# The Female-Impersonators/Part 3

Part Three: The Fairie Boy
I. Female-Impersonation.
In Part Three, I shall outline what kind of adult career is the natural sequel of the childhood and adolescence described in Part Two; what kind of adult career is bound up with the physique and psyche with which I am endowed. I shall disclose what Providence had in store for the youthful religious prodigy of the Connecticut hills—the delicate, lilliputian, chickenhearted girl-boy—after he had been swallowed up in New York's millions.
Since ultra-androgynes are, in a sense, instances of dual personality—a male soul and a female soul inhabiting the same brain and body—it is natural for them to live a double-life.
Moreover, as the "classy," hypocritical, and bigoted Overworld considers a bisexual as monster and outcast, I was driven to a career in the democratic, frank, and liberal-minded Underworld. While my male soul was a leader in scholarship at the university uptown, my female soul, one evening a week, flaunted itself as a French doll-baby in the shadowy haunts of night life downtown.
Since my student and subsequent professional career were prosaic, I leave them almost unmentioned ​throughout Part Three. I, however, always gave them first place in my life. But I here confine myself to what I experienced and learned while impersonating a French doll-baby because it constitutes something novel to most readers.
Indeed Parts Three, Four, and Five portray the social life and diversions of the most cultured New York coterie of the third sex during the last decade of the nineteenth century. For, while little has yet been published about instinctive female-impersonators because of the prudery of the sexually full-fledged, they form (necessarily sub rosa) quite a large class of society—about one out of every three hundred physical males. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Fourteenth Street Rialto was their chief stamping-ground in the New York metropolitan district. I became acquainted with them because during the decade indicated, I was myself in my prime as a female-impersonator in two out of the three principal bright-light quarters of the metropolitan district.
[There exists also a fourth sex, the gynanders. But experience has not qualified me to describe them in detail. That task awaits some brave, high-minded, and brilliant physical female. See, however, chapter on Gynanders in my Riddle of the Underworld.]
The Overworld has enjoined complete silence about female-impersonators because of their thoroughly false view that any adolescent adopting the role must do so from moral depravity. They argue: "If I myself adopted the role, it could only be through unspeakable depravity. Ergo, the same is true for every male." They overlook the fact that Nature did not ​make all anatomical males of like passions. What would be moral depravity for one is not for another.
Instinctive female-impersonators are sexual cripples from their mother's womb. They had no choice in the matter. Thus they merit pity rather than scorn. Further, since their impersonations occasion no detriment to any one, but are a source of much entertainment to their sexually full-fledged associates, they are a positive ethical good. All beneficent talents that the Creator has distributed among mankind must have been meant for use—not for strangling.
As to the ethical question, I myself, who from the age of nineteen to thirty-one had an intensive career as fairie—female-impersonator, can truthfully state, on arrival in my late forties, that I was not once, during that career, guilty of an irreligious or unethical act—excepting alone that I seriously impaired my own health. But it is doubtful whether the impairment was permanent. In my late forties, my physical vigor is not at a lower level compared with males of my own age than it was during my childhood. My health has always been delicate.
Numerous wives and mothers suffer in health from the sex passion as much as I. If my having had my health wrecked by it proves it immoral for me and to be legally repressed, then the yielding to it by wedded pairs is equally immoral and to be interdicted. If it be objected that the human race is perpetuated by the latter, I answer that this consideration would only permit to married couples a sex-union when offspring was the object—that is, for a cultured couple, from one to three times throughout their married life.
​ In the description of my own physique and psyche, I have indicated the general characteristics of the extreme type of androgynes foreordained to become quasi-public female-impersonators. But the outstanding feminesque physical stigmata of each "fairie" (as they are commonly called in the United States) tend to be sui generis. In one it is natural beardlessness alone. In another, the possession of female breasts alone. In a third, the female skeletal shape, particularly an over-long spine, short legs, and broad pelvis. In a fourth, natural soprano voice. Etc.
Whoever has beheld an instinctive female-impersonator when keyed up, must confess that this type are born actors—or "actresses," as they prefer to be called. Their histrionic skill is not primarily the result of practice or instruction.
Their audiences have marvelled because the impersonators' faces are devoid of any sign of beardal hair. Usually the beard is eradicated. It is allowed to grow for a full week in seclusion. By means of a mask of depilatory wax, every hair is then pulled out by the roots, the outer portion having become embedded, like hair in wall-plaster. For three weeks, the face is as glabrous as a baby's. Then the week's seclusion and the final excruciatingly painful yank of the wax mask all over again. The process has no permanent effect, either good or bad.
All the impersonators adopt a fancy feminine name, as Pansy, Daisy, and Lily. Often the names of living star actresses are adopted and "dragged into the mud," as people say. For while the career of a female-impersonator is a purely physiological and ​psychological phenomenon, it is incorrectly regarded as deep-dyed immorality.
All impersonators belonging to the middle and upper classes also choose a masculine alias, represented in the Underworld to be their legal name. They do not wish to risk disgrace to their family name. Moreover, on their sprees in the bright-light districts, they are careful to wear nothing containing their everyday initials.
Except for a few weeks, I myself was only an avocational impersonator. I gave to it only three hours a week, as compared with 109 waking hours to my student (or later, professional) life. I did not adopt the avocation until near the close of my sophomore year. Almost throughout the preceding twentyfour months, however, I had fought violently against almost irresistible tendencies to disappear for an evening in the Underworld on a female-impersonation spree. But my ultra-puritan education had injected into me such a moral horror of female-impersonation that I was able to resist the tendencies for two whole years after the date that Nature ordained them to begin.
The "French doll-baby" spirit had dwelt in my brain since birth. Throughout my life down to nineteen, it had manifested itself strongly, although after fourteen I had struggled to crucify it. At nineteen, it refused longer to be suppressed. I (the puritan, bookworm spirit in me) had to arrange a compromise. I promised to yield my physical and mental powers to it only one evening each week. And the doll-baby spirit was satisfied. Previously I had been the most melancholy person in the university. But dating from the ​compromise, my life flowed on peacefully and blissfully. Only occasionally—moments while suffused with ambition to make a name for myself in the intellectual and philanthropic world—would I turn against the dollbaby spirit with abhorrence, and ask myself how I could ever give place to it.
For the serious work of life, I realized that I must practically strangle the feminine side of my duality outside the three hours a week during which I conceded to it full possession of my personality. While at my every-day tasks, I sought to forget the doll-baby spirit that dwelt in my brain side by side with the scholar spirit.
II. A Typical Female-Impersonation Spree.
The one evening a week on which I (the scholarspirit) surrendered, I called "going on a female-impersonation spree." The typical spree did not occur until the December (1894) of my senior year. I had become somewhat adept in the art of impersonation through a year's apprenticeship in the Mulberry Street Italian quarter. As that training has been detailed in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld, I omit it here.
On the afternoon preceding a spree, I would be overwhelmed with dread and melancholia. I dreaded disclosure, which I realized would mean expulsion from the university because of the full-fledged man's horror of a sexual cripple. I dreaded possible disfigurement by blows—or even murder—by one of the numerous prudes who detest extreme effeminacy in a male (supposed). I was melancholy because about to embark on something that my puritan training had impressed me as in the highest degree disgraceful, and that I secretly wished I did not have to undertake. But to be contented and even happy for the following week and to guarantee that tranquillity necessary for the best scholarly success, the weekly spree was unavoidable.
Only a handful of upper-class female-impersonators adopt feminine attire for street wear. For myself (being a university student, and subsequently an honored member of a learned profession) it was too ​risky. I merely kept some feminine finery locked up in my room for occasional decoration of my person while I gazed in the mirror. But during the eighteen months that my sprees were staged in the Fourteenth Street Rialto and the six years on or near military reservations in New York's suburbs, my attire was as fancy and flashy as a youth dare adopt. Fairies are extreme dressers and excessively vain. To strange adolescents whom I passed on the street I proclaimed myself as a female-impersonator through always wearing white kids and large red neck-bow with fringed ends hanging down over my lapels.
I would set out from my lodgings with the feelings of a soldier entering a terrific battle from which he realizes he may never return. As the car carried me farther and farther from where I staged the puritan student life and nearer and nearer to where I staged the "French doll-baby" life, my overwhelming melancholia would gradually give way to a sense of gladness that in a few minutes I would find myself again on "Jennie June's" stamping-ground. I had left at home all my masculinity (a very poor variety) . The innate feminine, strangled for a week in order that I might climb, round by round, the ladder to an honored place in the learned world, now held complete sway.
Fourteenth Street Rialto, Stamping-Ground of the Hermaphroditoi
Stuyvesant Square, One of Jennie June's Stamping-Grounds
(Usually the evening was spent on the bench where two girls are seated in picture.)
​an evening of 1921, the pedestrian would conclude that no such phenomenon as sex attraction existed. But during the period that I was an habitue, the Fourteenth Street Rialto was as gay as European brightlight districts, which I was fated to explore.
The Rialto is confined principally between Third Avenue and Broadway. While I was an habitue, theatres, museums for men only, drinking palaces, gambling joints, and worse abounded.
On pleasant evenings, when the sidewalks were thronged with smartly dressed adolescent pleasure seekers, I would promenade—up and down, up and down—until I chanced to meet a coterie of young bloods who invited me to join them. Our evenings would be spent in pool-rooms, gambling joints, beer gardens of ill repute, or worse resorts. Nature made me proof against the vices I there witnessed. My only weakness was the craze for female-impersonation. My greatest joy was to flaunt myself as a bisexual before those who did not know my identity. I realized that every soul among my Rialto associates was turning his or her back on the Creator. But I was always determined to give Him first place in my affections. However, for fear of bringing reproach on religion if I made myself its representative—I, a misunderstood female-impersonator, whom even the Underworld in general regarded as one of the most impious of humans—I never mentioned the theme except under extraordinary circumstances.
If the weather were bad, I would immediately enter a beer garden and call for sarsaparilla. I would consume it in driblets while watching for the ​opportunity to join some tremendously virile bachelors out for a lark.
On the typical evening I have chosen to describe of my many passed in the Rialto, I happened to run across several youthful Lotharios waiting in front of a theatre for something "to turn up". Only one adolescent "male" out of three thousand in New York City adopts the role of quasi-public female-impersonator. A Rialto habitue therefore does not often run up against one. Judging by my own experience, a female-impersonator proves an attraction of the first order for young bloods having time hanging heavy on their hands. Thus this coterie—as many others have done—called out jubilantly on catching sight of me:
"Hello Jennie June!" "Hello sweetheart! That is what you want us to call you, isn't it?". . . . "Let me introduce you to Mr. A and Mr. B. They have never met a female-impersonator, and are dead anxious to see you take off a girl."
"And you are Jennie June, are you?" A and B exclaimed. "We have heard a lot about you and longed to meet you."
"Bon soir, messieurs," I replied. I had a liking for addressing chance-met beaux in a foreign tongue. I happened to be the foremost linguist among the university students.
"Bon soir, Jennie, bon soir!"
"Meine sehr geliebten junge Herren, wie geht's bei Ihnen?" I continued with a twinkle in my eye.
"Ganz gut," sounded the reply. New York is a Babel. On an hour's promenade in the Rialto, conversation in a score of languages would impinge on one's ​ear. Bright young men brought up in a New York foreign colony acquire a score of the commonest expressions in several languages.
"I miei amici, siete amati da me," I next declared in a third language.
"Pee-an-gou, savez? We don't understand Dago, Jennie. Tell us in American how much you love us."
I reply in Spanish: "Esto es lo mejor que podemos hacer. Hablemos ingles."
"Bert, Jennie seems to be a bright fellow—or girl—doesn't she? All these impersonators seem to be brainy. Jennie, I don't know whether to call you a fellow or a girl. Which is proper?"
"Girl, of course," I replied with a smile.
"Well, fellows, Jennie" June is part he and part she. He wears trousers, but she has breasts just like a woman and wants us fellows to regard her as a girl."
"Well, Jennie, if you are a girl, why do you wear breeches? And why don't you let your hair grow long?"
"Because I have the misfortune to be only part girl. I am only a girl incarnated in a boy's body. But besides my girl's mind, my entire body is shaped very much like a girl's and I possess her bone and muscular systems. Because I am part boy, the law prohibits to me my natural or instinctive apparel. But you will be so kind as to overlook my not appearing before you in gown and picture hat, won't you? I will make up for that lack by outwomaning woman in my actions. It is my nature to give up all I have, and do all I can, for the entertainment of heroes—as you manly fellows seem to be."
​"Jennie, let's walk around to the ladies' parlor of the Hotel Comfort and have a few drinks."
We arrived in an artistically furnished room 25 feet by 75. At one side was a bar from which waiters continuously carried drinks to the fifty-odd couples seated around the small ornamental tables which occupied most of the floor. Nearly all the patrons were under thirty, and absolutely all, highfliers sexually. The vast bulk merely smoked, drank, and "chinned."
Only a few were playing cards for money. All were refined and orderly. I have never circulated among more delightful people than I met frequently at the Hotel Comfort.
I had become well acquainted with the proprietor and all his employees. For more than a year the "hotel" was substantially the home of my feminine personality, "Jennie June." But this refined and luxurious "hotel" would have tolerated only a cultured and outwardly modest female-impersonator. Most examples of that biological sport were far below the standards of the Hotel Comfort, and would have been barred. But I was looked upon as a personality likely to attract a pecuniarily desirable class of patronage.
My five companions and I spent an hour sipping beverages.
[While during my twelve years as quasi-public female-impersonator, my companions always drank intoxicants, I always called for non-alcoholics. The latter's price was double in order to discourage the consumption of temperance drinks. I had been brought up to loathe alcoholics, and during my twelve years ​intimacy with heavy drinkers, came to a more and more rational loathing.
Alcoholics are by far the greatest curse of the Caucasian race. I have had almost unequalled opportunities for studying venereal diseases. My twelve years of having roues and filles de joies for bosom friends taught me that the presence of alcohol in the blood is the sine qua non of venereal disease. Perhaps my greatest contribution to the betterment and happiness of humanity is the epigram original with myself: No Alcohol, No Venereal Disease. But it is necessary to be a total abstainer. Mere moderation does not confer immunity. The total abstainer may possibly contract venereal disease, but it is sure to be benign, almost negligible, and inflicting no permanent injury. Dr. Robert W. Shufeldt, who as army surgeon had extensive experience in the treatment of venereal disease, wrote in the Journal of Urology and Sexology, 1917, page 458: "In my opinion, alcohol bears the responsibility more than any other single agent—indeed more than all the others put together—for ensuring venereal infection."]
"Jennie, why not take a cocktail instead of a lemonade? We want to warm you up. Then you will give us some of your recitations and songs. Won't you drink a few cocktails for my sake?"
"I would not put the poison into my system for anybody! I do not need that kind of stimulant. You know what kind I need to get warmed up to declaiming and singing!
   "'I am a-thirst, but not for wine; The stimulant I long for is divine; Poured only from your eyes in mine!
   I am a-cold, and lagging lame; Life creeps along my chilled frame; Your love will fan it into flame.
   I am a-hungered, but the bread I want; The food that e'er my thoughts doth haunt; Is your sweet speech, for which I pant!'"
"If that is all the stimulant you need, Jennie, it can easily be supplied."
We were the merriest party in the parlor. The attentions of my beaux were having their usual effect. To achieve my best success at female-impersonation, the stimulus of an appreciative and responsive audience of youthful Lotharios was necessary. Our hilarity was more and more attracting the eyes and ears of all other guests. Some recognized me as a female-impersonator. Calls began to reach me: "O you Jennie June, give us an impersonation of a prima donna!" The old-timers were remarking to new patrons of the "hostelry": "The little fellow with the red bow is a fairie!"
Hypnotized by the adulation of those whom I looked upon as demigods, as well as by the well-disposed attention of the other hundred-odd guests attracted by my unique, yet fairly modest, behavior, I broke into the "Old Oaken Bucket"—a song affording unusual opportunity to display my masculine-feminine tones: below middle A, baritone; from A upward, alto; with an occasional soprano and tenor modulation thrown in just to excite wonder. I fancy my singing voice is unusual in its variety of possible modulation ​as a result of my body being both male and female. In my singing voice particularly, these two elements are ever striving for the upper hand. One stanza each of several songs then in vogue followed: "After the Ball Was Over"; "Sweet Rosy O'Grady"; "Just Tell Them That You Saw Me"; etc.
Next I recited a dialogue, my naturally bland, sentimental, and caressing voice now aping a cry-baby mademoiselle, and now a stern, hoarse-voiced he-man. Now I burlesqued feminine airs and cadences; and now strove after the most virile and dare-devil effects.
I was, while the focus for all eyes, conscious only of the joy of being alive and in the midst of an admiring group. I experienced a feeling of exultation that for a brief spell I was looked upon under my real character—a bisexual. I was intoxicated with delight because emancipated—though only for a few moments—from a hated dissimulation and disguise, and enabled to be myself. Assuredly another personality than that of my every-day book-worm self was in possession of my body and faculties. I realized I was the same I who was one of the leaders in scholarship at the university. At the same time, I realized I was doing things incongruous with that position.
At midnight, I bade my convives a reluctant adieu. Before boarding an elevated train, I turned several corners abruptly and hid in the first dark doorway to make sure of not being dogged. But no Rialto associate ever did. After alighting from the train, I adopted the same strategy, to make assurance doubly sure.
​Arrived in my room, I first dropped to my knees to thank Providence for restoration to my every-day world. I rejoiced that the ordeal of a female-impersonation spree was over for a week. But the following days, while resting my mind for a moment from hard study, I gloated over the memory of my latest associations, as a member of the gentle sex, with the tremendously virile type of adolescent.
III. The Gambler.
"Where is my wandering boy to-night— The boy of my tenderest care, The boy that was once my joy and light, The child of my love and prayer?"
In chapter III I shall portray one of the most remarkable of the Adonises that I met during my 18-months Rialto career, to which the present Part Three is devoted, and in chapter IV, the most remarkable youthful Hercules. Other Adonises of the Rialto are protrayed in my Riddle of the Underworld. The remainder of the present book, to the end of Part V, will describe some of the most remarkable ultra-androgynes (female-impersonators) that I met in the Rialto. For a description of my most noteworthy "fallen angel" confidants, I refer to my Riddle, and to my fourth book, now in preparation, Susa, which gives the entire life of the Queen of the Rialto of the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth century. As I was fated to become the most widely known female-impersonator of the Rialto, Susa was the most widely known vampire. Two detested and cordially loathed types, but actually not a hundredth as bad as they had the name of being!
Numerous Rialto pals were adolescent professional gamblers. Because of that, I have chosen to devote an entire chapter to a characterization of the type. More than that, the young blood forming the subject of the present chapter was my "No. 1" friend among the couple of hundred Lotharios with whom I ​mingled in the Rialto. He became my favorite because he was the most elegantly dressed—and close to the handsomest—adolescent I ever met. Above all, he possessed the most genial disposition.
Has the reader ever remarked that just that kind of disposition generally goes hand in hand with deceit and hypocrisy? Later—to my bitterest sorrow—the hero-boy now being described was discovered to be the greatest hypocrite I ever met. In January, 1895, I made his acquaintance. For half-a-year he manifested the greatest affection—all feigned as I later found. When he had wrung me dry, he—entirely unexpectedly—flourished a loaded revolver around my head, and cried: "If you ever speak to me again, or even come into the same room, I will put a bullet through your head!"
This quondam soul-mate had such a craze for acquiring money—generally by foul means—as I have never witnessed in another. He made it a condition of our spending a couple of hours together that I put into his palm a five-dollar bill. But though I could get plenty of other company of his type gratis, I was so fascinated with him that I never gave a second thought to the self-sacrifice that such gifts demanded during my student days. While promenading the streets with him, I would, every other minute, glance into his face, reflecting: "The handsomest and best dressed young fellow of the Rialto is MINE." While we were seated in a theatre together, I would often gaze into his face instead of at the players, reflecting: "New York's Beau Brummel is MY SOUL-MATE." For no soft hair, no rosebud cheeks in a ​male, no arched eyebrows—ever surpassed those of the Adonis now being described. He was perfection in face, head, and body. He was perfection in dress. He was perfection in disposition—ONLY HE WAS ULTRA-DECEITFUL.
Buddie McDonald! Whom for over twenty-five years I have not seen or had news of! I am here addressing you because it is the only possible way to get through a message. If these lines should ever fall under your eyes, and you should, in this chapter, recognize yourself—somewhat covered in order to hide our identities—I wish to tell you that I have through the years always granted you first place in my heart after my mother alone, and if we could ever run across one another, I still stand ready to enslave myself to you, notwithstanding you doubtless have lost (because age deals no differently with you than with all other sons and daughters of Adam) nearly all your litheness and charm. But I still love you for what you were in your earlier twenties. Throughout a quarter of a century I have been longing and waiting for a chance encounter with you. Many times have I eyed every man passed in New York's crowds hoping to recognize your face. Nothing would I like better than to spend my declining years knit to your genial personality and heroic, grand-aired spirit. I freely pardon your past treachery—though it almost drove me insane—if only you would condescend to let my soul be knit to yours until death do us part!
Buddie McDonald! The most precious of all names! If it were my idol's legal name, I would not ​disclose it. It was the alias he used in the Rialto and the only name I knew him by.
Buddie told me that he was born and brought up on a farm near Lake Ontario. His people were Methodists. He had always gone to Sunday school and Epworth league, because his parents required it. For he was a black sheep by birth—the only one in his little rural community. When nineteen, the seventeen-year daughter of a neighbor appeared with her parents before a justice of the peace. Buddie lived with his child-wife only three days and then stole away for parts unknown. What pangs the poor girl must have suffered thus to lose a genuine Adonis—in beauty one man out of a thousand—to the arms of the demimonde! She had doubtless been comforting herself and congratulating herself that she had won for life as her helpmeet the most bewitching young blood of the community. And after just three days to be forever left in the lurch!
"Buddie McDonald" immediately bobbed up in the Rialto under that alias. In the Rialto! At that time one of the two chief amusement and gambling centers of the Western Continent, the magnet for the black sheep of pious families all over the United States. He immediately adopted the profession of card sharper, being endowed with the peculiar mentality necessary.
While we were pals, he was twenty-two—just a year older than myself. From ten to midnight one evening each week, I dogged him in one of the half-dozen gambling joints among which he divided his "working" hours.
​I was too much of a goody-goody ever to gamble myself. I would merely sit for hours as spectator. It was intense pleasure merely to have under my eyes the type of adolescent that sows wild oats.
Among my associates in the Rialto resorts were youthful actors playing at the several theatres, racetrack book-makers, wealthy adolescents who spent their evenings sipping gross pleasures, and high-fliers of the feminine persuasion—at that date as thick in the Rialto as flies in summer around an open jug of molasses.
I was now in my third year of leading a double life. My every-day circle was without suspicion. Outside my one evening per week in the Rialto, I led a most industrious student life, even winning prizes. I had already been awarded the bachelor's degree cum laude and was in my first year of graduate study. Of course I had never revealed to any Rialto associate that I was a university student. I was known there merely as "Jennie June," while the few who took the trouble to inquire my legal name never questioned "Ralph Werther." And my three most intimate Lothario friends of the Rialto were too busy evenings—Martin and Paul, chasing chippies, and Buddie, victimizing youthful greenhorns—to investigate where I spent my time while not in the Rialto. They have each asked me where I lived. I gave a fictitious address, hoping they would not investigate. And they never did. And my three most intimate androgyne friends—Roland Reeves, Eunice, and Phyllis—were, like myself, living a double life incognito, and thus ​were the more inclined to respect my disinclination to refer to my every-day life.
To the university circle I thus continued the "innocent" from whose view Heaven had mercifully shut off the seamy side of life, particularly the Underworld. They declared they never saw any one with such weak sexuality! But I actually knew a thousand times as much about passion and crime as any one of them. Some complained because I "never associated with men and learned human nature"! But I secretly knew human nature far better than any of them. They thought that my feminine predilections and lack of worldly wisdom (seeming) were due to my being a recluse! And I was a recluse so far as concerned university social affairs. For I elected to take my diversions as a mademoiselle—not as a gallant.
But to return to Buddie: I have picked out for description that one of my numerous evenings spent in part with him which best illustrates his character and our relations. Afternoons and evenings he hung around fashionable hotel lobbies and exhibition halls to scrape acquaintance with moderately wealthy and sportily inclined Reubs making their first trip to New York. With his unmatched geniality and hypocrisy, he was decidedly successful in getting a line aboard some "sport" from upstate, and taking him in tow. For with Buddie, it was "Brother, this" and "Brother, that". A large proportion of the Reubs whom Buddie condescended to buttonhole congratulated themselves doubtless on their good luck in happening on such a friendly New Yorker—a gentleman of leisure and a big roll of yellow backs (which Buddie always took pains to wave before the eyes of Reubs, a manoeuvre ​tending to hypnotise them) who condescended to show them the sights of the metropolis, and, above all, take them where they could quadruple and quintuple their funds in a single evening. The passion for enrichment by a stroke of luck is, after woman and wine, the chief pitfall for "he-men." An appeal to this craze in Reubs ambitious to be "sports" has good prospects of success for brainy metropolitan prestidigitators.
On Buddie's and my entering into a solemn contract—very similar to a marriage bond—to be "best friends," he agreed to reserve one entire evening each week for me alone. But it was only the fourth that I had to sit in a Fourteenth Street restaurant for two long hours waiting in vain. I was -wiping my tearbedimmed eyes four times a minute. Other diners probably thought I was experiencing some overwhelming bereavement.
At ten I made the rounds of the gambling joints frequented by my soul-mate. I finally caught sight of his wondrous blonde hair and peachlike cheeks in the very last—as always happens—of his half-dozen stamping-grounds. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was pre-eminently New York's Monte Carlo (which name I give it in this book) . The walls were paneled in rosewood. Every six feet a heavy gilt-framed plate-glass mirror reached halfway to the 15-foot ceiling. The latter was painted with Cupids and Venuses, in all sorts of poses, amid fleecy clouds floating in such a blue sky as is actually beheld only in Italy. The myriads of crystal prisms pendent from the huge chandeliers emitted all the colors of the spectrum. The floor was mosaic—in such exquisite patterns that it seemed a sin to set foot on it. The ​ebony furniture was inlaid with mother-of-pearl in floral patterns.
I rushed to Buddie's side noiselessly because, with three other smartly dressed young bloods, he was absorbed in a game. I knelt beside my hero-boy with head against his arm.
When the hand was played out, Buddie, throwing at me the sweetest of smiles, addressed the only one of the four who was a stranger: "Mr. Myers, let me introduce Jennie June, the female-impersonator. I am used to her hanging around while we fellows are playing. Do not let her presence distract you. Jennie and I call each other 'Best Friend.' Perhaps you never before ran up against a person who is one-third man, one-third woman, and one-third infant. Thst explains why she nestles up against me so affectionately."
But Mr. Myers appeared to be unutterably shocked. Particularly since I was in male attire. He appeared incredulous. He had never even dreamed that a third sex exists.
After an hour Buddie said: "Jennie, take my keys, go to my room, and wait for me there. Because I will not get home until long after midnight."
On arrival he exclaimed: "Jennie, what do you think of your new friend, Mr. Abraham Myers, the Beau Brummel of Myersville upstate, who is enjoying his first visit to our village?"
"I think, Buddie, that before to-night he had never been in any place worse than a church social. His evening in the Monte Carlo must have been an ​opener. Whenever my gaze fell on the poor innocent, the words of the Bible went through my head: 'He is led as a lamb to the slaughter! And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth!' I am sorry my hero-boy stoops to take advantage of an unsophisticated Reub! '
While we ate our midnight lunch, Buddie confided his evening's adventure. I was always inquisitive about the ways and habits of the tremendously virile—how they looked upon the mystery we call "life"—and habitually put to my numerous soulmates a long list of questions in case they did not spontaneously overflow. But it is an earmark of crooks to be garrulous with their soulmates. The former are proud of their sharpwittedness and gloat in unburdening their minds to some one they think they can trust. Their characteristic bragging to confidants is one of the chief means by which many of them finally fall within the toils of the law.
Secondly, Buddie was my soulmate. At that date, we felt ourselves husband and wife. For I am myself fundamentally a woman, though possessing the male primary determinants. The relationship of knit souls—amalgamation of two separate personalities of opposite sex into ONE human being—I have discovered tends to mutual confidences. I had already several times been in Buddie's presence when he had an intended victim (always a Reub) in tow, and saw through everything even if he had not told me. If it be asked how I, pretending to be of high morals, could associate with sharpers, I answer: Love is blind. In my subsequent Bowery period, described in my Autobiography of an ​Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld, I was knit into one being with youthful burglars, who, to whet my admiration for themselves, have entertained me with accounts of their burgling houses and demonstrated their truthfulness by exhibiting terrible scars from gunshot wounds suffered as they were fleeing from a burglary they had "made a mess of."
I would never have thought of contributing in any way to bring them to justice; first, because I slavishly adored them, and secondly, because I knew I would be murdered if they should ever entertain the least suspicion that I would "peach."
Experience taught me, during my six years in New York's Underworld, that crooks are particularly prone to confess to a fairie intimate. For they considered fairies (under the legal ban of ten years' imprisonment in New York) far worse criminals and far worse defiers of the law than themselves. Fairies—they thought—would not dare "peach."
Fairies would serve as the best stool pigeons for ferreting out thieves, just as keen filles de joie are employed as detectives.
Buddie McDonald had already received many proofs that I idolized him and would never do anything to his detriment. True: five months later he did "shake" me definitely and emphatically. But this was because he had discovered he had wrung out of me all the money he could; he had become financially independent beyond his wildest dreams; and I had come to be a terrible bore through hanging around his room several times a week and demonstrating myself insatiable.
​I summarize, as nearly as I can recollect, Buddie's account of the Abraham Myers adventure.
It was on account of my roping Abraham in, Jennie, that I had to cause you that terrible crying spell at the restaurant. But you will sure forgive me when you come to realize that it is not every afternoon that a fellow comes across a hundred-dollar wad on the floor of Madison Square Garden waiting for some bloke to pick her up.
While Abe and I were watching the poor devils spinning around the track, I slyly pumped out that he is the only son and hope of Jonathan Myers, owner of the knitting-mill that put Myersville on the map. Having once been a hayseed myself, Jennie, I know what pulls strong with them. So, to get a line aboard Abe, I first gave him an hour of soft soap. "Yes, brother, I spent the summer of 1892 up in Squeedunk in your part of the state. It sure is a garden of Eden ....How did this year's potato crop pan out?....And I myself know everything from A to Z about breaking in a colt. I was raised on a farm up in New Hampshire."
After Abe showed he thought I am the best fellow ever and I had found him to be an easy mark, it was time to discuss money. "Money, brother! You have a little and you love it. If only a fellow has money, he can go everywhere and have everything. Wouldn't you like me to show where you can take your money, AND IN THE SHAKE OF A LAMB'S TAIL MAKE MORE MONEY OUT OF IT?"
Abraham right away bit hard. So I dropped the subject for an hour. I didn't want him to smell a ​rat. And my silence would all the more make him hanker after the magic place where one could see his dough swell five-fold at a sitting.
After the first hour of blarney, I asked Abe to let me show him some of the sights of the Tenderloin, which all red-blooded Reubs hanker to see. "I swan!" he exclaimed. "I never believed such charming and handsome ladies existed!" I next took him to the Waldorf to dine. Of course I did not let him pay out a cent. Only one red-blooded hay-seed out of a hundred will, at the last, balk at sitting down at the card table, where I can get every penny back with interest at 10,000 per cent. We sharpwitted fellows have to take those chances, Jennie.
As we swilled such grub as Abe had never even smelled of, he rubbernecked at the wonderful frescoes and stared at the polished marble columns which made the great dining-room like a forest. "This place is like what I have dreamed heaven to be!" he broke out over and over again. He was so soft! "You are awful good, Mr. McDonald, to bring me to see all these heavenly things. I never believed there lived such an awf ul good fellow!".... Hah-hah-hah, Jennie! He was clean daft!
But, Jennie, I would never humbug a friend that way. Specially you, because you and I are "best friends." You see, Jennie, Abe Myers was a stranger with a big wad. I was loading him with favors and pulling the wool over his eyes because my plan was to wring him dry before I let him get out of my hands. Such tricks are what we smarter straight men of Fourteenth Street are for. We have to live off the greenhorns.....
​Don't, don't begin to chew the rag, Jennie! My only sorrow is that I haven't enough dough. Abe Myers' old man has barrels full. Abe will not suffer more than a few hours on account of the eighty-odd bucks I wrung out of him.
At nine we boarded a car for Fourteenth Street. We went into the bar-room of the Monte Carlo and sent a few glasses of champagne chasing after the many already swallowed. The poor innocent said his head swam! Hah-hah! He acted bashful-like as if he had never before tasted a drop. But he was too scart of being set down as a sissie to balk at another, and still another, glass while I waited for Pedro and Tracy. For I had phoned them to meet me at the Monte Carlo at nine to milk a cow. For they are my regular partners, Jennie. They haven't the brains to get a line aboard a Reub, but know the ropes when I am at their elbow to give them their cue. We have an understanding that I will later make good their evening's losses, or take my share of the winnings that I throw into their hands. I guarantee that they will each be to the good by one-tenth of the night's clean-up; my share, for furnishing the brains and taking all the risk, being eight-tenths.
Of course we made it look as if Pedro and Tracy dropped in by chance. All three of us did our best to give Abraham the happiest hour of his life. When the time was ripe, I said: "Fellows, what do you say to a hand at cards?"
Pedro and Tracy seconded my motion. I watched Abe's face to learn what I could count on and how far I dared go. It looked awful sheepish, as you said, Jennie. But I must say for Abraham that he is ​ and would not back down in any manly undertaking. Like ninety-nine out of every hundred Reubs wanting to be sports, Abe Myers wouldn't balk even though he felt in his bones he was being led down to hell. But he barely lagged after us into the card-room. But this was probably on account of his Methodist bringing up, like my own. He could not possibly have thought we were plotting to fleece him. As we swilled grub in the Waldorf, I had given his hand a hearty shake when he told me he was a member of the Epworth League. I said I also was, as really when I lived back home. Besides all three of us had patted him on the back and lionized him. There were aristocrats all about. And the Monte Carlo is such a high-class joint, decorated like Vanderbilt's palace. Abe probably thought—like he said about the ceilings in the Waldorf: "Sure I ought not to mind the loss of a few bucks. It is worth that to see all this heavenly art, so much beyond anything I ever believed existed on earth. Besides Mr. McDonald has been awfully good! Spent a mint of money on me! He sure couldn't let any harm befall me!"
For, Jennie, just that is the secret of getting the best of strangers. Treat them just lovely until the moment comes to pluck out their feathers.
We were soon buried in faro, as you saw while with us, Jennie. I played the banker and the others staked their money against me upon the order in which the cards would lie as dealt from the pack. The play ran on for over two hours. We spoke hardly a word. First along we each staked a dollar on each layout. But later five. For the first hour—while you were watching, Jennie—I turned things Abe's way a little. ​I wanted to get him awfully interested. When the time came to throw things in the other direction, I had to send you home, Jennie, for fear you would make some remark about my sleight-of-hand that would put everything in bad. Of course if Abe had not been awful green at cards, he would have got wise too.
And, Jennie, I remind you this once for all time. The saying is: "Death to the traitor!" And I know that you love life better than death. See how easy it would be for me to grab your throat and in a few minutes you would be a goner without being able even to make a whisper. But I know you could never do anything but help along your "hero-boy."
After midnight, Jennie, there happened what I had been looking for. With trembling hands, Abe opened up his wallet to let us see the three one-dollar bills still lining it. He said awful plucky: "Fellows, I am almost at the end of my tether. I need this bit until I can get some dough from dad." I felt sorry for the poor kid, patted him on the back, and handed him ten dollars from my own wad. I said we would play till he won back his losses. But at last he balked. So I said: "Let's go to the bar-room and have a drink."
Pedro, Tracy, and myself spit out soft soap over our drinks for a few minutes. For some time I had seen that Abraham was awful worried. He now hardly opened his mouth except to answer a question. He looked as if he were all the time saying to himself: "I'll never get into another scrape like this again!"
But he did not dare even breathe a whisper about us being sharpers. We were three against him alone, and even sweller dressed. Besides, being a stranger in New York, he lacked sense.
​I judged it time to escort him to his hotel, because he needed some one to steady him. He looked a wreck. Because he was not used to champagne and all. We shook hands with Pedro and Tracy, and boarded a car for the Grand Union, where all the middle-class Reubs put up. Even when we were alone in front of his hotel, he did not have the nerve to call me down. I have fleeced Reubs who have given me a good punch in the mug when they got me alone. Abe must have thought I am straight.
I shook his hand good-night, patted him on the back for the last time, and said I would call this coming evening to give him a chance to win back his money. Of course I never expected to keep the engagement. I don't suppose Abe did either. As soon as he got inside his hotel, I sneaked away as fast as my legs would carry me. For a week, I shall have to keep away from the Monte Carlo.
IV. A Stuyvesant Square Pick-up.
It is August, 1895—several weeks after Buddie McDonald had left me in the lurch, as he had his legal wife, and as he probably through life went on deserting quondam soulmates when having no more use for them. Furthermore, during this single summer that I frequented the Rialto, I found it a barren stampingground for myself. Nearly all my Lotharios were of the moneyed class that go out of the city for the heated term, or at least while away their evenings at a shore resort in the suburbs. For I did not drift with solid business young men, but with those who sought an easy life. The book-makers were at Saratoga, the vaudeville artists at seaside theatres. Even professional gamblers preferred Saratoga or Long Branch during the months that fools with money to burn went to those places rather than,to little old Fourteenth Street.
But in June I was fortunate in being introduced to some refined "young fellows" living near Stuyvesant Square, five minutes walk from the Rialto. Business or a slim pocketbook kept them in the city. I therefore formed the habit of staging my impersonation sprees in the Square—a park of about six acres. Within four weeks I had been introduced to several score young bloods—so many because all belonged to a neighboring club the talk of which I came to be on my advent because of my ultra-androgynism and female-impersonation. The majority liked to flirt with ​me an hour in the park as if I were a full-fledged mademoiselle. I was always clothed as a youth, although exceptionally loud, as fairies are wont. But the present work will pass over my relations with the Stuyvesant Square club-men because described in my Autobiography of an Androgyne.
In that August occurred one of the most eventful evenings of my twelve years' career as overt femaleimpersonator. I had promenaded every path in the Square without running across any clubman—very unusual on a balmy evening. Therefore just before dark I seated myself next to the most attractive stranger in the park, where two thousand people were enjoying the cool of a scorching day. He looked to be twenty, was rather shabbily clad, but clean. It was not his features, but his powerful and well proportioned figure, that attracted me. His hair was red—a favorite color for neckties, but the very last I would choose for a beau's chevelure. His face, while well formed, was close to the very worst among the more than one thousand young bachelors with whom I have coquetted. His eyebrows and lashes were blonde and barely visible. His complexion resembled a sheet of faded pink muslin—a solid color all over, not rosebud or peachlike, as the lamented Buddie McDonald's. Particularly his cheeks were covered with pimples, common in redhaired men, so that one wonders how they shave. But because of his unapproached bone and muscular development visible even through his clothes, I did not like him a whit the less on account of his pigmentary defects.
For several months after that night, I fell in love, at first sight, with nearly every red-headed adolescent ​I ran across, particularly if his cheeks were covered with pimples.
In order to ascertain the trustworthiness, good-heartedness, and liberalmindedness of the Hercules, I first drew him out craftily by a long series of questions. Even people in my every-day world have given me the palm for inquisitiveness. I expected to put myself in the power of Hercules and needed to find out all about him. I was always ultra-wary about falling into a trap, as I already had several times in the Underworld. Androgynes are murdered every few months in New York merely because of intense hatred of effeminacy instilled by education in the breasts of full-fledged males.
I learned Hercules' entire history—providing what he narrated was true. To my joy he told me he had been reared in a village in the Mohawk valley. Through heart-to-heart talks with hundreds of strange young bloods in New York's Underworld I discovered that boyhood environment makes a vast difference in adult honesty and altruism. The country-bred adolescent manual-laborer is apt to be far less vile-mouthed and pugnacious, and far less likely to assault and rob one of Nature's step-children than a young-blood product of city slums.
Only after I had been able to form a favorable judgment of Hercules' disposition, I began to disclose, by my talk, that I was an androgyne. From my dress and mannerisms, however, any city-bred youth would have already judged my sexual status. Hercules later told me he had, but had feared saying something offensive. He said he had been impatient for me to declare myself.
​The following conversation serves to illustrate and analyze the hero-worship of the androgyne. It is admittedly mushy. The question is whether the reader wants the mushy or the untrue. Ordinarily conversation with a sexual counterpart made me silly. All my flirtations were mushy. The following phraseology is very close to the actual except that I have semi-translated Harvey's dialect into ordinary English. Further, the reader must educate himself to judge justly even that with which, as he reads, he does not like to identify himself or make his own sentiment. For example, two confidential, Platonic literary friends told me that my original songs published in my Autobiography of an Androgyne were "sickening." They could not sympathize with the androgyne sentiments and therefore the songs were "shoddy." Likewise the following conversation must be judged objectively and the reader's verdict be based on absolute reason, not on personal bias—not on the basis of the reader's ability to put himself in the place of the Hercules or myself. It is a conversation to be analyzed scientifically.
"Beau, see how much bigger your hands are than mine! And how horny the palms! I bet you would give a good account of yourself in a fight!"
"I've had lessons in pugilism. Besides I come from a strong-built family. Me father's piano -mover and me only brother steeple-Jack. Meself has worked as riveter on sky-scrapers."
"So you have wielded a sledge-hammer!" I exclaimed enthusiastically because of his more and more marvellous revelations.
​"All day long while steel-worker's helper on the sky-scrapers."
"O you are such a wonderful young fellow! Wonderful alone in your being brave enough to mount the sky-scraper skeletons! And still more wonderful in possessing the muscle necessary for wielding a sledge-hammer all day! May I feel your biceps? I am anxious to have my hands on the very muscle that slung the sledge-hammer!"
"Anything at all!"
"0 what a biceps! Like a tremendous boil protruding out of your arm except that it is hard as steel. Among the scores of Strong Hanses whose biceps I have been privileged to pinch, you are the muscular prodigy! You must be a terrible slugger! I pity your opponent! Only a pyramid of jelly after you got through with him! Do you know, Mr. Strong Hans, that I have fallen in love with your biceps?"
"That's a funny thin' ter fall in love with! But just feel me chest muscles and leg muscles."
"They are steel!" I cried in ecstacy. "Because of your being a muscular prodigy, I am driven beside myself in hero-worship! Do you know what the word 'worship' means? It means that I could prostrate myself with lips to your dirty shoes, and cry out, over and over again, forever, forever, your wonderful endowments! I could forever call you Sledge-hammer ​Wielder! Personification of Strength! Incarnation of Power! Man of Iron! Mighty Man of Valor! Mighty Man of Renown! Heaven wills that I, a poor weakling, bow low in adoration of a muscular prodigy!"
"You said it! I've got the build of a pugilist. But it's meself as needs ter go ter the dentist ter git me teeth filled and have n't the price."
"I'll attend to that. Because you are a rare find, Mr. Strong Hans! You are one young fellow out of ten thousand. I must n't lose track of you. Let me tell you the plans that have been going through my head since I met you. Nature has made it impossible for me ever to marry a woman. For I am myself really a girl whom Nature has disguised as a fellow. I only dress as a fellow because the law ignorantly requires it. Nature meant that I should go through life with a husband—not a wife, as ignorant society commands. For some years it has been my dream to take to live under the same roof, as long as God leaves me in this world, a young fellow who approaches my ideal. And you do as hardly another I ever met. And I want you to live with me as my husband. When you reach twenty-five, you may also marry a physical woman, and she will keep house for us. I shall always regard your and her children as my own. God has given me much above the average brain power, and I can earn money enough to support all. You will never have a care. You need never work unless you want to. For I will be your slave. Because you possess in by far the highest degree the bodily and mental endowment that are for me a magnet. You will be ​paying for all I do by merely allowing me to gaze at your marvellous build a few minutes every day.
"You—like every one else—probably think I am a very bad sort of person. But perhaps you will discover some counterbalancing good qualities. In reality my bad side is no worse than that [sexuality] of all other men. The virile call me 'Child of the Devil!' The pot has always liked to call the kettle black. A person always considers right and highminded whatever he himself is inclined to, and wrong and devilish whatever others are inclined to. Because people are thus in love with themselves and their own tendencies, they will not forgive my own bad side. Not because it is in any way harmful; merely because it is so exceptional.
"I have the means to support you from this evening on. I guarantee you as good a start in life as young fellow ever had. Wouldn't you like to become a lawyer or physician? Then why not tell me your true name and address, lest I lose you? Because until I know you thoroughly, I can not reveal my own legal name and where I live. Because people misunderstand so terribly women-men like myself."
"Harvey Green, Eagle Hotel, Third Avenue."
"I detest 'Harvey' because two acquaintances of that name were such poor specimens of men. Since you are to be my own personal sledge-hammer-slinger, I change your name to 'Tom.' That is the most masculine of names, and because you are the most masculine of young fellows—indeed the Supreme Man—you must ​be decorated with it. For you appear to be even more than man. A wonderful visitant from some other world. A super-man!
"I am afraid, Tom, you may be only a dream. I am afraid you may be only an apparition with me a brief hour, then to return, like Lohengrin, to the heavenly realm where the hero is immeasurably beyond anything we have on earth.
"So from to-night on, your legal first name is Tom.' And after I have tried you out, you will take my own legal surname. But my pet name is 'Prince Wonderful!' Can you feel, Prince Wonderful, that you charm me as a serpent a bird that it creeps upon in order to swallow? I know I am doing something crazy in letting you swallow me; in turning my back on all my own pleasures and prospects in order that you may get more out of life. For I would rather be the instrument through which a demigod like yourself enjoys some good before my eyes than myself to enjoy it. It is crazy of me; but my instincts lead that way, and I have the will to act that way. Muscular prodigy I Sky-scraper dare-devil! Your prodigious strength and muscles cement me to you as with hoops of steel!"
We soon took a stroll of half-a-mile to the East River, to a neighborhood of gas-houses, closed factories, and storeyards. No one ventured here after dark except homeless gutter-snipes in summer to sleep. I myself would not have ventured at night anywhere near these dingy and desolate blocks except under the protection of a Strong Hans.
On female-impersonation sprees in the Rialto and Stuyvesant Square, I was always richly clad and wore jewelry. While during my year's ​female-impersonation apprenticeship on Mulberry Street my pockets were rifled every night, I had not now for nearly a year suffered the theft of even a copper. And why should I entertain even the shadow of a suspicion of "Tom" whom I wholeheartedly accepted as an unsophisticated youth recently from the Mohawk valley and to whom I had pledged the usufruct of my fairly good earning capacity to enable him to live like a nabob? For more than an hour, on the park bench, he had demonstrated himself supergenial. He had seemed so glad and so grateful over what I had promised: To lift him from the slums to an honored professional career. The story of his life did contain some inconsistencies but I realized it only too late.
As soon as we arrived in an unlighted stone-yard and there was not another soul within hearing—at least we had seen no one for the last five hundred feet—Harvey Green suddenly changed to just the opposite of his supergenial and ultra-grateful mask. Only at the moment that he had me completely at his mercy did he disclose himself as a dyed-in-the-wool criminal—a fiend who would never give a second thought to having just committed a murder.
Since I had expected to take him under my own roof and acquaint him with my every-day professional personality, I had not gone to the extremes of frivolous female-impersonation customary before young bloods who would never meet me in every-day life. I had feared I would forfeit his respect. Thus I had bidden him call me "Ralph"—not "Jennie."
"Ralph, what a ya think when I say I've served time in Elmira Reformatory? I kin prove what kinder man I am! Reach your hand here and feel this terrible ​scar. And then reach it here and feel this other. Ralph, I got these scars from bein' shot while runnin' away after havin' made a mess of burglin' houses in villages. For it's better ter be shot than caught. And I did n't dare go ter any doctor. My pal dressed the wounds the best he could, and it hurt awful—I tell you! And both times the buggers bled and bled till I close ter croaked. But luck was with me; me guts escaped the pepperin'. And after I recovered from loss of blood and after the wounds began ter heal, I was as strong and husky as you see me to-night.
"But just to-night I happened ter be broke. I was just loafin' in the park waitin' for a sissie like you, Ralph, ter walk inter me trap, so I could git hold of some dough."
"Harvey," I could only stammer, being next to speechless because of surprise and terror, "I am stunned at what you say. I never believed you could so deceive me. Can I say nothing to bring you to your senses? Don't you realize you have ten thousand times more to gain by being my friend?"
"Ralph, did n't yez ever hear a bird in hand's worth two in bush? Besides I could never be friend ter feller of your nature, Ralph! My hand's agin' you, Ralph! Because I've a criminal record, Ralph, every man's hand's agin' me. And my hand's agin' every man. I'm a man without any heart. I'd as soon put a bullet through a bloke as look at him.
"No, Ralph, the burglar's life I've chosen kin alone afford the excitement I need. Up me sleeve, I did n't take the least stock in all your soft soap as we sat in the park. Your pet names and promises mean nothin' ter me at all! You sure must take me for a softy in ​me promisin' ter live with a feller like yourself! You're now goin' ter have a taste of what use I have for that kind of feller! Hand out your money! Hand out your money!"
As he spoke, he clutched a shoulder with one hand and clenched the other in my face. I handed over my wallet.
"Here! I'll relieve yez of that watch and chain. .... And off with that ring!.... Now take off every stitch so I kin see if you've any concealed bills."
"You're welcome to all I have on me, Harvey, and I love you too much to prosecute. Only please, please, let me depart unharmed! I forgive everything! If only you will let me depart unharmed, I will
Neighborhood Where Harvey Green Thought He "Finished" Jennie June
"I could n't do that. It'd be too risky."
While we argued, I undressed meekly and in unspeakable terror. I realized I might be experiencing my last five minutes of life. I took as much time as possible in the hope that a watchman might chance along. But why a watchman in a store-yard of paving stones?
"I guess now I've got everythin' of value, though not as much as expected. You sneak, why did n't yez have more bills onter your carcass?"
On female-impersonation sprees in Stuyvesant Square, I carried less than ten dollars. But judging from my rich attire and not knowing I had set out from home just for such a spree, Harvey must doubtless have thought I had on me a big roll. The present is only one of the most remarkable of about two hundred adventures I have had with robbers, the thievishly inclined regularly preying on androgynes because knowing the latter are themselves outlaws and thus unable to complain to the police.
Incensed over the disappointing size of his haul, Harvey continued: "And now, you sneak, I've got yez at me mercy! There's not a man within hearin'! Shut your d—throat, or you'll be worse off yet! Hold down your hands from in front of your mug! Hold down your hands! You bastard! You cannibal! Your nature's so disgustin' that every rightminded man would agree your face oughter be used as a butcher's choppin' block! And it's me own great joy ter do the job!"
Only about so much of the fiend's ranting was I ​able to catch. After I had received several sledgehammer blows in the face, fallen to the ground, been kicked and stamped upon, I entirely lost consciousness. Even while I still heard his ranting, I hardly noticed any pain. I merely thought I was dying. I was fully reconciled, and prayed: "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!"
The next thing of which I was conscious was violent retching—due to internal injuries. In his youthful verdancy, the fiend had probably thought he had finished me. But Providence overruled, as in a number of subsequent similar assaults when I was snatched from the very jaws of death, whereas every few months I see in the papers that some less fortunate androgyne has not lived to tell the tale.
I was at first puzzled as to whether I was waking up on the earthly plane or in another world. Until I fully recovered my senses, I lay inert. Then I slowly dressed and limped away, having to rest on the curb every five hundred feet. I searched out a street fountain to bathe my bloodstained face and try to counteract the swelling and discoloration. For, most of all, I feared arousing the suspicions of my every-day circle.
I then boarded a car for home, begging my fare. In its regular hiding place in a stone wall of a neighboring park, I obtained the key to the street door of my boarding house. Fortunately without encountering anybody, I mounted the several flights of stairs and secured my room-key from its hiding place. On ​arrival in my own snug harbor, the first thing I did—as always—was to fall to my knees and bless Providence for permitting me to see home again.
For several hours, I could not sleep. Every moment I felt as if I would lapse into insane raving. Every moment I besought God to show mercy on a persecuted outcast. I reflected on my lot: To go through life as a cordially hated bisexual. That was my cross, and I repeated over and over again—in my struggle to save myself from insanity—the identic prayer that I had at fifteen repeated over and over again on the night I had consecrated myself, and been consecrated by the brethren of the puritan church to which I then belonged, to be a preacher of the Gospel:
   "Jesus, I my cross have taken, All to leave and follow Thee; Naked, poor, despised, forsaken, Thou from hence my all shalt be: Perish every fond ambition, All I've sought and hoped and known; Yet how rich is my condition, God and heaven are still my own!"
Immediately following later similar assaults, I have had to have my wounds dressed by a physician before seeking my room, and on one occasion had to enter a hospital. But on this occasion I waited until the following morning to summon my physician. He made one significant remark: "It would be worse than useless for you to try to prosecute your assailant. The court would immediately turn around and prosecute you as a felon!"
For two weeks I had to keep to my room. Never ​in all my life have I seen such a swollen and discolored face; with one exception, and that exception died a few days later as a result of his terrible blows in the face. I told my landlady I had been in a fight defending a woman from her drunken husband. I telephoned my office that I was slightly indisposed. Thus emphasized so no business associate would call.
After two weeks, when my face had become somewhat presentable, I ventured to the office still retaining only a black eye. "In my room in the dark, I struck the edge of the eye-socket on a chair spindle."
I doubt whether all believed me, but none proved so impolite as to ask embarrassing questions.
But Harvey Green! I here address you in case your eyes should ever fall on these lines. I shall remember you to my dying day as occupying third or fourth place among the hundreds of hero-boys with whom Providence permitted me to commune. I never ​met your equal in strength and muscle. Whenever I think of you, the words, Supreme Man, come into my mind. If I ever run across and recognize you after the lapse of more than a quarter of a century, I shall merely step up behind—where your eyes can not recognize me—and call: "Supreme Man!" "Supreme Man!" Then, without yet seeing me, you will recognize "Ralph" to be behind you; because no one else has probably thought to call you "Supreme Man"; because no one else could ever have worshipped you as I!
Poor deluded youth that you were in 1895! I almost weep whenever I reflect what you have missed in life through your poor judgment in robbing, and even aiming to murder, your would-be benefactor. For a few dollars worth of trinkets and for the satisfaction of torturing effeminacy, you turned your back on benefits to which could be attributed a money value of at least ten thousand dollars. But I freely forgive. Like the soldiers who crucified the world's Savior, you did not know what you were doing.
V. Evenings at Paresis Hall.
During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the headquarters for avocational female-impersonators of the upper and middle classes was "Paresis Hall," on Fourth Avenue several blocks south of Fourteenth Street. In front was a modest bar-room; behind, a small beer-garden. The two floors above were divided into small rooms for rent. In 1921 I visited the site, as well as that of the "Hotel" Comfort (the two Rialto resorts with which I was most intimately identified) in order to take photographs for publication in this book, but found both structures supplanted.
Paresis Hall bore almost the worst reputation of any resort of New York's Underworld. Preachers in New York pulpits of the decade would thunder Philippics against the "Hall," referring to it in bated breath as "Sodom!" They were laboring under a fundamental misapprehension. But even while I was an habitue, the church and the press carried on such a war against the resort that the "not-care-a-damn" politicians who ruled little old New York had finally to stage a spectacular raid. After this, the resort, though continuing in business (because of political influence), turned the cold shoulder on androgynes and tolerated the presence of none in feminine garb.
But there existed little justification for the police's "jumping on" the "Hall" as a sop to puritan sentiment. Culturally and ethically, its distinctive clientele ranked high. Their only offence—but such ​a grave one as to cause sexually full-fledged Pharisees to lift up their own rotten hands in holy horror—was, as indicated, female-impersonation during their evenings at the resort. A psychological and not an ethical phenomenon! For ethically the "Hall's" distinctive clientele were congenital goody-goodies, incapable (by disposition) of ever inflicting the least detriment on a single soul. They were of the type in the United States, by every-day associates totally ignorant of the secret sexual practices of Nature's step-children, denominated "innocents;" and in France, "little Jesuses" even though in that country their sexual character is an open book, since there the sexual appetite is regarded as no more shameworthy than the alimentary. But the "Hall's" distinctive clientele were bitterly hated, and finally scattered by the police, merely because of their congenital bisexuality. The sexually full-fledged were crying for blood (of innocents), as did the "unco' good" in the days of witch-burning. Bisexuals must be crushed—right or wrong! The subject does not permit investigation! The fact that it is race suicide justifies the denial of all mercy! Let Juggernaut's car crush out their lives!
It was Nathan's parable of the ewe lamb all over again. (Second Book of Samuel, chapter 12.) The full-fledged had innumerable opportunities for the satisfaction of their instincts. Androgynes had only "the Hall" with the exception of three or four slum resorts frequented by only the lowest class of bisexuals who had never known anything better than slum life.
Why deprive cultured androgynes of their solitary rendezvous in the New York metropolitan district and ​give carte blanche to the thousands of similar hetero-sexual resorts?
Paresis Hall was as innocuous as any sex resort. Its existence really brought not the least detriment to any one or to the social body as a whole. More than that: It was a necessary safety-valve to the social body. It is not in the power of every adult to settle down for life in the monogamous and monandrous love-nest ordained for all by our leaders of thought. For example: The existence of Paresis Hall was due chiefly to the fact that in about one out of every one-hundred-and-fifty presumed males, the internal testicular secretion has failed to be of the right consistency.
While in this book I use the resort's popular name, androgyne habitues always abhorred it, saying simply "the Hall." The full nickname arose in part because the numerous full-fledged male visitors—it was one of the "sights" for out-of-towners who hired a guide to take them through New York's Underworld—thought the bisexuals, who were its main feature, must be insane in stooping to female-impersonation. They understood "paresis" to be the general medical term for "insanity." The name also in part arose because in those days even the medical profession were obsessed with the superstition that a virile man's association with an androgyne induced paresis in the former, it not yet having been discovered that this type of insanity is a rare aftermath of syphilis.
By means of an introduction of the reader to several androgyne patrons of Paresis Hall, I aim to demonstrate that instinctive female-impersonation has no relation to brain lesions, dementia praecox, or other psychic disease. The prevalent diagnosis, by ​physicians, of androgynism as insanity is as rational as for a male alienist to pronounce all women insane because their psyche differs radically from his own. As already stated, androgynism is a mere matter of arrested development, due to imperfect internal testicular secretion, in the natural sex differentiation that begins in the early fœtus and ends at puberty. This arrest has for its result an adult homo more or less bisexual—a sexual intermediate, whose existence the bigotry of the leaders of thought has hitherto prevented their recognizing.
At the university, the student is taught all about the anatomy of the frog, but the prevalent view among the leaders of thought that everything connected with sex is taboo has prevented even the professors of physiology from investigating androgynism, which touches the social body so intimately. They have turned their backs because "the subject leaves a bad taste in the mouth!"
You milk-and-water hypocrites! Is it nothing to you that innocent androgynes are pining in prison an aggregate of thousands of years, and being continually murdered by prudes, like Harvey Green, because you have taught them that no punishment is too bad for so-called "homosexuality"? For prudery is common to some ultra-criminals and to the leaders of thought. In the sight of God, you latter, when deliberately refusing to hearken to the wailing of bitterly persecuted ​androgynes, are morally on a par with Harvey Green and the murderers of X, Y, and "Jimmie Q", the latter being three bisexuals whose cases are outlined at the close of this volume.
Paresis Hall was never my own headquarters. I visited it only now and then. I had too early become wedded to the "Hotel" Comfort. Moreover, I wandered more widely, and in some respects flaunted my androgynism to a greater extent, than any other female-impersonator of my day. I took greater chances than any other, except in the appearing in public places in feminine apparel, but was never arrested in the Rialto because always careful never to render myself liable. Never for a moment did I forget the possibility of being arrested. I was even hypersensitive in this matter. A common dream was that of being arrested. But this hypersensitiveness probably saved me, since others of my type were continuously being arrested and sent to the penitentiary. But the cultured androgyne is almost never caught by the police. Only those of poor mentality.
On one of my earliest visits to Paresis Hall—about January, 1895—I seated myself alone at one of the tables. I had only recently learned that it was the androgyne headquarters—or "fairie" as it was called at the time. Since Nature had consigned me to that class, I was anxious to meet as many examples as possible. As I took my seat, I did not recognize a single acquaintance among the several score young bloods, soubrettes, and androgynes chatting and drinking in the beer-garden.
In a few minutes, three short, smooth-faced young men approached and introduced themselves as Roland ​Reeves, Manon Lescaut, and Prince Pansy—aliases, because few refined androgynes would be so rash as to betray their legal name in the Underworld. Not alone from their names, but also from their loud apparel, the timbre of their voices, their frail physique, and their feminesque mannerisms, I discerned they were androgynes. Indeed effeminacy stuck out all over Prince Pansy. Manon Lescaut's only conspicuous anatomical feminesqueness was extraordinary breadth of hips. While Reeves' trunk and legs were not so feminine, he excelled in womanly features, with such marine-blue eyes and pink-peony cheeks as any beholder regretted should be wasted on a member (?) of the sterner sex. Moreover, Reeves alone, of the two score ultra-androgynes that I at different times met at Paresis Hall, was naturally beardless.
While Roland, Manon, and the "Prince" looked to be between twenty and twenty-five, I later ascertained the first mentioned was thirty-seven. As already observed, perennial youth is an earmark of ultra-androgynism.
Roland was chief speaker. The essence of his remarks was something like the following: "Mr. Werther—or Jennie June, as doubtless you prefer to be addressed—I have seen you at the Hotel Comfort, but you were always engaged. A score of us have formed a little club, the Cercle Hermaphroditos. For we need to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution of bisexuals. We care to admit only extreme types—such as like to doll themselves up in feminine finery. We sympathize with, but do not care to be intimate with, the mild types, some of whom you ​see here to-night even wearing a disgusting beard! Of course they do not wear it out of liking. They merely consider it a lesser evil than the horrible razor or excruciating wax-mask.
"We ourselves are in the detested trousers because having only just arrived. We keep our feminine wardrobe in lockers upstairs so that our every-day circles can not suspect us of female-impersonation. For they have such an irrational horror of it!"
On the basis of different visits to an upper room permanently rented by the Cercle Hermaphroditos, I am going to build up a typical hour's conversation in order to disclose into what channels the thoughts of ultra-androgynes run when half-a-score find themselves together. The reason for its unnatural ring is that I omit the nine-tenths that were prattle, retaining only the cream that I consider of scientific value.
It was about eight o'clock on an evening of April, 1895. Some of the hermaphroditoi were still in male apparel; some changing to feminine evening dress and busy with padding and the powder-puff; some in their completed evening toilette ready to descend to the beer-garden below to await a young-blood friend.
I do not recall that a single hermaphroditos was man enough to use tobacco, or even to spit. They affected foreign languages, particularly French. I recall one whose favorite method in beginning a conversation was: "Mes cheris,qu' est ce que c' est que vous savez de nouvelles?"
A second: "Have you observed the new styles? ​Very narrow skirts, and very large hats. The material saved on the skirt goes into the chapeau."
"Nothing could be more beautiful," Angelo-Phyllis, the most effeminate of the hermaphroditoi, opined softly and sweetly, "than a feminine face framed in a picture hat set sidewise, with rim reaching below the shoulders. How I do like to stalk Fourteenth Street myself with such a chapeau! How the young fellows stare and throw remarks after me! I am glad the petite turbans are going into the rag-bag. And what low necks and short arms the new evening dresses are showing! And the material hardly more than cobweb! One could almost hide an up-to-date corsage in the fist."
"You seem, Phyllis, to be an expert on lingerie."
"My woman friends tell me I have the best eye for color effects they ever heard of. Millinery happens to be my business. A star actress whom I happen to know always asks me to accompany her to the modiste's. I must practically pick out all her robes, as well as hats—including the way they are to be made up. Just the sight of the artistic fabrics, as they are unrolled by the saleswoman, is an exquisite delight. My mind becomes crowded with emotions, and on the spur of the moment I could pen a lyric sur les etoffes jolies that any ladies' magazine would publish .... The ​stupidity of some women! This actress has just divorced her husband and is looking around for a new alliance. If I happened to have been born a marrying man, I could make her my wife, although all the frontrow bald-pates are crazy after her. She has given every hint—everything except an actual proposal. But if I did let her marry me, the morning following the bridal night, she would apply to the court for an annulment. She does not even suspect the existence of pseudo-men."
Another: "It is strange how often a girl falls in love with us women-men. I myself have had three proposals. Girls are particularly prone to fall in love with members of their own sex disguised as men. Of course we are really only girls ourselves whom Nature has disguised as men. Particularly, rather mannish women fall in love with us Mollie Coddles."
********** Phyllis: "That reminds me of a young heiress whom I knew. Perhaps you read in the papers two years ago how a New York young woman disappeared, and the utmost efforts of the police were not rewarded with the least trace. She was of that mannish type. For months she was the pest of my life. I still have a big pack of letters and poems—all sickening—which she mailed me.
"I myself have no doubt of the fate of the poor girl. When the papers were full of rumors and hypotheses about her, I repeatedly wrote my theory to her father. When he ignored my letters, I gave the ​police my theory. They likewise thought it absurd and refused to investigate along the lines I suggested.
"When some mannish women find it impossible to marry an effeminate man, they adopt some petite cry-baby woman as their soul-mate. The papers stated that the last trace of Mollie Dale was her carrying away from O'Neil's several purchases. The latter immediately struck me as such alone as a gallant would buy to present his lady-love. When I told the police, they said: 'Absurd! Who ever heard of one woman being in love with another!'
"On leaving O'Neil's, Mollie Dale absolutely dropped out of sight for all time. It was as if the earth had suddenly yawned for her body and closed again so rapidly as to be unseen by the people nearby. Or as if she, absent-minded, had stepped into an open sewer man-hole and no one happened at the moment to have his eyes on the spot.
"My theory, hermaphroditoi, is that Mollie went right from O'Neil's to her cry-baby chum's. Probably within walking distance, because every soul in New York was asked through the newspapers over and over again if they had met on any public conveyance the morning of Mollie's dropping out of sight a young lady of her description, so detailed as to give even the pattern of her shoes, besides her much published photographs. Her disappearance was at the time the seven-days wonder of New York and every one was discussing it.
"The rule with men-women—as with us ​women-men—is never to breathe to any one of their every-day circle a word about their sweethearts because of the misunderstanding and horror evidenced by people ignorant of psychology. As a rule the soul-mates of us better-class bisexuals belong to a much lower social stratum. Very likely Mollie's lived in one of the thousands of tumbledown tenements within walking distance of O'Neil's.
"According to my theory, hermaphroditoi—and I have seen a hundred times more of life than the average man, and possess some sense notwithstanding people not knowing me well set me down as only a high-grade idiot because of my outward frivolousness and an unfortunate infantile carriage—the cry-baby's husband or father had only just learned of what he, as well as ninety-nine out of every hundred men, mistakenly regarded as the horribly corrupting influence of the poor martyr Mollie on the hare-brained cry-baby. Ignorant that men-women are victims of birth and that their so-called 'depravity' brings not the least harm to any one, and insanely angry with Mollie into the bargain, he that very morning bludgeoned her in his apartment. And he happened to succeed in disposing of the corpse.
"I thought of Mollie when last week the papers told about an unrecognizable female body, bent double, having been found in a trunk filled with salt that for two years had rested unclaimed in the trunk-room of the third-class Hotel X—just the type that a tenement-dweller would select to harbor such a trunk. The murderer was evidently a meat-packer, familiar with the processes of salting down.
"In such strange ways a continuous string of both ​men-women and women-men are being struck down in New York for no other reason than loathing for those born bisexual. And public opinion forbids the publication of the facts of bisexuality, which, if generally known, would put an end to these mysterious murders of innocents."
"Hello, Mith Nighty!" several called as one of the tallest, oldest, and most brunette of the hermaphroditoi entered the Cercle's dressing-room. The androgyne who had adopted the name of a romantic woman had, during his twenties, before becoming thick-set, been a female-impersonator on the vaudeville stage.
"Mith Nighty!" one of the youngest hermaphroditoi shouted in a falsetto. "Queenie and I want you to coach us in female-impersonation. Next Friday at the Masked Ball we make our debut as public femaleimpersonators."
A senior: "The world would call our hobby insanity. But the explanation is that we were created psychic females, who yearn for the dress and role of that sex—to feel skirts flapping about our ankles—and nevertheless Nature has been so cruel as to incarnate our woman-souls in the abhorred male body."
Another: "But other than in us women-men, the male figure is infinitely more artistic than the female. The only disgusting thing in man is the beardal growth. I can tolerate in a beau a small moustache only, but prefer him clean-shaven. But feminine breasts are the very badge of beastliness! You, of course, excepted, Ralph-Jennie. The short, fat, knockkneed feminine legs are monstrosities! If you''ll ​pardon me for saying it, Phyllis. On the other hand, the muscles of an athlete compel the attention."
Later it chanced that Roland Reeves and myself entered into a soft-spoken dialogue: "Ralph, do you know any woman-man whom we ought to get into the Cercle?"
"Four! But they do not realize anybody is wise outside the young athlete each has selected as chum. No one but another woman-man, or a full-fledged man who had read Krafft-Ebing, would ever suspect them. Their public conduct is always the height of propriety. One of them even makes it a practice to boast of excesses cum femina—to ward off suspicion, for he has always shunned females as one would the plague. But on the basis of self-knowledge, we women-men easily recognize our own kind. I need only hear the voice and glimpse the features and figure.
"But none of the four ever visits the Underworld. They do not feel the need. Their being so fortunate as to have secured soul-mates among their every-day circle has proved their safety-valve. You, Roland, and I have simply been denied by Providence a heroconfidant from among our every-day circle. Moreover, we have been unwilling to risk betrayal to that circle. We are not hunting for high-figured blackmail and possibly years in prison.
"One is a university student. The college body refers to his ultra-virile room-mate and himself as "X and wife." But no user of the phrase ever dreams of its real significance, not knowing of the existence of intermediates. Of course they have heard of homo​sexuality, but think only the scum of mankind could be guilty. Impossible in the case of a high-minded intellectual!
"Here's Plum. Plumkin, you look as if you had lost your last friend!"
The 23-year Mollie Coddle sobbed: "Everything looks dark. Two days ago I was fired. I have hardly slept a wink since. I have hope for the future only in the grave. Some bigot denounced me to the boss. He called me into his private office. As this had never happened before, I guessed the reason"
Plum outlined his conference. I have listened to several similar confessions. The following is a composite. ********** Plum: "I confess to being a woman-man and throw myself upon your mercy."
Fairsea: "That confession is sufficient, and proves you an undesirable person to have around!"
Plum: "It will be hard to find a new job, since I have been with you for five years and must depend on your recommendation."
Fairsea: "Knowing your nature, Plum, I could not recommend you even to shovel coal into a furnace!"
Plum: "But you have steadily advanced me for five years! Why should to-day's discovery make any difference in your opinion of my business ability?"
Fairsea with a sneer: "An invert ought to leave brain work for others! He ought to exhaust himself on a farm from sunrise to sunset so that the psychic movings would be next to non-existent. He should pass his life in the back woods; not in a city. He has no ​right in the front ranks of civilization where his abnormality is so out of place!"
Plum: "You mean that he should commit intellectual and social suicide in obedience to the aesthetic sense of Pharisees?"
Fairsea: "Certainly! The innate feelings and the conscience, as well as 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? ​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 lifetime 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 ​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!"
​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 I"
********** 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."
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 crossdressing 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.
Androgynes, during childhood, are particularly prone to fall into bad habits (fellatio; or pathicism in prædicatio) 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 ​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 ​ 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 pseudocourtship 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 Hermaphrodites—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 ​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 Englishspeaking 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 ​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.
Bowery, in the Nineteenth Century America's Main Red-Light Street, and Stamping-Ground of Frank-Eunice, Angelo-Phyllis, and Ralph Werther-Jennie June
* ↑ Substitute for the real name of the pseudo-hotel.
* ↑ Decades ago I read in a newspaper this imperfectly remembered lyric. Name of poet not published.
* ↑ I was dogged only three times in my many years of leading a double life: (1) Several Stuyvesant Square clubmen 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 clubmen. 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 lookea 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. Note.—See "Memories" in Part VIII
* ↑ Martin and Paul are depicted in THE RIDDLE OF THE UNDERWORLD.
* ↑ In the summer of 1921 I twice saw moving pictures of Jack Dempsey arching his naked biceps. I was thirty feet away and his size was magnified at least twice. I carefully watched for comparison with Harvey Green. The protuberance was not equal to Harvey's, who was far from being approached by any of the scores of sluggers whose biceps I have pinched. I can never forget Harvey's mountains of biceps.
* ↑ I had graduated more than a year before and was earning a good salary during this summer vacation between my first and second post-graduate years.
* ↑ On one spree, when I left the key in my pocket, it had been stolen out of meanness, necessitating the embarrassment, and risk of suspicion, of having to ring at midnight for admission.
* ↑ In a later catastrophe, one did call. I was compelled to tell the truth, but he proved sympathetic and respected my confidences. He subsequently asked his physician about homosexuality and was informed it was deepest moral depravity and merited no sympathy. He himself happened to be one of the most broadminded of men. He remarked that physicians as a class are narrow-minded since most have not taken a liberal-arts course.
* ↑ In a later scrape, after being laid up for a week, I ventured to my large publishing office with practically no skin on my nose, that member having a week before been badly smashed. My physician had furnished me with the explanation that he had applied a mustard plaster for a cold and the nose resulted! But the better joke was that simultaneously another university-trained androgyne working in the same room was limping around with a crutch. He said he had been thrown off a horse, but I never doubted he had been crippled by some sexually full-fledged brute as a punishment for his androgynism.
* ↑ Prudery is one of the foremost earmarks of anaphrodites and the mildly virile, to which classes nearly all the leaders of thought belong. The trait is completely absent from the more virile, as well as androgynes. Some of the more virile, as Harvey Green, are prudes only as to homosexuality because taught that fellators ought to be killed.
* ↑ In the last decade of the nineteenth century also, there existed a feminine craze for skirts as narrow as a pant-leg. "Merry Widow" hats also had their day then. But in 1921 for the first time in Christendom, respectable women have been crazy to display their bare breasts, bare arms, and next-to-nude legs in the crowded streets. Respectable women have to-day adopted for street wear the garb, for exclusive brothel wear, of filles de joie of a quarter of a century ago.
* ↑ See "French Doll Baby" in Part VIII.
* ↑ This anecdote deals with only one of a number of similar occurrences in New York. Gynanders, as well as androgynes, are doomed to suffer murder at the hands of hare-brained prudes because of the false teaching of the leaders of thought.
* ↑ The scientific names "androgyne" and "gynander" evidence a blunder of their coiner. The order of their components is the reverse of their English colloquial equivalents.
* ↑ Havelock Ellis's works on sex—the foremost in the English language—had not yet been published in 1895.