Part Eight:
Androgyne Verse
The first of the following =attempts= to penetrate into Plato’s “world of ideas” and get at the real essence of things, and then to express them in an ideal manner, was inspired by a chance visit to the Whitestone station in October, 1921. Subsequently I was seized with the desire to try out my muse in incorporating some of my other emotions and experiences in verse. I had essayed no metrical composition since 1905, the year of writing the last of my =Fairie Songs=, the best of which were published in the =Autobiography of an Androgyne=.
I understand by “poetry” the version of things seen incorporeally; things spiritualized or with a halo around them; things as they exist in substance, in reality, back of their superficial or phenomenal presentation—the version of things that an individual’s subconscious or subliminal self utters.
At present when I evolve verse, I try to lose myself to the phenomenal world—the domain of sensation—and to let down my bucket into the well of the subconscious, the subliminal; to peer into the eternal, the infinite world (the domain of fundamental substance). The sensuous, material skin or crust of this world of ideas is all that most children of Adam can grasp. Only to poets and metaphysicians has Nature given a rope of sufficient length that their buckets can reach as far as the water level in the well of ideas. Nearly all poets even of the first rank manage to flop into their buckets a few exquisite thoughts as to eternal realities, and clothed in appropriate language, only about once out of a score of attempts. Nineteen-twentieths of their verse would better have been forever withheld from the public’s eyes, since it is merely artificial, nonsense doggerel. In that proportion of their work, these poets of the first rank show themselves up merely as bad rhymesters.
The editor of =The Female-Impersonators= declared “the book would be better off without” my verse, but has kindly humored my wish to include it. The reader’s verdict may be that I, too, am merely a bad rhymester, and thus put my work on a level with the vast bulk of the outpourings and outdronings of our best poets.
But I, as a would-be poet, labor under the disadvantage of expressing sentiments of an =androgyne=. Even if there should [Sidenote: _Androgyne Verse._] really be any poetry in my own outdronings, no one but another androgyne could recognize the fact, since it is next to impossible for anybody to appreciate any literature unless they can make its sentiments their own and identify themselves with one of the characters. And the sexually full-fledged, who constitute more than ninety-nine per cent of the reading public, are obsessed by an irrational horror of androgynes.
I therefore beg the reader, in judging the following verse, to bear in mind that it is not written by a _man_ about _men_, as the reader first thinks; but about men by a _pseudo_-man; by a physical “man” who is psychicly a woman, and even physically a woman at least thirty-three per cent.
I have read some of Mary Baker Eddy’s verse, which her disciples place on a level with the Psalms of David. But I think the former weak and the latter perfect. Here again we see that to judge verse to be good, one has to imagine it one’s own outpouring. I therefore do not expect any sexually full-fledged person to declare of my verse (even if it were the best ever written) anything else than that it is “far beneath the worst doggerel. The mere thought of it is painful!”
For—I repeat—it is impossible for any one to judge poetry objectively—only subjectively: that is, not according to the merits of the verse, but according to whether the reader can make the sentiments his own.
A sexually full-fledged literary confidant, who has read the first two books of my trilogy, declared of my verse: “If you publish it, it will cast ridicule and contempt on your whole book. In the book, you have claimed culture, but when your readers come to this verse, they will say that no one with the culture of a longshoreman would try to pass off such stuff as verse even in fun, and that if you had the slightest tincture of literary taste, you would realize this. You will go down to posterity in ridicule, and destroy all the good your books might otherwise do.”
But I persist in including the verse. If the quoted verdict is correct, then I have “a screw loose” intellectually, as well as being sexually and anatomically “a freak of Nature.” The published pieces show the psychologist what ultra-androgyne verse is like. Besides, possible androgyne readers may be able to appreciate this verse.
As three out of the four following “attempts” were first conceived only in January, 1922—after =The Female-Impersonators= had gone to press—it has been impossible that they benefit by the author’s judgment after they have grown cold.
EMOTION[50]
(Inspired by sight of Whitestone station in 1921.)
Still stands the selfsame Whitestone station, So sombre as night’s shades fall; At its north front do still halt trains, While brakemen “Whitestone! Whitestone!” call.
My trysting-place in nineteen three With warriors of the nation, When I was frivolous and wild, Was this old Whitestone station.
Yea, holy ground its platform is; It makes me sigh and ponder; In my mind’s eye those blue-clad forms Still wait for me just yonder!
They met me at the train when I From New York came, directed To see and stroll about with “braves” Of manhood unsuspected!
On balmy eves we stalked dark lanes, No other person near us; No other’s eye upon us gazed, No other’s ear could hear us.
What gallant, passionate lovers they! Considerate of my pleasure! Uplifting to the highest bliss That Eve on earth can measure!
Returning to the porte cochere Of that selfsame old station, We lingered, till the whistle blew, In blissful conversation.
What eyesore thou, old Porte Cochere, To every traveller seemest! To me, howe’er, thou shelter gave; With memories dear thou teemest!
The station’s waiting-room with seats Extending all around it, ‘Whelms me with recollections fond, Because unchanged I found it!
For ’twas on these rude benches there, When winter’s winds were hurtling, And travellers few and far between, All evening sat we flirting.
In words our conversation lagged; In substance it was silly! For all I said the evening through Was: “How I love thee, Willie!”
We every confidence but breathed, Lest some strange ear o’erhear us; They guessed not—travelers—what we said; There were none very near us.
Whene’er the train I took for town, And we “Goodnight!” repeated, “Farewell!” o’erwhelmed me as I left And in the coach was seated.
Once rode with me a gallant three To College Point, first station; To have with me five minutes more Before farewell ovation.
How charmed was I that period brief! Its memory ever lingers; As we sat holding hidden hands, I felt their horny fingers.
“Three cheers for Jennie June!” they cried, When finally they must leave me; “The soldiers’ friend, and sweetheart too! Let not our parting grieve thee!”
· · · · ·
Gone are ye from my life for years, You heroes! Wonder boys! In memory though I hold you fast— Forever perfect joys! Farewell!
RECOLLECTION[51]
O thou FAIR as the sunrise on deep sea’s green surge, While the whitecaps seem dancing all around! FAIR as sunset from mountain’s sheer precipice’s verge, Seen o’er maze of high ridges snowbound! Even FAIRER than the rose, of all flowers the fairest; Beyond Vatican’s Apollo Belvedere; BUD MCDONALD, youth’s soul-mate, of beauty the rarest, ADOLESCENT wert thou without peer!
First, BEAU BRUMMEL wert thou, so fussy about clothes, O immaculate BUDDIE MCDEE! Dirt and slovenness cat, never more than thou, loaths; Must be brushed every hour from dust free; Every lock of thine hair with worried care laid in place; As a girl didst thou prink—I can vow! But of all the young bloods of Rialto’s fast race, Not one sweller was costumed than thou!
Beheld one the shining patent leather of thy shoe, And both hands decorated with rings; Marked thy wiles through which dude _hoi polloi’s_ favor doth woo, One would say: “All from effeminacy springs!” “Not a bit!” I must answer. For MACK, SPORT as well, Was a crack shot with pistol and ball; How he hunted, coldblooded, dumb beasts he did tell; Furry creatures clubbed dead; cursed them all!
Best of all:—an ADONIS wert thou, BUD MCDEE, With incomparable red peachlike cheeks; Threads of eyebrows so cleancut!—in memory I see— As o’er her eyes a soubrette alone seeks; With thy pearls of teeth, cherry lips—beloved sir— And as well chiselled nose as can be, How I’ve wondered that thou and I intimates were!— Explanation:—God gave thee to me!
I again in fond memory behold before me, Pinkish mountain of loveliness tower; BUDDIE’S _forma divina, au naturel_, see; How his charms, yea unmatched, did o’erpower! An “eyeful” his two breasts, with fine gold scraggy hair; Graceful curves; rotund body and limb; With his robust ribs bursting through skin O so fair, And his deep-channeled back breathing vim!
· · · · ·
Once UNEQUALED “YOUNG FELLOW”! Six-and-twenty long years Now have rolled by since thou wert ALL THAT! Art to-day gibbering sot, maybe suffering jeers, With foul trousers and torn greasy hat? For the cup cherished thou that glad makes the sad heart.— How I wonder! Where sleptest last night? Is vitality wasted? In grave resting art?— Us together soon lead, Kindly Light!
MEMORIES[52]
I dream to-night of the gay bright lights Where I sought recreation; While meek I sat at feet of profs To gain an education: I studied hard six dreary eves, But when the seventh came, Bade “au revoir” to books and grind, And skipped to RIALTO’S game.
There where lurked pleasure’s devotees Giant Kill-joy never came; I met there New York’s wildest swains, And buxoms of ill fame: We revelled all the evening through— Fine fellowship, I say! I ne’er happed on politer folk Than in RIALTO gay.
And which was I, kind sir, dost ask? Was I a bad roué? Or shameless demi-virgin wild, In paint and powder gay?— “But I was neither this nor that!” Such answer here I set; While youth in form, I chose to take Diversion as soubrette.
The young bloods pardoned me—they said— For wearing hated breeches! “For thou art not a real male; Thou’rt like yon winking witches
Who throng these noisy promenades Their favors fair to sell; And kissing thee we deem as sweet As kissing ma’moiZelle!
“Lik’st thou that we thee sweetheart call?— We’ll humor thy desire; Sit on our laps while we sip wine; Let’s flirt until we tire; To break thy shapely corset stays, We’ll try our best, dear Jenn; But thou must mimic maid thy best; For us:—the part of men!”....
To have love made by youthful swains, To me was highest bliss; In the bright dives where scores beheld, No,—shrinked we not to kiss:— Of yore in gay RIALTO’S halls Knew folk no self-restraint; Insane e’en sometimes acted fools! Those dens no place for saint!....
I’m prone to-night to philosophize:— Why did I gravitate Toward RIALTO’S racy denizens When moved to dissipate? ’Twas just because I sought and found, In RIALTO’S “swell” gallants, The opposites and complements For whom my spirit pants....
O comrade of RIALTO’S halls Of nineties of century past— Should’st read these lines, some former pal, “Jennie June” remembered hast; Now after twenty-six years, I hail thee with heartfelt greeting; Beseech Benediction on thine head, In lieu of present meeting.
FRENCH DOLL-BABY[53]
Young bloods prom’nade Fourteenth Street’s pave— Each eve out for a lark; Their eyes “peeled” for French doll babies; With whom they sigh to spark; Why admire the fraidcat babies, Who weep easily? The helpless crippled sex e’en _seek_!— Hare-brained gentility!....
Cheeks a beauteous red through rouge puff; Pink powder (pretty, pretty!!!) ‘pon nose; One inhales as she nigh minceth, Such soothing scent of rose! Locks—so silklike—reach to shoulders; Gown of “art” design; Coquette extreme must she be sure; All signs she doth combine.
When a young blood spieth dolly, Cutely mincing Fourteenth Street; Then the young blood smileth sweetly, And, stranger e’en, doth greet: Replies she smilingly “Good evening!” Surely she is fly! Too, overjoyed because of having Bewitched a stalwart “guy.”
“Little tootsy-wootsy!” cries guy, “Art ravishingly cute! Thou art, yea, a pretty Pussie! Pussie, Pussie!!! Ne’er saw I such a beaut!” Answereth she in mellifluous voice: “And I ‘Strong Hans’ thee call! Thy frame so large and powerful! Not spindling thou, yet tall!”
They acquainted barely minute, Such confidences express! As only hubby—hidden, secret— Doth glad to spouse confess: Bold gallant the French doll calls “Wifie!” While she e’en feels that he To her already united is— The twain, twin souls, to be!
Reader, never heardst thou such words! Much mush! (as “Kiddo! Kiddo!”—“Kitty! Kitty!”[54]) Passing strange the way of young blood With French doll baby pretty! That sexual difference existeth Renders twain insane; Except for Nature’s procreative plan, These instincts—how inane!....
Holdeth French doll from “guy” a secret; Yes, surely she can _act_! Only after hour’s deception, Revealeth she the fact; When she’s found that she can trust him; Can reveal her whim: In burst of laughter doth disclose: “My real, true name is ‘Jim’!”
ANNOUNCEMENT OF THIRD OF TRILOGY The Riddle of the Underworld
Sequel to _Autobiography of an Androgyne_ and _The Female-Impersonators_
By Ralph Werther—Jennie June
Edited by
Alfred W. Herzog, Ph.B., A.M., M.D.
(Editor MEDICO-LEGAL JOURNAL)
To be published, in the fall of 1922, by the MEDICO-LEGAL JOURNAL. At least 65,000 words and a dozen illustrations. Cloth. Price three dollars, including postage within United States. The three volumes of the TRILOGY, (an aggregate of over 200,000 words) ordered on the same date, eight dollars, including postage. The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, ordered on the same date with one other of the TRILOGY, six dollars. Price of AUTOBIOGRAPHY alone, four dollars including postage.
The author of the TRILOGY, one of the half-dozen most remarkable bisexuals known to medical science, while living in New York City as college student and subsequently professional “man,” had, incidentally, a six years’ variegated experience (age nineteen to twenty-five) in the Underworld of the metropolis. In [Sidenote: _The Riddle of the Underworld._] the AUTOBIOGRAPHY, besides an exhaustive analysis of his own intuitions, beliefs, courses of reasoning, emotions, penchants, and instincts, the author merely _outlined_ his manner of life and adventures, particularly while impersonating a female. In THE FEMALE-IMPERSONATORS, he undertook little more, in description of Underworld life, than to detail the experiences of cultured ultra-androgynes.
In the RIDDLE OF THE UNDERWORLD, the author of the TRILOGY—
GIVES the history of New York’s white-light and red-light districts since the beginning of the nineteenth century; analyzes the causes of vice and crime on the basis of his intimate mingling with the Underworlders; shows why a “vicious tenth” exists in all cities, and how the Overworld (which constitutes nine-tenths of the population of Christian lands) should regulate the former.
DEPICTS life in New York’s poorest immigrant quarters and tenements—_in its reality_ because he saw it as an _insider_, the denizens of the slums and the Underworld shamefacedly veiling the fundamental facts of their existence from charity and sociological investigators, but admitting the author to everything because he mingled with them as a non-intellectual and fairie.
DEPICTS life in the lowest type of slum lodging-house, once the author’s home, and the night life in general of the Bowery at the height of the latter’s vogue as New York’s principal red-light street, the author at the time being one of its “_filles de joie_.”
[Sidenote: _The Riddle of the Underworld._]
DEPICTS, lastly, in great detail, his career as female-impersonator in New York’s slums and red-light and white-light districts and the life of “bosom friends” of the Underworld: Young bloods sowing their wild oats; middle-aged extreme alcoholic wrecks; extreme drug addicts; intellectual mild androgynes during the hours when Nature drives them to a double life in the Underworld; low-class “fairies”; _filles de joie_ in their hey-day; wrecks of such in their thirties; “confidence men”; gangsters, gunmen, and burglars (whom Providence gave the author as soul-mates).
THE CLOSING VOLUME OF THE TRILOGY DEPICTING THE LIFE EXPERIENCE OF A BISEXUAL UNIVERSITY “MAN”
INDEX
(and., abb. for androgyne or androgynism)
Abraham Myers adventure, 124
Abstinence induces melanch., 44, 72
Absurd legal superstitions, 196
Acquired or congenital, 16, 199
Actors, androgynes as, 87, 97, 100, 177, 206
Adam of Angelo, 215, 216
Adonises, 114, 236, 257, 258
“Adopted sons”, 187, 214, 257, 258
Aesthetes often effeminate, 25
Aestheticism of and., 17, 200, 224, 231
Age-group sought, 226
Age sobered me, 256
Alcoholics, 109
Aliases, choosing, 94 necessity of, 93
Ambition, author’s, 79, 83
American aborigines, 47
AM. JOURNAL OF SEXOLOGY, 266
An Adonis or a Hercules?, 258
Anatomy of author, 84, 86, 87, 91
Alexander the Great, 29, 30, 38
America’s most impious, 184
Anaphrodites, 13
“Androgyne” and “gynander” terms, 155
Androgyne expedients, 241 outcast, 159 Platonic marriage, 217 stamping grounds, 226 talk, 153
Androgynes, 15 et al. are æsthetes, 17, 224 are goody-goodies, 51 banishment of, 42 benefactors, 36, 220, 221 compelled to fabricate, 242 (cultured), 146 ff., 158, 164 ff., 198 ff., 237 ff., 259 gifted, 36, 37, 48, 161 in war, 255 linguists, 152 loud dressers, 104, 131, 223, 225, 231 more numerous among cultured, 43, 265 nabobize menials, 193 not Sodomites, 223 not to marry, 20, 205 resourceful, 174 wish wife for “sons”, 218
Androgynes’ angelic dispo., 38 families unsuspi., 183, 239 favorites fortunate, 176, 178, 193, 208, 256, 257 one offence, 50 relatives ashamed to prosecute, 246
Androgynism, causes of: =See= Cause of and. nationally healthful, 48 not degeneracy, 46 stigmata of: =See= Stigmata of and.
Angel to fiend, 138
Angelo—Phyllis, 153, 198 ff.
Anglo-American law unintell., 179
Apollo, 25, 26
Apostro. to lost soul-mate, 116 to the supreme man, 145
Apotheosis of an and., 211
Are androgynes supermen?, 37
Army, bobtailed from, 255
Arrest of androgynes, 150
Arrested development, 49, 149
Artificial breasts, 264, 265
Assassins of high morality, 249
Assault and battery, 141 ff., 256, 261
Associates (author’s) of Bowery, 285 childhood, 54, 59 Fourteenth Street, 118, 130, 215 Stuyvesant Square, 113, 130
Association of and., 146 ff., 232
Astigmatism (mental) of and., x
Author a repository for Underworld’s secrets, 5 robbed two hundred times, 141
Author’s attempt at suicide, 252, 253 contribution to sociology, 96 conversations with opposites, 256 flirtations mushy, 133 foretaste of Z’s fate, 251 menopause, 166, 167 third “adopted son”, 257 trilogy, 3 visage the most marred, 144
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, vii, x, xi, 3, 16, 43, 50, 59, 72, 83, 86, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 122, 131, 133, 166, 228, 236, 239, 251, 252, 253, 255, 258
Aversion to feminine society, 75, 119, 183, 201, 231, 260
B. A. a fairie, 118
Bacon, Francis, 34, 35, 49 Roger, 39, 80
Badge of fairie-ism, 104
Ball games, 65, 257
Banishment of and., 42
Battery Park, 226
Beard growth of author, 84
Beardless men (natural) 19, 29, 32, 151, 264, 265
Beard scanty, 169, 199, 250
Bears, 252, 254
Beer-garden adventure, 212 ff.
Being dogged, 112, 113
Belle of the ball, 185
Benighted lawyers, 196 leaders of thought, 41 physicians, 74, 176, 204, 220
Bent for woman’s toil, 224, 227, 257, 268
Bias rules in sex domain, 163
Bible and sex instinct, 13, 14, 15, 44, 73 on homosexuality, 51, 160
Biceps unrivalled, 134
Bicycle race, six-day, 124
Bigotry (sexual), 2, 22, 23, 39, 41, 51, 52, 72, 73, 74, 80, 87, 95, 139, 147, 149, 154, 159 ff., 160, 167, 168, 180, 191, 193, 195, 197, 202, 209, 213, 220, 222, 239, 240, 245
“Biog. of Passive Pederast”, 266
“Biol. Sport of Fairieism”, 262
Blackmail, viii, 158, 163, 178 ff., 182, 185 ff., 217, 224, 257
Blarney triumphant, 125
Bobtailed from army, 255
Boon of an “adopted son”, 189
Bowery, 169, 207 a magnet, 203 ff. assoc, of author, 284, 285 “boys”, 172, 176, 205, 207, 285
Brain, author’s, 83
Breasts (artificial), 264, 265
Bright intellects, 36, 258
Broadway Tenderloin, 104, 125, 226
Brownies, 89
Buffalo Bill’s show, 254
Bugle, 212
Burglar alarm, 225
Business career of author, 90 ff., 253, 255
Cæsar, 31, 37, 38
“Calvin Luther”, 217, 219 ff.
Caravan, 253
Carpenter, Edward, 17, 37
Castration, 16, 67
Catamite, 27
Cat in a strange garret, 172
Cause of androgynism, 18, 46, 49, 60, 70, 73, 147, 148, 149 female-impersonation, 99, 100, 101, 148 sex intensity, 78, 164, 165
Central Park, 226
Cerc. Herm., 151 ff., 200, 224
Change of life, 165, 166
Chantage: =See= Blackmail
Chevelure, feminine, 264
Chevelure of author, 85, 86
Childhood female-impersonation, 62, 66, 170
Childhood’s sex influences, 165
Childlike and womanlike, 86
Childlikeness of author, 83, 85, 88, 91
“Child of the Devil”, 136
Child sex expression, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 78
Choosing aliases, 94
Christians’ morality, 196
Christine of Sweden, 38
Church and public opinion guilty, 245, 261
Clerical profession, 42, 43, 44, 191
Climacteric, 166
Coasting, 66
Coddled in college, 85
College course, 82 preparation, 65, 72
Common and. practices, 158 type of sexual insanity, 137
Compens. by Providence, 83, 256
Comstock, Anthony, 92
Conclus. from life exp., 73
Confessions to author, 5, 256
Confidants of every-day circle, 91, 95, 144
Congen. or acquired, 16, 199
Conscientious murderer, 235
Cont. Europe contrast, 179
Conversations, sample, 107 ff., 133 ff., 152 ff., 188 ff. with sexual opposites, 256
Cornbury, Lord, 38
Corsets, 250
Court empl. ultra-crim., 93
Court martials, 94, 257
Cowardice of and., 67, 68, 75, 224, 225
Cowboys, 253, 254, 258
“Crime against Nature”, 195, 196
Criminal prudery, 61 ultra-, 113, 138 ff.
Crooks are boastful, 122, 123
Cross, author’s, 143
Cross-dressing, 62, 66, 67, 75, 87, 103, 104, 108, 131, 135, 152, 157, 165, 170, 199, 200, 201, 202, 209, 211, 237, 239, 240, 244, 246, 248, 250, 264, 265, 267
Cultured and., 146 ff., 158, 164 ff., 170 ff., 198 ff., 259, et al.
Cure for homosexuality, 16, 20
Curiosity, author a, 84
Dalliance, 256
Damocles, sword of, 225, 231
Dark ages, 39, 80, 93, 160, 220
Daughter of regiment, 255
Day dreams, 113, 170, 203, 259
Death experienced, 142 preferred to discl., 230 to the traitor, 128
Decline of nations, 45
Degeneracy, and. not, 46
“Degenerates”, 49, 221, 252, 263
De Joux, 17
Depilation, 32, 100, 152, 169, 185, 199
“Depraved” defined, 160
Detectives, and. as, 123, author as, 5, 238, 284
Development, arrested, 49, 149
Disclosure to “every-day” associates, 91, 95, 144
Disposition of and., 38, 51
Diversions of girl-boys, 62, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72
Divorce, 7, 12
Does fairie exist?, 263
Dog-faced boys, 84
Dogged, 113, 208
Double life, 97, 101, 104, 118, 119
Dressing, cross: =see= Cross-dr. for a spree, 202
Dress-making of and., 68, 232
Dual personality, 92, 97, 101, 102, 112, 119
“Duchess of Austria”, 176
Early consc. of deform., 74
Earmarks of and.: =See= Stigmata
Ear-rings, 266
Effects of abstinence, 44, 72 child sex expression, 78, 164, 165
Effeminacy common in æsthetes, 25, 231 that is culpable, 47
Egotism, 163, 168
Ellis, Dr. Havelock, 37, 48, 50, 158
Elmira Reformatory, 138
Endocrinology’s testimony, 16
Enemies of truth & justice, 4
Enlistment in army, 257
Environment, infl., 132
Epworth League, 127
Erotic pleasure’s value, 72
Eternally dovetailed, 211
Eunice, 168 ff., 206
Eunuchs, 20
Europe, continental, 179
Euterpe, 184 ff.
Every-day circle of author, 85, 91 ff., 95, 102, 118, 119, 144
Experiencing death, 142
Exp. from univ., author’s, 95
Fabrication of and., 242
Fags: =See= Fairies
Fairie apprenticeship, author’s, 103 bachelor of arts, 118 does he really exist, 263
Fairieism, badge of, 104 “biological sport of”, 262
“Fairies”, 89, 109, 150, 255, 262 ff., 266 ff., et al.
Fairies best stool pigeons, 123 extreme dressers, 104, 131, 231, 268
Fairsea, Mr., 159 ff.
“Fairy and Lady Lover”, 262
“Fallen angels”, 114, 118, 205, 285
Families ignorant of bisexual members, 62, 183, 239
F’ank, 54, 59, 61
Faro, 127
Fasting, 79
Father’s assert. disc., 247
Favorites of androgynes, 7, 107 ff., 114, 130, 131, 208, 209 ff., 214 ff., 227, 232, 233, 234, 236, et al.
“Fed up” on falsehoods, 254
Fellatio, 59, 60, 64, 182, 228, 235, 236, 238, 255, 256 effects of, 99, 235, 256
Female-impersonate intoxication, 104, 106, 111, 212
Female-impersonation, 32, 46, 66, 93, 99, 100, 101, 103 ff., 131, 150, 157, 171, 177, 183 ff., 201 ff., 205 ff., 209 ff., 235, 243, 256, 261, 263, 267, et al. cause of, 99, 100, 101, 148 in childhood, 66, 170 instinctive, 99 obsession, 260 sprees, 103 ff., 170, 175 ff., 201 ff., 207, 211 ff., 218, 240, 241, 248, 251, 255, 259
Female-impersonators, gifted, 108 popular, 107
Female with male genitals, 176
Femin. anat. of and., 64, 66
Feminesqueness of author recognized by business associates, 91
Feminine chevelure, 264 figure recognized, 87
Fire-arms, horror of, 75
First real. of abnor., 70, 73
Flagellation, 79
Flirtation, 107 ff., 130, 133 ff., 166, 207
Fort X, 245 Y 255 ff.
Fourteenth St. Rialto, 98, 104, 106, 117, 118, 130, 208, 215, 226
Fourth sex, 98
Frank White, 168 ff., 206
Freaks of nature, 84, 263, 270
French doll-baby, 91, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 153, 280
French leave, 197, 257
Freq. of and., 17, 18, 253 fairie-ism, 107
Frigidity of and. toward women, 226, 231, 260
Full-fledged instincts equally unæsthetic, 136
Gamblers, 114
Gambler’s antecedents, 117
Gambling a master passion, 120
Gangsters, 171 ff., 205 ff., 260, 261
Ganymede, 27
Gas-house district, 137
Genius, 36, 263
George’s antecedents, 215
Gethsemane, author’s, 77 ff.
Girl-boy diversions, 62, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72 reasons for suicide, 68
God will avenge androgynes, 52
God-intoxicated youth, 70, 73, 76, 77, 79, 143
Gœthe, 93
Goody-good. of and., 51, 180 a “fille de joie”, 204 transformed, 204
Grabowsky, Dr., 17
Grand Central, 206, 208 Union, 129
Great cy. desir., 200, 201, 203 delusion, the, 168
Greeks, 27, 47, 48, 162
Guest murders, 227, 229, 234, 250
Gun-men, 171
Gynanders, 98, 154 ff., 199 love androgynes, 154, 155
Gynander’s fate, 154 ff.
Hacked to death, 228
Half-and-half as to sex, 15, 19, 22, 201, 205, 209
Hanging and., 251
Hangman’s noose, 247
Hare-brained sex, 211, 280
Harmlessness of and. and inversion, viii, 28, 42, 50, 147, 161, 192, 209, 220, 221, 236, 263
Harvey Green, 131 ff., 144, 149
Health of author, 99, 235
Hercules, 236, 257, 258 an unrivalled, 131 ff.
Hermaphrodites, 21 psychic, 19
Hermaphroditoi, 151 ff., 164 ff.
Hermaphroditos, 27 Cercle, 151 ff., 200, 224
Hero-worship, 134
Herzog, Dr. A. W., i, vii ff.
Hirschfeld, Dr. M., 18
Homocide Bureau, 247
Homos. at climacteric, 166 Bible on, 44, 51, 160 (chronic) congenital, ix, 16, 20, 46 cure for, 16, 20
“Homosexuals” a misnomer, 254 no worse than hetero., 148
Hon., author’s bosom friend, 85
Hotel Comfort, 109
Hotel X, 156
Housekp. of and., 201, 226, 257
How milk on 14th St., 126
Howard, Dr. W. L., 27, 37
Hypocrites, 11, 115. =See= also Pharis.
Immoral. novelty in N. Y., 194
Imprisonment of and., 81, 149, 191 ff., 209, 213, 263 ff.
Incognito necessary, 200
Indian country, 258
Industry of author, 255
Infantilism, 38, 61, 84, 88, 90, 156
Infatuation, 187
Inherited lechery, 56
In high spirits, 241, 242
Inquis. author, 122, 132, 150, 167
Instinct. female-imp., 99
Intellect of author, 82, 83 androgynes, 36, 83, 263, 267
Intellectual aristocrat browbeaten by pleb., 195
Intoxication, female-impersonate, 104, 106, 111, 212
Irresponsibility of and., 163
Is bisex. worst crime?, 147
“I want to die!”, 69
Javerts, 197
“Jennie June”, origin, 93
Jennie Lind, 94
Jesus, 15
Jilted, 115, 138, 251, 252, 254
Joseph (of Egypt), 220
JOURNAL OF SEXOLOGY, 37, 110
Kant, 14
Keep tots sexually clean, 60
Key stolen, 142
Knit souls, 122, 123, 210
Krafft-Ebing, Dr., 15, 158
Lake Ontario, 117
Law, Ang.-Amer., unintell., 179
Law clerk, 92
Laws, change of, viii, 1
Lawyers, benighted, 196
Leader of a Bowery gang, 207
Leaders of th’t benight., 41 ignore evidence, 162 murderers, 150, 209, 245, 261
Lecturer on sexo., author, 256
Legal adoption, 217, 218 persecution of androgynes, 1, 93, 143, 161, 162, 179, 196, 213, 265 superstitions, 196
Leland, Chas. G., 37
Lichtenstein, Dr. P. M., 16, 262
Life-story told sweeth., 256
Lind, Earl, 92, 94, 95
Loathing of androgynes, 228, 238, 242, 245, 246, 251, 253 ff., 261 a murder motive, 157, 232
Lohengrin, 137
Lotharios, 107 ff., 118, 130
Love letters, author’s, 95
LOVE’S COMING-OF-AGE, 17, 37, 48
Lumbering camps, 253
Madison Sq., 226 Garden, 124, 254
Male figure more artistic, 157 qual. that knit fem., 258
Man and woman in one body, 112 ashamed of his nature, 168 not rational, 39 ff., 163 -slaughter, 243 transf. into soubr., 268 woman, & infant in one, 88
Man’s prudery almost fatal, 80 causes many murders, 157
Mandatory of society, 222, 233, 235, 238
Manner of life of and., 200, 224, 257, 264
“Manon Lescaut”, 151
Many fem.-imp. expl., 240
Mardi gras, 184
Marriage covers sins, 218 of and., 20, 29, 31, 217
Marry, androgynes not to, 20, 205
Martin, 118
Masked ball, 157, 182 ff.
Match-heads eaten, 255
Maternal instincts, 177
McDonald, B., 116, 119 if., 275
Medical exam., 250, 260, 261 superstition, 20
MEDICAL LIFE, 262
MEDICAL REV. OF REVIEWS, 262
MEDICO-LEGAL JOURNAL, vii ff., 4
Melancholia of and., 44, 62, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76 ff., 80, 101, 103, 104, 195, 201, 202, 209, 239, 252, 254
Menopause, 166 of author, 166, 167
Men-women: =See= Gynanders.
Methodists, 117, 193
Method of robbery, 140 ff.
Michelangelo, 32, 37, 38, 161, 215, 216
Mildly androgynous, 18, 151 virile, 11, 220, 221
Military prison, 257
Millinery of and., 200, 268
Miners, 253
Misanthrope, making a, 192
Missionary work of author, xi, 1, 2, 81, 167, 245
Mistresses, 253
“Mith Nighty”, 157
Modesty of girl-boys, 64, 68
Mohawk valley, 132, 138
Moll, Dr. A., 17
Mollie Dale, 155 ff.
Monandry not for and., 182
“Monsters”, 1, 42, 180, 191, 222, 233, 238, 244, 252, 254
“Monte Carlo”, 120, 126 ff.
Morality of and., 49, 51, 180, 222 of Christians, 196
Morgue, 260
Moron, 83, 90
Most and. ultra-relig., 43 shelt., 2 went to bad, 55
Mr. Skirt, 186 ff.
Mulberry St., 103, 138
Murder motive in loathing of and., 157, 232
Murdered by a guest, 227, 229, 234, 250
Murderer (consc.), 235, 249 mand. of soc., 222, 233, 235, 238
Murd. and. not necessary, 254
Murders of and., viii, 1, 142, 149, 157, 162, 208, 221 ff., 227, 231, 235, 237 ff., 254, 256, 259 ff.
Muscles of author, 84
My life’s motto, 77 tempta. hardly eq., 78
Myers, Abraham, 121, 124 ff.
Nabob. by and., 236, 256, 257
Names of and., 93, 100, 101, 151, 157, 176, 219
Nathan’s parable, 147
Nations, decline of, 45
Natural monogamy, 12 polygamy, 10
Nature indic. rear. as girl, 65 to be blamed, 163
Nature’s nobleman, 254
Neckties, 104, 260
New York Harbor, 237 Beau Brummel, 115 ff.
Newton, Isaac, 14
No alcohol, no ven. dis., 110
Non-congenital homos., ix
Non-resist. of and., 206, 241, 248
Non-segregation, 161
Not cause decl. nat., 47
Not willingly half-and-h., 201
Now man, now woman, 3, 190
Nursing by and., 255
Nymph. (psy.), 60, 169, 257
Obed. to Nat. gave peace, 101
Occupations of and., 16, 43
Onanism, 12, 83
Onanists (mutual), 20
One offence of and., 50
Opposites attract, 258
Outcast and., 159
Outlook on life at 11, 67
Over-conscientiousness, 71, 220
Parents killed by offs., 254 take time for children!, 165
Parents’ duty, 60, 61
Paresis, 148 Hall, 146 ff., 181
“Pass. pederast, biog. of”, 266
Pathics, 60
Paul (author’s soul-mate), 118
Paul, St., 14
Pederasty (active), 20 (passive), 20, 266
Pedro, 126 ff.
Perennial youth of and., 91, 151, 228, 255
Persecution of and., 149, 180, 193, 197, 244, 246, 251, 261
Personality (dual), 92, 97, 101, 102, 112, 119
Petits-jesus, 51, 147
Phariseeism of public, 4, 11, 23, 159 ff., 181, 193, 252
Phyllis, 153, 198 ff. antecedents, 200 finds herself, 206, 207 passes on, 221
Physicians dicta, 16, 49, 74, 143, 149, 204, 220 ff. narrowminded, 144
Physique of author, 84, 89, 108
Plato, 27, 29, 37, 161
Plat. mar. of and., 166, 217, 239
Plum, 159 ff.
Plumpness of and., 20
Policeman, 213, 247, 260
Portrait painter, 215
Potiphar’s wife, 220
Poultry bisexuality, 24
Predest. of aut. to career, 79, 80
Present soc. rules inadeq., 57
Prince Pansy, 151
Prodigy (muscular), 134 ff.
Professional life of author, 90 ff., 253, 255
Promisc. and., 182, 235, 255
Prostitutes, 253
Provid. compens. aut., 58, 256 praised, 73, 113, 143
Prudery, 40, 61, 220, 228, 238, 245, 256 murders, 149, 225, 227, 235, 245, 253
Pseudo-hermaphrodites, 21
Psyche, author’s, 89
Psych. effem., degrees, 240 hermaphrodites, 19, 239
Psychop. individuality, 238
Public opinion guilty, 245
Publicity would remove a world of woe, 197
Pug Heaven, 175 ff.
Pugilists’ Haven, 171 ff.
Punishments for and., 144
Puritanism of and., 45, 106, 118, 249
Pussie (origin of name), 94
Q Apartments, 224
Q’s murder, 3, 259 ff.
“Rabbit”, 205 ff.
Race suicide, 49, 161, 196
“Ralph Werther”, origin, 93, 94
Raphael, 33, 49, 93, 161
Rare find, 135
Rebellion, War of, 255
Recogn., mutual, of and., 158
Recogn. after 16 yrs., 255
Regimentals overpowering, 210
Rejec. from Chr. ministry, 80
Relat. ashamed prosec., 246
Religiosity of and., 43, 73, 143, 191
Religious prodigy, author was, 70, 73, 76, 77, 79, 143
Reporters, 248
Resourceful and., 176, 181
Reticence, sex, 167, 168, 222, 239, 245, 259
Reubs, 119 ff.
Rialto: =See= Fourteenth St.
RIDDLE OF UNDERWORLD, 4, 59, 98, 103, 114, 118, 123, 204
Robbers’ vic. 200 times, 141
Robbery, 140, 173, 176, 230, 232, 234, 256, 261
Rockies, 252, 253, 258
Roland Reeves, 150 ff., 158 ff., 164, 208
Ropes, 249
Sadder but wiser “Reub”, 129
Sailors, 172 ff., 230, 240, 249
Saint Paul’s sex teachings, 14
School days (author’s), 63, 82
Seance with a burglar, 139
Secret guest, 231
Segregation of and., 161
Sex bigotry: =See= Bigotry doctrine of Bible, 13, 14, 15, 44, 73 domain ruled by bias, 163 expression in childhood, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 78 fourth, 98 influences of childhood, 165 instinct’s decline, 165 intensity, cause of, 78, 164, 165 scale, 22
Sexology tabooed: =See= Reticence
Sexual insanity, 137 precocity, 64 the worst crippling, 2
Shakespeare-author, 34, 37, 38 problem, 35
Shame of and.’s rel., 245, 246
Shufeldt, Dr. R. W., 82, 89, 110, 266
Sikhs, 48
Simul. life as 3 persons, 92
Sing Sing, 196, 202
Skeleton of author, 84
Social elite, 265
Sociology, aut’s contr., 96
Socrates, 28, 37, 161
Sodomites, 45, 146, 223, 238
Softness of and., 66, 84 ff., 254, 255
Soldiers, 11, 30, 31, 47, 79, 87, 104, 210, 226, 233, 255 ff.
“Soldiers’ Friend”, 89
Solut. of gyn. disapp., 156
Sons (“adopted”), 187, 214, 257, 258
Songs of fairie, 133, 269
Soprano voice of and., 267
Soul-mate of author (lifelong in dreamland), 54
Spencer, Herbert, 14
Spermatorrhea, 83
Spiritual auto. of author, 73
“Squirrel”, 207
Stamping grounds of and., 226
Stigmata of and., 19, 100, 151, 199, 231, 250, 255, 259, 264, 265, 267
Strangling of and., 232 ff., 237 ff., 242, 249
Struggling to save reason, 143
Stuyvesant Sq., 113, 130 ff.
Suetonius, 37
Suicide of and., viii, 1, 62, 68, 74, 195, 209, 237 ff., 251 ff., 254, 255, 260
Super-men are and.?, 37
Supreme man, 136, 145 woman, 212
Susa, 114
Talk of and., 153 ff.
Temperance only salv., 59
Tenderloin (Broadway), 104, 125, 226
Testicular secretion, 16, 149
Things not what seem, 119
Throwing act of and., 65, 67, 267
Tobacco, 152
“Tombs” (N. Y. City), 194 ff., 262
Tony Neddo, 186 ff., 193, 197
Torture of and., method, 244, 261. =See also under= Persecution.
Tracy, 126 ff.
Transform, not bargained, 173
Tremend. vir., 7, 107, 122, 221 attitude toward and., 172, 176, 186 ff., 201, 206, 221, 235, 253, 256
Trilogy (author’s), 3
Trusted murderer, 234
26th to 32d yrs. of aut., 89 ff.
Two handwritings, 95
Ulrichs, K. H., 38
Ultra-androgynous, 19 crim. court employee, 93 unexpected happens, 138 virile, 9
Underworld’s sec. confi. aut., 5
Union Square, 226
University and., 103 ff., 118, 158, 180 author expelled from, 95
“Urning” term, 38
Value of erotic pleasure, 72
Village fairie, 71
Virile: =See= Tremend. v. & ultra-v.
Virility confers bravery, 255
Visage aut. most marred, 144
Visit to Ft. Y in 1921, 255
Voice of author, 86, 111
Walt Whitman, 30, 36, 37, 255
War and and., 30, 32, 87, 255
Warning to and., 206
Whistling, 267
Wilde, Oscar, 18, 28, 49
Witch-burning, 41
Weapons a fetish, 224
Wee girl-boy’s outlook, 62
“Werther”, origin, 93
Why androgynes are hated, 45 an Underworld, 6
Wig, 202, 217, 265, 268
Wiles of and., 158, 181, 239, 240, 241, 251
Womanlike, author, 86, 87
Woman-man, the, 213
Woman-soul, 253
Woman’s toil, bent, 227, 257, 268
World War, 255
Wyoming, 254
“X and wife”, 158
X offenceless, 236
X’s murder, 223 ff.
Xenophon, 29
Y offenceless, 236
Y’s murder, 231 ff.
Yearning for feminine attire, 267. =See also= Cross-dressing.
Z of and. physique, 250
Z’s fate, aut’s foretaste, 251 murder, 237 ff. woman’s apparel, 248
Footnote 1:
Continental European civilizations are, on this subject, a half-century ahead of Anglo-American.
Footnote 2:
See Part VI, chapter III.
Footnote 3:
A physician of wide experience who read the above before publication argued that in the United States, only five per cent are mildly virile. I stand unconvinced that my proportion is in error. The proportion surely differs with racial types and environment. The physician has always lived in New York City and practiced among liberal-minded, non-church, pleasure-loving people of Teutonic or Latin parentage. My own every-day associates, particularly in the village where I was brought up and which I still frequently visit, have been, almost entirely, ultra-puritan Anglo-Saxons. When I maintained their sexual temperance, the physician declared them hypocrites, whose secret practice is the same as “worldlings.” I have been intimately acquainted with hundreds of these male puritan church-devotees, and am convinced they are hypocrites solely in supposing their sexual moderation due to their own superior morals. Sex has naturally small place in their lives.
Footnote 4:
Do not confuse with anaphrodites the excessively rare men who are attracted by female beauty and manners, marry, but then desire merely Platonic relations. Such are rather cases of impotence. The genuine anaphrodite never even courts a woman.
Footnote 5:
The author has always preferred to read biography to fiction. If his life is spared, he will write an extensive work on the sexuality of noted men and women. An unusually large proportion of geniuses have been either anaphrodites or androgynes. For example, Sir Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant appear to have been anaphrodites.
Footnote 6:
I take no stock in the theory advanced by some medical writers that androgynism (generally termed male sexual inversion) is acquired and not congenital. The exceptional method of sexual expression can be =acquired= only by individuals congenitally on the very borderline between androgynes on the one hand and anaphrodites or mildly virile on the other. The latest proponent of the “acquired” theory, Dr. P. M. Lichtenstein, in the August, 1921, issue of MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS, suggests that masturbation in boyhood may produce in adulthood a fairie or ultra-androgyne. In my physical prime, I was a fairie of extreme type. I never masturbated as a child or as an adult because of acute horror. My own pudenda never had any part in my sexual ardor—any more than had my vermiform appendix.
Dr. Lichtenstein’s suggestion of the correction by parents of feminine predilections in small boys is futile. Those feminesque traits, when congenital, as I believe they always are in ultra-androgynes, can not be suppressed. Likewise his advice that the adolescent girl-boy seek the company of the gentle sex as a cure is as futile. In my teens, I forced myself to it, but it had not the least curative value.
=Note Added in Galley=: I just came across a scrap of a recent NEW YORK WORLD Sunday magazine, containing “=Glands That Govern Our Lives=”, name of author missing. I quote: “The not uncommon phenomena of the smooth-faced man with a feminine voice and a figure resembling that of a woman, and of the deep-voiced, hairy-faced masculine woman, are produced by abnormalities in the development of these glands.” Only in the third decade of the twentieth century is the comparatively new branch of medical science, =endocrinology= (the study of glands, particularly the ductless) coming forward to maintain the irresponsibility of “homosexualists” for their idiosyncrasy. It has also only just been brought into the limelight that the testicles are invigorating (as well as masculinizing) to the individual possessing them and the prime reason for man’s being physically stronger than woman. I myself, for several years after castration at the age of twenty-seven, observed a marked diminution in my stamina. (For details, see my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE.) My own testicles were abnormal judged by the fact that I, though always having intense horror of self-manustupration, suffered from acute spermatorrhea from the incidence of puberty up to castration, while I was totally devoid of the propensity natural to full-fledged adult males for emptying the seminal vesicles.
Footnote 7:
Other authorities make them more numerous. I quote from =Love’s Coming-of-Age=, page 125: “Dr. Grabowsky ... quotes figures ... as high as one man in every 22, while Dr. Albert Moll (=Die Contraere Sexual-Empfindung=, chapter 3) gives estimates varying from one in every 50 to as low as one in every 500. These figures apply to such as are exclusively of the said nature [excluding the psychic hermaphrodites. Including the latter] the estimates must be greatly higher.... Some late statistical inquiries (See =Statistische Untersuchungen=, Dr. M. Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1904) yield 1.5 to 2 per cent as a probable ratio.”
I myself have fixed upon the median of ratios I have read, as well as the frequency that has occurred to me as a result of a half-century’s unusually intimate mingling with all social types in many nations, having possessed, at the time I lived in the foreign nations, some speaking ability in seven foreign languages. But the frequency is greater than I have given in the text rather than less. But the extreme German estimates are too high for the United States. It is my conclusion from intimate intercourse with the natives in many countries that the frequency of bisexuality per thousand is proportional to the density of population. Nature puts a break on over-population by increasing the proportion of sterile bisexuals. When a population is regularly underfed, the number of bisexuals born appears to increase. But that is not the only factor. Another law is that when a consanguineous multifamily (a group of families) multiplies with exceptional rapidity, bisexuals are born in that family even though the food supply is undiminished. The author believes the latter to be the reason he himself was born bisexual. It was because the generic womb (i.e., those of my grandmothers for several generations) had been overtaxed.
The ratio is probably much higher among the cultured—particularly art devotees—than among the “hoi polloi.”
Footnote 8:
See later chapter: THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY THE HERMAPHRODITOI IN GENERAL.
Footnote 9:
Bisexuality occurs also in animals and birds, but far less frequently than among humans. Perhaps this difference is due to the fact that the human male and female differ much less in respect to secondary sexual determinants than do most birds and animals. Several times in my life I have come across a newspaper item such as the following. I inquired of a poulterer, who informed me that he has had numerous hens that crowed and possessed secondary male determinants.
CROWS AND LAYS EGG. IS IT COCK OR HEN? Copyright by =Press Publishing Co=. (NEW YORK WORLD), 1921 (=Special cable despatch to the WORLD=)
LONDON, Dec. 9.—A Buff Orpington cock at a poultry show in the agricultural hall at Islington has laid an egg. This bird began its career with all the attributes of a sure-enough hen. It laid eggs and cackled over them in time-honored fashion. Its head, plumage, and habits were all hen-like.
As it grew, its conformation underwent a subtle change. It began to grow a cock’s comb, sprouted a cock’s tail, developed spurs and crowed on appropriate occasions—but continued to lay eggs. When its owner exhibited it as a “cock-hen” and claimed despite its male affiliation, that it produced eggs, all the poultry fanciers derisively nicknamed it “Bluff Orpington.”
One doubter offered to pay one hundred pounds if the bird laid an egg. It was watched day and night for the coming of the marvel, and yesterday duly presented its watchers with an excellent egg.... Physiologists are dumbfounded.
Footnote 10:
“Catamite” is the Latin, as well as modern, corruption of the vocable “Ganymede.” For the relation between Jupiter and Ganymede, see Dr. Wm. Lee Howard’s =Pederasty vs. Prostitution= in =Journal of the American Medical Association=, May 15, 1897. Also Plato’s =Phædo=. Greek literature in general is suffused with pederasty. I read Greek six years in “prep” and university. My observation is that androgyne scholars have a penchant for that language and drift into teaching it. Prior to the twentieth century, the Greek and Latin masterpieces—in all “preps” and colleges read unexpurgated because the sexually full-fledged have not generally understood the homosexual descriptions—were the only publications affording androgynes an inkling of the secrets of their sex life.
Footnote 11:
For twenty-five years, the author has combed the medical press for information on androgynism. This chapter is the [Sidenote: _Are Androgynes Super-men?_] fruit. I made no notes, never expecting to publish the results. At the present writing, I lack the necessary month for research to the end of making a complete list of my sources. For Socrates, see Plato’s Symposium and Phædo, Xenophon’s Symposium, and Haller’s Die Rede des Sokrates in Platon’s Symposium. For Plato, see his Dialogues, particularly the Symposium; Grote’s Plato; Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, page 229; The Sexuality of Plato in Journal of Urology and Sexology, 1916, page 201. For Cæsar, see Dr. Wm. Lee Howard’s Pederasty vs. Prostitution in Journal of the American Medical Association, May 15, 1897, and Suetonius’ Lives of the Cæsars, written about A. D. 120. The latter work is a revelation of the pederasty with which the best Roman society was honeycombed. I believe conditions are about the same to-day in all civilizations above the barbarous, although in Christian nations one has not been permitted to publish the facts. They are really not horrible, nor portentous of ruin for society; merely imagined to be so. They are not really conducive to the detriment of society, and have existed practically as now throughout history. It is all because Nature has created the phenomenon of androgynism, really beneficent to society, but sorely misjudged by writers grossly ignorant of the phenomenon. Its final investigation in the twentieth century can do no hurt; only a world of good.
For Michelangelo, see his Sonnets and his biography by J. A. Symonds. For the Shakespeare-Author, see his Sonnets and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H., published in Blackwood’s in 1889, as well as that same article expanded in a monograph published by Mitchell Kennerly in 1921. For Whitman, see his Leaves of Grass and Drumtaps.
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, in her New Horizons in Love and Life, says: “Inversion [sexual] and genius have a sort of affinity. They certainly both tend to belong to the neurotic group.” [R. W’s comment: As a rule both androgynes and gynanders, but particularly the former, are bundles of nerves.]
The valuable popular exposition of the philosophy of sex, Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age (published by Boni and Liveright) did not come to my attention until after THE FEMALE-IMPERSONATORS was written. The following are excerpts from the chapter, The Intermediate Sex, the bracketed words being my own: Page 124: “Charles G. Leland (“Hans Breitmann”) in his book, The Alternate Sex (1904), insists much on the frequent combination of the characteristics of both sexes in remarkable men and women, and has a chapter on “The Female Mind in Man,” and another on “The Male Intellect in Woman.” [I once read the statement in a medical journal, name not recalled: “Homosexualists are particularly common among authors.”]
Page 139: “The instinctive artistic nature of the male of this class [urnings or androgynes], his sensitive spirit, his [Sidenote: _Androgynes’ Angelic Disposition._] wavelike emotional temperament, combined with hardihood of intellect and body ... may be said to give them ... through their double nature, command of life in all its phases, and a certain freemasonry of the secrets of the two sexes which may well favor their function as reconcilers [of the full-fledged males with the full-fledged females] and interpreters [of human nature, particularly from the standpoint of sex]. Certainly it is remarkable that some of the world’s greatest leaders and artists have been dowered either wholly or in part with the Uranian temperament [that is, either ultra-androgynes or ultra-gynanders or else psychic hermaphrodites]—as in the cases of Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar, or, among women, Christine of Sweden, Sappho the poetess, and others.”
It is noteworthy that tremendously virile males—who alone, as a rule, have been intimate with the extreme type of androgyne—have named him “fairie” in English-speaking countries and “petit-jesus” (Little Jesus) in France, largely because of his having, innate, the disposition of an angel; while the most common scientific term for androgynes in general has been “urning”, from Greek ouranos, meaning “heavenly being.” The originator of the term “urning”, however, was himself a bisexual, K. H. Ulrichs, an Austrian, the originator, about 1880, of the scientific study of sexual intermediates, and author of several published papers on the theme.
A lesser historic character than those listed in my text, Lord Cornbury, cousin of Queen Anne and colonial governor of New York, had the fad of attiring himself in feminine finery for a stroll on the capital city’s principal promenade. One of the most prominent judges (now deceased) of the Atlantic coast was declared to me, by a citizen of his own town, to be a psychic hermaphrodite. An official once high up in the government at Washington was declared to me, by a citizen of his native place, to be an androgyne. One of the greatest factors in world politics to-day is merely a grown-up infant and an androgyne, though at the same time a genius.
Footnote 12:
A confidant who read these paragraphs commented in substance: “‘Physician, heal thyself!’ Your book shows that you yourself are governed by instinct and prejudice. ‘Those that live in glass houses should not throw stones.’ Therefore omit these paragraphs.”
If I am governed by instinct and prejudice, I am conscious of being ruled only by reason. Perhaps those who advocate the suppression of intermediates without investigation equally feel they are governed by pure reason. Granted that both they and myself are ruled by instinct and prejudice and that it is impossible for mankind to exercise pure reason, nevertheless intermediates should finally have their day in court. They number 700,000 in continental United States alone, including some of the brightest minds and most useful members of society.
Footnote 13:
My own case indicates that Nature creates androgynes and gynanders as a brake on too rapid multiplication. Both paternal and maternal stock have averaged eight children to a marriage. It seems that Nature wishes to preserve to as many of her children as possible the joys of courtship. Often, instead of making cold anaphrodites or female icebergs out of the men and women not needed to perpetuate the race, she brings into the world androgynes or gynanders—as a rule, sterile.
Footnote 14:
I wrote this paragraph, so much like that quoted (at close of preceding chapter) from Carpenter’s =Love’s Coming of Age=, before I had heard of the existence of the book named.
Footnote 15:
For me it was extreme temperance, considering my natural sexual ardor. For most people it would have been gross intemperance. Extreme temperance might be defined as the denial of six-sevenths of one’s strong fleshly desires. That is what it was with me. Professional fairies commonly indulge more than ten times as often per year as I did. But as a result, they go early to the grave.
Footnote 16:
Fellatio.
Footnote 17:
Particularly during my teens, I have worried and grieved a thousand times as much as the average individual. I say for the solace of fellow melancholiacs who retain their reason that at my present age of forty-seven, I show not the least sign of thinning or whitening hair. But this may be due to my being an ultra-androgyne, a subspecies blessed with perennial youth. Strangely also in my own case intense grief (except the agonies in my Garden of Gethsemane, for which see close of this chapter) has seemed to put physical strength into my usually weak body. I feel also that it sharpens my wits and adds to my wisdom and literary ability. “There’s not an ill wind but blows some good.”
At the age of forty-seven my conviction is that great sorrows, after the lapse of a score of years, are recognized to have been blessings in disguise. My life experience has demonstrated that “there is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.” My life experience has demonstrated that the biblical teachings about human life are in general true, and that either the Christian or Jewish religion is practically necessary to save from despair and suicide men and women foreordained to drain the cup of anguish to the dregs. My personal faith in Christian doctrine, and my habit, instilled in infancy, of “taking everything to God in prayer,” have saved me from suicide a thousand times and made the deepest of sorrows tolerable.
The upshot of my very exceptional life experience is: (1) “Praise God from whom all blessings flow;” and (2) Even pain, sorrow, and death are blessings in disguise. The heart of the universe is beneficent.
As I have had an unusual religious experience, one of the numerous books I plan to write, if my life is spared, will be entitled: MY SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY. I have made many discoveries in religion and ethics which I long to proclaim to the world. As already stated, I have always been ultra-religious and a deep student of the Bible. Another book I plan to write will be entitled: THE BIBLE AND THE SEXUAL INSTINCT. In the latter I will seek to demolish the Church’s chief stumbling block. As already stated, I was cut out for a preacher.
Footnote 18:
After my conversion at fifteen, I fought against my sexual attraction toward schoolmates as few others have struggled against the ruling passion. I was no longer a coquette, although desiring as much as ever to be such. My passion for loud apparel, however, was not suppressed since I did not recognize in it any sin.
Footnote 19:
I had in mind possible predestination to be a fille de joie—the career which haunted me, off and on, every year of my life after my second, even years before I heard of the existence of such filles. I had already had an intensive five years career (third to seventh years). Another foreshadowing (that of my actual career from my twenty-sixth to fortieth years) was a common dream, from about my ninth to fourteenth years, of being chased through streets and fields by youthful soldiers, who would finally catch me, and great terror would result. The dream occurred so often that in my waking hours I resolved, the next time I had that dream, to tell the soldier boldly: “I am not afraid of you, because this is only a dream!” Repeatedly in my dreams did I tell that to the soldier who had grabbed me, but he replied (as I dreamt): “You are mistaken. This is not a dream. It is the real thing!” And then I would become as terrified as ever. My dream would always end a second or two after being grabbed, and generally I would wake up as if from a night-mare.
Footnote 20:
Anglo-Saxon leaders of thought have hitherto been of the opinion that the domain of sex is “=terra interdicta=,” just as those of Roger Bacon’s time (priests and monks exclusively) would have believed it sacrilege to use a telescope or microscope—“to see what God meant man should never see.” Roger, although having invented these instruments, did not dare tell his generation because the leaders of thought would have burnt him alive for invading =terra interdicta=.
Footnote 21:
However, as described in detail in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, the congenital extraordinarily keen edge on my intellect was progressively and permanently dulled from the age of sixteen to twenty-three by emissions during sleep twice a week. It is necessary to add that I always had acute horror of self-abuse.
Footnote 22:
An adult who never surpasses the mentality of a child of twelve.
Footnote 23:
One of my three confidants achieved the highest success in life of any student in college with me—one of the highest political offices in the United States. Down to forty, I confided my homosexual adventures, although after we graduated, our personal relations were never closer than shaking hands. Within two years of his =honorable= name’s appearing in absolutely every newspaper of the Union, he permitted me to receive mail addressed to one of my aliases (used only by those who knew I was an androgyne) in his care. At the time I did not realize the favor I was asking—the risk to his reputation that he unselfishly took. Ungrounded scandals sometimes arise when a full-fledged man does favors for an androgyne.
Footnote 24:
Some androgynes of a less extreme type, however, tolerate militarics. I know of two who served in the World War—because they wanted, every day and hour, to be surrounded by adored young Mars. But if they ever got to the front, they would probably malinger. I know of another androgyne who was so afraid of being drafted that he took a hatchet and chopped off two fingers of his right hand. In the World War, I was subject to draft under the latest law. I had planned to escape by claiming that I was not a man, the law specifying that sex alone as liable.
Footnote 25:
Non-mushy specimens are given in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE. Its editor killed the mushy.
Footnote 26:
Substitute for the real name of the pseudo-hotel.
Footnote 27:
Decades ago I read in a newspaper this imperfectly remembered lyric. Name of poet not published.
Footnote 28:
I was dogged only three times in my many years of leading a double life: (1) Several Stuyvesant Square club-men succeeded, unbeknown to me, in boarding the same elevated train. I discovered them only after I had descended to the street. My refusal to proceed to my lodgings so incensed them that they disfigured my face with blows. (2) I was dogged again by several other Stuyvesant Square club-men. I discovered them before I boarded the train. Again my refusal to proceed angered them to giving me a beating. [They beat me because they had been taught that androgynes are monsters of depravity. All were around twenty years old.] (3) I was dogged in 1918 by a ruffian of twenty-two, with whom I had talked confidentially, but finally forsook because my usual test had shown him untrustworthy. He followed me for more than a mile, although I turned several corners suddenly and stood in a doorway and watched. But he had reckoned on my doing just that, and in some mysterious way guarded against my discovering him. He was evidently a super-crafty criminal. On straight stretches of street, I looked back half-a-dozen times, but saw nothing of him. (Because he had always taken the opposite side of the street and kept such a distance behind I could not recognize him, while his own eyesight carried further than mine.) When I arrived at my goal (fortunately this time an amusement resort and not my home), he gave me one of the surprises of my life by coming up to me. I fled from him in irrational terror.
Footnote 29:
Note.—See “Recollection” in Part VIII.
Footnote 30:
Martin and Paul are depicted in THE RIDDLE OF THE UNDERWORLD.
Footnote 31:
In the summer of 1921 I twice saw moving pictures of Jack Dempsey arching his naked biceps. I was thirty feet away and his size was magnified at least twice. I carefully watched for comparison with Harvey Green. The protuberance was not equal to Harvey’s, who was far from being approached by any of the scores of sluggers whose biceps I have pinched. I can never forget Harvey’s mountains of biceps.
Footnote 32:
I had graduated more than a year before and was earning a good salary during this summer vacation between my first and second post-graduate years.
Footnote 33:
On one spree, when I left the key in my pocket, it had been stolen out of meanness, necessitating the embarrassment, and risk of suspicion, of having to ring at midnight for admission.
Footnote 34:
In a later catastrophe, one did call. I was compelled to tell the truth, but he proved sympathetic and respected my confidences. He subsequently asked his physician about homosexuality and was informed it was deepest moral depravity and merited no sympathy. He himself happened to be one of the most broadminded of men. He remarked that physicians as a class are narrowminded since most have not taken a liberal-arts course.
Footnote 35:
In a later scrape, after being laid up for a week, I ventured to my large publishing office with practically no skin on my nose, that member having a week before been badly smashed. My physician had furnished me with the explanation that he had applied a mustard plaster for a cold and the nose resulted! But the better joke was that simultaneously another university-trained androgyne working in the same room was limping around with a crutch. He said he had been thrown off a horse, but I never doubted he had been crippled by some sexually full-fledged brute as a punishment for his androgynism.
Footnote 36:
Prudery is one of the foremost earmarks of anaphrodites and the mildly virile, to which classes nearly all the leaders of thought belong. The trait is completely absent from the more virile, as well as androgynes. Some of the more virile, as Harvey Green, are prudes =only as to homosexuality= because taught that fellators ought to be killed.
Footnote 37:
In the last decade of the nineteenth century also, there existed a feminine craze for skirts as narrow as a pant-leg. “Merry Widow” hats also had their day then. But in 1921 for the first time in Christendom, respectable women have been crazy to display their bare breasts, bare arms, and next-to-nude legs in the crowded streets. Respectable women have to-day adopted for street wear the garb, for exclusive brothel wear, of =filles de joie= of a quarter of a century ago.
Footnote 38:
See “=French Doll-Baby=” in Part VIII.
Footnote 39:
This anecdote deals with only one of a number of similar occurrences in New York. Gynanders, as well as androgynes, are doomed to suffer murder at the hands of hare-brained prudes because of the false teaching of the leaders of thought.
Footnote 40:
The scientific names “androgyne” and “gynander” evidence a blunder of their coiner. The order of their components is the reverse of their English colloquial equivalents.
Footnote 41:
Havelock Ellis’s works on sex—the foremost in the English language—had not yet been published in 1895.
Footnote 42:
In the year of writing (1921) sight-seeing busses feature the Bowery at night. Years ago that formerly quaintest of New York’s streets lost most of its character as red-light and amusement center for New York’s manual-laborer foreign stock. For a brief history of New York’s bright-light districts since 1800, see the author’s RIDDLE OF THE UNDERWORLD, in its Table of Contents.
Footnote 43:
A warning to any unsophisticated androgyne who may be moved to an impersonation spree in a red-light district. It is necessary to go slow and be ultra-cautious. Numerous androgynes have been murdered by gangsters. Frank—Eunice, Angelo—Phyllis, and myself were exceptionally fortunate. Every time an androgyne puts himself in the power of a stranger gangster, it is at the risk of murder. Several times I myself have been half-murdered. A poverty-stricken aspect and concealment of one’s culture constitute the best protection. By no means show fight if assaulted.
Footnote 44:
Just the day I retyped the above (Jan. 24, 1921) I read how a girl-boy of eighteen committed suicide in New York City by jumping from a thirty-five foot bridge upon railroad tracks. Adolescent androgynes are continually putting an end to their lives because bitterly persecuted merely on account of their bisexuality and most unfeelingly told by their closest associates that they are deeply depraved, and because prohibited by the leaders of thought from acquiring scientific knowledge of their idiosyncrasy.
Footnote 45:
The reader might omit this chapter because thinking it not a propos. It is given because describing an actual episode in the life of the sexual cripple being depicted. It also paints the type of fast young bachelor after whom the cultured ultra-androgynes of New York commonly “run.” To avoid any chance of a suit for slander, I merely substitute the real name of one of my own half-dozen New York favorites—the half-dozen who will live forever in the sanctum sanctorum of my memory—that one favorite who physically much resembled Phyllis’s “adopted son,” but whose character was ideal. The real George Greenwood—of immaculate beauty and charm, and unsurpassed friendliness to a sexual cripple like myself. In the words of Phyllis, I am “continuously burning incense in my heart to his memory.” I would wish to confer on him immortality.
Footnote 46:
At the time I knew him slightly, he was very bald and possessed a rather “passe” countenance. He was nearly six feet tall, perfectly proportioned, and had a negroid complexion, charcoal eyes, and the blackest of curly hair—that is, what was left of it. He was apparently of Spanish extraction. Only when he had his hat on was he still of entrancing appearance.
Footnote 47:
In the July, 1921, number of a prominent American medical journal, I saw a tirade against androgynes, whom its author declared merited no mercy, but ought to be crushed as a social menace. The invective proved merely that its physician-author clings to the sexual ethics of the Dark Ages, and at the same time belongs to the mildly virile type. That type lacks a superfluity of sexual vigor. It is inconceivable that a young man of that type should be intimate with an androgyne except for a rich reward—which has occurred when the individual androgyne was cut off from all access to the ultra-sexed, toward whom alone he gravitates. The mildly virile young man shudders violently at the very thought and is confident—=a priori=, as it is only a traditional phantasy—that his =vita sexualis=, health, and morals would be seriously undermined. I concede, however, that such might be the case with the mildly virile because possessing only a modicum of sexual vigor (perhaps, for example, merely enough for relations with his lawful wife once a fortnight or so) and because tending to be overconscientious. I concede that the mildly virile’s morals would be damaged, simply because he fancies such relations the unpardonable sin. If once in his youth overcome by the offer of a “bonanza,” he would ever afterwards regret the experience and feel deep guilt. As I myself in my youthful verdancy, he would cry out a thousand times: “‘O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!’” And because of his meagre sexual energy, he might possibly feel ill effects physically. But that by no means proves that the ultra-sexed would also feel them. And morally, the latter look upon the experience as entirely natural and sinless—the same as the eating of a piece of mince pie. Instead of ever regretting it, they look back with satisfaction that they had the experience.
Mildly virile writers on sex forget that there exist tens of thousands of men of far superior sexual energy. While they themselves, for example, may care for the services of their legal wife as seldom as twice a month, the tremendously virile “fellow” is not satisfied with less than an opportunity every night, and is at the same time “the husband of all women.” In my opinion, Philippics against the androgyne have their basis only in prudery and bigotry.
Footnote 48:
See note beginning bottom page 254.
Footnote 49:
I had fully described this adventure in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, but the details were cut out by its editor. I append them here because tending to show that the sparser the population of a district, the greater the repugnance of civilized young roues to androgynism and the rarer is the latter phenomenon per thousand males. In other words: My conclusion from extensive travel and intimate mingling, as an ultra-androgyne, with native adolescent roues in every corner of the United States and Europe is that among civilized nations, the frequency of male bisexuals per thousand inhabitants and their tolerance by the full-fledged are in general in direct proportion to the density of population.
I, a woman-soul, but reputedly a young man, was delegated to write up an unusual affair transpiring in a Rocky Mountain wilderness. I was in a caravan with fifty men of the roughest type, cowboys, miners, etc. All were bachelors or grass-widowers. Day in and day out, they hardly talked of anything but prostitutes, some of whom enlivened every mining or lumbering camp of any permanence, although their rates were seven times city prices and they laid away fortunes. Some of the decidedly lucky prospectors, as well as occasional city-ites on hunting trips, were always accompanied by their mistresses—the city-ites doubtless glad to get away from “friend wife” for a few weeks.
I found the adolescent cowboys and miners of the Rockies the most prejudiced against effeminate males of any of the hundreds of circles of adolescent roues with which I have mingled as a girl-boy. The first hour, when I had not compromised myself in any way, they began to heap up insults, particularly taking pains to refer to me within my hearing by the obscene term most often used by roughs for a girl-boy. (My own age was then thirty-three, but my friends told me I looked to be only twenty-five. I still possessed the “small-boy” aspect common among ultra-androgynes.) I feared my forced sojourn with those who so despised effeminacy would be intolerable.
But my plan to win their respect succeeded. I exhibited my credentials as representative of a journal of national reputation. They never again insulted me and I even became popular. The more sensual began to resort to terms of endearment and embraces. But, while fascinated by these attentions, I distrusted them to the extent of not disclosing my secret desires. I knew that prudes occasionally murder bisexuals in cities. In the wilds of the Rockies these same prudes (only so far as concerns homosexuality) could so easily push me over a [Sidenote: _Murdering Androgynes Not Now Necessary._] precipice after tempting me to a stroll, and no one ever learn my fate. The tradition is wide spread that bisexuals must be murdered. Perhaps the practice of murdering is akin to that prevalent among some savage tribes of children killing their parents as soon as the latter become too feeble to hunt and work. It was racial economy to put out of the way those who could not contribute their share to the food supply, as well as those impotent to procreate children. But as civilized man no longer finds it necessary to the continued life of the nation to knock in the head all citizens as they reach the age of sixty, equally there is now no call for murdering (or even chastising) individuals incapable of generation.
But sleeping in the same tent and continuously having to listen to confessions of their amorous adventures, I became wrought up as rarely in my life. Therefore after a week of continuous Platonic association with the cowboy who seemed naturally the most high-minded and trustworthy, I invited him for an evening’s stroll in the forest primæval. He had been brought up on a Wyoming ranch, never been inside of a church, never heard a word read out of the Bible, and could not read nor write. He asserted he had once been a rough rider in Buffalo Bill’s show, and my test of his descriptions of the surroundings of Madison Square Garden in New York evidenced his truthfulness. I worshipped the very soil on which this “Nature’s nobleman” trod. For he was, in addition, the handsomest adolescent in the caravan. On our stroll I confessed myself an “hermaphrodite,” using that inaccurate term because it is known to every rough (though by them always pronounced incorrectly). He would not have understood “androgyne.” Since he was only a servant in the caravan, I offered a large bill. But much to my surprise and almost to my death, he abruptly jilted me with an unparalleled display of horror. But he promised to keep the incident locked in a chamber of his brain, and events proved him true blue. My desolate stroll in the bear-infested wilderness followed immediately.
If these cowboys and miners, as well as all other men, instead of having been, from boyhood, fed on the most crime-provoking of falsehoods, namely, that homosexuals (so called, though psychicly and often in part physically belonging to the opposite sex) are monsters of depravity for whom no punishment is too severe, had been taught that these sexual cripples merit only compassion, I would myself have been spared those hours of excruciating anguish in the forest, and hundreds of youthful androgynes would not have committed suicide.
=Note to page 240.=—This comment so developed that I was compelled to make it a footnote. The assignment to shore duty might indicate that Z’s immediate superiors might have noticed that he was of soft disposition, an earmark of [Sidenote: _Visit to Fort “Y” in 1921._] androgynism. An androgyne acquaintance, though perfectly sound physically, was rejected in the World War draft merely on account of his softspokenness and generally “soft” mannerisms. Another young androgyne acquaintance enlisted in the Hospital Corps during the war so as to be able to pass all his time among idols. Moreover, androgynes long to serve as nurses to wounded virile young men, as did Walt Whitman during the American War of the Rebellion. Androgynes make the best nurses of youthful warriors because they slavishly adore them. From an eyewitness I heard of a third androgyne who was drafted in the World War and “bobtailed” out of the army because discovered to be addicted to fellatio. From another eyewitness I heard of a fourth androgyne who was similarly “bobtailed”, and as a result of the indignities heaped upon him at the time, immediately committed suicide. Of course those who heaped up the indignities thought the sexual cripple wilfully depraved. From still another eyewitness I heard of another drafted androgyne who, on the eve of his first battle in France, ate the heads off matches so as to assure getting back into the hospital while his virile “buddies” were valiantly “going over the top.” Virility confers bravery.
At the date of writing, I still “pal” only with regular soldiers, but am instinctively such an industrious worker that I go into any kind of fellowship only about once a fortnight. I still look upon youthful regular soldiers as magic demigods to whom I wish to enslave myself. Two days before the present writing, I happened to take a walk to Fort Y, which played a large part in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, and which, from 1902 to 1905, I visited, in the role of female-impersonator, one evening out of fourteen, and where I was acquainted with practically every one of the four hundred men not above the grade of sergeant. That of two days ago was only my second trip there in the past sixteen years. Because it is inconveniently located for a visit. After sixteen years, I happened to be recognized by one soldier who had stuck to that post and risen to the rank of sergeant. He told me there were still only about four at the fort who served there when I had the honor to be “the daughter of the regiment.” He expressed his amazement at my being so well preserved, saying I look twenty years younger than I am. He told me that only four or five fairies had run after the men of that fort in the past sixteen years. That small number is due to the remoteness of Fort Y from the city. At two other forts formerly frequented by me as a female-impersonator which are right in the city, androgyne cultivators of the common soldiers are numerous. A man serving at one of these forts told me that common soldiers often speak with one another about their “fairies.” Whenever any one of the former appears with a new watch, ring, etc., a common query of his “buddies” is: “Did your fairie give it to [Sidenote: _Author’s Conversations with Opposites._] you?” Seven out of ten common soldiers appear exceedingly glad to have a prosperous young androgyne in their midst, particularly because he showers them with gifts and entertainment. Only one out of ten is such a prude as to walk away from the circle of which I have hundreds of times had the privilege of being the star. Some of these prudes would murder an androgyne but for fear of being punished.
Because of this remoteness of Fort Y, however, I had found there, during the hey-day of my career as female-impersonator, a specially hearty welcome and specially rich pickings.
(See “=Emotion=” in Part VIII.)
The sergeant I met two days ago—as common soldiers in general—was very much interested to hear the experiences of an androgyne as I narrated my life-story for the sixteen years since I talked with him. I habitually tell soldier associates the complete story of my life, and all who stay in the circle to listen appear very glad for the chat. Of course I never use any indecent language, although dealing frankly with sex questions. I am a lecturer on sexology to them. Moreover, within three minutes after becoming acquainted with a common soldier, I sometimes ask him, if he is beyond twenty-five, if he is married. For I do not care to chat with married men. I also commonly ask why he never married. I ask him to enlighten me as to his feelings toward the gentle sex, and as to what transpires when he and a girl are out for an evening’s stroll on a rural road. They are very frank in telling me their outlook on life. If there is no opportunity for assault and robbery (A large proportion of the uncultured thinking the first thing of robbing a stranger androgyne, if not of “beating him up”) I have, to strange young soldiers, confessed myself an androgyne within three minutes after we exchanged our first words, because their learning that fact proves, in general, the strongest kind of a drawing card.
The sergeant of two days ago wanted to make a date with me. I absolutely turned my back on such a proposition, chiefly on account of the dread of the physical and mental debility always supervening the following day. He urged me to resume my visits to Fort Y, to flaunt myself before all the soldiers as female-impersonator, as sixteen years before. I replied that I was now too old and too feeble. While sixteen years before I never left the vicinity of the post without dalliance with intimates, two days ago I did not entertain the least idea of, and hardly any wish for, such relations. Age has sobered me. “Intimates” I just wrote—some of whom, however, I had never laid eyes on until three minutes before. Providence gave me this wealth of one kind to counterbalance the almost unparalleled anguish I have been called upon to suffer because of my fate of being a sorely persecuted androgyne.
[Sidenote: _Author’s Third “Adopted Son.”_]
Lest I should be misjudged (the reader will any way judge me the warmest body that ever breathed, as intimates have told me) I further confess that during the year ending March, 1921, I visited at another fort about once a fortnight a 20-year-old private whom I planned to adopt (not legally) as son to live with me the rest of my life. I previously looked over, at ball games at the post, the entire common-soldier personnel of several hundred in order to pick out one of the three or four handsomest. Even at my first visit, one or two of the privates with whom I exchanged words evidently took me for an androgyne looking for a sweetheart, and did their best to be “the lucky dog.” But I passed the poor fellows by until I could get intimately acquainted with one of the three or four pre-eminent Adonises. I later ascertained that the one selected—greatly to his joy and to the envy of numerous “buddies”—excelled in disposition and character as much as in good looks. I also learned he had been brought up in the back woods and had never attended school a single day, although he had learned to read and write a little after entering the army. After I had known him intimately for nine months, his enlistment expired. Only now I disclosed my true name and station and took him to live in my own home, where I had been all by myself, doing my own housework like a woman. Although I had loaded him with gifts, this my “third adopted son” took French leave after only three days’ residence with me. His “buddies” told me he had gone away to marry the girl with whom I had known he had been corresponding.
Having lost him, I immediately started in to cultivate at the same barracks its pre-eminent Adonis, and almost its pre-eminent Hercules, with a view to his non-legal adoption to live with me as son the rest of my life after a nine-months apprenticeship during which he would not know my real name, station in life, or place of residence. It is easy to conceal these things from common soldiers. They are not inquisitive. They believe my misrepresentations of myself—necessary because androgynes are the favorite victims of blackmailers. But after a month, this latest favorite committed theft and I never saw him again. His “buddies” told me that he had stolen two blankets, “=government property=,” and was therefore sentenced to two years in military prison. If I am correctly informed, court martials often impose on an enlisted man caught in a misdemeanor a prison sentence several times as lengthy as would a civil court. I take this opportunity to enter a plea for better treatment of common soldiers, who have been my “pals” for a quarter of a century—particularly for punishments by court martial no more severe than by civil courts. Sometimes I have thought that when an uneducated young man enlists to defend his country as a common soldier, he thereby forfeits all rights of citizenship and all privileges guaranteed by the [Sidenote: _An Adonis or a Hercules?_] American constitution. The cowboys of the Rockies have mingled with common soldiers because of the numerous forts scattered throughout the “Indian country.” I asked one with whom I was well acquainted why he did not serve a few years in the army. His words were: “Do you think I want to be a slave?” But the lot of the common soldier has steadily improved during my association with him, excepting during our war with Germany. In 1921, he is better treated by his officers than ever before.
The context of this footnote moves me to reflect: Do I prefer an Adonis or a Hercules? I incline to the latter slightly. My first “adopted son” (for nine years, as described in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE) was an almost unmatched Hercules and at the same time an almost unmatched Adonis. He was one young man out of ten thousand. My second “adopted son” (for only a half-year, as described in same work) was neither a Hercules nor an Adonis. Not more than one out of twenty adolescents can qualify under either of these physically superior types, and I must confess that these types are very much lacking in mental acumen. Bright intellects nearly always go hand in hand with poor physical development. My second “adopted son” (while only tolerably good-looking) commanded my adoration because of his beautiful disposition and extreme passion for myself. My third prospective “adopted son” was a pre-eminent Adonis, and a fair Hercules.
There exist other attractive qualities in males that knit females to them. The chief is intellectual brilliance. That to me has always been, sexually considered, decidedly detractive—because I am myself of the intellectual type. As a rule, only opposites attract.
Footnote 50:
Attempt at poetical expression of experiences described in prose on page 255 following.
Footnote 51:
For prose description of the personality that I have here attempted to depict poetically, see page 114 following.
Footnote 52:
See page 103 following.
Footnote 53:
See =THE FEMALE-IMPERSONATORS=, page 153. Second stanza is a free translation from Beranger. For original, see =AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE=, page viii.
Footnote 54:
Seemingly natural language of “pup love”, the girl repeating the former a hundred times in five minutes, and the adolescent the latter. Both also cry these words simultaneously while gazing into each other’s eyes.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. P. 21, changed “because never permitted to learn of their existence” to “because they were never permitted to learn of their existence”. 2. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 3. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.