Tony Neddo as adopted son. Nature created me impotent. I could never
possess wife and children. And for the reason that I accepted the only
alternative of an adopted son, society incarcerated me! Ralph, do you
call that Christianity and enlightenment? You, Ralph, recognizing that I
am a congenital goody-goody, are in condition to accept my declaration
that I have never in all my earthly pilgrimage transgressed against a
solitary individual. In addition, Mother Nature endowed me with such
cerebral capacity that at the university I was one of the leaders in
scholarship. Nevertheless policemen and jailers—who of course are not
responsible for their meager education in the rural districts of
Ireland, where they were instructed merely to spell out the primer and
scrawl their own names—have tyrannized over me, handcuffed me, and
compelled me, when absolutely guiltless of any offence against the Deity
or society, though having transgressed against mediæval jurisprudence,
to accompany them whither I strenuously did not desire, and to perform
hard labor for years without remuneration, and to abide in a cell, amid
vermin, and subsist on disgusting nourishment! Do you marvel that such
impositions, continued for years, have rendered me a misanthrope? For
while I sympathize with and alleviate the sufferings of humanity up to
my capacity, I experience only detestation for hypocritical humanity
surfeited with exuberant health and in influential positions.
[Sidenote: _Androgynes Nabobize Menials._]
After the Masked Ball of ten years ago, Tony Neddo continued, for a
longer period than any other young fellow, to be my adopted son and
soul-mate. With the exception of his initial roguery, he rang true. Of
course the consideration that I loaded him with benefits exercised an
enormous influence. He realized that solely by cultivating my affection,
he could play a good thing for all it was worth. My ambition to educate
him for a profession was doomed to disappointment. While sufficiently
intelligent in practical affairs, he lacked the gray matter for
acquiring book knowledge.
The immediate reason for my incarceration was merely an indiscretion. I
had resided two years on the continent of Europe, where every individual
comprehends bisexuality and nobody oppresses those so unfortunate as to
be afflicted therewith. That tolerance unfitted me for residence in the
United States, where the words “sex” and “sin” are synonyms. I
erroneously opined I could be as overt in New York as in Paris.
Therefore, while continuing to reside with my aged parents, I, soon
after adopting Tony (not legally of course) leased for him a furnished
apartment at a high-class residential hotel. Two successive hostelries
finally refused to rent further to Tony and me. In the third year, we
were in our third caravansary. But its personnel proved of unexampled
bigotry—because the manager was a narrowminded Methodist. He opined that
simply expelling Tony and myself ignominiously was not sufficient. He
was busybody to the extent of praying for my incarceration. Therefore he
engaged an unusually handsome youthful [Sidenote: _Immorality a Novelty
in New York._] detective to enmesh me. Attired as a Beau Brummel, the
sneak first scraped acquaintance and then insinuated himself into my
confidence. Soon he succeeded in seducing me where it was possible for a
confederate to employ a camera without my suspecting anything. It was on
the basis of that photograph that I was sentenced. My accomplice, who
had been the sole occasion of the so-called felony, and who alone had
proceeded deliberately and wilfully, received merely the thanks of the
court and of society.
You inquire about the element of suffering during my incarceration. The
first week in the Tombs jail, I lay awake half of every night in mental
anguish, for I realized I was a martyr. Every one was accusing me of
deepdyed depravity when my life was actually on a high ethical plane.
All the journals announced in big headlines that I had been surprised in
a double life—intimating wilful immorality. “Immorality”! “Immorality”!
That was the keynote of all newspaper accounts of myself, as if hitherto
“immorality” had been an unknown quantity with Knickerbockers. People
could not get through singing the refrain: “At last a New Yorker has
been discovered who is infected with _immorality_!!!” The journals
stated that I had been incarcerated in the Tombs to await trial, the
evidence against me being so incontrovertible and the felony charged so
revolting that bail had been refused. At the time I was unenlightened as
to what that evidence was and a thousand possibilities coursed through
my stream of thought, none of which, however, emerged in my subsequent
trial.
I was terribly browbeaten by the plebeian police. They resorted to
subterfuge and endeavored by every [Sidenote: _Intellectual Aristocrat
Browbeaten by Plebeians._] means to betray me into confession of the
secrets of my heart that they suspected. They adopted insulting
language. They inquired point-blank over and over again in the common
indecent expressions whether I had not with such and such persons
(particularly Tony) been guilty of what jurists denominate ridiculously,
though solemnly and with bated breath, “the crime against Nature,” when
in fact nothing is more natural than the conduct in question. It is
exclusively Nature’s feat. But I scrupulously guarded myself from making
a single incriminating statement. I refused in any way to admit being a
bisexual—because all my inquisitors presented evidence that they
considered that condition the most horrible of crimes.
This was before I ascertained the existence of the photograph and I
fully expected to elude incarceration. And the result proved that they
were impotent to lay their hands on any other legal evidence beyond the
detective’s statements.
That first week in the Tombs I would have committed suicide if I had
been vouchsafed an instrument. For I was continuously immersed in the
deepest melancholia. But the jailers were careful to deprive me of my
pocket-knife and everything else by which it was possible to do myself
harm. Even while at meals, I was continuously observed lest I utilize
the table knife on my body.
“Who ne’er his bread in sorrow ate,
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers!”
Before I experienced it, I did not believe an individual could survive
years of such depression. [Sidenote: _Absurd Legal Superstitions._] But,
as you see, Ralph, it turned my hair white. Fortunately it has not
rendered me bald or wrinkled.
And the judge’s charge was so absurd: “The crime of which you, Frank
White, have been convicted, is of such a disgusting character that it
can not even be defined!”
To think of relegating an individual to state’s prison on a charge that
no one comprehended; that no one had ever been permitted even to
investigate—because the subject is beyond investigation, no intellectual
even being willing to define it!
The judge said: “It is as heinous as murder, because it strikes at the
very existence of the race! No one but a criminal of the deepest dye
could descend to it! Frank White, you have been convicted of the awful
felony of race suicide!”——Unreason and prejudice! There was hardly an
individual within the hearing of the judge who had not been guilty of
race suicide, though in a different way from my own! And they for the
most part deliberately, whereas I was compelled by Mother Nature. They
imprisoned me for what they conceded to themselves: Following Nature’s
behests other than solely for the perpetuation of the race!
And then the day following my sentence, in the yard of the Tombs jail,
being thrust into an iron-barred bus along with a score of hardened male
criminals—just as if I were myself a male!—to be driven to the Grand
Central to board a train for Sing Sing. I, the goody-goody girl-boy,
having evolved into a felon!
But my prosecution by self-righteous Christians for what were really
offences against no one—simply to satiate these Christians’ thirst for
tormenting [Sidenote: _Publicity Would Remove a World of Woe._] people
whose views differed from their own—had more serious results than my
five years in prison. My life has been a wreck ever since. My having
been incarcerated on a conviction so utterly loathsome to the ordinary
mind—because it has never been permitted access to the truth of the
matter and is governed solely by mediæval bias—completely alienated
every member of my family, who now regarded me as dead, and disinherited
me on the ground of deepdyed hypocrisy and degeneracy. If we encountered
one another on the street, they would not speak.
When liberated from Sing Sing, I was compelled to adopt a new
appellation and strike out into a new field of labor, where it has been
possible only with difficulty to make ends meet.
As for Tony, he escaped to parts unknown immediately following my
arrest. My deprivation of his friendship was the severest blow of all,
for he had shown himself so devoted—but only, as results demonstrated,
because of the fortune he derived from me. He merely left a memo
declaring he would write me some day, but never effectuated his promise.
If only the Javerts who prosecute Nature’s step-children realized the
world of woe they thereby occasion these most unfortunate of mankind,
they would reflect twice before inaugurating the prosecution. But
society prohibits the reasons for the conduct of bisexuals becoming
known. Which knowledge would prove a death blow to such prosecution.
Part Five:
Angelo—Phyllis
I. Angelo Angevine’s Debut as Public Female-Impersonator.
That fancy masculine name was only an alias, androgynes having a
penchant for such as are musical and of exalted connotation. Further,
its first element was after Michelangelo, an arch-bisexualist.
In 1895, Angelo—Phyllis divulged what I have here recorded as nearly as
I can remember. As I said in the first chapter of this book, I remember
only the general outlines of the originals of the monologues I give. But
I have listened to numerous confessions of the sort of which I now
present a sample. Where definite memory fails me, I have had recourse to
my sea of general memories of the way the hermaphroditoi talked, how
they looked upon life, what they did, and what befell them. I aim at a
fairly full, but essentially true, portrayal of the inner history and
life experience of cultured female-impersonators who were my bosom
friends during my own hey-day in that avocation in the Rialto. In order
to economize the reader’s attention, I present all of Angelo—Phyllis’s
life-story as if confessed to me at one sitting.
In referring to Frank White it seems more natural to use the masculine
alias and pronoun, but [Sidenote: _Cross-Dressing._] the feminine with
Phyllis. For the latter was conspicuously womanish: beardal growth
sparse and always clean-shaven, if not eradicated; breasts as large as
in some women; hips very broad; spine disproportionately long and legs
correspondingly short. “His-her” body approached the feminine to a
higher degree than that of any other androgyne I ever set eyes on with
the possible exception of myself. Phyllis surpassed me in meagreness of
beardal growth, sissie voice, feminine strut and gestures, and craze and
taste for feminine finery. As a cross-dresser and female-impersonator,
the bisexual now to be portrayed was one of the two or three extreme
hermaphroditoi, while ranking low in erotic _furor_.
[In a physical male, cross-dressing is the instinctive wearing of
feminine apparel, or, in default, of the loudest and fanciest male
styles. In a physical female, it is similar adoption of masculine
habiliments, or in default, of feminine attire and aspect approaching
the masculine as nearly as possible: hair bobbed, stiff linen collar, a
man’s neck scarf, and always severely plain tailor-made waist and skirt.
The reader will recall such photographs of brilliantly intellectual
women, particularly authoresses. Cross-dressing is generally an earmark
of sexual intermediacy. It is not at all due—as bigots claim—to moral
depravity, but entirely to irreproachable instinct. It is not at all due
to childhood’s training, such as the stories of parents’ bringing up
their boy or girl as a girl or a boy when they particularly wished a
female or a male heir. Such child, as soon as he or she became old
enough, would wholeheartedly rebel against such a travesty. In nearly
every case, cross-dressing is due to the fact that Nature injected a
psyche of the one sex into a corpus of the other. The cross-dresser is
not usually conscious of the oddity of taste for apparel. His or her
manner of dressing indicates what he or she considers artistic. All
ultra-androgynes—such as made up the membership of the Cercle
Hermaphroditos—would always, if society permitted, clothe themselves as
women.]
[Sidenote: _Phyllis’s Antecedents._]
In 1895, Angelo—Phyllis was a plump little body looking to be a decade
younger than “his-her” thirty-three, and of decidedly brunette,
Mediterranean type.
* * * * *
Ralphie, _mon cheri_, the sexual cripple now speaking was born in 1862
and brought up in a town of 50,000 within 300 miles of New York City. I
did not move here until twenty. As soon as I became financially
independent of father, I chose New York as the stage for my career
because only in a great city can an instinctive female-impersonator give
his overwhelming yearnings free rein _incognito_ and thus keep the
respect of his every-day circle.
Father was one of the leading lawyers in my home town and wanted me in
his office, for he seemed blind to my being a sissie. But just because
of this fate, I could not stand living in my home town. Furthermore, I
had no taste for law, and pined only one year in father’s law office
after leaving high-school. I was all for Art, with a capital A! Art!
Art! Which taste turned me into millinery channels as soon as I began
life in New York in 1882.
Excepting the years that George Greenwood was with me as “adopted son,”
I have in New York lived [Sidenote: _Not Willingly Half-and-half._] all
by myself in a 5-room apartment. Thus I have been able to transform
myself into a young woman and set out for a female-impersonation spree
without any one getting wise.
If I had had my say at birth, Ralphie, my lot would have been that of a
full-fledged woman, or, less to be wished, a virile man. Not
half-and-half. But at twenty I cut out the foolishness of all the time
shedding tears over my fate. Those tears were chiefly due to the world’s
forbidding a bisexual’s living according to his-her nature. I could not
assume the responsibilities of a man and pay court to women—an ordeal so
horrible, but expected of me if I stayed in my home town. I balked at
having my life forced into a masculine groove. In New York one can live
as Nature demands without setting every one’s tongue wagging.
I was unconscious of sex until my fourteenth year. Up to that age, I
went to pay school. My dozen schoolmates—including four sisters—were all
of the goody-goody type. No one ever tried to seduce me.
From fourteen to eighteen I went to public high-school. Several boys
hugged and kissed me now and then. While I liked this, I shrunk away for
shame. Now for the first time I felt sorry I was a boy. I stole a
sister’s discarded garb, from corset to hat, which I kept under lock and
key in my room and put on now and again in order to strut before a
full-length mirror and feast my eyes on myself as female-impersonator.
Because of shame, I never told a soul.
So counter to the fate of most hermaphroditoi, I was a virgin until the
beginning of my female-impersonation [Sidenote: _Dressing for a Spree._]
sprees. Because in high-school, morbid bashfulness kept me from becoming
well acquainted with a single boy. Down to twenty I lived as sheltered a
life as any girl. I had really never been under any kind of temptation.
Ralphie, _mon cheri_, I can never forget the entire day spent in getting
together my woman’s wardrobe on arrival in New York. I went to a ladies’
store in the Ghetto. I lacked the cheek to buy feminine finery uptown. I
gave the Russian Jewess the usual hoax of amateur theatricals. And women
are so dense as to believe it! She helped hugely to the end of my being
able to turn myself into a stunning soubrette.
An evening or two later, in my flat, I dressed for my first spree. I
touched up eyebrows with a stick of charcoal and cheeks with rouge;
applied padding where needed, laced on a corset, and adjusted a
soubrette’s wig. Lastly I put on my art gown, pinned on a picture hat,
threw an opera cloak about me, and was ready to set out.
On my sprees I have always been careful to avoid a clue to my identity.
No one would have ever learned who I really am even if I had been sent
to Sing Sing. Since the world thinks female-impersonation utterly
disgraceful, I had to spare my family all risk. Furthermore, they
themselves would disown me if they ever learned of my mania for
cross-dressing and female-impersonation.
It is bitter to be so misjudged! And people balk at being set right!
While I get much joy out of life, I often feel crushed to earth when
seeing how I am scorned, and now and again weep a full hour. When,
[Sidenote: _The Bowery a Magnet._] in the pride of their manly vigor,
the virile throw at me a glance full of hatred or of ridicule, I feel
like killing myself!
I always closed my hall-door noiselessly and used the stairs. The
elevator boy might have recognized me in my disguise. If, on the several
flights, I heard an approaching footstep, I would slink for a moment to
a dark corner of the spacious hall. Reaching the street, I had my
regular hiding place for my key and a yellow back. It was most necessary
to be able to let myself in on my late return, when the street door was
locked, instead of ringing up the janitor.
On my first spree, Ralphie—as on all for several years—I boarded an
elevated train and alighted at a Bowery station. Several times in later
years, I spied acquaintances of my every-day world either on the train
or on the Bowery. I always gave them a wide berth, although having a
great advantage in means of recognition.
And why, on my very first spree, did I seek the Bowery, Ralphie? Because
only a few weeks before, in my home town, I had seen a comic opera
staged on that avenue, its keynote the oft repeated refrain:
“The Bowery! The Bowery!
There they say such things!
And they do such things!
The Bowery! The Bowery!
I’ll never go there any more!”
So I was dead crazy to bring to pass there the female-impersonation
sprees of which I, for several years, had had merely waking dreams in my
home town. Such realization was why I moved to New York. [Sidenote: _The
Goody-Goody Transformed._] It was, _mon cheri_, all because I wanted to
live within half-an-hour’s journey of the enchanting old Bowery!
On my first spree, I made my way up and down the crowded sidewalks for
an hour, staring with all my eyes at the brilliantly lighted fronts of
beer gardens, the many gaudily dressed girls strutting up and down all
alone, but, most of all, the sporty-looking youthful laboring men
seeking their evening’s fun. How longingly and beseechingly I gazed into
the latter’s eyes! A hundred times I had accosting words on the end of
my tongue. I but barely lacked the brass for utterance, notwithstanding
that in my every-day life I had always been morbidly bashful. How I
wished I were acquainted with at least one of these powerfully
built—and, to me at least, bewitchingly handsome—foreign-looking young
fellows!
Who, _mon cheri_, that knew me as a goody-goody boy in my home town,
always going to Bible school twice on Lord’s day, and not merely once as
nearly all children of pious parents, would have foretold that some day
I would be tapping the sidewalks of America’s greatest red-light
district as a common strumpet?[42]
Doctors claim to understand such as me _a priori_ and are too squeamish
to investigate. They would say I am insane. I have never shown any sign
of a diseased brain, nor has there been any taint of insanity [Sidenote:
_The “Rabbit.”_] in my family. Ours, _mon cheri_, is simply the case of
half-and-half as to sex. The only taint in my family is that father is
somewhat womanish: falsetto voice, sissie mannerisms, and never any mind
for things thoroughly masculine. He ought never to have married to
perpetuate, and probably strengthen, his own mild sexual intermediacy.
As I walked the Bowery on that first spree, I was puzzling my mind
as to which of the brightly lighted dance-halls or the dark and
fearsome dives—through whose doors I saw pass only sailors,
gutter-snipes, and slovenly gangsters—would be the best stage for
my virgin effort at female-impersonation. At last I slipped into
the least prosperous-looking and, to the stranger, most
uninviting, dance-hall, the notorious “Rabbit.” And why the
“Rabbit”? Because it looked to be the most crime-inviting of all
the dance-halls. I had stood and watched as there passed in and
out the most criminal-faced of the Bowery boys: coal-heavers,
dock-rats, and fierce-and-cruel-stalking gunmen—not to speak of
the poor, deluded “fallen angels.”
I dropped into a chair. Almost in less time than I can tell it, four
youthful coal-heavers came up grinning: “Hello Bright Eyes!”
Those three words were the most soulful, the most infatuating, that had
ever fallen on my ears. I was also delighted because so lucky as to take
in, right off, some of the many bewitching Bowery boys I had stared at
that night, and cement them to myself. I smiled back: “Hello!”
For the next few hours, I was in hitherto undreamed-of bliss because of
being wooed by all four in [Sidenote: _Phyllis Finds “Herself.”_] their
delightfully wild and rough way. Ever since my later teens, I have
always yearned to be treated by young fellows as a girl, and on my
female-impersonation sprees now and again, I have had such yearnings
fully met. On that debut at the “Rabbit,” I was for the first time in my
life with sexual counterparts before whom I could be myself because they
did not know who I was. And they treated me as _their_ sexual opposite.
They danced with me in turn. Only after four hours, I had to own up that
I was not an out-and-out female. But that knowledge seemed to count for
nothing with these lovesick coal-heavers.
Already two hours before, I had felt that I had had more than enough
flirtation for one night. All my efforts to get away, however, were
useless. At two A. M., the “Rabbit’s” doors were locked. I had to allow
one of my beaux to escort me somewhere: to the Grand Central
waiting-room, for there I would be safe. I now warned my beau that if he
did not leave me, I would sit there for a week. But it took him two more
hours to give up all hope of my yielding to his goodhearted pleas.[43]
Five minutes after he left, I sought the street. I turned half-a-dozen
corners, lurking a minute around each to see if the coast was clear. I
then boarded a car. I slowly dragged myself up the three flights of
[Sidenote: _Leader of a Bowery Gang._] stairs and noiselessly let myself
into my flat. Tired out, I threw myself on the bed only half undressed
and slept until noon.
But, _mon cheri_, I had now found myself. For seven years afterward, I
sought the “Rabbit” or the “Squirrel” once every other week, giving the
rest of my time to business or self-culture. One evening out of fourteen
was all I could spare for the female side of my being. But the balance
of my waking hours were filled with blissful thoughts of my
flirtations—memories which will last as long as I. These sprees have
been to me the first thing in life. I would have given up anything else
for them. When now and again something has blocked my fortnightly spree,
I would be the most melancholy person in New York.
On the Bowery, I always went with the same gang of about a dozen
savages. If any one took a look at me, Ralphie—so soft-spoken, so
chicken-hearted, so wishy-washy—they wouldn’t set me down as leader of a
Bowery gang, would they? But that’s just what I once was. All the
members of my gang were of foreign parentage, sturdy, possessed of well
chiselled features, and tolerably clean. I found nothing disgusting
about them. None had had more than three years’ schooling, or the least
training in morality or religion. Nevertheless they were not a bad lot;
far from being as evil-minded as the upper class would judge from the
outside. None was more than twenty-five while a member of my gang, and
none bright enough to earn his bread at an occupation of higher grade
than coal-heaver.
The average age remained low because one after another settled down in
marriage, having brought to [Sidenote: _Androgynes’ Favorites
Fortunate._] an end his sowing of wild oats, and some budding gangster
took his place with me.