothels of eunuchs and boys were found in the small town of Karachi, and Burton was instructed to visit and report on them.  Hindus, in general, however, it appears, hold homosexuality in abhorrence.  In Afghanistan homosexuality is more generally accepted, and Burton stated that “each caravan is accompanied by a number of boys and lads almost in woman’s attire, with kohled eyes and rouged cheeks, long tresses and hennaed fingers and toes, riding luxuriously in camel paniers.”

If we turn to the New World, we find that among the American Indians, from the Eskimo of Alaska downward to Brazil and still farther south, homosexual customs have been very frequently observed.  Sometimes they are regarded by the tribe with honor, sometimes with indifference, sometimes with contempt; but they appear to be always tolerated.  Although there are local differences, these customs, on the whole, seem to have much in common.  The best early description which I have been able to find is by Langsdorff[28] and concerns the Aleuts of Oonalashka in Alaska:  “Boys, if they happen to be very handsome,” he says, “are often brought up entirely in the manner of girls, and instructed in the arts women use to please men; their beards are carefully plucked out as soon as they begin to appear, and their chins tattooed like those of women; they wear ornaments of glass beads upon their legs and arms, bind and cut their hair in the same manner as the women, and supply their place with the men as concubines.  This shocking, unnatural, and immoral practice has obtained here even from the remotest times; nor have any measures hitherto been taken to repress and restrain it; such men are known under the name of schopans.”