[Illustration: The Author Ready to Set Out on Life’s Journey.]
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF AN
ANDROGYNE
BY EARL LIND (“RALPH WERTHER”—“JENNIE JUNE”)
EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION
BY ALFRED W. HERZOG, Ph.B., A.M., M.D.
Member of the New York and the New Jersey Bar
Editor of the _Medico-Legal Journal_
NEW YORK
THE MEDICO-LEGAL JOURNAL
1918
COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY ALFRED W. HERZOG
First edition, 1,000 copies. Sold only, by mail order, to physicians,
lawyers, legislators, psychologists, and sociologists; by Medico-Legal
Journal, 123 West 83d Street, New York City.
This is copy Number .... and is sold
to .................................
Inscribed to NATURE’S STEP-CHILDREN—the sexually
abnormal by birth—in the hope that their lives may
be rendered more tolerable through the publication
of this Autobiography.
“But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they
are all of them snared in holes, and they are
hid in prison houses; they are for a prey, and
none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith,
Restore.
“Who among you will give ear to this? Who will
hearken and hear for the time to come?”—Isaiah XLII,
v. 22, 23.
CONTENTS
Introduction, by Dr. Alfred W. Herzog i
Author’s Preface 1
Autobiography 5
Appendix I. Impressions of the Author, by a Business Associate 246
Appendix II. The Case of Oscar Wilde, by Author of this
Autobiography 251
Appendix III. Questionnaire on Homosexuality 259
Index 260
ILLUSTRATIONS
Opposite—
The Author Ready to Set Out on Life’s Journey Title page
The Author—a Modern Living Replica of the Ancient Greek
Statue of “Hermaphroditos” Page 5
Ancient Greek Statue of an Androgyne, called
“Hermaphroditos,” now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence,
Italy Page 6
The Author at Thirty-four Page 235
The Author at Forty-four Page 242
INTRODUCTION
I offer no apology for bringing the AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE before
the members of the learned professions, to whom the sale of this book is
restricted.
Were, in my opinion, an apology needed, this volume would not make its
appearance through my instrumentality.
The reason for its appearance is missionary, and therefore I consider it
right and proper that I should explain what I hope to accomplish
thereby.
I am sorry not to be able to say that the appearance of this volume will
fill a long felt want.
For, although I hope to fill with the AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE a
void; yet, had this void been recognized, were the want felt to have
this void filled, my task would be easier of accomplishment.
The void whereof I speak is the colossal ignorance of the reasons for
homosexual practices on one side, and the pharisaical pulchritude on the
other side, which, although knowing that homosexuality has been
practiced uninterruptedly from biblical times up to the present, refuses
to study its causes or its devotees; and while not endeavoring to make
this world a better place to live in through its own abandoning
unwholesome practices, vices and other actions which, although approved,
condoned or ignored by the multitude—because these actions are
popular—are condemned by philosophers and thinkers, yet will crucify
those whose vices are much less harmful, because they are vices for
which this pharisaical pulchritude has no taste, which therefore it
cannot understand, and not understanding them, cannot condone.
This is to be no brief in defense of homosexuality, although, were I to
try to find redeeming features for homosexual practices in certain cases
and under certain circumstances, I would not have to cudgel my brain
overly to do so.
This is not intended as a defense of all those who indulge in homosexual
practices.
Such a defense might be attempted and successfully carried out, were it
possible to bring this question before a jury of unbiased, open-minded
and independent thinkers, who would decide the question upon the
platform of equal justice to all, weighing the relative harmfulness of
all sexual crimes and excesses, and who would not punish those indulging
in homosexual practices, if they refuse to punish those indulging in
sexual crimes and excesses vastly more injurious to the human race and
to society.
This book is published in an endeavor to obtain justice and humane
treatment for the Androgynes, that class of homosexualists in whom
homosexuality is not an acquired vice but in whom it is congenital.
In pleading a case in Court, even before the highest tribunals, it is
good practice not to take it for granted that the judge knows the law,
or even facts, which might appear to the pleader to be matters of common
knowledge; and so I may be excused if I state to the reader matters
which to him may be already familiar.
Let us then first consider what Homosexuality is.
Homosexuality means sexual love for one of the same sex.
Thus, if a male feels sexual desire for another male, or a female for
another female, they are called sexually inverted or homosexual.
Freud claims that there is in every one an original bisexual tendency,
which is also established anatomically.
Normal development leads from bisexuality to the primacy of the
heterosexual instinct.
Thus inversion corresponds to a disturbance of development.
Whether one agrees with Freud, that homosexuality or inversion
originates in every instance in early childhood, or whether one
disagrees with him and takes the stand which I take, that some cases of
homosexuality are congenital, that others are acquired in early
childhood, while others again are the result of vice or sexual
necessity, as among soldiers, sailors, or in schools; we must come to
the conclusion, that laws which do not differentiate in the punishment
of crimes against nature between those who are born inverts or whose
inversion dates from early childhood and those whose homosexuality is
due to vice or association and who amphogenously inverted or
occasionally inverted use a sexual object belonging either to the same
or the opposite sex, are inadequate, antiquated, not keeping step with
the progress which has been made as to the subject, and should be
changed.
The subject has been discussed not for tens, or hundreds, but for
thousands of years.
Martial, in his epigrams, treats of homosexuality; Socrates and
Alcibiades were said to have been lovers; this is the reason why
pæderasty is also called Socratic love.
Homosexuality in women is called tribadism, euphemism, Lesbian or
Sapphic love; this because Sappho, after having lost Faon, is said to
have turned from men to homosexual love.
This should be sufficient to show that homosexuality was discussed among
the Romans and Greeks, and it is well known that the Bible is not quiet
about it.
Thus then one should expect that a subject which has been so much
discussed should be well enough understood to have its devotees treated
fairly.
Let us see what the law has to say about it?
While in some countries homosexuality is not punishable, in the United
States the law on homosexuality is all comprised in the statutes under
the term of Sodomy.
This comprises not only homosexuality, but also bestiality.
The Penal Code of the State of New York, par. 303, says:
Crimes against Nature.
A person who carnally knows in any manner any animal or bird; or
carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the
mouth; or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge; or attempts
sexual intercourse with a dead body is guilty of sodomy and is
punishable with imprisonment for not more than twenty years.
Par. 304:
Penetration sufficient.
Any sexual penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the
crime specified in the last section.
Our discussion has nothing to do with bestiality or sexual violation of
the dead or unnatural practices between persons of different sex.
And here I wish to state that homosexuality between females, or
so-called Lesbian or Sapphic love, has, to my knowledge, never been
punished in the United States, although the statute seems broad enough
to cover certain sexual practices, as for example cunnilingus, between
females, while tribadism, in which there is no penetration, and whose
devotees according to Yanez, are called in Spain vulgarly “tortilleras,”
according to the New York Code can not be punished, as there is no
penetration. Yanez, in his _Medicina Legal_, published in Madrid in
1884, gives an excellent description of homosexuality and describes also
the general appearance of those male homosexualists whose ways and
manners resemble those of the female sex, and who in common parlance in
the United States are called “Fairies.”
Tidy, in his _Legal Medicine_, not only refers, in discussing
homosexuality, to Romans, I, 26, but gives some historical references,
and cites a number of English cases.
In speaking of “sodomites,” he says: “Sodomites are persons of all ages,
but they usually present a somewhat feminine appearance, or strive to
appear like women. To this end they commonly conceal or destroy, as far
as practicable, such virile appendages as beard, whiskers, or moustache,
wearing a profusion of jewelry, paint and padding. So far, indeed, may
this liking go, that in one case a male to the death is said to have
passed himself off as a female, being employed evidently as a passive
agent.
“And yet, curious to say, sodomites generally affect the society of
their own sex, and avoid that of the opposite sex.
“To them natural sexual intercourse is frequently a matter of absolute
distaste.... All this suggests the curious question, whether such
aberration of sexual desires may not be the result of an incipient
hermaphrodism. Casper’s account of a brotherhood of sodomites and of
their mutual powers of recognition, further suggests to the medical
jurist (dangerous as the very idea may be accounted) how far the
criminality of these people is not beyond their control. But on the
other hand, undoubted sodomites are to be found with none of the
characteristics just described and free from all hereditary taint.”
I have quoted from Tidy at such length, to show that Tidy recognized the
fact that in certain homosexualists a hereditary taint is the cause and
because I wish to emphasize the fact that while the condition has been
recognized by Tidy and others, yet it has not been clearly understood.
This can be deduced from the words above quoted, that “curious to say,
sodomites generally affect the society of their own sex.”
It must be understood, that the congenital homosexualist is really a
human being, born with the body of a male, with perhaps some female
characteristics, but with the soul of a female. The congenital
homosexualist always feels himself as a female, and therefore is always
attracted towards men and would rather be in their society than in the
society of females, who are sexually repulsive to him. This Tidy
evidently failed to clearly understand.
This then is my contention, that homosexuality is either an acquired
vice, that is to say a habit, or an acquired mental aberration, that is
to say, insanity, or congenital; and then it is that a human being is
born with a body with sexual organs all those of the male, yet most
likely with a body which shows certain earmarks of the female, and with
a soul nearly all female, but certainly entirely female in regard to the
sex question. Such a person is a homosexualist, because he feels like a
woman and to him all male persons belong to the opposite sex. He is not
a roué, who has developed homosexuality as a vice, but he is born an
androgyne, whom we can recognize in his manners and mannerisms; a male
person with female ways.
If then the Bible already speaks of homosexual practices and warns
against the idolatrous homosexual practices devoted to Moloch and Bal
Phegor; if already Juvenal and Martial and Cornelius Nepos describe
homosexuality, were it not about time that something were done to change
the existing laws?
Hofman, in his _Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Medizin_, published in 1884,
draws attention to the fact that passive pæderasts are generally of
remarkable femininity, and quotes Brouardel as also remarking that this
female appearance, these female actions and these female habits, likes
and dislikes are generally congenital.
Tidy also, in his work on _Legal Medicine_, published in 1883, states:
“Nor must the hereditary nature of such crimes be overlooked.”
To quote from Beranger:
“Son teint, reluisant de pomade,
Par le carmin est embelli.
On le devine, quand il passe,
Autour de lui l’air est ambré.
Ses cheveux bouclent avec grace,
Son habit presse un dos cambré.
Comme une coquette un peu grasse,
Dans un corset il est serré.”
Mantegazza, in his _Hygiene of Love_, published in 1877, mentions the
subject and states that these cases generally are not due to congenital
aberration, thus admitting that some of them are. I think that it was in
1877 when Krafft-Ebing first drew attention to the psycho-pathology of
certain forms of homosexuality; since that time forty years have passed,
and still the laws fail to differentiate between the vicious pæderasts
and the unfortunate passive pæderasts. The distinction between those in
whom homosexual practices are a vice and in whom they are a misfortune,
is, it seems to me, generally very easily made. The vicious
homosexualist acts the part of a male. The unfortunate, insane or
congenital homosexualist acts the part of a female. The one is active,
the other passive.
That the passive homosexualist is a victim of nature, an unfortunate who
is generally despised and hounded, seems however not to be enough, for
he is also considered legitimate prey of the underworld, who blackmail
these unfortunates systematically. This form of blackmail is known under
the term of “chantage,” and practiced in every large city of the
European and American continents. The laws against homosexuality, as at
present in force, similar to the Mann White Slave Act, seem to only
serve blackmailing crooks, so as to give them an easy living.
It is true that homosexuality at present is not punished as severely as
it was in olden times. It was not so long ago when in Europe it was
punished by burning, later by burying alive; only a few years ago in the
United States it was punishable by hanging; now the punishment is much
milder, but, if it be admitted that homosexuality in certain easily
recognizable persons is congenital and incurable, and if it be also
admitted that it surely is a great deal less harmful than ordinary
prostitution, why punish it at all, or why not at least exempt from
punishment those homosexualists whom Krafft-Ebing so rightly calls “true
stepchildren of nature”?
The author of the AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE called on me some time
ago with his manuscript, imploring me to read it and to publish it.
He told me that he had written most of it years ago and that he had
spent a great deal of time trying to find a publisher, but
unsuccessfully.
He stated that he had written his autobiography in an endeavor to bring
his misfortune vividly before the medical and legal fraternities, for
the purpose of lightening the heavy load which rested so unjustly, as he
said, upon the unfortunates of his class.
While proving to me through letters which were in his possession and
which were addressed to him under various pseudonyms, that he had
submitted his work to different men of learning, all of whom commented
upon it favorably, still the fact that he had unsuccessfully tried to
find a publisher among the various publishers of medical works, was not
a very good introduction of his manuscript to me; yet the open statement
of this fact spoke for his honesty, and although very busy at the time,
I promised him that I would read it.
Now a word about the author: While, according to his own statement, he
is in the fifth decade, he would pass as considerably younger. I have
seen him during the preparation of the work a score of times and have
had some slight chance of observing him.
His language was always very carefully chosen and showed considerable
polish.
His manner was always very gentlemanly and inoffensive.
In figure he is short, stout and has a very arched back.
His voice is rather hoarse, trembling and has, perhaps, a certain female
timbre.
His manner seemed generally timid and embarrassed, and he blushes very
easily.
From his appearance and manners he can, by the gnoscenti, be easily
recognized as an Androgyne.
His avowed purpose in writing and desiring the publication of his
Autobiography, is, as I stated before, by describing his martyrdom, to
lighten the burdens which other Androgynes have to bear; yet my study of
him makes me think that the underlying and perhaps to him unknown reason
for the creation of this Autobiography is vanity.
The author is extremely vain.
My impression of him is, that while he really suffered the agonies he
describes; while he really in the beginning of his career underwent the
soul struggles he tells about; yet he is at present extremely proud of
the, to him undisputable fact, that he is all of a woman’s soul in a
body which he believes to be one-third female and thus only two-thirds
male.
There is no doubt but that his body shows some female characteristics;
especially so his breasts.
He glories in it.
To him, this at least is my impression, to be all woman would be
heavenly.
Some years ago he underwent the operation of castration.
He says, and perhaps he believes, that the reason why he underwent the
operation was, that he suffered from spermatorrhea.
My belief is, that, feeling as a woman, desiring to be a woman and
wishing to seem as much as possible like a woman to his male paramours,
he hated above all the testicles, those insignia of manhood, and had
them removed to be more alike to that which he wished to be.
I read through his AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE.
I cannot say that I enjoyed it.
I neither liked the style in which it was written, nor the manner in
which, to me, unimportant details were given a great deal of space, nor
the manner in which vital questions were entirely overlooked.
I did not see any scientific value in the conversations related nor any
poetical value in the verses recited.
The subject matter was all well known to me and nauseating.
I was to edit this “Autobiography” and stood aghast at the task that I
thought was before me.
I saw the author and told him what I have just stated and that in my
opinion the book had neither literary nor scientific value in the way in
which he thought it had.
I found that the author was severely hurt. This Autobiography was his
joy—a work which this epoch had been waiting for and which futurity will
crown as a classic.
He fought with all his might against any of his verses being omitted.
Every single word that I wanted to change or expunge was of vital
importance to him.
And then I saw a light.
The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE would serve its mission best unedited,
and so it practically remains.
The author, in writing this book, has written into it his own soul, for
him to read who can see further than the printed word.
He has lighted a torch to show in his own way the baser sex feelings of
a sexual invert.
He has shown some of the suffering which he has undergone at the
beginning of his career.
He has shown the contempt in which the Androgyne is held by reason of a
psychical aberration not of his own making.
He has shown how the homosexualist who does not do because he wills but
who does because he must, is exploited by the criminal classes.
In thus lighting the torch and holding it up for us to see what he
desires us to see, he also unconsciously lights up himself in all his
womanly vanity, showing his pride in the fact that he is different from
others; showing his pride in his many conquests; in fact, if I may use
the word in a perhaps not quite exact way, giving a _psychoanalysis_ of
himself without attempting to do so.
Thus then, while the author offers the AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE as
a plain chronological statement of facts slightly covered to hide his
identity, I offer it at the same time as a psychological study, well
worthy of a careful analysis.
Whether this volume is read from the author’s viewpoint or from mine,
only one conclusion can be reached:
Such as he are not to be punished.
ALFRED W. HERZOG.
October, 1918.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
From childhood I have been unusually introspective. I began to keep a
diary at the age of fourteen, and have continued it up to past the age
of forty almost without intermission. Even my earliest diaries dealt
with the phenomena of my sexual life, so that in general I have had to
keep them under lock and key.
The third physician from whom I sought a cure for my sexual abnormality
gave me to understand as early as 1892 that my case was a remarkable
one. This pronouncement incited me still further to keep a record of
what life brought me with a view to writing an autobiography some day.
In 1899, at the age of twenty-five, I wrote the accompanying account of
my life down to that age, and subsequently added accounts of significant
events as they occurred. I also from time to time edited and made
inserts in what I had already written. As a result, parts of some pages
were written in different years. The book has been fated to wait
eighteen years for publication, primarily because American medical
publishers—on the basis of the attitude of the profession—have had an
antipathy against books dealing with abnormal sexual phenomena.
I wish to impress upon the reader that I have not let the sexual
appetite possess first place in my life. It had to have its place, but
the appetite itself, exclusive of its effects, occupied only a small
place. From this autobiography a hasty reader might obtain the
impression that I was completely absorbed in the line of life and
thought here presented, that it was all I lived for. But it is to be
remembered that the object of the book is to delineate the phenomena of
androgynism, passive sexual inversion, and psychical infantilism as they
manifested themselves in the life of its writer, and to give only such
part of his life as was out of the ordinary. My nonsexual life has been
along the same lines as that of all other intellectual workers, and is
barely touched upon in this autobiography, that is, only where it has a
bearing on the phenomena to be delineated. Taking my adulthood as a
whole, the sexual side of life has probably occupied my attention only
to the same extent as in the case of the average virile man, although
much more than in the case of the average woman.
I am uncertain whether the writing out of my experiences has tended to
mitigate my sexual instincts. If it has had any influence in this
direction, nearly a score of years has been requisite to make
perceptible its curative quality.
My own is not an isolated case. Among most races and in all ages of the
world, one individual out of about every three hundred physical males—on
a conservative estimate—is by birth predominantly female psychically. I
merely furnish an extreme case of passive inversion, and my life
experience has simply been unusually varied and noteworthy.
The author trusts that every medical man, every lawyer, and every other
friend of science who reads this autobiography will thereby be moved to
say a kind word for any of the despised and oppressed stepchildren of
Nature—the sexually abnormal by birth—who may happen to be within his
field of activity.
THE AUTHOR
April, 1918.
[Illustration: The Author—A Modern Living Replica of the Ancient Greek
Statue of “Hermaphroditos.”]
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF AN
ANDROGYNE
_Hermaphroditos._
The fusion in one human being of the distinctive physical and mental
characteristics of the two sexes has from antiquity proved to be a
phenomenon interesting to mankind. In some of the great museums of the
world can still be seen examples of the classical statue of
_Hermaphroditos_, with complete primary male sexual determinants and no
trace of female, but with female secondary determinants. The work now in
the hands of the reader portrays the inner history and the life
experience of such a specimen of the _genus homo_.
[Sidenote: _“Androgyne” Defined._]
An “hermaphrodite,” according to the original Greek signification of
this term, was not an individual—in the modern sense—having both the
male and the female organs of reproduction in whole or in part, or a
curious fusion of the two, but only those of the male. In other
respects, however, the bodily form was that of a female. The
hermaphrodite was thus, according to the Greeks, a female with male
genitals. Because modern usage has diverted the term “hermaphrodite” to
a different signification, the word “androgyne” has come into use to
denote an individual with male genitals, but whose physical structure
otherwise, whose psychical constitution, and _vita sexualis_ approach
the female type.
Androgynes have of course existed in all ages of history and among all
races. In Greek and Latin authors there are many references to them, but
these references are not always understood except by the few scholars
who are themselves androgynes or at least passive sexual inverts. About
the middle of the 16th century, the celebrated theologian Beza more
clearly wrote: “What shall I say of these vile and stinking
_androgynes_, that is to say, these men-women, with their curled locks,
their crisped and frizzled hair?”[1] As is evident in this passage,
these men-women, because misunderstood, have been held in great
abomination both in the middle ages and in modern times, but the
prejudice against them was not so extreme in antiquity, and a cultured
citizen having this nature did not then lose caste on this account.
Footnote 1:
Harmar’s translation of Beza, page 173.
But until Krafft-Ebing published his epoch-making work, _Psychopathia
Sexualis_, in the last decade of the 19th century, European and American
medical science was either practically ignorant of or else ignored the
existence of androgynism. But that author treated principally of other
unusual sexual phenomena. Very little of androgynism came under his
observation. I quote from page 389 of the English translation of the
12th edition of his work: “There is yet wanting a sufficient record of
cases belonging to this interesting group of women in masculine attire
with masculine genitals.”
[Illustration: Ancient Greek Statue of an Androgyne, Called
“Hermaphroditos,” Now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.]
[Sidenote: _“Fairie” Defined._]
The present work discloses not only the life of an androgyne _per se_,
but that of a “fairie” or “petit-jesus,” the life of which rare human
“sport” (in the biological sense) your author was apparently also
predestined to live out in a way immeasurably more varied than falls to
the lot of the ordinary fairie, having had a limited experience in this
vocation in Berlin and Paris and other great European cities, in
addition to his extensive experience in New York.
The “fairie” is a youthful androgyne or other passive invert (for they
are perhaps not all members of the extreme class of androgynes) whom
natural predestination or other circumstances led to adopt the
profession of the fille de joie. The term “fairie” is widely used in the
United States by those who are in touch with the underworld. It probably
originated on sailing vessels of olden times when voyages often lasted
for months. While the crew was either actually or prospectively
suffering acutely from the absence of the female of the species, one of
their number would unexpectedly betray an inclination to supply her
place. Looked upon as a fairy gift or godsend, such individual would be
referred to as “the fairy.” As the author is one of the first users of
the printed word in this derived sense, he has elected to adopt a
distinctive spelling.
It is hardly necessary to explain that the sacrilegious term,
“petit-jesus,” commonly used in France, means “a little Jesus.” This
term would naturally be applied to youthful pathics by the irreverent
because being psychically female, they are likely to be “saintly” or
“goody-goodies,” as were both your author as a youth, and practically
all the youthful pathics he has known.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: _Types of Hermaphrodism._]
Contrary to the ordinary view, there exists, in the human race, no sharp
dividing line between the sexes, just as there exists none between the
vegetable and the animal kingdoms. The two sexes gradually merge into
each other. Between the complete physical and psychical man and the
similarly complete woman, there are innumerable stages of transitional
individuals. As there are organisms which the novice would be puzzled to
classify as animal or vegetable, so there are human beings who have a
just claim to be classed with the sex other than that with which they
are commonly classed. Some examples of these transitional individuals
are the psychical hermaphrodite, the pseudo-hermaphrodite, the mujerado
of the Mexican Indians, the man-woman of East India, and the virago or
amazon, as well as the fairie, already mentioned.
Besides the fact of the existence of the decidedly hermaphroditic or
androgynous types named, there exists a continuous scale of mental
sexuality along which all human beings might be arranged, the poles of
which are thorough masculinity and thorough femininity, respectively. At
the masculine pole stand the warrior, the blue-jacket, the pugilist,
etc., and it was only such, the tremendously virile, who possess no
gentle or feminine traits at all, to whom your author was ordinarily
attracted. Further down the male side of the scale, after the man of
adventure and sport, come, successively, the stevedore and his like, the
manual laborer, and the merchant, and still lower, the scholar, which
class possesses in general only a comparatively low degree of
masculinity and virility. Partaking largely of the feminine type of mind
are the male dress-maker and milliner, and the dilettante.
[Sidenote: _Scalæ Sexuales._]
Those at the extremity of the male side of the scale, as the volunteer
soldier and sailor, are the most strongly inclined to venery, as a
general rule. This is your author’s conclusion after intimate experience
with 800 young men, of whom at least one-half belonged to the
occupations just designated. He concludes further from his experience
that nearly all who associate with a fairie belong to this “tremendously
virile” class. It is also probably true that congenital active pederasts
belong chiefly to this class. The individuals near the lower end of the
male side of the scale, as the college professor, are as a rule
continent by birth, and fathers of few children, while those at the
lower end, as the male milliner and the dilettante, are likely to be
sexual inverts. Your author happens to be a pronounced specimen of the
dilettante.
At the beginning of the feminine side of the scale, and likely also to
be inverts, stand the woman soldier (surreptitious), the woman marksman,
and the woman gymnast. Lower down stands the ordinary _mater familias_,
entirely normal sexually and completely satisfied with monandry. The
_fille de joie_ stands still lower, and is as a rule more intensely
feminine and childlike than the _mater familias_. Many are also
naturally polyandrous. At the feminine pole we find the helpless
cry-baby species of woman. The author aspired to be of this type, and
always, when impersonating a woman, acted out this type.
[Sidenote: _Author’s Feminine Characteristics._]
As already indicated, the participation of the transitional individuals
in the characters of the two sexes varies in all degrees. There may be
simply a union of the perfect body of one sex with the susceptibility to
such sexual charms as ordinarily attract the other sex alone, or with
the mental traits of the other sex. Or the individual may possess the
male genitals, but be beardless, or else possess mammary glands, broad
pelvis, and sacral dimples; or possessing the female genitals, have a
rudimentary moustache, or else meagrely developed breasts, narrow
pelvis, etc. Instances have been known of human beings with an ovary on
one side of the body and a testicle on the other, and of males who were
able to suckle infants.
As to my own feminine characteristics, I have been told by intimate
associates from boyhood down to my middle forties—when this book goes to
press—that I markedly resemble a female physically, besides having
instinctive gestures, poses, and habits that are characteristically
feminine. My schoolmates said that I would make a good-looking girl and
that kissing me was “as good as kissing a girl.” When I was fourteen,
one of them remarked that my calves were “as shapely as those of a
girl.” My associates in college have remarked how much I was like a
woman in form and manners, though they never showed evidence of a
suspicion that I might be an invert. They were probably ignorant of the
existence of this human sport. “He blushes like a woman,” was said of
me. Later, in my fairie days, my associates would remark that my hands
felt like a woman’s, and that my skin in general was as soft as a
woman’s. They said that my voice, especially when singing, had a
feminine timbre. The voice is one of the chief criteria by which to
determine abnormal sexuality. I fancy that I can diagnose a man sexually
simply by hearing him sing. For example, a male invert, as well as the
closely related “eunuch by birth” or anaphrodite, is likely to sing a
tenor which is hardly distinguishable from an alto.
[Sidenote: _Femininity Betrayed in Voice._]
I have been told that my speaking voice is a very uncommon one, having
the “fulness of a woman’s voice,” and that it often “breaks and changes,
sometimes in the middle of a sentence; from being masculine, it suddenly
changes timbre and becomes decidedly feminine.” I have myself observed
sometimes when in conversation with a young man with whom I was in love
that my voice would involuntarily change from a bass to a treble. My
voice has also been described as “soothing, sentimental-sounding,
gushing, bland, and caressing.” I have been told that when I talk,
involuntary—and to myself unconscious—movements of the lips take place
not necessary for articulation, and that the same movements take place
occasionally even when I am not talking.
Barbers have remarked that my hair is “literally as fine as silk,” that
they had “never seen it so fine in any other man.” I believe this to be
a general peculiarity of androgynes, who also have a predilection for
wearing the hair rather long because they think it contributes to their
own good looks, while abhorring long hair in a normal male.
[Sidenote: _Femininity—Physical and Psychical._]
I have the feminine slope of shoulders and the feminine angle of arm.
Pelvis is broad and limbs loosely hung, as in a woman, and fingers and
hands rather feminine in their general fineness of texture, comparative
absence of hair, absence of prominent bones and veins, and the softness
and pleasing tint of skin.
Features are small like a woman’s, but nose, lips, and ears large in
proportion, indicating sensuality. I possess mammary glands and sacral
dimples. While my breasts are as large as in some women, the nipples are
small, even for a man. I am small-boned, of delicate build, and my
muscular system is soft. An anatomist of national reputation who gave me
a physical examination at the age of thirty-three, pronounced
approximately one-third the exterior lines of my body those of the
female, and remarked that any one viewing my naked form from the rear
and not knowing my sex, would pronounce me a female.
I was said not to “reason like a man, that is, logically”; to be “fussy
and inclined to peevishness”; and to have “great patience for minute
details.”
I was said to throw a ball, drive a nail, etc., “just like a girl.” A
lead pencil sharpened by me looks as if I had chewed it off with my
teeth. I have always had the feminine instinct of screaming at slight
provocation. When coasting as a child, I always sat upright after the
manner of girls. In snowball fights, in which the girls packed the
snowballs behind the barrier and the boys exposed themselves in
throwing, I instinctively took my place with the girls, the eternal lack
of fitness never dawning upon me.
[Sidenote: _General Physical Traits._]
I might mention here some further characteristics which are not
peculiarly feminine. I am below the average stature for a man, and
unusually light for my volume, weighing only 110 pounds stripped from
the age of nineteen to twenty-five, after I had attained my maximum
height of five feet five inches. My back is much arched. Penis is below
the average size, but entirely normal. Testicles were pronounced of
normal appearance by the surgeon who castrated me at the age of
twenty-eight.
I am of the brunette type. At the age of eighteen, the growth of hair on
my body and limbs became more luxuriant than on the average male, but
after the first shaving off of all this hair in my early fairie days, I
continued to be far less hairy than the average man even after I ceased
the practice of body-shaving.
My lips are a deep red, and my complexion gives the appearance of good
health. My eyes are bistre-brown. I have been told that I look like a
woman around the eyes, and when youthful have been complimented on their
beauty, and my general appearance pronounced not unprepossessing. I have
been pursued by women, and have received three proposals of marriage. In
general the women who have seemed to be attracted toward me have been a
few years older than myself. Havelock Ellis has said (“Sexual
Inversion,” page 140) that “women seem with special frequency to fall in
love with disguised persons of their own sex.” Your author is really a
woman whom Nature disguised as a man.
[Sidenote: _Childlikeness._]
As late as my middle forties my “childlike face” has been commented
upon, and even more my “decidedly childlike manner.” I have been told
that my “face wears expressions not ordinarily seen on persons of [my]
age,” that in the office my childishness is a constant source of mirth
with my business associates, even those who have not had the faintest
idea that I am sexually abnormal and even addicted to fellatio, and that
they watch me while I am working because of my childlike way of doing
things and my childlike expression. According to one of my
business-associate informants, I still had in my middle thirties “the
real childlike naiveté.” The term “grown-up child” has also been
affectionately applied to me by my office associates down to my middle
forties, and they have said that teasing me was “just like teasing a
child.” All through my life, even down to my middle forties, when this
book goes to press, my male school or business associates—most of whom
have not even suspected my inversion—have taken delight in teasing me as
older children a younger child, or as brothers tease their sisters, and
I generally liked to be thus teased.
My office associates in a “provincial” city in my middle thirties were
far more puritanical and unsophisticated than those in New York City of
my middle forties, and never gave any evidence that they even knew of
the existence of fairies. But those of the later period showed such
knowledge, and several times made remarks to me indicating their
suspicions about myself, but I always sought to counteract them. The
knowledge of unusual sexual phenomena is apparently far more widespread
in a great cosmopolitan center like New York than in a “provincial”
city.
[Sidenote: _Infantilism._]
Further, all my life down to my early thirties, my decidedly virile
associates in school and business have babied me. Indeed in some
respects I have never ceased to be a baby mentally. I have wept and
sobbed a great deal all my life. Up to my early thirties, I yearned to
be called “Baby” by decidedly virile males, and to have them treat me as
a baby and a weakling. All through my open career as a fairie, I
conducted myself with intimates in the same way as a baby of two years
towards its mother. Whenever I have seen an infant nursing, I have been
seized with a desire for fellatio cum viro of about my own age, and have
sometimes even experienced an attack of babyish actions, as panting or
cooing in satisfaction, or swayed the head or other parts of the body, a
sort of natural graceful dance of these parts. I seem to have retained
many of the instincts of the babe which are normally outgrown; only
these instincts—the feeling of dependence, the looking for protection,
the yearning to be held in the arms and fellatio (in its etymological
sense)—were, after the age of four, no longer directed to the mother,
but to stalwart males around my own age.
I have aged slowly, successfully passing for twenty-four as a fairie
after I had reached thirty-one, and for twenty-nine in my middle
forties. When I was thirty-two, a lady of forty who did not know my age
remarked of me: “Why he is only a boy!” When I was forty-two, a business
associate of rather long-standing and only twenty-six years of age
remarked that he had “never met any one else so abnormal as [myself] in
respect to the discrepancy between apparent and actual age.” I have
sometimes thought of myself as “the boy who never grew to be a man.”
Before reaching my fortieth year, it was my ambition to preserve my
youth indefinitely. In my middle forties business associates have asked
me for the recipe for perennial youth. Before reaching my fortieth year,
possibly no other male was so horrified as myself at the thought of
waning youth and approaching old age. But now (1918), in my middle
forties, I am reconciled to growing old.
[Sidenote: _Perennial Youth—Æstheticism._]
I am rather vain, and have been guilty of contemplating my reflection in
a mirror. Prior to my middle forties I was of a bashful disposition and
lacked self-confidence, except when following out my fairie instincts.
Down to my middle forties I have been unusually fond of small animals as
pets and have covered their coats with kisses. I likewise am unusually
fond of petting children.
I am devoid of practically all interest in sport. In place of this
interest, I happen to be an æsthete. My home is an art gallery, with
more art objects per cubic foot than I have heard to exist anywhere else
outside an art gallery or shop. Few are better endowed than myself in
respect to the capacity for deriving pleasure from beauty in art and
nature.
[Sidenote: _Polyglottism._]
Almost every department of human knowledge interests me. I like
psychology, sociology, economics, and history least of all, and
languages and philology most of all. Metaphysics and theology also stand
high in my regard, while the natural sciences occupy a middle position.
The common union of sexual inversion and the aptitude of the linguist
has been commented upon by medical writers. I turned out to be perhaps
the best linguist of my college class. From childhood I have had a craze
for the acquisition of foreign languages. I speak two with considerable
fluency, and when having frequent occasion to use them, can carry on a
conversation in two others. Besides these four, I have read quite
extensively in the original the literature of about a dozen foreign
tongues. For more than a decade, I devoted an average of at least ten
hours a week to reading in these numerous foreign languages.
* * * * *
Why am I a sexual invert? I have an explanation to offer, which is
perhaps more fanciful than scientific. Is there not a difference between
the “protoplasm” or cellular tissue of males and of females, which is
the ground of the difference in the physical and psychical development
of the sexes? Must there not be in the protoplasm of males a specific
male “germ” or characteristic, and in the protoplasm of females a
different germ, which are the ground of the opposite development of the
sexes? Just as we know by the taste that the protoplasm of the muscle of
an ox is differently constituted from that of a sheep, likewise must not
that of the male and female homo differ, although in less degree? If
through a surgical operation the breast from a male infant could be
grafted in the proper place on a female infant, and the breast from a
female infant on a male infant, the two individuals, as they became
adult, would develop physically along the lines of his or her own sex
except the grafted breast. That of the girl would remain flat, that of
the boy would develop a mammary gland and become elevated into a mons.
They each have on them a patch of the tissue of the opposite sex. In the
passive invert there may exist one or more such patches from birth.
[Sidenote: _Cause of Inversion._]
According to the author’s theory,—whether any individual shall be a male
or a female depends on the result of a battle in the embryo between the
female corpuscles or germs of the egg and the male of the spermatozoa.
From some cause, perhaps the relative state of vitality of the secretory
sexual glands at the time of the formation of the particular egg and
spermatozoon, either the female germs or the male germs happen to be the
more vigorous, and determine the sex of the unborn. If the fœtus
develops into a female, it is because the female germs have devoured the
male. For some reason, in exceptional cases, the more vigorous set of
cells have not succeeded in devouring the other set entirely, and both
kinds coexist in different parts of the same individual throughout his
existence. In a male there may be only a single patch of female
tissue—that is, tissue dominated in its development by the presence of
the female bacteria—about the cheeks and neck, rendering him beardless,
but with masculine habits of mind and the male sexual instinct. To
constitute a passive invert, the brain, the physical basis of the
psychical nature, must be composed of female tissue, must be a “female
brain.”
[Sidenote: _Female Brain in Male Body._]
Can it be denied that the brain of a male is fundamentally different
from that of a female, although in outward appearance they are
practically alike? The psychical nature of a female is radically
different from that of a male, consequently the fundamental nature of
certain brain cells of the female must be as different from that of
corresponding cells of the male as the psychical nature of a woman is
different from that of a man, and as the corpus of a woman is different
from that of a man. How can one explain why a six-year-old boy (the
author) should class himself as a girl, give himself a girl’s name,
fight against his parents’ course of bringing him up as a boy, and
grieve because he could not be brought up as a girl, except on the
assumption that the cells of his brain were identical with the cells of
a girl’s brain and fundamentally different from those of a normal boy?
If a surgeon could interchange the brains of a boy and of a girl, your
author believes that the boy would ever afterward feel himself to be a
girl, and the girl feel herself to be a boy. But it would be nearer the
truth to say that with the implanting of the brain of the opposite sex,
the male and female souls were also transposed. We would have an
instance of a male human being with a perfect female body except the
brain—an artificial amazon. Similarly, a female human being with a
perfect male body except the brain—an artificial androgyne. In the
natural androgyne, the female brain was formed in the male corpus before
birth. There are likely, as in the case of your author, to be other
patches of female tissue in other parts of the corpus.
[Sidenote: _Oscar Wilde’s Life Story._]