Z’s fate, aut’s foretaste, 251
murder, 237 ff.
woman’s apparel, 248
-----
Footnote 1:
Continental European civilizations are, on this subject, a
half-century ahead of Anglo-American.
Footnote 2:
See Part VI, chapter III.
Footnote 3:
A physician of wide experience who read the above before publication
argued that in the United States, only five per cent are mildly
virile. I stand unconvinced that my proportion is in error. The
proportion surely differs with racial types and environment. The
physician has always lived in New York City and practiced among
liberal-minded, non-church, pleasure-loving people of Teutonic or
Latin parentage. My own every-day associates, particularly in the
village where I was brought up and which I still frequently visit,
have been, almost entirely, ultra-puritan Anglo-Saxons. When I
maintained their sexual temperance, the physician declared them
hypocrites, whose secret practice is the same as “worldlings.” I have
been intimately acquainted with hundreds of these male puritan
church-devotees, and am convinced they are hypocrites solely in
supposing their sexual moderation due to their own superior morals.
Sex has naturally small place in their lives.
Footnote 4:
Do not confuse with anaphrodites the excessively rare men who are
attracted by female beauty and manners, marry, but then desire merely
Platonic relations. Such are rather cases of impotence. The genuine
anaphrodite never even courts a woman.
Footnote 5:
The author has always preferred to read biography to fiction. If his
life is spared, he will write an extensive work on the sexuality of
noted men and women. An unusually large proportion of geniuses have
been either anaphrodites or androgynes. For example, Sir Isaac Newton
and Immanuel Kant appear to have been anaphrodites.
Footnote 6:
I take no stock in the theory advanced by some medical writers that
androgynism (generally termed male sexual inversion) is acquired and
not congenital. The exceptional method of sexual expression can be
=acquired= only by individuals congenitally on the very borderline
between androgynes on the one hand and anaphrodites or mildly virile
on the other. The latest proponent of the “acquired” theory, Dr. P. M.
Lichtenstein, in the August, 1921, issue of MEDICAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS,
suggests that masturbation in boyhood may produce in adulthood a
fairie or ultra-androgyne. In my physical prime, I was a fairie of
extreme type. I never masturbated as a child or as an adult because of
acute horror. My own pudenda never had any part in my sexual ardor—any
more than had my vermiform appendix.
Dr. Lichtenstein’s suggestion of the correction by parents of feminine
predilections in small boys is futile. Those feminesque traits, when
congenital, as I believe they always are in ultra-androgynes, can not
be suppressed. Likewise his advice that the adolescent girl-boy seek
the company of the gentle sex as a cure is as futile. In my teens, I
forced myself to it, but it had not the least curative value.
=Note Added in Galley=: I just came across a scrap of a recent NEW
YORK WORLD Sunday magazine, containing “=Glands That Govern Our
Lives=”, name of author missing. I quote: “The not uncommon phenomena
of the smooth-faced man with a feminine voice and a figure resembling
that of a woman, and of the deep-voiced, hairy-faced masculine woman,
are produced by abnormalities in the development of these glands.”
Only in the third decade of the twentieth century is the comparatively
new branch of medical science, =endocrinology= (the study of glands,
particularly the ductless) coming forward to maintain the
irresponsibility of “homosexualists” for their idiosyncrasy. It has
also only just been brought into the limelight that the testicles are
invigorating (as well as masculinizing) to the individual possessing
them and the prime reason for man’s being physically stronger than
woman. I myself, for several years after castration at the age of
twenty-seven, observed a marked diminution in my stamina. (For
details, see my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE.) My own testicles were
abnormal judged by the fact that I, though always having intense
horror of self-manustupration, suffered from acute spermatorrhea from
the incidence of puberty up to castration, while I was totally devoid
of the propensity natural to full-fledged adult males for emptying the
seminal vesicles.
Footnote 7:
Other authorities make them more numerous. I quote from =Love’s
Coming-of-Age=, page 125: “Dr. Grabowsky ... quotes figures ... as
high as one man in every 22, while Dr. Albert Moll (=Die Contraere
Sexual-Empfindung=, chapter 3) gives estimates varying from one in
every 50 to as low as one in every 500. These figures apply to such as
are exclusively of the said nature [excluding the psychic
hermaphrodites. Including the latter] the estimates must be greatly
higher.... Some late statistical inquiries (See =Statistische
Untersuchungen=, Dr. M. Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1904) yield 1.5 to 2 per
cent as a probable ratio.”
I myself have fixed upon the median of ratios I have read, as well as
the frequency that has occurred to me as a result of a half-century’s
unusually intimate mingling with all social types in many nations,
having possessed, at the time I lived in the foreign nations, some
speaking ability in seven foreign languages. But the frequency is
greater than I have given in the text rather than less. But the
extreme German estimates are too high for the United States. It is my
conclusion from intimate intercourse with the natives in many
countries that the frequency of bisexuality per thousand is
proportional to the density of population. Nature puts a break on
over-population by increasing the proportion of sterile bisexuals.
When a population is regularly underfed, the number of bisexuals born
appears to increase. But that is not the only factor. Another law is
that when a consanguineous multifamily (a group of families)
multiplies with exceptional rapidity, bisexuals are born in that
family even though the food supply is undiminished. The author
believes the latter to be the reason he himself was born bisexual. It
was because the generic womb (i.e., those of my grandmothers for
several generations) had been overtaxed.
The ratio is probably much higher among the cultured—particularly art
devotees—than among the “hoi polloi.”
Footnote 8:
See later chapter: THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY THE HERMAPHRODITOI IN
GENERAL.
Footnote 9:
Bisexuality occurs also in animals and birds, but far less frequently
than among humans. Perhaps this difference is due to the fact that the
human male and female differ much less in respect to secondary sexual
determinants than do most birds and animals. Several times in my life
I have come across a newspaper item such as the following. I inquired
of a poulterer, who informed me that he has had numerous hens that
crowed and possessed secondary male determinants.
CROWS AND LAYS EGG. IS IT COCK OR HEN?
Copyright by =Press Publishing Co=. (NEW YORK WORLD), 1921
(=Special cable despatch to the WORLD=)
LONDON, Dec. 9.—A Buff Orpington cock at a poultry show in the
agricultural hall at Islington has laid an egg. This bird began its
career with all the attributes of a sure-enough hen. It laid eggs and
cackled over them in time-honored fashion. Its head, plumage, and
habits were all hen-like.
As it grew, its conformation underwent a subtle change. It began to
grow a cock’s comb, sprouted a cock’s tail, developed spurs and crowed
on appropriate occasions—but continued to lay eggs. When its owner
exhibited it as a “cock-hen” and claimed despite its male affiliation,
that it produced eggs, all the poultry fanciers derisively nicknamed
it “Bluff Orpington.”
One doubter offered to pay one hundred pounds if the bird laid an egg.
It was watched day and night for the coming of the marvel, and
yesterday duly presented its watchers with an excellent egg....
Physiologists are dumbfounded.
Footnote 10:
“Catamite” is the Latin, as well as modern, corruption of the vocable
“Ganymede.” For the relation between Jupiter and Ganymede, see Dr. Wm.
Lee Howard’s =Pederasty vs. Prostitution= in =Journal of the American
Medical Association=, May 15, 1897. Also Plato’s =Phædo=. Greek
literature in general is suffused with pederasty. I read Greek six years
in “prep” and university. My observation is that androgyne scholars have
a penchant for that language and drift into teaching it. Prior to the
twentieth century, the Greek and Latin masterpieces—in all “preps” and
colleges read unexpurgated because the sexually full-fledged have not
generally understood the homosexual descriptions—were the only
publications affording androgynes an inkling of the secrets of their sex
life.
Footnote 11:
For twenty-five years, the author has combed the medical press for
information on androgynism. This chapter is the [Sidenote: _Are
Androgynes Super-men?_] fruit. I made no notes, never expecting to
publish the results. At the present writing, I lack the necessary month
for research to the end of making a complete list of my sources. For
Socrates, see Plato’s Symposium and Phædo, Xenophon’s Symposium, and
Haller’s Die Rede des Sokrates in Platon’s Symposium. For Plato, see his
Dialogues, particularly the Symposium; Grote’s Plato; Ellis’s Sexual
Inversion, page 229; The Sexuality of Plato in Journal of Urology and
Sexology, 1916, page 201. For Cæsar, see Dr. Wm. Lee Howard’s Pederasty
vs. Prostitution in Journal of the American Medical Association, May 15,
1897, and Suetonius’ Lives of the Cæsars, written about A. D. 120. The
latter work is a revelation of the pederasty with which the best Roman
society was honeycombed. I believe conditions are about the same to-day
in all civilizations above the barbarous, although in Christian nations
one has not been permitted to publish the facts. They are really not
horrible, nor portentous of ruin for society; merely imagined to be so.
They are not really conducive to the detriment of society, and have
existed practically as now throughout history. It is all because Nature
has created the phenomenon of androgynism, really beneficent to society,
but sorely misjudged by writers grossly ignorant of the phenomenon. Its
final investigation in the twentieth century can do no hurt; only a
world of good.
For Michelangelo, see his Sonnets and his biography by J. A. Symonds.
For the Shakespeare-Author, see his Sonnets and Oscar Wilde’s The
Portrait of Mr. W. H., published in Blackwood’s in 1889, as well as that
same article expanded in a monograph published by Mitchell Kennerly in
1921. For Whitman, see his Leaves of Grass and Drumtaps.
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, in her New Horizons in Love and Life, says:
“Inversion [sexual] and genius have a sort of affinity. They certainly
both tend to belong to the neurotic group.” [R. W’s comment: As a rule
both androgynes and gynanders, but particularly the former, are bundles
of nerves.]
The valuable popular exposition of the philosophy of sex, Edward
Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age (published by Boni and Liveright) did
not come to my attention until after THE FEMALE-IMPERSONATORS was
written. The following are excerpts from the chapter, The Intermediate
Sex, the bracketed words being my own: Page 124: “Charles G. Leland
(“Hans Breitmann”) in his book, The Alternate Sex (1904), insists much
on the frequent combination of the characteristics of both sexes in
remarkable men and women, and has a chapter on “The Female Mind in Man,”
and another on “The Male Intellect in Woman.” [I once read the statement
in a medical journal, name not recalled: “Homosexualists are
particularly common among authors.”]
Page 139: “The instinctive artistic nature of the male of this class
[urnings or androgynes], his sensitive spirit, his [Sidenote:
_Androgynes’ Angelic Disposition._] wavelike emotional temperament,
combined with hardihood of intellect and body ... may be said to give
them ... through their double nature, command of life in all its phases,
and a certain freemasonry of the secrets of the two sexes which may well
favor their function as reconcilers [of the full-fledged males with the
full-fledged females] and interpreters [of human nature, particularly
from the standpoint of sex]. Certainly it is remarkable that some of the
world’s greatest leaders and artists have been dowered either wholly or
in part with the Uranian temperament [that is, either ultra-androgynes
or ultra-gynanders or else psychic hermaphrodites]—as in the cases of
Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar,
or, among women, Christine of Sweden, Sappho the poetess, and others.”
It is noteworthy that tremendously virile males—who alone, as a rule,
have been intimate with the extreme type of androgyne—have named him
“fairie” in English-speaking countries and “petit-jesus” (Little Jesus)
in France, largely because of his having, innate, the disposition of an
angel; while the most common scientific term for androgynes in general
has been “urning”, from Greek ouranos, meaning “heavenly being.” The
originator of the term “urning”, however, was himself a bisexual, K. H.
Ulrichs, an Austrian, the originator, about 1880, of the scientific
study of sexual intermediates, and author of several published papers on
the theme.
A lesser historic character than those listed in my text, Lord Cornbury,
cousin of Queen Anne and colonial governor of New York, had the fad of
attiring himself in feminine finery for a stroll on the capital city’s
principal promenade. One of the most prominent judges (now deceased) of
the Atlantic coast was declared to me, by a citizen of his own town, to
be a psychic hermaphrodite. An official once high up in the government
at Washington was declared to me, by a citizen of his native place, to
be an androgyne. One of the greatest factors in world politics to-day is
merely a grown-up infant and an androgyne, though at the same time a
genius.
Footnote 12:
A confidant who read these paragraphs commented in substance:
“‘Physician, heal thyself!’ Your book shows that you yourself are
governed by instinct and prejudice. ‘Those that live in glass houses
should not throw stones.’ Therefore omit these paragraphs.”
If I am governed by instinct and prejudice, I am conscious of being
ruled only by reason. Perhaps those who advocate the suppression of
intermediates without investigation equally feel they are governed by
pure reason. Granted that both they and myself are ruled by instinct and
prejudice and that it is impossible for mankind to exercise pure reason,
nevertheless intermediates should finally have their day in court. They
number 700,000 in continental United States alone, including some of the
brightest minds and most useful members of society.
Footnote 13:
My own case indicates that Nature creates androgynes and gynanders as a
brake on too rapid multiplication. Both paternal and maternal stock have
averaged eight children to a marriage. It seems that Nature wishes to
preserve to as many of her children as possible the joys of courtship.
Often, instead of making cold anaphrodites or female icebergs out of the
men and women not needed to perpetuate the race, she brings into the
world androgynes or gynanders—as a rule, sterile.
Footnote 14:
I wrote this paragraph, so much like that quoted (at close of preceding
chapter) from Carpenter’s =Love’s Coming of Age=, before I had heard of
the existence of the book named.
Footnote 15:
For me it was extreme temperance, considering my natural sexual ardor.
For most people it would have been gross intemperance. Extreme
temperance might be defined as the denial of six-sevenths of one’s
strong fleshly desires. That is what it was with me. Professional
fairies commonly indulge more than ten times as often per year as I did.
But as a result, they go early to the grave.
Footnote 16:
Fellatio.
Footnote 17:
Particularly during my teens, I have worried and grieved a thousand
times as much as the average individual. I say for the solace of fellow
melancholiacs who retain their reason that at my present age of
forty-seven, I show not the least sign of thinning or whitening hair.
But this may be due to my being an ultra-androgyne, a subspecies blessed
with perennial youth. Strangely also in my own case intense grief
(except the agonies in my Garden of Gethsemane, for which see close of
this chapter) has seemed to put physical strength into my usually weak
body. I feel also that it sharpens my wits and adds to my wisdom and
literary ability. “There’s not an ill wind but blows some good.”
At the age of forty-seven my conviction is that great sorrows, after the
lapse of a score of years, are recognized to have been blessings in
disguise. My life experience has demonstrated that “there is a
Providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.” My life
experience has demonstrated that the biblical teachings about human life
are in general true, and that either the Christian or Jewish religion is
practically necessary to save from despair and suicide men and women
foreordained to drain the cup of anguish to the dregs. My personal faith
in Christian doctrine, and my habit, instilled in infancy, of “taking
everything to God in prayer,” have saved me from suicide a thousand
times and made the deepest of sorrows tolerable.
The upshot of my very exceptional life experience is: (1) “Praise God
from whom all blessings flow;” and (2) Even pain, sorrow, and death are
blessings in disguise. The heart of the universe is beneficent.
As I have had an unusual religious experience, one of the numerous books
I plan to write, if my life is spared, will be entitled: MY SPIRITUAL
AUTOBIOGRAPHY. I have made many discoveries in religion and ethics which
I long to proclaim to the world. As already stated, I have always been
ultra-religious and a deep student of the Bible. Another book I plan to
write will be entitled: THE BIBLE AND THE SEXUAL INSTINCT. In the latter
I will seek to demolish the Church’s chief stumbling block. As already
stated, I was cut out for a preacher.
Footnote 18:
After my conversion at fifteen, I fought against my sexual attraction
toward schoolmates as few others have struggled against the ruling
passion. I was no longer a coquette, although desiring as much as ever
to be such. My passion for loud apparel, however, was not suppressed
since I did not recognize in it any sin.
Footnote 19:
I had in mind possible predestination to be a fille de joie—the career
which haunted me, off and on, every year of my life after my second,
even years before I heard of the existence of such filles. I had already
had an intensive five years career (third to seventh years). Another
foreshadowing (that of my actual career from my twenty-sixth to fortieth
years) was a common dream, from about my ninth to fourteenth years, of
being chased through streets and fields by youthful soldiers, who would
finally catch me, and great terror would result. The dream occurred so
often that in my waking hours I resolved, the next time I had that
dream, to tell the soldier boldly: “I am not afraid of you, because this
is only a dream!” Repeatedly in my dreams did I tell that to the soldier
who had grabbed me, but he replied (as I dreamt): “You are mistaken.
This is not a dream. It is the real thing!” And then I would become as
terrified as ever. My dream would always end a second or two after being
grabbed, and generally I would wake up as if from a night-mare.
Footnote 20:
Anglo-Saxon leaders of thought have hitherto been of the opinion that
the domain of sex is “=terra interdicta=,” just as those of Roger
Bacon’s time (priests and monks exclusively) would have believed it
sacrilege to use a telescope or microscope—“to see what God meant man
should never see.” Roger, although having invented these instruments,
did not dare tell his generation because the leaders of thought would
have burnt him alive for invading =terra interdicta=.
Footnote 21:
However, as described in detail in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, the
congenital extraordinarily keen edge on my intellect was progressively
and permanently dulled from the age of sixteen to twenty-three by
emissions during sleep twice a week. It is necessary to add that I
always had acute horror of self-abuse.
Footnote 22:
An adult who never surpasses the mentality of a child of twelve.
Footnote 23:
One of my three confidants achieved the highest success in life of any
student in college with me—one of the highest political offices in the
United States. Down to forty, I confided my homosexual adventures,
although after we graduated, our personal relations were never closer
than shaking hands. Within two years of his =honorable= name’s appearing
in absolutely every newspaper of the Union, he permitted me to receive
mail addressed to one of my aliases (used only by those who knew I was
an androgyne) in his care. At the time I did not realize the favor I was
asking—the risk to his reputation that he unselfishly took. Ungrounded
scandals sometimes arise when a full-fledged man does favors for an
androgyne.
Footnote 24:
Some androgynes of a less extreme type, however, tolerate militarics. I
know of two who served in the World War—because they wanted, every day
and hour, to be surrounded by adored young Mars. But if they ever got to
the front, they would probably malinger. I know of another androgyne who
was so afraid of being drafted that he took a hatchet and chopped off
two fingers of his right hand. In the World War, I was subject to draft
under the latest law. I had planned to escape by claiming that I was not
a man, the law specifying that sex alone as liable.
Footnote 25:
Non-mushy specimens are given in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE. Its
editor killed the mushy.
Footnote 26:
Substitute for the real name of the pseudo-hotel.
Footnote 27:
Decades ago I read in a newspaper this imperfectly remembered lyric.
Name of poet not published.
Footnote 28:
I was dogged only three times in my many years of leading a double life:
(1) Several Stuyvesant Square club-men succeeded, unbeknown to me, in
boarding the same elevated train. I discovered them only after I had
descended to the street. My refusal to proceed to my lodgings so
incensed them that they disfigured my face with blows. (2) I was dogged
again by several other Stuyvesant Square club-men. I discovered them
before I boarded the train. Again my refusal to proceed angered them to
giving me a beating. [They beat me because they had been taught that
androgynes are monsters of depravity. All were around twenty years old.]
(3) I was dogged in 1918 by a ruffian of twenty-two, with whom I had
talked confidentially, but finally forsook because my usual test had
shown him untrustworthy. He followed me for more than a mile, although I
turned several corners suddenly and stood in a doorway and watched. But
he had reckoned on my doing just that, and in some mysterious way
guarded against my discovering him. He was evidently a super-crafty
criminal. On straight stretches of street, I looked back half-a-dozen
times, but saw nothing of him. (Because he had always taken the opposite
side of the street and kept such a distance behind I could not recognize
him, while his own eyesight carried further than mine.) When I arrived
at my goal (fortunately this time an amusement resort and not my home),
he gave me one of the surprises of my life by coming up to me. I fled
from him in irrational terror.
Footnote 29:
Note.—See “Recollection” in Part VIII.
Footnote 30:
Martin and Paul are depicted in THE RIDDLE OF THE UNDERWORLD.
Footnote 31: