the Bible, teach that the invert has no rights! I myself have only
deep-rooted contempt for him! Every fibre in my body, every cell in my
tissues, cries out in loud protest against him! He is the lowest of the
low! I dare say that at the bottom of your heart, Plum, you are
thoroughly ashamed of the confession you made a moment ago?”
Plum: “By no means. I have learned to look upon bisexuality as a
scientist and a philosopher. But you have just shown yourself to be
still groping in the Dark Ages.
“No, Mr. Fairsea, I can hardly bring myself to be ashamed of the
handiwork of God. A bisexual has no more reason than a full-fledged man
or woman to be ashamed of his God-given sexuality.
“You appear, Mr. Fairsea, to be unable to get my point of view. All in
my anatomy and psyche that you gloat in calling depraved and
contemptible I have been used to since my early teens. If your views
have any justification in science or ethics, I am unable to see it.
Although it almost breaks my heart to be made an outcast and penniless
by yourself, I prefer that lot, knowing I am in the right, than to be in
the wrong even if sitting, as yourself, in the chair of president of the
X—— Company.
“How do you define ‘depraved’, Mr. Fairsea? [Sidenote: _Reasons for
Non-Segregation._] If in such a way as to exclude Socrates, Plato,
Michael Angelo, and Raphael, then you exclude me also.”
Fairsea: “But the phenomenon works against the multiplication of the
human race. Nature, with this in view, instilled in all but the scum of
mankind this utter disgust for the invert. To the end of the continued
existence of the race, he must be condemned to a life of unsatisfied
longing. For this reason he should be imprisoned for life, not for only
ten or twenty years as the statutes now provide!
“We strictly segregate diphtheria and scarlet fever, Plum. Why should we
not similarly quarantine against inversion?”
Plum: “Because there is a vast difference. Contagious disease, if not
strictly segregated, would occasion death and acute suffering to many
additional persons. WHEREAS THE BISEXUALS’ BEING AT LIBERTY OCCASIONS
NOT THE LEAST DETRIMENT TO ANY INDIVIDUAL, NOR TO THE RACE AS A WHOLE.
“A second reason: The quarantining of contagious disease is only a
matter of shutting up a few persons for a few weeks in their own homes.
It causes no serious privation or suffering. Whereas the segregation of
bisexuals would affect for a life-time tens of thousands of our most
useful members of society. It would occasion, among these already
accursed by Nature, additional intense mental suffering, despair, and
suicide.
“Any one who can suggest the latter segregation is unable to see farther
away than the end of his nose.
“And as to race suicide, Mr. Fairsea. You should be the very last to
lecture anybody on that subject! You are the father of only two children
and have put [Sidenote: _Leaders of Thought Ignore Evidence._] three
wives under the sod through your beastly, excessive demands!
“Can it be that you shut your eyes to all evidence? Do ocular proofs
count for nothing? Hasn’t the human race survived the best decades of
classic Greece? While the Greeks are acknowledged by all modern
historians to have attained the highest development of mind and body
ever known, they at the same time gave to the women-men who happened to
be born among them—as among all races of all ages—an honorable place.
And by far more place, both in their personal and social life, than in
the case of any other nation of the ancient or modern world.”
Fairsea: “But I had hoped that the human race had evolved above this
phenomenon! I hate to believe it of the human race! Because the
phenomenon lowers humanity down to the lowest levels of animal life!
I——”
Plum: “So does eating!”
Fairsea: “I detest it! My disgust is innermost and deepseated! To begin
now to show any mercy to the invert, after having for two thousand years
confined him in dungeons, burned him at the stake, and buried him alive,
would be a backward step in the evolution of the race!
“Plum, the invert is not fit to live with the rest of mankind! He should
be shunned as the lepers of biblical times! If generously allowed
outside prison walls, the law should at least ordain that the word
‘UNCLEAN’ be branded in his forehead, and should compel him to cry:
‘UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!’ as he walks the streets, lest his very brushing
against decent people contaminate them!”
[Sidenote: _Bias Rules in Sex Domain._]
Plum: “All that is only bigotry and bias! Nearly every man’s conduct is
still governed by bias!”
Fairsea: “I even acknowledge that it is bias! For bias is justifiable in
matters of sex!... You say that medical writers have declared inverts
_irresponsible_! That declaration proves that they know nothing about
them! You say inverts are assaulted and blackmailed! They deserve to be!
It would be wrong for any one at all to show any leniency! Their
existence ought to be made so intolerable as to drive them to lead their
sexual life along the lines followed by all other men! Your case, Plum,
fills me with such disgust that I could not rest knowing you were around
the office!”
* * * * *
Roland brought the conversation to a close: “Mankind are so steeped in
egotism! Whatever they are not personally inclined to is always horribly
immoral! Whatever they are instinctively inclined to is always supremely
right!
“Why not go to the root of the matter and take revenge on Nature,
instead of her irresponsible and pitiable step-children? Nature alone is
to blame for the existence of sexual cripples. Why not marshal every son
and daughter of Adam for the work of honeycombing the entire crust of
the earth with galleries to be filled with dynamite? And then set off
the world-wide charge simultaneously so as to destroy all terrestrial
Nature at one coup, humanity included. This would constitute man’s sole
_logical_ vengeance on bisexuality.
“BUT MAN IS TRULY A PASSIONAL, RATHER THAN A RATIONAL, BEING.”
[Sidenote: _The Fairie Boy._]
VI. Thoughts Suggested by the “Hermaphroditoi” in General.
I associated with the hermaphroditoi less than a year. Paresis Hall then
happened to be raided by the police and the hermaphroditoi—who happened
to be the police’s chief quarry—afterward gave the resort a wide berth
for fear of arrest.
The hermaphroditoi numbered about a score. All were highly cultured
ultra-androgynes varying in age from eighteen to forty. Half-a-score
have given me their life-story. But the careers of only two were
particularly tragic. I have therefore, in PARTS FOUR and FIVE, detailed
the life-stories of these two as nearly as I can remember, having of
course taken no notes at the time.
In the lives of some hermaphroditoi, nothing particularly remarkable had
ever transpired beyond their chronic female-impersonation sprees. For
example, Roland Reeves, the most brilliant, was, in every act, moderate
and sensible. He was of the type of cross-dressing androgyne that
possesses little animality. He was by no means a coquette—as were most
of the hermaphroditoi. People would say that he had more self-restraint
and moral backbone than the coquettes. But my unusually wide
observations have taught me that sexual moderation is as a rule due to
weak instinct when not to lack of opportunity.
[Illustration:
The Author at Thirty-four
(Amateur Photo)
]
A prime regulator of the sexual intensity of the adult androgyne—as
probably of all humans—consists [Sidenote: _Parents, Take Time for Your
Children!_] of the influences toward sexual expression during childhood.
My own adult career had its prototype in my intense fairie-ism from two
until seven. Sexual impressions of early childhood have often a powerful
influence down through middle life. In large measure they determine the
course to be taken by the adult sexual life. PARENTS CAN NOT BE TOO
WATCHFUL OF THE SECRET PRACTICES OF SMALL CHILDREN, AND OF THE INFLUENCE
OF SERVANTS.
Androgynes, during childhood, are particularly prone to fall into bad
habits (fellatio; or pathicism in pædicatio) because always confined
with their sexual opposites. What would one expect of the chastity of a
high-strung girl of twelve marooned for a summer on an island with
merely a dozen ultra-virile youths? That is the identical situation of
youthful androgynes.
As a rule, when an androgyne reaches the middle thirties, the instinct
to dress and pose as a mademoiselle gradually becomes feeble. Age sobers
many and they become practically asexual. I have observed the same thing
in ultra-virile men during my twelve years career as their mignon. Their
craze for the opposite sex is strongest from twenty to twenty-five (just
at the time when Christian custom interdicts the propensity) after which
it gradually declines. It is the same with animals. Poulterers cut off
the heads of all but “adolescent” roosters. I have myself been a Guinea
pig fancier. I discovered that the males gradually lose their virility
at middle age.
Indeed I have observed that as androgynes approach fifty, they sometimes
become more masculine than they ever were, and will even marry. It seems
that in rare cases mild virility supplants sexual [Sidenote: _“Change of
Life” (Climacteric)._] passivity as fifty is approached. On the other
hand, I have heard of mildly virile men marrying in their twenties,
begetting children, and only after reaching middle age, becoming
somewhat sissified, acquiring _horror feminæ_, like ultra-androgynes,
and finally seeking the latter’s sexual role.
These changes in ultra-androgynes and in the mildly virile are like
menopause in woman. There is a turning point in the sex life. The
hitherto passive ultra-androgyne occasionally becomes active. The mildly
virile occasionally develops a quasi-feminine leaning. The latter class
were possibly mildly androgynous by birth, but the idiosyncrasies did
not come to the front of the mental life until the climacteric
corresponding to menopause.
In my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, I said nothing about my personal
“menopause” because it came at about the close of my writing that book,
and I did not recognize it as such until after the latter’s publication.
On page 197, I described how, at the age of forty-two, my weight,
stripped, within six weeks, jumped from 133 to 160. For ten years, it
had been stationary at 133. For the following five years, it has been
stationary at 160. I now attribute the change to “menopause.” Moreover,
a few months after the increase in weight, I kept company with a young
lady for half-a-year. I drifted into it almost unconsciously and
involuntarily. I paid her gallantries immeasurably beyond any other
incident of my life. I even regarded a Platonic marriage as a
possibility, though not a probability.
But I was too extreme an androgyne, in addition to my having been
castrated. The virility that occasionally [Sidenote: _My Personal
Menopause._] for the first time surges up in ultra-androgynes at “the
change of life” could not go very far with me. After six months, I
renounced the pseudo-courtship entirely, with disgust at the feminine
sex, but particularly with the young female who had done her best to
rope me in as her husband. For she did most of the courting. I merely
let myself almost fall into her trap.
* * * * *
Even in my twenty-second year—the period when I belonged to the Cercle
Hermaphroditos—I had already written a brief AUTOBIOGRAPHY. But the
bigotry of cultured man made me wait twenty-three years for publication.
Already—because I happened to be an ultra-androgyne myself—I had
selected androgynism as my special field in science and literature. I
therefore desired to collect all the data possible, although not yet
having acquired the habit of note-making.
In order to draw out atypic individuals—particularly androgynes—I made
it a practice first to reveal my own secrets. This frankness generally
led them to confide to me what they never breathed to another—people in
general, and particularly cultured androgynes, having an absurd
reluctance to discuss the sexual side of their lives. (Androgynes for
fear of persecution and prosecution, not by reason of prudery.) And the
human race has suffered so greatly as a result of this obsession!
When God created human nature, his handiwork was so horrible that
mankind, as soon as they reached the stage of civilization, have thrown
a blanket over their own nature, after the example of Shem and
[Sidenote: _Man Ashamed of His Nature._] Japheth with their father
Noah’s drunken nakedness. Cultured man has interdicted human nature’s
coming out into the light of day because of its inexpressible ugliness.
Even in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world, next to
nothing is known about human sexuality. At least with the exception of a
handful of sexologists. Each individual simply knows his own sexual
life, refuses to divulge it because of its “nastiness,” and is unable to
overcome his shame to inquire whether other humans (men and women,
respectively) are of like passions with himself. He assumes yes. But the
truth of the matter is that on the sexual side of life, every individual
is _sui generis_. And if a man or woman does chance to discover that an
associate is different “from _me_,” right away he or she is crazy to
murder the associate for daring to be different! On no side of life is
charity so much needed as on the sexual.
But Frank White (or Eunice)—whom, out of deference to the predilections
of the general reader, I am going to let tell “his-her” own story in
PART FOUR—needed, by exception, little urging to draw him out. He told
me piecemeal. But I hand it on to my readers without a break. Moreover,
I endeavor to reproduce his unconscious hifalutin, Johnsonese style of
expression.
At the time he epitomized his life for me, Frank—Eunice (as he was known
in the Underworld) was a comely blonde around forty, and five feet five
tall. His physique was not noticeably feminine. He possessed merely a
small-boy air and appearance, notwithstanding his hair was nearly white,
though not thin. The [Sidenote: _Frank White Introduced._] beardal
growth was sparse, always clean-shaven, and for special occasions,
eradicated. The amative side of life (“erotic ardor”, as he phrased it)
was his only fault. In leisure hours he could talk of little else than
modern exemplars of adolescent Adonis or Hercules. In this respect he
was one of the two or three extreme hermaphroditoi.
[Illustration:
Bowery, in the Nineteenth Century America’s Main Red-Light Street, and
Stamping-Ground of Frank—Eunice, Angelo—Phyllis, and Ralph
Werther—Jennie June
]
Part Four:
Frank—Eunice
I. Debut as Adult Female-Impersonator.
Ralph, I was ushered into this mundane sphere in the year of our Lord
1854. I was a lucky dog to be brought up on the upper West Side a few
blocks from Central Park [New York City]. As a diminutive urchin, I
dolled myself up in feminine habiliments at every opportunity. Eunice
was my favorite playmate. I opined her appellation the most melodious
that ever impinged upon my eardrums and regretted it was not mine
personally. Whenever I flaunted myself in skirts, I adopted it.
In my early teens, father escorted me to a physician that the latter
might query me concerning my feminine predilections and ridicule me out
of same. Simultaneously father, through severe castigation, imposed a
finis to female-impersonation in my own clique. I therefore commenced,
during periods of special obsession to be a _puella_, the practice of
perambulating the slums, first by daylight, and later after the shades
of night had fallen. During these insensate peregrinations, there would
swarm through my mind visions of flirtations with the ruffians around my
age that I encountered. These “huskies” riveted my gaze. They fascinated
me. But not until the fifth or sixth [Sidenote: _The Pugilists’ Haven._]
peregrination could I screw up courage to insinuate myself into the
confidence of one of these magical intelligences.
I chanced for the first time to run across a Bowery bar-room, the
“Pugilists’ Haven,” which, I had read in the papers, was the rendezvous
of prize-fighters, gamblers, and gunmen [the most desperate type of
gangster who will murder for pay]. The press advocated its obliteration.
Curious that just because of this reputation, I was immediately insane
to enter. For it was unholy ground. I reflected: “In this lowest of
dives, they may accept me as a _puella_, although superficially a boy.”
Because all early influences, Ralph, had made me opine that taking the
part of a girl was the very lowest thing a boy could descend to. I
further pondered: “Between the luxurious mansion of _pater familias_ and
this dingy dive, give me the latter! For here alone I might be able to
pass as a _puella_. In my own cultured, Christian circle,
female-impersonation is castigated. But would not the attitude of the
offscouring of our mundane sphere—the Pugilists’ Haven gunmen—be
different?”
And how crazy I was to insinuate myself with the adolescent gunmen, whom
I had only read about! The very supposition of their presence just
within that latticed door attracted me as a potent magnet snatches steel
filings to itself. I passed and repassed the dive, continuously
imagining what would transpire if I should penetrate this unholy of
unholies, and having delectable visions of every species of flirtation
with the demigods who made the saloon their rendezvous.
I finally emboldened myself to thrust aside a leaf of the latticed
portal. It was my first appearance inside [Sidenote: “_A Cat in a
Strange Garret._”] a saloon, and I never had tasted any intoxicant. In
my diffidence and ignorance of the proper course to pursue, I subsided
into the first vacant fauteuil. For, on one side, against the wall, were
rude, wooden fauteuils, almost all occupied by middle-aged cherry-nosed
individuals. Extending the full length of the other side was a bar
crowded with fast-looking younger men, each with a glass before him.
Doubtless because of my verdancy, several commenced eyeing me, making
remarks, and laughing. The nearest bar-tender immediately inquired:
“Doll-baby, what’ll yer have ter drink?”
“Nothing.”
“Jackass! Every bloke dat comes inter dis here joint has ter take
somethink!”
“Then give me a glass of beer,” I replied hardly above a whisper. In my
embarrassment, I imbibed the beverage almost at a swallow. That gave all
the witnesses hysterics. They assured me: “We only sip it!” They
addressed me as “Siss!” “Pet!” “Fairie!” I did not immediately perceive
the significance of the last appellation. I was encircled. Particularly
two sailors ingratiated themselves. They requested me to purchase
“schnapps” for them because impecunious. I provided glass after glass,
for they were bewitchingly gallant. All the other individuals were
kidding me: “The doll-baby likes the blue-jackets, sure Mike!”
“Sailor-boy, take off your suit and make it a present to her!” “How I
wish I was one of Uncle Sam’s boys and I’d git steeped in schnapps too!”
I was mortified by such observations, and as soon as the sailor-boys
invited me, departed under their escort.
I hired a chamber at a third-class hotel nearby. [Sidenote: _A
Transformation Not Bargained For._] I gave them funds to secure another.
For we did not desire that the clerk perceive that we were all to occupy
the identic room. We pretended the sailors and I were unacquainted....
They finished by inserting a handkerchief into my buccal cavity, tying a
strip of the bed linen over it, binding my hands behind my back, and
fastening my lower extremities to the bed springs so that I could not
even kick. They then departed with my wallet and outer clothing.
After an hour of helplessness, I discovered that the partition to the
adjacent chamber was scarcely more than cardboard. Because I perceived
sounds of the entrance of an individual. I could even hear his
breathing. I discerned the words: “How I wish I had three hundred
dollars!”
I commenced a continuous jouncing up and down. The uninterrupted
tintinnabulation of the springs attracted the individual’s attention and
he addressed me. I could respond only with a low gurgling. The clerk
soon liberated me. I had to confess everything. But he manifested
sympathy and donated a nickel for carfare.
One blue-jacket was of about my own measurements. Evidently he intended
to desert. For he had abandoned his uniform. I was compelled to attire
myself therein and boarded a car for my domicile.
My house-key had remained in my appropriated habiliments. How to enter
was my problem. If I rang, my arrival at midnight costumed as a sailor
would disclose everything. I hoped the butler had neglected to secure
the covering of the coal-hole in front of the basement windows.
[Sidenote: _Androgynes Resourceful._]
Every one had retired. Able to raise the covering, I dropped to the
coal-pile. I discovered that the door at the head of the cellar stairs
was also fortunately unsecured. With trepidation and in absolute
silence, I ascended, in stocking feet, to my chamber and devoutly
thanked Providence for restoration to my family without a hair injured.
I had only recently purchased the appropriated habiliments. The
subsequent day I visited the same establishment and succeeded in
securing an exact duplicate so that my family would not observe the
disappearance of the original.
[Sidenote: _Frank—Eunice._]
II. The Pug Heaven.
I henceforth visited the Pugilists’ Haven one evening each week. After
the appropriation of one good suit, I always attired myself rather
shabbily. After seven o’clock dinner, I would change to the cast-off
apparel and noiselessly glide down the two flights of stairs from my
chamber. Fortunately father always had prayers after dinner. While the
family were in the prayer-room and all the servants in their
dining-room, I succeeded in engineering my exit for an evening’s revel
with little risk, in my poverty-stricken disguise, of encountering any
individual in the halls. No one ever suspected the reason for my
absences. It was several times remarked that I had been out late. But I
threw the observer off the scent by the pretext of a perambulation to
obviate insomnia.
As I proceeded rapidly from my domicile, I would, if I detected a
familiar figure advancing, cross to the other side of the street and
make a feint of ringing a door-bell. In order, in my dilapidated
apparel, to avert the danger of encountering on the public conveyance
some one acquainted with my identity, I would perambulate more than a
mile in order to attain the Bowery by an east-side car. On the way I
would conceal my house-key and an emergency greenback in a crevice in
the Central Park stonewall—always the identic cavity in order to be
regained with ease.
At Pug Heaven—as my dive was nicknamed—I was universally given a hearty
welcome and secured [Sidenote: _A Female with Male Genitals._] the
society of adolescent ruffians fairly clean and sprucely attired. Of
course they always ransacked my pockets the first chance that offered.
Before it could happen, I had treated liberally half-a-dozen of the
handsomest, and thus insinuated myself into their good graces. I always
kept a reserve five-dollar bill sewed in the waistband of my trousers—a
pair worn on these sprees alone because too shabby to be a temptation
for appropriation.