Also I am someway the Lesbian woman.
It is but one phase--one which slightly touches each other phase I
own. And in it I am poetic and imaginative and worldly and amorous
and gentle and true and strong and weak and ardent and shy and
sensitive and generous and morbid and sweet and fine and false.
The Lesbian sex-strain as an effect is reckoned a prenatal
influence--and, as I conceive, it comes also of conglomerate
incarnations and their reactions and flare-backs. Of some thus
bestowed it makes strange hard highly emotional indefinably vicious
women, turbulent and brilliant of mind, mystically overborne,
overwrought of heart. They are marvels of perverse barbaric energy.
They make with men varied flinty friendships, but to each other they
are friends, lovers, victims, preyers, masters, slaves: the flawed
fruits of one oblique sex-inherence.
Except two breeds--the stupid and the narrowly feline--all women have
a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures
refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant
intensive personal taste, the _flair_ of inner-sex, in the tenderest
friendships of women.
For myself, there is no vice in my Lesbian vein. I am too personally
fastidious, too temperamentally dishonest, too eerily wavering to
walk in direct repellent roads of vice even in freest moods. There
is instead a pleasant degeneracy of attitude more debauching to
my spirit than any mere trivial _traînant_ vice would be. And a
fascination in it tempers my humanness with an evil-feeling power.
I have lightly kissed and been kissed by Lesbian lips in a way
which filled my throat with a sudden subtle pagan blood-flavored
wistfulness, ruinous and contraband: breath of bewildering demoniac
winds smothering mine.
Lesbian essence is of mental quality. There are aggressively endowed
women whose minds are so bent that they instinctively nurture
any element in themselves which is blighting and ill-omened and
calamitous in effect. There are some to which the natural inhibition
of their own sex is lure and challenge. There are some so solitary by
destiny and growth that the first woman-friend who comes into their
adolescence with sympathy and understanding wins a passionate Lesbian
adoration the deeper for being unrealized. There are some so roiledly
giftedly incongruous in trait that they are prone to catch and hold
any additional twisted shreds afloat in human air-currents.
Each of those influences biases the Mind of me, which is none the
less a clear-visioned mind which rates no thing a truth which it
knows to be a lie: though it batten on the lie.
--often here and there around this human world the twisted and
perverted and strongly false concepts are the strong actual working
facts and the straight road is myth--myth--existent but in visions--