lives down to death under the obsession (due to misinterpreted biblical
texts) that the gratification of his unusual instinct is the most
heinous of sins, and spends all his days, in which God meant that he
should rejoice, in mourning over his sexual ardor (for which he does not
realize he is irresponsible), in crucifying his body continuously, with
its affections and lusts (as commanded by the anaphrodite, St. Paul),
and is thereby, throughout adult life, on the borderline of insanity. I
have heard sermons from such clergymen and was moved to pity as they
were shedding tears in the pulpit and rendering themselves unpopular,
both with their fellow preachers who are sexually full-fledged and with
the laity, because their aspect was always that of tragedy. I advise
that all such melancholiacs immediately ask that they be honorably
deposed from the ministry. As a result, their lives would be happy and
satisfying.
The vast majority of preachers are manly. I have a higher respect for
that profession than for any other. If it had not been for my
androgynism, I would have myself entered it. It would be well for the
Church authorities to question, as to their sexuality, all candidates
for beginning a theological course, and in the kindest manner advise
adolescents in the least bisexual to choose some other profession
because of the public’s misunderstanding of this phenomenon. [Sidenote:
_Why Androgynes Are Hated._] Sexual conduct is not primarily a voluntary
matter or an ethical question, but rooted in anatomy, physiology, and
psychology. The androgyne who yearns to preach the Gospel can do so
through the printed word. Because of St. Paul’s sex teaching (that of an
anaphrodite) the profession of “the cloth” is rightly open only to
anaphrodites and the mildly virile. The more virile are likewise
excluded because it is next to impossible for them to abstain from
adultery.
Why are androgynes so hated? Primarily because the leaders of thought
have always identified them with the men of ancient Sodom (mistakenly,
because the Sodomites were full-fledged males) and historians have
mistakenly (because they never met androgynes personally and were taught
in their boyhood to hate them with all their heart, soul, mind, and
strength) laid upon them all the blame for the decline and fall of
nations, and declared that therefore effeminacy or androgynism is a type
of moral depravity to be crushed mercilessly. Better that some thousands
of androgynes be deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
than that the general welfare of the nation be imperilled!
Androgynes—they argue—are unavoidably the scape-goats of the race.
I answer: In the first place, such imperilment is only a _figment of the
imagination_. This superstition can be disposed of by merely asking to
what extent the welfare of humanity was imperiled by the sex functioning
of the arch-androgynes listed in chapter III? In the second place,
androgynism is not moral depravity or degeneracy. I myself—an extreme
type of androgyne—spring from the most puritan stock. I was brought up
to consider that on Sunday, reading [Sidenote: _Androgynism Not
Degeneracy._] anything but Christian doctrine or walking a hundred feet
for mere pleasure were heinous sins. In addition to springing from the
most puritan stock, both my paternal and maternal stock are of unusually
strong build. A paternal and also a maternal uncle were professional
athletes. A brother was the champion athlete of my native village. My
stock and early environment are indeed the last that any one would pick
out as likely to bring into the world a homosexual or androgyne as a
result of moral degradation.[13] My androgynism has, however, made me
myself rather lilliputian. With one exception, I grew up to be the
smallest man of my paternal and maternal families.
It is not necessary to crush androgynes in order to guard against the
spread of effeminacy. Effeminacy, in the sense of androgynism, does not
spread by example. It is entirely congenital. Only a physical male born
with quasi-feminine predilections would adopt the role of a female after
becoming adult. An androgyne’s predilections and practices are regarded
with such repugnance by all full-fledged males that none would stoop to
them unless constrained by instinct.
Why imprison and murder the androgyne any more than the deaf-mute? The
former is no more abnormal than the latter; no more degenerate; no more
depraved. It is unfortunate that the human [Sidenote: _Not Cause of
Decline of Nations._] race is handicapped with either of these defective
classes. But the androgyne deserves only pity, the same as the
deaf-mute.
_Effeminacy in an entirely different sense, and a kind that spreads
rapidly through example, is the actual cause of the decline and fall of
nations_; in the sense of the weakening of the moral fibre of the males
of the upper crust or ruling class through their having grown overfond
of ease and pleasure and lost their joy in industry and justifiable
fighting. A neighboring nation of superior moral fibre is quick to learn
of such effemination and subjugates the decadent one. But these
_effeminates’_ fondness for the gentle sex has in no way declined.
Generally it has greatly augmented. Witness the decline and fall of the
Greek, Roman, and Turkish empires.
Where has androgynism been more prevalent than formerly among the
American aborigines? Probably because the tribes were constantly
underfed. Whenever a male arrived at puberty, the weapons of the warrior
and the cooking vessels of the squaw were ceremoniously placed before
him that he might choose his future social status. A not inconsiderable
number of adolescents (because congenital androgynes) always chose the
culinary utensils and passed the rest of their lives as squaws, the hair
of the beard being plucked out as fast as it showed itself, and the
costume being that of the female sex. Surely savage tribes continuously
on the war-path can not be accused of degenerative effeminacy!
About one-third the soul-mates of androgynes who have come under my
observation have been voluntary common soldiers or blue-jackets. I am
far [Sidenote: _Androgynism Nationally Healthful._] from being the only
androgyne who has gravitated toward the “supreme men” whose voluntary
profession has as its aim the killing of their fellow man. Androgynism
appears to go hand in hand with militarism rather than _vice versa_.
Havelock Ellis says that homosexuality is particularly common among the
Sikhs, the most military of the Hindustan races.
It is more likely that the emergence of androgynism is a sign of
national health. The ultra-brilliant Age of Pericles surpassed all other
periods in the recognition and influence of androgynism, which promotes
art and general culture. The androgyne, being a combination of man and
woman in a single individual, has a wider view of life than the
full-fledged man or woman. He possesses, in a measure, the mental
qualities peculiar to each sex. That is why the Shakespeare-Author knew
both the masculine and the feminine mind better than any other writer.
Such duality is the reason artistic genius crops out far more frequently
among androgynes than among the sexually full-fledged. The amalgamated
man-woman nature gets nearest to sentiment and emotion—to the soul of
art.[14]
Why do cultured androgynes carefully conceal their quasi-feminine sexual
predilections? Why did Angelo not publish any of his homosexual sonnets?
Why did Raphael not proclaim on the housetops the happenings in his
house at night? Androgynes hide their sexual predilections and
practices, not because of consciousness of personal degeneracy, but
because [Sidenote: _Race Suicide._] grossly misunderstood by the
sexually full-fledged. By exception, Oscar Wilde was open and above
board, and was therefore shut up in prison.
Only bigoted pseudo-scientists have pronounced androgynes degenerates.
Only mediæval medicine, not modern medicine. Androgynism is merely an
instance of arrested development; or possibly of atavism—an attempt on
the part of Nature to return to the original hermaphrodism of man’s
early antecedents. The androgyne who follows the dictates of Nature is
not a whit more degenerate morally than the full-fledged man who
marries. It is only the fallible _mores_ which make the full-fledged
think that a person with apparently male pudenda who impersonates a
female is infinitely below themselves morally. Were Socrates, Plato,
Angelo, Raphael, and Francis Bacon monsters of depravity? Ought the
Shakespeare-Author to have been buried alive by his hare-brained fellow
citizens before he had a chance to pen a line?
The chief charge against androgynes is that they are guilty of “the
awful crime of race suicide.” But it is the fault of Nature alone that
the ultra-androgyne is incapable of doing his part in the perpetuation
of the race.
The cultured androgyne, knowing his irresistible instincts are harmless
to his soul-mate, is unable to discern in them any transgression against
ethics or against God.
But a very small proportion of adult androgynes have been guilty of a
lamentable transgression because finding themselves in a tight place:
that is, recourse to boys under puberty. The prudery of full-fledged men
has hitherto prohibited androgynes from [Sidenote: _Androgynes’ One
Offence._] scientific knowledge of themselves. Until thirty years ago,
American and British public opinion would not tolerate the publication
of the facts about androgynism even for circulation among the medical
profession. Havelock Ellis’s _Sexual Inversion_, the earliest published
book in the English language on androgynism, was promptly suppressed by
the British government thirty years ago. I myself had to bend the knee
for eighteen years to medical publishers before my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN
ANDROGYNE was fed into the printing-press in 1918.
Thus, because full-fledged men have interdicted to cultured androgynes
the means of understanding themselves and knowledge of how they ought to
pass their lives, some—particularly those who have achieved places of
honor, because androgynes of lower rank do not need to be so crafty in
hiding their terrible secret from the heartless world—have ultimately
been revealed guilty of recourse to the immature (because they could not
screw up their courage to disclose their abnormality to an older and
wiser male). But on account of the tyranny of the full-fledged, these
erring androgynes merit mercy. Their offences have probably not been at
all harmful to the immature. They are merely asserted to be so by men
unable to accept any scientific results except those inculcated by
mediæval savants. But this one offence of androgynes will be a thing of
the past when they are permitted recourse to books which explain the
riddle of their lives, and when full-fledged men read such books in
order that they may do justice to Nature’s step-children.
As already stated, ultra-androgynes, having a [Sidenote: _Androgynes Are
Goody-Goodies._] woman’s psyche, are goody-goodies. Indeed
goody-goodiness may be regarded as their most marked characteristic. For
this reason, in France, they are called “little Jesuses” (_petits
jesus_) notwithstanding that the more extreme are public
female-impersonators in resorts of ill repute. Ultra-androgynes are
incapable of doing any real harm. If all the human race were as
harmless, this world would be a far better place in which to live.
The cultured androgyne is a desirable citizen and a desirable member of
any circle. While ultra-androgynism makes its victims physically
weak—like a woman—it has no deteriorating effect morally or mentally.
The usual charge of gross immorality is merely a relic of mediæval
bigotry.
It matters not, however, that androgynes are absolutely innocuous
practically and ethically. Do they not offend the _æsthetic_ sense of
the majority of mankind? What better cause for grinding them under one’s
heel?
And this bitter persecution that has been the lot of some androgynes has
rendered them misanthropes. Not their androgynism _per se_. A mildly
androgynous acquaintance—an intellectual giant of the highest moral
character except for his irresponsible and innocuous passive
pederasty—is, as a result of society’s shutting him up in prison for the
five years of his intellectual prime, a chronic and bitter reviler of
the Church. Because zealous churchmen were responsible for the wrecking
of his life through their misunderstanding of the biblical teaching on
homosexuality.
But in general we androgynes, possessing the long-suffering feminine
psyche, are resigned to being [Sidenote: _God Will Avenge Androgynes._]
ground to powder by the hypocritical world. It is better to suffer than
to inflict suffering. Though the world despise and ostracise us, the
All-Knowing is still our refuge, and another life awaits us where
conditions will be more just. The bigoted and pharisaical judges and
juries who have haled hundreds of innocent androgynes off to prison
should remember the Old Testament doctrine: “‘Vengeance is mine!’ saith
Jehovah.” Those who incarcerate the innocent in this world will in the
next have to serve time in the darkest dungeons of a just God.
* * * * *
Note to Illustration Facing Page 53.
My father was a reversionary pure Alpine, but his brothers were
decidedly Nordic. My mother is a reversionary pure Nordic, while most
of her brothers and sisters were predominantly Alpine. Evidences of
Mediterranean blood in my paternal or maternal stock are doubtful. I
myself am predominantly Alpine, particularly evident in my short
stature and generally brunette features. But the Nordic cross has
given me a rather ruddy complexion and “browned” my chevelure. My
beard hair is jet black, but always clean-shaven, if not eradicated. I
am of English, Scotch, Dutch, German, and French descent. During
adulthood, I have always considered the highest human beauty to reside
in adolescent Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans of approximately
pure Mediterranean stock.
[Illustration:
The “Fairie Boy” Ready to Set Out on Life’s Journey
(See note on page 52.)
]
Part Two:
How the Author Came to Be a Female-Impersonator
(PART TWO summarizes my pre-nineteen life and my physical and mental
traits for those not reading my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE.
Particularly for details of purely medical interest, the scientist is
referred to that work, since the present volume is designed primarily
for the general reader. PART TWO, however, presents many facts not in
mind when I wrote the earlier work over twenty years ago.)
I. Reveries Suggested by My Infancy.
Connecticut, famous for its wooden nutmegs and other freak products,
gave to the world, in 1874, one of its half-dozen most widely known
girl-boys.
My mother has said that I was the greatest cry-baby of her eleven
children. I have really never outgrown this characteristic. Still in my
late forties, I occasionally weep bitterly for a whole hour.
Up to my eighth birthday, timidity made me reluctant to leave my
mother’s side to play with other children. Sticking very close to
“mother” as a child, and extraordinary devotion to her when adult are
common earmarks of androgynism. I have known of no other reputed male so
devoted to his mother, even down to his late forties, as I. My mother is
still, by [Sidenote: _My Life-Long Soul-mate (in Dreamland)._] a kind
Providence, spared to me. I frequently weep bitterly at the thought of
her dying and can not imagine living when she is in the grave. I knew an
androgyne who, in his sixties, died from grief a few days after the
death of his mother around ninety.
In my early childhood, only one other person attracted me in a
comparable fashion—a neighbor’s burly boy, F’ank, five years older than
myself. All my life I have seen him at least several times a year, since
he has remained a close friend down to the time when we both count about
half-a-century of life. His influence is still strong, although sexual
relations ceased when I was seven. He was one of the most amorous of
boys. From my third to seventh year, he sought me several times a week.
Perhaps he also embraced every chance for heterosexual relations—common
among the children under twelve in the “best set” of the village, among
whom I was privileged to be brought up. And yet all these contaminated
youngsters—excepting myself—turned out fairly virtuous adults. The
ultra-amorous and active pederast F’ank became, when adult, exclusively
heterosexual and quite promiscuous, being of the tremendously virile
type. But around thirty, he settled down into absolute monogamy. He,
however, never had a child. At past fifty, he stands at perfection in
health, strength, and morality.
I say they “turned out”! That is, so far as I ever heard. But they would
all have said of me that I passed through my adult life a cold
anaphrodite! One can never know! Some might secretly have been addicted
to venery as much as I. But they betrayed no external sign. Neither have
I.
[Sidenote: _Most Sheltered Two “Went to the Bad.”_]
But while all those who indulged in “nastiness” before reaching their
teens grew up, so far as I was able to observe, into men and women above
reproach, two of “my set”—those who were “kids” at the same time within
a radius of five hundred feet of my own paternal roof, the several
homosexualist schoolmates elsewhere described having lived outside that
radius—the two that had been most carefully brought up and shielded by
their mother from corruption by other children, almost the only two that
were sexually unblemished as children, “went to the bad” immediately on
arrival at puberty. They were brother and sister—the only children of a
wealthy, pious couple. The brother became a chronic dypsomaniac and
roué. The sister, a beautiful and brilliant girl who had enjoyed a
college education, died before thirty as a result of excesses in her
chosen profession of _fille de joie_ in New York City. The mother died
of a broken heart in her early forties. The father, previously active in
church work, became despondent on seeing both his children “go to the
bad,” took to drink, and died a sot.
Debauchery was born in these two children, for they had never missed
Bible school up to their middle teens. They were unusually innocent
prior to puberty. But religious teaching failed to convince them. They
thought the “goody-goodies” were trying to rob them of the pleasures of
life through false representations. I believe both could have been saved
from shipwreck of life if, at puberty, a book, scientific, not
goody-goody, could have been put into their hands, demonstrating that
alcoholic and venereal excesses bring on ruin and often early death.
Children inclined to dissipation on arrival at puberty are far more
likely to heed the pronouncements [Sidenote: _Inherited Lechery._] of a
physician than of a Bible school teacher.
* * * * *
In that same immediate puritan circle in my childhood’s village, I have
lately observed a similar case in the _next_ generation. I have known
well a certain gentleman of my own age since we were boys together. He
is of the tremendously virile type and sowed his wild oats as hardly
another young blood in the village. But in his middle twenties he was
“soundly converted” in a puritan church (to which I myself belonged) and
married one of its purest daughters. In his subsequent life, he attained
rare success financially and socially. He has had only two children—both
girls around twenty years of age at the date of writing. I know the
family intimately. I have direct information that both girls are “fast
going to the bad” (notwithstanding they have always been under only
puritan influences) and that the father has “backslidden,” evidently
being no longer able to restrain his _de facto_ polygamous instincts.
The purest of wives is heart-broken and on the borderline of insanity.
_Every one says_ the girls and their father are wilfully depraved and
their puritan community has already begun to treat them as outcasts. _I
say_ the girls inherited their craze for venery from their father, in
whom likewise it was inborn. He is a noble man in every other respect.
All three are largely irresponsible. They are, by birth, not fitted for
the puritan society in which they were brought up. Under present social
ideas and usages, the only outlet for the girls is prostitution and the
consequent early loss of health soon terminating in death. But their
only fault is [Sidenote: _Present Social Rules Inadequate._]
nymphomania. If society had some way by which it could bring about the
satisfaction of these needs of these cultured girls, the latter could be
saved from the shipwreck of life and be useful members of their
community. In my own life I have proved that Christian conversion and
absorption in the teachings of the Bible can not save one from innate
nymphomania. I could suggest a means of salvation for these girls, but
dare not. If only the leaders of thought did not prescribe an identic
sex life for every daughter of Eve, although Nature has created them
with such diversity along these lines! If only the leaders of thought
permitted _real_ sexual problems (as well as namby-pamby) to be
investigated, as all other phenomena are searched out to the very
bottom! If only the leaders of thought permitted the truth to be told
about sex instead of continuing to propagate the hypocrisies and
fabrications regnant down from the Dark Ages!
* * * * *
I have read statements of puritans of the dreadful results that will
follow the common sex relations of children under twelve in city
tenements. I have spent a large part of my life in rural districts as
well as in great cities. My observations are that conditions are the
same among children of both types of environment. Numerous youngsters
receive their sex initiation before twelve. But, unless carried to
excess, it does not seem to have any bad influence, particularly after
they become adults. The probability is that the same practice has ruled
among small children for thousands of years. It is Nature.
And the context moves me to remark: It turned [Sidenote: _Providence’s
Favoritism Toward Author._] out that of my several hundred schoolmates
(prior to the university) I achieved in adult life the highest success.
Not as a business man or money-maker, in which line I did not excel. Not
in art or politics. But in the following fields, both individually and
combined: Intellectual and general cultural development; enjoyment of
(but not adeptness in) all species of art; breadth and depth of life and
knowledge of human nature; enjoyment of the society of my fellow humans,
particularly sexual opposites; and, last but not least, fame, or, as
some would prefer to have me say, notoriety. For I feel that I, as an
extreme type of the bisexual, am doomed to live in the minds of savants
for scores of years after every one of my hundreds of schoolmates, and
my other hundreds of university associates, are eternally forgotten.
[=Note Added in Galley=: I omitted to mention that I have also far
excelled in suffering inflicted by man and in sorrow—which two items
together have about counterbalanced the advantages enumerated.]
But I have achieved this last element (terrestrial immortality) of the
highest success in life denied to all my wide circles of childhood and
adolescence through my “going to the bad”—as the saying is. But though
that was the fate marked out for me by the Architect of the Universe, I
was actually able to restrain my “evil” propensities so as not to make
shipwreck of life. My girl-boy intimate described in the early part of
the second chapter following did make, decidedly, shipwreck of his life,
as have many other girl-boys. My salvation lay in practicing
_relatively_[15] [Sidenote: _Temperance the Only Salvation._] extreme
temperance in the indulgence of the sexual propensities except during my
Bowery period described in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE and RIDDLE
OF THE UNDERWORLD. Extreme temperance in indulgence of any fleshly
appetite is, for all humanity, the sole means of salvation from the
shipwreck of earthly life. Overindulgence of any appetite defeats its
own end.
Thus while nearly all other girl-boys are doomed to be forgotten by
mankind a few years after their bodies return “dust to dust,” I myself
am—I feel—destined to live in the memory of savants primarily because of
my extensive self-restraint, and secondarily because of my excelling the
other girl-boys in innate brain power.