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Title: The female-impersonators
A sequel to the autobiography of an androgyne and an account
of some of the author's experiences during his six years'
career as instinctive female-impersonator in New York's
underworld; together with the life stories of androgyne
associates and an outline of his subsequently acquired
knowledge of kindred phenomena of human character and
psychology

Author: Ralph Werther

Editor: Alfred W. Herzog

Release date: February 11, 2023 [eBook #70019]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Medico-Legal journal, 1922

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70019

Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEMALE-
IMPERSONATORS ***

Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is
placed in the public domain.

The Author—a Modern Living Replica of the Ancient Greek Statue,
“Hermaphroditos”

(Photo by Dr. A. W. Herzog)

The
Female-Impersonators
A sequel to the AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE and an account of some of the

author’s experiences during his six years’ career as instinctive female-impersonator in New

York’s Underworld; together with the life stories of androgyne associates and an outline of his

subsequently acquired knowledge of kindred phenomena of human character and psychology.

BY

RALPH WERTHER—JENNIE JUNE
(“EARL LIND”)
Author also of
The Riddle of the Underworld

EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION
BY

ALFRED W. HERZOG, Ph.B., A.M., M.D.
Member of the New York and the New Jersey Bar

Editor of the Medico-Legal Journal

NEW YORK
THE MEDICO-LEGAL JOURNAL
1922

Copyright, 1922

By ALFRED W. HERZOG

First edition, 1,000 copies. Sold only to physicians, lawyers, clergymen, teachers, writers,
psychologists, sociologists, and legislators; by Medico-Legal Journal, 123 West 83d Street, New York
City.
This is copy Number ................. and is sold
to ..............................................

Inscribed to Nature’s Step-Children—the sexually abnormal by birth—
in the hope that their lives may be rendered more tolerable through the
author’s efforts to enlighten thinking men on these step-children’s
psychology and life experience.

“But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them snared in
holes, and they are hid in prison houses; they are for a prey, and none
delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore.
“Who among you will give ear to this? Who will hearken and hear for
the time to come?”—Isaiah XLII, v. 22, 23.

CONTENTS

Page
Introduction, by Dr. Alfred W. Herzog vii

Part One: The Third Sex
I. How This Book Came to Be Written 1
II. The Place of the Androgyne in the Male Sex Scale 7
III. Androgynes of Mythology and History 25
IV. Man Is a Passional, Rather Than a Rational, Being 39

Part Two: How the Author Came to Be a Female-Impersonator
I. Reveries Suggested by My Infancy 53
II. School Days 63
III. An Androgyne’s Youth 70
IV. I Grow into The Fairie Boy 82
V. The Boy Who Never Grew to Be a Man 89

Part Three: the Fairie Boy
I. Female-Impersonation 97
II. A Typical Female-Impersonation Spree 103
III. The Gambler 114
IV. A Stuyvesant Square Pick-up 130
V. Evenings at Paresis Hall 146
VI. Thoughts Suggested by the “Hermaphroditoi” in General 164

Part Four: Frank—Eunice
I. Debut as Adult Female-Impersonator 170
II. The Pug Heaven 175
III. A University Friendship 178
IV. The Masked Ball 182
V. Frank—Eunice’s Indiscretion 191

Part Five: Angelo—Phyllis
I. Angelo Angevine’s Debut as Public Female-Impersonator 198
II. Jailed for Wearing Petticoats 209
III. George Greenwood 214

Part Six: Newspaper Accounts of Murders of Androgynes
I. Two Murder Mysteries Which, Strangely Alike in Many Ways, Baffled All Efforts
to Solve 223
II. Z Mystery Baffles Inquiry at Every Angle 237

III. College Student’s Death Is Unexplained 259

Part Seven: Medical Writers on Androgynism
I. What a New York Official Physician Has to Say about Fairies 262
II. What One of America’s Foremost Medical Writers Has to Say about Fairies 266

Part Eight: Androgyne Verse
I. Emotion 271
II. Recollection 275
III. Memories 278
IV. French Doll-Baby 280

Announcement of The Riddle of the Underworld 283
Index 286

ILLUSTRATIONS

Page
I. The Author—A Modern Living Replica of the Ancient Greek Statue,
“Hermaphroditos” (Photo by Dr. A. W. Herzog) Frontispiece
II. Ancient Greek Statue of an Androgyne, Called “Hermaphroditos,” Now
in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy 25
III. Alexander the Great—An Androgyne of the Mild Type 31
IV. Julius Cæsar—An Androgyne of the Mild Type 31
V. Raphael—the Most Gifted Ultra-Androgyne the World Has Known 33
VI. The “Fairie Boy” Ready to Set Out on Life’s Journey 53
VII. My Garden of Gethsemane 78
VIII. Front View of Author at Thirty-three (Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt) 82
IX. Rear view of Author at Thirty-three (Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt) 89
X. Fourteenth Street Rialto, Stamping-Ground of the Hermaphroditoi 105
XI. Stuyvesant Square, One of Jennie June’s Stamping Grounds 105
XII. Neighborhood Where Harvey Green Thought He “Finished” Jennie June 140
XIII. The Author at Thirty-four (Amateur photo) 164
XIV. Bowery, in the Nineteenth Century America’s Main Red-Light Street,
and Stamping-Ground of Frank—Eunice, Angelo—Phyllis and Ralph
Werther—Jennie June 169
XV. Michelangelo’s Adam 216
XVI. Whitestone Railroad Station (“Holy Ground”) 271, 272,
273
XVII. “The Boy of the Piave” (America’s gift to Italy in 1921) 277

Introduction

When, in 1918, I agreed to publish the author’s Autobiography of an
Androgyne, I did so because persuaded that androgynism was not
sufficiently understood and that therefore androgynes were unjustly made to
suffer.
Owing to the subject matter, or rather on account of the way in which it
was presented by the author, I was obliged to restrict the sale of the book to
physicians, lawyers, legislators, psychologists, and sociologists.
The sale of the book, while not as large as it ought to have been, showed
however that the interest of the professional man could be awakened, and
he be made to realize that the androgyne is no more to be punished for his
harmless sexual transgressions than a congenital physical cripple for the
latter’s unæsthetic physique.
Hardly had the Autobiography of an Androgyne been published, when
the author (who, it must be understood, belongs to that despised class of
sexual cripples) started, to use his own words, “to peddle the script” of The
Female-Impersonators around to general book publishers, and continued to
do so for two years, until ten publishers had returned it to him as unsuited
for general circulation.
It must be understood that the author wrote The Female-Impersonators
for the general reader as he felt that, although propaganda among scientists
was necessary, and would undoubtedly do some good, really to help the
suffering androgyne quickly, it was necessary to reach the general public.
In this idea the author was not wrong. During the last few years several
suicides and murders of androgynes have come to my personal notice, and
although a change of laws, which would do away with the punishment of
androgynes for their harmless sexual lapses, would do a great deal to
ameliorate the conditions surrounding their lives (particularly prevent much

blackmail, from which they continually suffer) yet the suicides of
androgynes are almost always due, not to fear of punishment by the law, but
to fear of exposure, which would cause the loss of their positions and insure
their being shunned by “decent” society.
As to the frequent murders of androgynes, these surely have not been
committed by members of the medical, legal or other learned professions,
but by men belonging to “the general public”—men more or less
“civilized,” but altogether brutal.
It can not be doubted that a repeal of those laws which prescribe
punishment for sexual lapses of these “pseudo-men” would do good, as it
would not only save them from prison terms, but also enable the braver of
them to prosecute and stop blackmailers, who make a regular business of
draining the resources of androgynes.
It is however impossible to achieve all that is desirable until the general
public has been thoroughly impregnated with the fact that androgynism (as
well as its correlative, gynandrism) is a psychopathia sexualis, a mental
twist, as harmless to society as anything can be, because it is neither
infectious nor contagious, and can not be induced in anybody through either
association with androgynes or through quasi-philosophical (that is,
sophistical) teachings or cults.
It must be understood that a normal man can not develop sexual feelings
or desires for another man, although it must be admitted that homosexuality
is occasionally practiced under conditions where access to the opposite sex
is impossible (or next to impossible), as, for example, among soldiers on
campaigns, among sailors during long voyages on sailing vessels, in
boarding-schools for adolescents, etc. This species of homosexuality is
indulged in only from “necessity”—so to say—and is not considered by
those indulging as much different from self-manustupration. It is gladly
abandoned as soon as access to the opposite sex has become possible.
An ultra-androgyne however, although he has the male primary physical
attributes, never feels himself to be a real male, but a female incarnated in a
male body (often with feminine earmarks), and would no more be able to
develop sexual feelings for a female than a normal man for another male.
It is therefore a consummation devoutly to be wished that a book setting
forth the facts of androgynism could be distributed among the general

public. The author tried to write a compendium for such readers, and The
Female-Impersonators is the result.
That he has failed in his attempt is to me not only very apparent, but also
quite natural.
To the author nothing that he has written about the practices of
androgynes seems what we call immoral or revolting. Because their own
congenital sexual tendencies appear to androgynes as the full-fledged man’s
appear to the latter.
To the author of The Female-Impersonators it is as natural to fall in love
with another male (bearing in mind however that the androgyne is only a
“pseudo-male”) and write, what he calls poems, dedicated to his “hero-
boys” (who to me appear nothing but low ruffians, blackmailers, and
grafters) as it would be for a normal man to fall in love with some good-
looking female, and write “poetry” about her, perhaps in some of his later
“poems” to bewail the fact that she has proven herself “faithless, truthless,
and makes a sale of that which men call love, to him who bids the highest.”
It is therefore but natural that, since the author sees human beings, as it
were, distorted through his own mental astigmatism, namely females as
belonging to his own sex and males to the opposite, his second book, The
Female-Impersonators, contains a great deal which to the average reader
would be “shocking”, and thus, instead of accomplishing the result which
he intended, would cause disgust, and make the treatment of the androgyne
even worse than at present.
After the author had submitted the manuscript of his book to numerous
publishers, trying in vain (as I had predicted to him) to induce one of them
to bring out the book for general circulation, I agreed to publish it for
restricted sale.
Not because I really felt that the book presents a great deal of new
material of scientific interest, but because, by describing the life experience
of various other androgynes, their viewpoints, their sufferings, it continues
the missionary work begun by the author in his Autobiography of an
Androgyne and thus helps in keeping up the good work. For, to achieve
results, it is not only necessary to awaken interest in a subject, but also to
keep that interest alive.
Gutta cavat lapidem, non vi, sed saepe cadendo. “A drop of water wears
a hole in a stone, not by force, but by frequently falling.”

That the author is really doing missionary work can not be doubted by
me, for I know that he does not derive any financial benefit from the
publication of his Autobiography of an Androgyne, nor do I expect he will
from the publication of the present sequel.
Every cent which I have turned over to him as royalties from the sale of
his Autobiography he has returned to me to be expended for advertisements
in various medical journals and, owing to the slight interest in the subject
which exists among physicians, I am sorry to say that those advertisements
have not been financially remunerative.
As the author however feels that he has a mission to fulfill; that he has
been created by Providence one of the despised androgynes for the purpose
of taking up their cause and ameliorating their state of almost unparalleled
sufferings, the missionary work will go on, as it has begun.
As in the case of the first of the present trilogy, The Female-
Impersonators is published practically as its author wrote it.
For my impressions of the author’s personality, I refer to my Introduction
in his Autobiography Of an Androgyne.
ALFRED W. HERZOG.

March, 1922

The Female-Impersonators

Part One:
The Third Sex

I. How This Book Came to Be Written.

My motive was humanitarian. My aim was to save thousands of innocent
step-children of Nature from an aggregate of tens of thousands of years in
prison, and bring about a repeal of the laws under which they are
incarcerated and which are still in the codes because civilized man has not
yet entirely emerged from the prejudice and superstition of the Dark Ages.
My second aim was to put a stop to the continuous string of murders of
these step-children, the assassins laboring under the delusion that
homosexuality is due to deepest moral depravity, and feeling that they are
mandatories of society in ridding the world of these “monsters.” My third
aim was to save hundreds of these superlatively melancholy sexual
intermediates from suicide as the result of bitter persecution by those who
pride themselves on the fact that in their own case, sex has been thoroughly
differentiated.
The Sexual The
Worst Crippling.
The problem of the bisexual girl-boy or androgyne has been presented for
the learned professions in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and The
Riddle of the Underworld. But to accomplish my three aims, it is
necessary that the general reader have instilled into his mind that sexual
intermediates are not to blame for their cross-sex idiosyncrasies. Such

knowledge could not besmirch the soul of the general reader, but only
benefit him morally.
In the present work I have a message for the general reader such as, in
nearly every individual case, has never yet reached him. My God-given
mission is to be one of the first to cry: “Child of English culture,[1] reflect a
moment, and ask yourself whether you are at last, in this the most
enlightened century of man’s existence, willing to grant justice and humane
treatment to the androgyne and gynander? Do you still insist that these
sexual cripples continue to suffer physical and mental torture for another
century because your own pleasure bulks too large for you to hear and bear
the truth about the despairing cross-sexed?
Why should the Christian and the Jew have always regarded as the one
unpardonable sin the union in one human body of the distinctive physical
and psychic earmarks of the two recognized sexes? Why should they have
pitied and assisted the club-footed and the deaf-mute, but always
endeavored to grind sexual cripples to powder under their heels?
There is indeed no worse crippling than the sexual. This is because sex,
with all that it implies, is the principal physiological factor in life. Any
abnormality of sex is truly the greatest of tragedies.
Authors’ Trilogy.
Reader, what would have been your own attitude on this question if God
had created you, or your son or daughter, a sexual intermediate, instead of
some stranger about whose banishment, suicide, or murder you have read in
the paper? Would you have driven the ill-starred son or daughter from
home, and henceforth treated them as dead? Or would you, when their dead
body was fished out of the river, be able to feel pity as did a father I read
about in a New York paper, who exclaimed at sight of it: “Poor Jimmie!
How you must have suffered!”[2]

My first three books on sexology form a trilogy. They together set forth
all phases of the life experience of a bisexual university “man.” To only a
trifling extent do they overlap. Thus the scientist wishing a full account of
my unique life experience must read the entire trilogy. For I was
predestined to an unusual role in the great drama we call “life.” I was
brought into the world as one of the rare humans who possess a strong
claim, on anatomic grounds as well as psychic, to membership in both the

recognized sexes. I was foreordained to live part of my life as man and part
as woman.
The first of the trilogy, the Autobiography of an Androgyne, was
published in January, 1919. In the following June, I began a supplement,
The Female-Impersonators. Before September, I began to submit it to
Enemies of Truth publishers. But they refused to do anything toward
and Justice.
ameliorating the condition of the world’s most
oppressed class. It seemed to be their opinion that the world must have its
scapegoat—to punish, vicariously, for the world’s own sins. For centuries,
sexual intermediates had served the world in that capacity.
After I had peddled the script around for two years to a total of ten
regular book publishers, the Medico-Legal Journal, publisher of my first
book, consented to make the work available for those interested. The long
delay in publication was utilized by myself in improving the form.
The third of the trilogy, The Riddle of the Underworld, has been
elaborated simultaneously with The Female-Impersonators. Into the latter, I
put the “milk for babes” (in St. Paul’s language); into the former, the “meat
for strong men.” I wrote the latter in a popular style because addressed
primarily to the general reader; the former more in the style suitable for
scientists.
In my Autobiography, I was almost exclusively occupied with a frank
exposition of what life meant to me personally. In the two supplements, I
have been chiefly occupied in depicting characters with whom I associated
in the Underworld. The Bible says: “Man is altogether born in sin!” But in
Christendom this is really true of only the one-tenth of the race who people
the Underworld. The other nine-tenths are comparatively saints. But there
exists no reason for the latter’s prevalent Phariseeism. For the most part
their moral superiority is hereditary and environmental.
Because of my innate appetencies and avocation of female-impersonator,
Author Repository I was fated to be a Nature-appointed amateur
for Underworld’s
Secrets.
detective. I enjoyed entrée to the hearts of both
male and female denizens of the Underworld, my
stamping-ground when I surrendered my bisexual body to the feminine side
of my dual psyche. They would whisper into my ears their innermost
secrets. Those who happened to be Roman Catholics (because some whom I
met in the Underworld were only chance and rare visitors, and ordinarily

able to live up to high ideals) have doubtless revealed the mysteries of their
inner life to their priest in the vaguest terms. But with me, because as a rule
ignorant of the confessor’s identity and not likely to meet him in Overworld
life, the confessions of Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and atheist were
detailed and exhaustive. Surely my having been thus favored by Providence
ought to qualify me to depict little known human types for those who have
missed the opportunity of meeting all kinds of people.
Of course, after the lapse of more than a score of years, I can not recall
verbatim the individual confessions and conversations. I remember only
their general drift. As outlined by me, they are merely representative. But
Nature has endowed me with a rare memory. The earliest ascertainable date
is the age of two years and three months, when I recall having seen the
coffin of a great-grandmother carried out of the house. I still preserve
earlier memories, such as being held on my mother’s lap and contemplating
her mountainous bare breast. I remember hearing the moon whistle shrilly
(the six P. M. factory whistles as I gazed at the crescent moon).
No reader should conclude from my trilogy that New York has been
Why an Underworld. particularly immoral. Conditions are about the
same in all great cities, except that those of the United States are puritan
towns compared with Europe. I have explored the Underworld in many
cities of both continents, being temperamentally qualified. But in America’s
smaller cities west of the meridian of Kansas City, the sexual Underworld is
more bold and wields more political power than anywhere else in the
United States or Europe.
An Underworld exists in all cities of any size because human nature is
what it is, and because of the social usages decreed by the blind Overworld,
which happens to include the vast majority of mankind. Man is descended
from the beasts, and still retains many of their instincts—particularly true of
the atypic or atavic who throng the red-light districts.
As the Medical World said of my Autobiography of an Androgyne, the
present work also “will be found a revelation of things undreamed of by
most people. It is a contribution to the almost unexplored field of abnormal
psychology.”

II. The Place of the Androgyne in the Male Sex Scale.

The Third Sex.
Throughout the ages that mankind have trod the earth, a broad and
endless stream of masculinity has coursed along until swallowed in the
ocean of eternity. In all streams—whether of water, lava, or manhood—the
particles at the center flow most rapidly and the speed gradually decreases
toward the banks. At occasional points along the latter, the particles are
stationary, or there is even an eddy.
(1) The Tremendously Virile cause the surging rapids at the center of the
masculine river. Their pre-eminent characteristic lies in excessive venery
and excessive promiscuity. Sex holds by far the chief place in their
thoughts. A large part of their waking hours is spent in the torture of
unsatisfied longing. Their conversation with business intimates tends to
sexual lines. They are the “black sheep” of families, never letting an
opportunity go by without improving it. They are the seducers of girls under
puberty. They are largely instrumental in securing a continuous flow of
recruits to the rapidly decimating demimonde. Indeed the tremendously
virile constitute the latter’s chief raison d’etre.
Their ambition being to be “the husbands of all women,” the
tremendously virile, among Christian nations, often do not marry. If they
do, a separation or divorce follows within a few years.
As a rule, only these free lances—as long as under thirty—appeal to
The Tremendously androgynes as “heroes.” To them alone do these
Virile.
pseudo-men yearn to devote themselves as slaves.
As a rule, the tremendously virile are not gentlemen. For they possess not
even a vestige of mild or semi-feminine traits. They are overbearing,
quarrelsome, and pugnacious. They will not take a back seat for any one.
They constitute the raw material for the roughest, rudest, and most death-
defying occupations, as volunteer soldiers and sailors, pugilists,
highwaymen, and burglars. They abhor prosaic work.

As a rule, the tremendously virile are men of only three interests in life:
fighting (including the slaughter of dumb beasts, in their inability to give
the same treatment to their fellow man); sport in the usual sense of that
word; and the sexual instinct. But a mere handful, whom Nature endowed
with unusual brain power, have been leaders in war and politics. In the
United States, I dare instance only Mohammed, Henry the Eighth, Louis the
Fourteenth, and Bismarck. But leaders of the American nation have
belonged to this tremendously virile class. I dare not name them because
cultured society, with their present mediæval ideas on sex, severely censure
men of this class as “bestial.” But the latter are fundamentally irresponsible.
In absolute monarchies and aristocracies almost throughout history, the
tremendously virile have been at the helm of the ship of state. Because they
have been, by birth, the greatest fighters. They thus forged to the front and
pre-empted for themselves and their posterity the best things of life. Their
constituting themselves the ruling class has rendered history, for the most
The Ultra-Virile. part, a record of wars. Tremendous virility,
combined with unusual brain power, makes the born leader of men, before
whose will the masses bow unquestioningly and they blindly turn
themselves into “cannon fodder” at his beck and call. Only since the dawn
of the nineteenth century have the mildly virile been coming into their own,
and brain and science beginning to get the upper hand over brute force. The
recent World War was the final resurgence of the tremendously virile as
moulders of the destinies of nations, as well as the death blow to their
ambitions in this direction.
As the status of peoples descends from the enlightened to the savage, the
proportion that this class forms of the entire male sex gradually increases.
Among enlightened nations, I estimate it at five per cent on the basis of my
intimate mingling, in the role of a soubrette, with several thousand young
bachelors belonging exclusively to either the tremendously or ultra-virile
class, while nearly all my every-day associates have belonged to the mildly
virile.
On the basis of my reading in anthropology, I estimate the proportion
among savages at seventy-five per cent. Among the adult males, I have read
that women constitute almost the sole topic of conversation. Fighting and
sport fill up the rest of life. When an explorer has visited a savage or

barbarous tribe, the outstanding hospitality is the provision of a bed-fellow
belonging to the gentle sex.
(2) The Ultra-Virile, on either side of the sexually fastest flowing
particles just described, take their less rapid course in the stream of
masculinity. Sex occupies their thoughts to a much less extent. But, like the
Natural Polygamy. tremendously virile, they are naturally
polygamous. Only these two classes of males, together with ultra-
androgynes and a small proportion of the mildly androgynous, sow wild
oats, beginning in their later teens and ending usually in their later twenties.
Prior to settling down in marriage, the ultra-virile secretly do not care a fig
for the sexual mandates of Christian society. But for the sake of
appearances, they hypocritically chime in with the regnant note and openly
condemn in the harshest terms the least infraction of the conventions by
another than themselves. After marriage, however, their infidelities are few
and far between. Perhaps a score in a life-time, as compared with a
thousand upward for the tremendously virile.
The ultra-virile make excellent husbands and divorce is rare. The wife,
however, while herself occupying first place in the husband’s affections, has
much cause for jealousy.
While the ultra-virile do not regularly choose an occupation free from
prosaic toil and ministering to love of sport and adventure, they are usually
averse to intellectual pursuits, favoring the manual. If possessing unusual
brain power, the ultra-virile man heads some engineering or construction
enterprise. The ultra-virile build our railroads, great bridges, leviathans, and
sky-scrapers. A handful are distinguished by a knack for political leadership
and have contributed the vast majority of such leaders.
Both the tremendously and the ultra-virile tend to excel in physique and
comeliness. Some athletes, however, are only mildly virile. “Virility” refers
only to sexual power. More than the ordinary erotic ardor, however, usually
The Mildly Virile. goes hand in hand with brawn, just as intellectual
tastes and spirituality do with brain. With the evolution of the race in
culture, erotic ardor, together with the animal side of man’s nature in
general, is declining. The goal for which the race is headed is the minimum
of sexual consciousness, coitus for procreation only, just enough offspring
to keep the number of the human race on earth stationary, lengthened life,
and ever increasing expansion of the intellectual in man at the expense of

the physical. With this evolution, the proportion of sterile bisexuals will
also increase.
The fighting forces of a nation are almost entirely made up of the two
more virile classes, although together constituting only about twenty-five
per cent of the total manhood of civilized nations. It is dangerous for the
world’s peace when these two classes get control of a great nation’s
government. Of the five classes of males being described, these two alone
love war and seek occasion for it.
(3) The Mildly Virile constitute, among so-called “Christian” nations,
about seventy-five per cent of all males.[3] Only on rare occasions do
Natural Monogamy. thoughts about sexual congress enter their minds.
That is, if married, they desire it only about once a fortnight or so, and up to
the date of marriage, the incentive is so weak that they never gratify it. Thus
up to the bridal night, this class three have usually been as chaste as their
better halves. They have usually never indulged even in masturbation, while
the generality of classes one and two have indulged frequently from around
the age of ten to the period in which opportunities cum femina or cum
androgyna become plentiful. In the mildly virile man’s ignorance of the
force of sex in classes one and two, however, he has been known to be
obsessed with the delusion that sex in himself is strongly developed. The
mildly virile always marry, although a few postpone it until much past
thirty. Subsequently they have at most only negligible desires to drink water
at a strange cistern. They are content to go to their graves having been
absolutely faithful to the lawful wife, or several successive ones, that God
gave them. Divorce is almost unknown, since its cause, in nearly every
case, is de facto polygamy in the husband, or his excessive demands on the
frigid wife—two faults absent from the psyche of the mildly virile.
The sexual life of the latter flows on gently and smoothly. It is called
humdrum by the tremendously virile, continuously wafted up and down in a
dizzy fashion in the rapids at the center of the masculine river. But what the
mildly virile miss of the “pep” of life is more than compensated by the
blissful peace that characterizes their earthly journey.
Their abhorrence of androgynism is many times as intense as in the case
of the more virile. While not a single mildly virile man would ever succumb
Anaphrodites. to androgyne allurements, I have ascertained
through many years’ association with thousands of tremendously or ultra-

virile that at least seventy-five per cent readily suffer capture providing
their sexual needs are not already abundantly gratified. The chief reason for
the bitter antagonism of the mildly virile is that they know androgynism
only by hearsay. They have not, like the more virile—to whom alone
androgynes gravitate—been eye-witnesses of the entirely innocent,
innocuous, and even pitiable sexuality of these pseudo-men.
The mildly virile, constituting the vast majority of all males in
“Christian” countries, seek to impose the dictates of their own sexual
natures upon all men whatsoever. The sexual mandates of “Christian”
society and of the New Testament express the sex feelings in part of the
mildly virile, and in part of the anaphrodites. Whatever harmonizes with
these feelings is right; whatever fails to, is “bestial.”
The mildly virile are inclined toward the less strenuous occupations, as
agriculture, manufacturing, and trade. They also include ninety-five per cent
of intellectuals.
(4) The cold Anaphrodites are the particles that cling immovably to the
banks of the masculine river.[4] They neither progress nor regress. They
number about one-half of one per cent of all adult males. Like the ultra-
androgynes, they have a horror of women from the sex point of view. But
St. Paul’s Sex unlike the former, their minds are devoid of hero-
Teachings.
worship and they shudder violently at the very
thought of any kind of association grounded on sex differences. Their
anaphroditism is either an after-effect of an illness in childhood or
congenital.
For the most part, anaphrodites are intellectuals. The exquisite joys
associated with courtship and marriage that they are predestined never to
know are more than compensated by Providence in the way of extra
allotment of intellectual enjoyment. Herbert Spencer is the shining example
of anaphroditism of the nineteenth century.[5]
Since anaphrodites are not suffused with adoration for any type of
human, the vast majority are the more inclined to lift their thoughts to their
Creator. Some great religious leaders have been anaphrodites. St. Paul, in
his epistles, shows little patience even with normal sex phenomena. He
advises that every man imitate his own absolute celibacy. “But if they can
not contain, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to burn [to lust].”

It is impossible for the tremendously or the ultra-sexed to live up to the
sexual ideals of an anaphrodite. And yet St. Paul’s epistles bind them upon
Christians. It is infinitely easier for an anaphrodite to be a saint than for the
ultra-virile to be even decent. St. Paul’s sex teachings constitute the greatest
stumbling block of the church. They have caused the human race a world of
Androgynes. woe. Belief in St. Paul’s inerrancy makes it
impossible to reconcile Christian ethics with the incontrovertible teachings
of Nature. While, in respect to value to the human race, I give St. Paul’s
epistles first place among all published documents (the woe they have
occasioned being, a thousand times over, outweighed by the light they have
given man on the greatest questions that puzzle his brain) I must,
particularly because of their false sex doctrines, deny their inerrancy. If
inerrant, the human race ought to have ceased existence eighteen hundred
years ago.
Jesus made no such blunders in his sex teaching. He was the only biblical
teacher apparently to recognize the existence of androgynes without
thundering against them. As “eunuchs from their mother’s womb,” he may
of course have had in mind only anaphrodites. But apparently he was aware
of the existence of androgynes. St. John the Divine, apparently his favorite
disciple, having possessed the earmarks, particularly “softness” of
disposition.

(5) Androgynes are the eddies along the banks of the masculine river.
Their movement is retrograde. They are instances of arrest of development.
In the early fœtus sex is not apparent. Only later does differentiation begin.
In more than ninety-nine out of a hundred humans, it is completed at
puberty. But the individual androgyne or gynander remains, down to death,
to a greater or less degree bisexual. Just as a mule is part horse and part
donkey, so an androgyne or gynander is part man and part woman. To quote
from Krafft-Ebing: “They [androgynes] are neither man nor woman: a
Acquired or mixture of both; with secondary psychic and
Congenital?
physical characteristics of the one as well as the
[6]
other sex.”
Androgynes tend to occupations having to do with art—in the widest
Androgynes Are sense of that word. They are extreme æsthetes. I
Aesthetes.
quote from Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-

Age (published by Boni and Liveright) page 135, where he speaks of male
urnings, called by myself “androgynes”: “At the bottom lies the artist-
nature, with the artist’s sensibility and perception. Such a one is often a
dreamer, of brooding reserved habits, often a musician, or a man of
culture, ... almost always with a peculiar inborn refinement. De Joux ...
says...: ‘They are enthusiastic for poetry and music, are often eminently
skilful in the fine arts, and are overcome with emotion and sympathy at the
least sad occurrence.... The nerve system of many an urning is the finest and
the most complicated musical instrument in the service of the interior
personality that can be imagined.’” (R. W.’s comment: An androgyne is
usually a bundle of nerves.)
In my university course in æsthetics, the professor lamented that art tends
to make its devotees immoral. He probably had in mind the notorious
frequency of homosexuality among æsthetes. But he got the cart before the
horse. The æsthetes affected were born bisexual and their devotion to art
was a consequence.
Androgynes are clearly of two types, each of which, the author estimates,
constitutes in the United States about one out of every three hundred
humans possessing the male primary determinants:[7] (a) The mildly
The Mildly androgynous, of whom Oscar Wilde is the best
Androgynous.
known of contemporaries; and (b) the ultra-
androgynous, of whom the present writer is the most widely known of his
generation.

(a) The anatomy of the mildly androgynous is not conspicuously
feminine. Only a few feminine traits appear in the psyche. The mildly
androgynous always mingle with full-fledged males and seek to pass as
such themselves. As a cloak, they are prone to fabricate about excesses cum
femina. But while secretly preferring homosexual romance, they are capable
The Ultra- of espousing a woman and begetting children.
Androgynous.
Sexologists have therefore called them “psychic
hermaphrodites.”
(b) In ultra-androgynes alone, the physique is noticeably feminesque, and
the psyche predominantly feminine. As a rule, they alone have a craze to
decorate themselves in feminine finery and spread paint and powder on
their faces. They tend to avoid the society of full-fledged males except to

display to a tremendously virile coterie—to whom they are generally
incognito—their skill in female-impersonation.
Unless otherwise indicated I shall use the terms “androgyne” and
“pseudo-man” only in reference to the ultra-androgynous. All my
androgyne associates whom I shall portray in this book belong to this class,
because with a few exceptions they alone are Female-Impersonators. In my
Riddle of the Underworld I describe some mild androgynes.
There exists vast diversity in the anatomy and psyche of androgynes—
just as, from the standpoint of size and shape of the genitalia and sexual
tastes, any two full-fledged males or any two full-fledged females differ
more or less. In one androgyne, the only conspicuous external feminine
stigma may be absence of beardal growth; in another, mammary glands; in
another, the complete skeleton or the complete muscular system of the
female. The one physical feminine stigma that is indispensable to the
possession of a decidedly feminine psyche and the quasi-female method of
sexual expression is the female variety of brain protoplasm. For there have
probably lived naturally beardless men, males possessing milk glands or
sissie voices, etc., who have nevertheless not been at all homosexual. But
such are exceptions to the rule.
A Medical
Superstition.
While an earmark of ultra-androgynism is sexual passivity, the mildly
androgynous may be active pederasts or mutual onanists. Only in the case
of ultra-androgynes are the individual’s genitalia entirely divorced—as a
rule—from the sexual life. For them, Nature has substituted other organs.
Ultra-androgynes are, by birth, practically identical with males castrated
in early childhood, except that adult artificial eunuchs are usually overlarge.
Adult ultra-androgynes tend merely to plumpness as a result of their
dwarfed genitalia.
I have heard of ultra-androgynes, who, in their early twenties, on their
physician’s advice, married a woman, when Nature intended they should
marry a man. All high-minded “homosexualists,” soon after arrival at
puberty, consult a medical man for a cure. From time immemorial it has
been one of the profession’s superstitions that marriage would cure
homosexual tendencies. Some unsophisticated adolescent androgynes put
faith in their physician’s positive assurance that marriage is a sure cure. If,

as a matter of conscience alone, the androgyne promises the physician to
marry, he sometimes goes insane over the dread of it, or else commits
suicide, either on the eve of marriage, or a few days afterward. But even if
the marriage ceremony is performed, the consummation never takes place
in the case of ultra-androgynes, and the wedded state proves very unhappy
for both parties. At least in the case of the ultra-androgynes, such marriage
possesses no curative value. Chronic and extreme homosexuality is
congenital and incurable. It is monstrous to advise even a mild androgyne to
Hermaphrodites. marry, and thus contribute to propagating a line of
unhappy and unwelcome bisexuals down through the centuries.
The two classes of androgynes do not mix well. Just as the full-fledged
man is averse to attendance at a ladies’ sewing-circle. Particularly the
mildly androgynous fear suspicion of their secret if they associated with
ultra-androgynes. Coteries of ultra-androgynes naturally form. Knowing
their own nature, they readily recognize one another, although down to
1921 at least, the sexually full-fledged have usually been blind to the
androgynism of daily associates, because they were never permitted to learn
of their existence.
(6) Pseudo-Hermaphrodites are humans possessing in part both the male
and the female genitalia, or else organs so deformed that even sexologists
are unable to determine the sex until puberty. In half such cases, the
physician then pronounces the individual to belong to the sex other than
that with which he or she has identified him or herself. As a rule, they
subsequently live and clothe themselves per prescription. But some,
accustomed to the dress and usages of their first sex, choose to identify
themselves with it throughout life.
Pseudo-hermaphrodites are the limit toward which the ultra-androgynous
approach by slight gradations. Their frequency is not greater than one in a
million to ten million humans.
(7) Full Human Hermaphrodites—possessing both complete male and
complete female genitalia—have never been encountered. There exists in
medical annals, however, a pseudo-hermaphrodite who so nearly
approached full hermaphrodism that at one period he-she claimed to have
The Sex Scale. lived as husband and father, and at a later, as wife
and mother. This reputed transposition is in accord with the observed

phenomenon[8] of an individual’s passing over from one sex class to another
at the climacteric corresponding to menopause in woman.

I have a theory that the sex class of an individual male depends on the
size, but particularly the vigor, of his physical reproductive apparatus. I
have ascertained such variety to be practically infinite, and psychicly as
well as physically.
There exist no sharp dividing lines among the six classes of males. While
the bulk of a particular class correspond closely to the description, there are
individuals on each side of such mode who constitute slight gradations over
to the next class. Thus each class gradually and almost imperceptibly shades
off into the next. There exists indeed a sex scale along which all human
beings can be theoretically arranged. At one pole stands the tremendously
virile man—for example, the rough volunteer common soldier, as a rule
intensely polygamous; at the other the petite, cry-baby species of woman.
Androgynes and gynanders occupy exactly the middle section, looking
toward both the male and the female side.
It is quasi-instinctive with each sex class to scorn members of another
class just because they happen to be built on a different plan. It is the same
phenomenon prevalent in the religious domain in past centuries, when the
Roman Catholic yearned to murder the Protestant and vice versa. Which
Sex Animosity. intolerance the gradual conquest of human affairs
by reason is pushing further and further into the background. But still in the
twentieth century, reason is a nonentity in the domain of sex. There all is
illogical instinct and bigotry. Each sex class still revels in calling the others
bad names. The tremendously virile “fellow” bellows out at the mildly:
“You milk-sop!” The latter calls back: “You rake!” The ultra-virile hisses
through his teeth at the anaphrodite: “You dried tree!” The mildly virile
points his finger at the androgyne: “Unclean! Unclean! Child of the devil!
Monster!” And even if I do not say so here, the reader will conclude after
finishing this book: The androgyne calls back at the mildly virile: “You
hypocrite! You Pharisee!” For the outstanding earmark of the mildly virile
is Phariseeism. They think they themselves are the only moral and God-
fearing men in the world, and that all other men are sexually vile.
Is it right to chastise a horse because he prefers to munch hay out of a
manger instead of walking into his owner’s dining-room; throwing himself

backwards into an enormous chair; squeezing with difficulty a spoon
between his two front hoofs; and with it carrying to his mouth ice-cream
and French pastry? The average man (who is of the mildly virile type) says
that the latter is, for every creature, the superior method of taking
nourishment, and insists on all others conforming to what is right in his own
eyes. If they do not, he ostracizes and even imprisons and murders those
who dare to offend his æsthetic sense.
In general, man is a free agent. But his sex class is imposed by
Providence. Just as he is not responsible for the face he has to carry through
life.
Poultry Bisexuality.
Why should not every human be at liberty to live out his life in the way
Nature ordains for him so far as he does not thereby transgress against any
one else?[9]

Ancient Greek Statue of an Androgyne, Called “Hermaphroditos,” Now in the
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

III. Androgynes of Mythology and History.

The Third Sex.
Apollo is the pre-eminent androgyne god. He was always represented
with a feminine face and coiffure, and therefore worshipped as the god of
beauty.
In conformity with his semi-femininity, he was the life-giving and light-
giving deity—both physical and figurative life and light. He was the leader
of the muses—the spirits presiding over all human inspiration in the fine
arts.
The artistic instinct—the poetic temperament, “sentimentality” in its
highest sense—goes hand in hand with a rounding-off of the sharp corners
of masculinity. Artistic or poetic decades have been conspicuous because of
a semi-slumbering of fundamental masculine traits, that is, the instinctive
relish for wrangling and war. The sterner sex has temporarily laid aside its
primal fighting function ordained by Nature and become to some degree
effeminate.
As a rule, abstract beauty’s devotees—“æsthetes” in the highest sense,
that is: poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, and superior musicians—have
been characterized by more or less effeminacy. They have been particularly
prone to homosexuality. While among full-fledged males, the proportion
that has achieved proficiency in one of the fine arts is something like one in
a thousand, among androgynes (the two varieties combined), it has been
one in about twenty. I will later point out that the pinnacle in poetry,
sculpture, and painting has been achieved by androgynes.
Apollo.
But the feminesque Apollo was the god not only of beauty, but of
adolescence—the period of life during which human beauty is at its
culmination. He possessed eternal youth. He is even referred to as “the boy
god.” Adoration of him sprang out of man’s delight in the semi-

womansouled and quasi-womanbodied stripling just before arrival at
puberty.
And ultra-androgynes remain—to a large extent—in that pre-puberty
period down to thirty-five. Their development has been arrested. Full-
fledged male associates absolutely ignorant of the existence of androgynism
have described—in the author’s hearing—androgynes even close to fifty
years old as “still mere boys.”
But an adolescent androgyne or boy god was also worshipped by the
Semite nations (other than the Jews) under the name Ablu, and by the Celts
under the name Maponus.
Philologists will recognize that “Apollo,” “Ablu,” “Maponus,” and “boy”
are descended from the same vocable in the language used by the Asiatic
tribe from which most of the civilized nations of the ancient and modern
world derive. B is only a strengthened p; the liquid l has often been
transmuted into the kindred n; and the diphthong oy indicates the elision of
a liquid. We have here etymological evidence that an adolescent-androgyne
deity was worshipped before the dawn of history.
To-day, among some primitive races, as the aborigines of America,
androgynes are the central feature of the most sacred rites.
Hermaphroditos and
Ganymede.
Hermaphroditos stands second among androgyne gods. The myth is that
“he-she” was originally a full-fledged human adolescent and an entirely
separate nymph in the full flower of feminine charm. The nymph, falling in
love, besought Zeus that the adolescent and herself might be forever
amalgamated. Excepting the pudenda, the body remained that of the nymph.
The psyche became a compound of the masculine and the feminine. This
myth was a poetic recognition of the existence, at the very dawn of history,
of androgynes such as exist to-day.
A picture or statue of Hermaphroditos adorned nearly every Greek and
Roman home of the better class. This was because the ancients held the
androgyne in honor as the super-human—man and woman in one
individual.
Ganymede ranks third.[10] Originally a human adolescent of extraordinary
feminesque beauty, Zeus snatched him up into the heavenly zone and
conferred immortality that the feminesque youth might be his cup-bearer.

The latter’s statues represent him with a mademoiselle’s chevelure, hips,
and legs, but with male breasts and pudenda. The fact that the father-god of
Socrates. the classic world entered into this most intimate
union partly explains why the androgyne was held in honor by the Greeks
and Romans.
Socrates is the earliest historic character whom sexologists have
declared an androgyne. For centuries, a common designation of male
homosexuality has been “Socratic love.” In Plato’s “Dialogues,” Socrates is
the teacher. His remarks of extreme affection to his youthful disciples are
sickening even to me, though an androgyne myself. Present-day scholars
who close their eyes to the facts of androgynism, who cling to mediæval
sex ideas, and hence hold homosexuality to result from deep-eyed moral
depravity, have denounced Socrates as the greatest moral leper that ever
lived. But from Socrates’ own generation down through the nineteenth
century, he was universally recognized as the greatest saint of the classic
world.
That Socrates was a married man and father and wore a beard does not
disprove the sexologists’ claim. The mildly androgynous—psychic
hermaphrodites, like Oscar Wilde—occasionally marry and procreate;
chiefly for social reasons, not from the sexual incentive. Secondly, the razor
was practically unknown in Socrates’ generation. Even to-day, some of the
less extreme androgynes wear a full beard because of horror of a razor.
One of the three charges on which Socrates was condemned to death was
that he was “a corruptor of youth;” the identic charge that landed Oscar
Wilde in prison. But neither of these geniuses ever corrupted any youth.
The prevalent idea that the association of an older androgyne with a
sexually full-fledged younger man corrupts the latter is absolutely
groundless. The androgyne only benefits, in several ways, the adolescent
Plato. whom he loves far more than a father loves an only
son. Socrates’ two most brilliant disciples, Plato and Xenophon, wrote
books, still extant, one of the purposes of which was defence of Socrates
from the charge mentioned.
Plato, the St. Paul of the pagan classic world—as was its Jesus
(Socrates)—was an androgyne. His voluminous “Dialogues”—one of the
world’s two score of literary masterpieces—are permeated with
homosexuality. In the Symposium, Plato confesses himself a homosexualist.

In his day, homosexuality was not regarded a disgrace any more than
heterosexuality. The charge against Socrates was largely a pretext, the
politicians having to give some plausible reason for ridding themselves of
him.
Plato’s falsetto voice—a common characteristic of androgynes—is
commented on in writings of his day still extant. He never married nor
procreated.
Alexander the Great has been adjudged by sexologists an androgyne of
the mild type. He was the first prominent Greek to dispense with hirsute
decorations. The probability is that he was naturally beardless. But in
imitation of the genius and leader of their generation, all the men who
wished to be somebody started to shave clean. Knowledge of the razor first
became common in Greece because Alexander the Great happened to be
congenitally beardless!
As a monarch, Alexander was compelled to espouse a woman. But he
spent nearly all his married life absent from his legal spouse, and was
incapable of procreation. All the evidence is that his real soul-mate was a
young warrior of his entourage. The two were inseparable. His strange
Alexander the Great. affection for other young men of his entourage is
remarked by contemporaries. He bewailed the death of favorites in battle as
only a wife can mourn a husband.
Androgynes, because they possess the feminine psyche in greater or less
degree, are generally very much opposed to war. But it is possible for a less
extreme androgyne—of the psychic hermaphrodite type—to be a great
general when the leadership of armies is thrust upon him. Genius occurs far
oftener in connection with androgynism than with full-fledged masculinity.
The rare keenness of mind of an androgyne like Alexander would enable
him to plan successful campaigns. But his feminine cowardice would
always keep him far from the battle-front, where there was no danger of a
hair of his head ever being touched. And that is what happened with
Alexander. Above all things else, he was a sybarite.
Androgynes, though never mixing in a fight themselves, are particularly
attracted toward the war-loving “hero.” Much more than half of my own
associates during my female-impersonation sprees belonged to a profession
whose object was to kill their fellow man. For almost twenty years of my
“youngmanhood,” I was an habitué of barracks, etc., and a worshipper of

swords and rifles, although I would have been horrified if required to take
them into my own hands. I have known other androgynes whose female-
impersonation sprees were staged before professional common soldiers. A
young androgyne acquaintance actually enlisted in the hospital corps in the
war with Germany because he wished to be surrounded continually with
warriors—the type of manhood which androgynes in general most servilely
Julius Cæsar. worship. Walt Whitman is celebrated for his work
among the wounded in America’s War of the Rebellion. I read in a medical
journal that during the World War, a problem with the Italian army heads
was to debar androgynes, who were said to demoralize the army because of
their cowardice and seductive influence on their sexually full-fledged
comrades. I heard of an androgyne who received a dishonorable discharge
from the American conscript army because wrongly judged to be the
incarnation of deepdyed moral depravity.
Perhaps the reason why Alexander and the next mild androgyne to be
described were two out of the three greatest generals and conquerors of
history was their craze to pass practically all their adult lives surrounded by
warriors!

Alexander the Great

(Ancient Coin)

Julius Cæsar

(Bust in Louvre)

Julius Cæsar has been adjudged by sexologists an androgyne of the mild
type. He married, as social custom demanded of aristocratic Romans, but
spent nearly all his wedded life absent from his legal spouse. His offspring
is said to have consisted only of a single daughter. History says he had a
son by Cleopatra. But this is doubtful because that queen was every man’s
wife. But even if Cæsar had offspring, he would merely be proved a psychic
hermaphrodite.
Cæsar was always clean-shaven, if not naturally beardless. He even had
his body depilated—as is customary to-day with “fairies.” Like the latter
also, he was, in dress, notoriously fussy and feminine—in order to prove
attractive to his lieutenants. He was an instinctive female-impersonator. His
entourage were accustomed to refer to him as “the queen.” Of all historic
characters, Cæsar excels in respect to the sensational stories of homosexual
excesses found in contemporary authors still extant.
Cæsar was a great conqueror merely because circumstances, largely
beyond his control, placed him at the head of an army. As in the case of

Alexander, Cæsar’s genius enabled him to plan successful campaigns.
Others, however, had to expose life and limb, while he kept himself safe in
the rear passing his days and nights as an extreme voluptuary.
Michelangelo.
Michelangelo, with the renaissance of civilization after the Dark Ages,
heads the list of the mildly androgynous. He never married or was known to
have a mistress. He left behind many hitherto unpublished homosexual
sonnets of such merit that his nephew-executor gave them to the world after
radical expurgation. Angelo’s statues and paintings are pre-eminent in their
consummate, although sensual, outlines of the nude adult male, the
principal subject of his art. His statues of the nude youthful Bacchus, Cupid,
and David of his middle twenties point the direction of his sexuality. Before
thirty he also produced the picture, “The Battle of Cascina,” 288 square feet
Raphael. crowded with nude male figures. His favorite
Greek sculpture was a statue of Hercules.
Raphael was an ultra-androgyne. He was always beardless (probably
natural) and boylike in appearance. Instead of choosing a Roman
mademoiselle to be mistress of his mansion in the then most aristocratic
residence district of the world, he took two young men to live with him as
“sons”,—a common practice with well-to-do twentieth century androgynes.

Raphael, the Most Gifted Ultra-
Androgyne the World Has Known

The Shakespeare-Author was an androgyne. The proof lies in the
numerous homosexual passages of his sonnets. The authorship of the
The Shakespeare- Shakespeare literature is still undetermined after
Author.
close to three hundred publications on this
question. If Providence grants me time, I will finally prove beyond the
shadow of a doubt, by the homosexual argument original with myself, that
Francis Bacon was the Shakespeare-author. I give below an outline of my
proposed thesis.
The young actor, Shakespeare, was a tremendously virile male, but
estranged from his wife and living apart during most of his married life.
Bacon was an androgyne several years older than Shakespeare. He married
only in middle life and solely for money. He was a great statesman, but
sorely in need of money to meet his extravagant tastes. Apparently he was
incapable of procreation. Both men lived in London, and were at least
acquaintances, during the dozen years which saw the creation of the
Shakespeare literature.
Bacon was the foremost scholar and one of the foremost statesmen of his
generation. He and the Shakespeare-author are recognized to-day as two out
of the three greatest intellects which have ever blossomed forth in England
—even by those who deny the identity of the two, and hand the palm of
Shakespeare-author to the obscure actor, Shakespeare.
Numerous literateurs believe that evidence exists that the incomparable
Bacon’s fad was writing plays, the theatre in his day being comparatively a
new craze (that is, for modern times)—as are the “movies” in the first
quarter of the twentieth century. It would then have been regarded as
incongruous for the dignified statesman, Bacon, to write plays as for an
expresident of the United States to-day to write scenarios for the “movies.”
The Shakespeare Through covering his authorship, Bacon was
Problem.
spared the jests of his upper-crust entourage.
Whatever credit, too, the plays had, Bacon would wish his adored soul-
mate to reap—just as the present writer has sacrificed his own interests
fundamentally that his soul-mate might be benefited. But if Bacon had
thought the Shakespeare literature would survive his own generation, he
would doubtless, on his deathbed, have confessed himself its author. But
even for many years after his death, everybody considered it would be

forgotten by man as soon as the shredded leaves of the first printing were
thrown into the fire place.
Another reason why Bacon would never confess his authorship is that in
his age the law condemned to burial alive any one guilty of such
homosexual sentiments as he was constrained, by passion, to express in the
“Shakespeare” sonnets.
Francis Bacon published extensively under his own name. He published
extensively—as a large body of literateurs believe—under the name of
“William Shakespeare.” Just as the present writer has quite a number of
publications under his legal name, and a number under the name “Ralph
Werther—Jennie June.” And no one suspects the identity of the two present-
day authors.
The actual Shakespeare—behind whose skirts Bacon hid—was, down to
his death, only an obscure actor, not known personally to any writer of his
own generation except (by supposition) Bacon. The actor Shakespeare has
achieved immortality through having been Bacon’s soul-mate.
Walt Whitman.
Walt Whitman stands foremost among American androgynes. But he
was of the mild type. Many passages of Leaves of Grass and Drumtaps
exist as proof. He never married, although closely pursued by even wealthy
women desiring him as husband. In middle age he spent his hours for
recreation in the society of adolescents—as I was informed by Whitman’s
so-called “adopted son”. That is, he courted them, as a normal man courts a
woman. Chance made me intimate with the “adopted son” in his seventies.
All three of us happened to belong to New York City.

Surely we androgynes, who for two thousand years have been despised,
hunted down, and crushed under the heel of normal men because they have
misunderstood biblical condemnations of homosexuality, have no reason to
be ashamed of our heritage. America’s foremost poet; the world’s greatest
sculptor subsequently to Athens’ golden age; the two greatest ethicists and
two out of the three greatest intellects of ancient Greece and Rome; two out
of the three greatest conquerors of history; the greatest painter of all ages;
and—to cap the climax—the greatest intellect that the English-speaking
world ever produced and the greatest literary genius of all time (these two
distinctions united in Francis Bacon)—ALL WERE ANDROGYNES.[11]

And to you full-fledged males I say: “What God hath cleansed [through
endowment with sublime talents] call not ye ‘Unclean!’”

IV. Man Is a Passional, Rather Than a Rational, Being.

The Third Sex.
Twentieth-century psychologists are coming around to the view that even
the leaders of thought are governed by instinct and mores rather than
reason. Even for intellectuals, truth is what is intuitive or what satisfies their
prejudices and instincts. Still in the twentieth century, the leaders of thought
bow down before intellectual idols, although other than those overthrown
by Francis Bacon. Still to-day—as in the generation of Roger Bacon (13th
century)—conservatives yearn to imprison, or even burn at the stake, those
in whom a purer reason than their own operates.
My own is thus a Herculean task: To be an intellectual iconoclast. To
break down the last remnant of cultured man’s savage, criminal instincts
and mores. But, like Roger Bacon, I may comfort myself with the thought
that my views are centuries in advance of my time; but, like him, I am
therefore bitterly persecuted.[12]
Prudery Triumphant.
“Away with any one who attempts to bring out the truth about sex!” cry
the conservatives. “Crucify him! Crucify him! Sex is a theme too disgusting
for discussion!”
In the university I took an extended course of lectures on physiology. But
not a word was said about sex. The professor would not have thus befouled
his mouth, nor corrupted the morals of his students. Martin’s Human Body,
the standard text-book of the time, had to be published in two editions: (1)
That which treated of human sexuality as viewed in the Dark Ages, and (2)
that which imagined the genus homo to be asexual.

One presumed male out of every three hundred belongs to the third sex,
strictly speaking. That is, the ultra-androgynes—the pseudo-men who
possess only undersized and non-functional male pudenda, whose body

otherwise tends toward feminesqueness, and whose psyche, predilections,
tastes, gestures, and postures remind one of a female.
The third sex is a commonplace topic in the Underworld, which
comprises about one-tenth the population of “Christian” lands. The
Underworlders, however, generally fail to understand the cause of the
effeminacy. The nine-tenths of the unlearned who have never entered a
more immoral place than a “movie” theatre are almost entirely ignorant of
the third sex. What hazy ideas they have are criminally incorrect. And
Benighted Leaders of except for a handful of sexologists, the learned still
Thought.
cling to views handed down from the Dark Ages.
In the seventeenth century, when a cyclone demolished a hamlet or an
epidemic broke out, a council of physicians, lawyers, and clergymen was
called to determine which semi-bearded old hag had wished the catastrophe
upon the community. After prayer for divine guidance and an exhortation
by a parson that the Bible taught that witches ought to be ferreted out, the
high-brows would seek to determine who of the several bags of bone
known to all of them presented the most loathsome appearance, and who
should therefore be burned at the stake as the witch responsible for the
catastrophe—as the necessary human sacrifice to appease the anger of the
Unseen Powers. For even down to the twentieth century there survives in
Christendom the pagan superstition of the necessity of a human sacrifice
now and then.
But in the twentieth century, leaders of thought have evolved from the
belief in witchcraft. They must look elsewhere than to semi-bearded hags
for their sacrificial victims on whom to load the sins of mankind, and the
blame for the decline and fall of nations. Since, next to hags, they consider
sexual cripples as the most loathsome of humans, they make the latter the
scape-goats of present-day society. While they no longer burn them at the
stake or bury them alive (as provided in old European law) they are
permitted by twentieth century statutes to imprison inoffensive androgynes
for twenty years. And these archaic statutes are still frequently enforced.
Only a few months ago I read of a Boston clergyman who was sentenced to
Banishment of prison on the testimony of a young ex-soldier. But
Androgynes.
to-day these statutes serve chiefly as ground for
extensive blackmail of Nature’s step-children, hardly one of whom, if

belonging to the middle or upper class, but has had to pay out considerable
sums, occasionally running into the thousands.
Instead of imprisonment, public opinion has generally substituted
banishment of the disclosed androgyne forever from all he loves.
During the few months of composing this book, the New York papers
have told of the abrupt flight to parts unknown of three intellectual leaders
in their communities, two just over the city line and the third within a
hundred miles. They had to flee, not because they had done the least real
harm (all three were pastors of churches) but because of the mediæval
ignorance and bitter hatred that their communities immediately manifested
toward a “man” (reputedly) all of a sudden disclosed to be a “monster”
(though in reality a harmless and pitiable sexual cripple). The populace,
ignorant that he had probably practiced a thousand times more self-denial
than any one of themselves, but had at last been able to withstand Nature’s
demands no longer, chased him out of his community for good and all with
the feeling that he was the lowest scoundrel that ever contaminated it.
I admit that these unfortunates did show bad judgment in remaining in
the ministry when they knew they were afflicted with a powerful instinct
abhorred by the sexually full-fledged, and they showed the worst kind of
judgment in having recourse to boys under puberty. But they were in a tight
place, and besides felt that they were doing no one any harm. For the
Most Androgynes androgyne generally comes at last to the view that
Ultra-Religious.
what Nature demands can be no sin and, if
properly fulfilled, no transgression against any human.
The newspaper devotee runs across a similar item every once in a while,
and nearly always the “monster” is a clergyman or a teacher. But the
abhorred penchant (fellatio) is, of course, not peculiar to these professions.
Simply their high ethical standing, and the common fancy that they should
therefore be proof against what is incorrectly regarded as the worst of vices,
attract greater attention, and give news value to the occasional disclosures.
But it is probable that among the occupations, those two, together with
all having to do with art of any kind, have the largest proportions of
androgynes. As a rule, male bisexuals are goody-goody boys who develop
into ultra-religious adolescents. They are enthusiastic to better the race
morally and spiritually. The robes commonly worn by clergymen are also a
powerful drawing card, since androgynes yearn for apparel that conceals

that they are bipeds. Thus quite a number who were born intellectual and
whose sexual ardor, during adolescence, is comparatively weak, gravitate
into the two professions standing highest ethically and religiously. When
making his choice, the adolescent is filled with religious fervor and
possessed of a strong determination to crucify his “homosexual” tendencies.
The androgyne already yielding would never put on “the cloth,” although
he would go into pedagogy. But the puritan-minded regards these
tendencies as his “besetting sin” and fights them for years in the strenuous
manner described in my own Autobiography of an Androgyne.
Throughout his teens, and perhaps even his twenties, he never expects to be
Abstinence Induces overmastered. But later in life many a one of these
Melancholia.
sexual cripples who have put on “the cloth”
disgrace it notwithstanding his prior unparalleled mental struggles against
Nature’s behests.
Or if coming out victor in the lifelong struggle, the pitiable woman-man
lives down to death under the obsession (due to misinterpreted biblical
texts) that the gratification of his unusual instinct is the most heinous of
sins, and spends all his days, in which God meant that he should rejoice, in
mourning over his sexual ardor (for which he does not realize he is
irresponsible), in crucifying his body continuously, with its affections and
lusts (as commanded by the anaphrodite, St. Paul), and is thereby,
throughout adult life, on the borderline of insanity. I have heard sermons
from such clergymen and was moved to pity as they were shedding tears in
the pulpit and rendering themselves unpopular, both with their fellow
preachers who are sexually full-fledged and with the laity, because their
aspect was always that of tragedy. I advise that all such melancholiacs
immediately ask that they be honorably deposed from the ministry. As a
result, their lives would be happy and satisfying.
The vast majority of preachers are manly. I have a higher respect for that
profession than for any other. If it had not been for my androgynism, I
would have myself entered it. It would be well for the Church authorities to
question, as to their sexuality, all candidates for beginning a theological
course, and in the kindest manner advise adolescents in the least bisexual to
choose some other profession because of the public’s misunderstanding of
Why Androgynes Are this phenomenon. Sexual conduct is not primarily a
Hated.
voluntary matter or an ethical question, but rooted
in anatomy, physiology, and psychology. The androgyne who yearns to

preach the Gospel can do so through the printed word. Because of St. Paul’s
sex teaching (that of an anaphrodite) the profession of “the cloth” is rightly
open only to anaphrodites and the mildly virile. The more virile are likewise
excluded because it is next to impossible for them to abstain from adultery.
Why are androgynes so hated? Primarily because the leaders of thought
have always identified them with the men of ancient Sodom (mistakenly,
because the Sodomites were full-fledged males) and historians have
mistakenly (because they never met androgynes personally and were taught
in their boyhood to hate them with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength)
laid upon them all the blame for the decline and fall of nations, and declared
that therefore effeminacy or androgynism is a type of moral depravity to be
crushed mercilessly. Better that some thousands of androgynes be deprived
of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than that the general welfare of
the nation be imperilled! Androgynes—they argue—are unavoidably the
scape-goats of the race.
I answer: In the first place, such imperilment is only a figment of the
imagination. This superstition can be disposed of by merely asking to what
extent the welfare of humanity was imperiled by the sex functioning of the
arch-androgynes listed in chapter III? In the second place, androgynism is
not moral depravity or degeneracy. I myself—an extreme type of androgyne
—spring from the most puritan stock. I was brought up to consider that on
Androgynism Not Sunday, reading anything but Christian doctrine or
Degeneracy.
walking a hundred feet for mere pleasure were
heinous sins. In addition to springing from the most puritan stock, both my
paternal and maternal stock are of unusually strong build. A paternal and
also a maternal uncle were professional athletes. A brother was the
champion athlete of my native village. My stock and early environment are
indeed the last that any one would pick out as likely to bring into the world
a homosexual or androgyne as a result of moral degradation.[13] My
androgynism has, however, made me myself rather lilliputian. With one
exception, I grew up to be the smallest man of my paternal and maternal
families.
It is not necessary to crush androgynes in order to guard against the
spread of effeminacy. Effeminacy, in the sense of androgynism, does not
spread by example. It is entirely congenital. Only a physical male born with
quasi-feminine predilections would adopt the role of a female after

becoming adult. An androgyne’s predilections and practices are regarded
with such repugnance by all full-fledged males that none would stoop to
them unless constrained by instinct.
Why imprison and murder the androgyne any more than the deaf-mute?
The former is no more abnormal than the latter; no more degenerate; no
Not Cause of Decline more depraved. It is unfortunate that the human
of Nations.
race is handicapped with either of these defective
classes. But the androgyne deserves only pity, the same as the deaf-mute.
Effeminacy in an entirely different sense, and a kind that spreads rapidly
through example, is the actual cause of the decline and fall of nations; in
the sense of the weakening of the moral fibre of the males of the upper crust
or ruling class through their having grown overfond of ease and pleasure
and lost their joy in industry and justifiable fighting. A neighboring nation
of superior moral fibre is quick to learn of such effemination and subjugates
the decadent one. But these effeminates’ fondness for the gentle sex has in
no way declined. Generally it has greatly augmented. Witness the decline
and fall of the Greek, Roman, and Turkish empires.
Where has androgynism been more prevalent than formerly among the
American aborigines? Probably because the tribes were constantly
underfed. Whenever a male arrived at puberty, the weapons of the warrior
and the cooking vessels of the squaw were ceremoniously placed before
him that he might choose his future social status. A not inconsiderable
number of adolescents (because congenital androgynes) always chose the
culinary utensils and passed the rest of their lives as squaws, the hair of the
beard being plucked out as fast as it showed itself, and the costume being
that of the female sex. Surely savage tribes continuously on the war-path
can not be accused of degenerative effeminacy!
About one-third the soul-mates of androgynes who have come under my
observation have been voluntary common soldiers or blue-jackets. I am far
Androgynism from being the only androgyne who has gravitated
Nationally
Healthful.
toward the “supreme men” whose voluntary
profession has as its aim the killing of their fellow
man. Androgynism appears to go hand in hand with militarism rather than
vice versa. Havelock Ellis says that homosexuality is particularly common
among the Sikhs, the most military of the Hindustan races.

It is more likely that the emergence of androgynism is a sign of national
health. The ultra-brilliant Age of Pericles surpassed all other periods in the
recognition and influence of androgynism, which promotes art and general
culture. The androgyne, being a combination of man and woman in a single
individual, has a wider view of life than the full-fledged man or woman. He
possesses, in a measure, the mental qualities peculiar to each sex. That is
why the Shakespeare-Author knew both the masculine and the feminine
mind better than any other writer. Such duality is the reason artistic genius
crops out far more frequently among androgynes than among the sexually
full-fledged. The amalgamated man-woman nature gets nearest to sentiment
and emotion—to the soul of art.[14]
Why do cultured androgynes carefully conceal their quasi-feminine
sexual predilections? Why did Angelo not publish any of his homosexual
sonnets? Why did Raphael not proclaim on the housetops the happenings in
his house at night? Androgynes hide their sexual predilections and
practices, not because of consciousness of personal degeneracy, but because
Race Suicide. grossly misunderstood by the sexually full-fledged.
By exception, Oscar Wilde was open and above board, and was therefore
shut up in prison.
Only bigoted pseudo-scientists have pronounced androgynes degenerates.
Only mediæval medicine, not modern medicine. Androgynism is merely an
instance of arrested development; or possibly of atavism—an attempt on the
part of Nature to return to the original hermaphrodism of man’s early
antecedents. The androgyne who follows the dictates of Nature is not a whit
more degenerate morally than the full-fledged man who marries. It is only
the fallible mores which make the full-fledged think that a person with
apparently male pudenda who impersonates a female is infinitely below
themselves morally. Were Socrates, Plato, Angelo, Raphael, and Francis
Bacon monsters of depravity? Ought the Shakespeare-Author to have been
buried alive by his hare-brained fellow citizens before he had a chance to
pen a line?
The chief charge against androgynes is that they are guilty of “the awful
crime of race suicide.” But it is the fault of Nature alone that the ultra-
androgyne is incapable of doing his part in the perpetuation of the race.
The cultured androgyne, knowing his irresistible instincts are harmless to
his soul-mate, is unable to discern in them any transgression against ethics

or against God.
But a very small proportion of adult androgynes have been guilty of a
lamentable transgression because finding themselves in a tight place: that is,
recourse to boys under puberty. The prudery of full-fledged men has
Androgynes’ One hitherto prohibited androgynes from scientific
Offence.
knowledge of themselves. Until thirty years ago,
American and British public opinion would not tolerate the publication of
the facts about androgynism even for circulation among the medical
profession. Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, the earliest published book in
the English language on androgynism, was promptly suppressed by the
British government thirty years ago. I myself had to bend the knee for
eighteen years to medical publishers before my Autobiography of an
Androgyne was fed into the printing-press in 1918.
Thus, because full-fledged men have interdicted to cultured androgynes
the means of understanding themselves and knowledge of how they ought
to pass their lives, some—particularly those who have achieved places of
honor, because androgynes of lower rank do not need to be so crafty in
hiding their terrible secret from the heartless world—have ultimately been
revealed guilty of recourse to the immature (because they could not screw
up their courage to disclose their abnormality to an older and wiser male).
But on account of the tyranny of the full-fledged, these erring androgynes
merit mercy. Their offences have probably not been at all harmful to the
immature. They are merely asserted to be so by men unable to accept any
scientific results except those inculcated by mediæval savants. But this one
offence of androgynes will be a thing of the past when they are permitted
recourse to books which explain the riddle of their lives, and when full-
fledged men read such books in order that they may do justice to Nature’s
step-children.
Androgynes Are As already stated, ultra-androgynes, having a
Goody-Goodies.
woman’s psyche, are goody-goodies. Indeed
goody-goodiness may be regarded as their most marked characteristic. For
this reason, in France, they are called “little Jesuses” (petits jesus)
notwithstanding that the more extreme are public female-impersonators in
resorts of ill repute. Ultra-androgynes are incapable of doing any real harm.
If all the human race were as harmless, this world would be a far better
place in which to live.

The cultured androgyne is a desirable citizen and a desirable member of
any circle. While ultra-androgynism makes its victims physically weak—
like a woman—it has no deteriorating effect morally or mentally. The usual
charge of gross immorality is merely a relic of mediæval bigotry.
It matters not, however, that androgynes are absolutely innocuous
practically and ethically. Do they not offend the æsthetic sense of the
majority of mankind? What better cause for grinding them under one’s
heel?
And this bitter persecution that has been the lot of some androgynes has
rendered them misanthropes. Not their androgynism per se. A mildly
androgynous acquaintance—an intellectual giant of the highest moral
character except for his irresponsible and innocuous passive pederasty—is,
as a result of society’s shutting him up in prison for the five years of his
intellectual prime, a chronic and bitter reviler of the Church. Because
zealous churchmen were responsible for the wrecking of his life through
their misunderstanding of the biblical teaching on homosexuality.
But in general we androgynes, possessing the long-suffering feminine
God Will Avenge psyche, are resigned to being ground to powder by
Androgynes.
the hypocritical world. It is better to suffer than to
inflict suffering. Though the world despise and ostracise us, the All-
Knowing is still our refuge, and another life awaits us where conditions will
be more just. The bigoted and pharisaical judges and juries who have haled
hundreds of innocent androgynes off to prison should remember the Old
Testament doctrine: “‘Vengeance is mine!’ saith Jehovah.” Those who
incarcerate the innocent in this world will in the next have to serve time in
the darkest dungeons of a just God.

Note to Illustration Facing Page 53.
My father was a reversionary pure Alpine, but his brothers were decidedly Nordic. My mother is a
reversionary pure Nordic, while most of her brothers and sisters were predominantly Alpine.
Evidences of Mediterranean blood in my paternal or maternal stock are doubtful. I myself am
predominantly Alpine, particularly evident in my short stature and generally brunette features. But
the Nordic cross has given me a rather ruddy complexion and “browned” my chevelure. My beard
hair is jet black, but always clean-shaven, if not eradicated. I am of English, Scotch, Dutch, German,
and French descent. During adulthood, I have always considered the highest human beauty to reside
in adolescent Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans of approximately pure Mediterranean stock.

The “Fairie Boy” Ready to Set Out on
Life’s Journey

(See note on page 52.)

Part Two:
How the Author Came to Be a Female-
Impersonator

(Part Two summarizes my pre-nineteen life and my physical and mental
traits for those not reading my Autobiography of an Androgyne.
Particularly for details of purely medical interest, the scientist is referred to
that work, since the present volume is designed primarily for the general
reader. Part Two, however, presents many facts not in mind when I wrote
the earlier work over twenty years ago.)

I. Reveries Suggested by My Infancy.

Connecticut, famous for its wooden nutmegs and other freak products,
gave to the world, in 1874, one of its half-dozen most widely known girl-
boys.
My mother has said that I was the greatest cry-baby of her eleven
children. I have really never outgrown this characteristic. Still in my late
forties, I occasionally weep bitterly for a whole hour.
Up to my eighth birthday, timidity made me reluctant to leave my
mother’s side to play with other children. Sticking very close to “mother” as
a child, and extraordinary devotion to her when adult are common earmarks
of androgynism. I have known of no other reputed male so devoted to his
mother, even down to his late forties, as I. My mother is still, by a kind
My Life-Long Soul- Providence, spared to me. I frequently weep
mate (in
Dreamland).
bitterly at the thought of her dying and can not
imagine living when she is in the grave. I knew an
androgyne who, in his sixties, died from grief a few days after the death of
his mother around ninety.
In my early childhood, only one other person attracted me in a
comparable fashion—a neighbor’s burly boy, F’ank, five years older than
myself. All my life I have seen him at least several times a year, since he
has remained a close friend down to the time when we both count about
half-a-century of life. His influence is still strong, although sexual relations
ceased when I was seven. He was one of the most amorous of boys. From
my third to seventh year, he sought me several times a week. Perhaps he
also embraced every chance for heterosexual relations—common among
the children under twelve in the “best set” of the village, among whom I
was privileged to be brought up. And yet all these contaminated youngsters
—excepting myself—turned out fairly virtuous adults. The ultra-amorous
and active pederast F’ank became, when adult, exclusively heterosexual and
quite promiscuous, being of the tremendously virile type. But around thirty,

he settled down into absolute monogamy. He, however, never had a child.
At past fifty, he stands at perfection in health, strength, and morality.
I say they “turned out”! That is, so far as I ever heard. But they would all
have said of me that I passed through my adult life a cold anaphrodite! One
can never know! Some might secretly have been addicted to venery as
much as I. But they betrayed no external sign. Neither have I.
Most Sheltered Two
“Went to the Bad.”
But while all those who indulged in “nastiness” before reaching their
teens grew up, so far as I was able to observe, into men and women above
reproach, two of “my set”—those who were “kids” at the same time within
a radius of five hundred feet of my own paternal roof, the several
homosexualist schoolmates elsewhere described having lived outside that
radius—the two that had been most carefully brought up and shielded by
their mother from corruption by other children, almost the only two that
were sexually unblemished as children, “went to the bad” immediately on
arrival at puberty. They were brother and sister—the only children of a
wealthy, pious couple. The brother became a chronic dypsomaniac and
roué. The sister, a beautiful and brilliant girl who had enjoyed a college
education, died before thirty as a result of excesses in her chosen profession
of fille de joie in New York City. The mother died of a broken heart in her
early forties. The father, previously active in church work, became
despondent on seeing both his children “go to the bad,” took to drink, and
died a sot.
Debauchery was born in these two children, for they had never missed
Bible school up to their middle teens. They were unusually innocent prior to
puberty. But religious teaching failed to convince them. They thought the
“goody-goodies” were trying to rob them of the pleasures of life through
false representations. I believe both could have been saved from shipwreck
of life if, at puberty, a book, scientific, not goody-goody, could have been
put into their hands, demonstrating that alcoholic and venereal excesses
bring on ruin and often early death. Children inclined to dissipation on
arrival at puberty are far more likely to heed the pronouncements of a
Inherited Lechery. physician than of a Bible school teacher.

In that same immediate puritan circle in my childhood’s village, I have
lately observed a similar case in the next generation. I have known well a
certain gentleman of my own age since we were boys together. He is of the
tremendously virile type and sowed his wild oats as hardly another young
blood in the village. But in his middle twenties he was “soundly converted”
in a puritan church (to which I myself belonged) and married one of its
purest daughters. In his subsequent life, he attained rare success financially
and socially. He has had only two children—both girls around twenty years
of age at the date of writing. I know the family intimately. I have direct
information that both girls are “fast going to the bad” (notwithstanding they
have always been under only puritan influences) and that the father has
“backslidden,” evidently being no longer able to restrain his de facto
polygamous instincts. The purest of wives is heart-broken and on the
borderline of insanity.
Every one says the girls and their father are wilfully depraved and their
puritan community has already begun to treat them as outcasts. I say the
girls inherited their craze for venery from their father, in whom likewise it
was inborn. He is a noble man in every other respect. All three are largely
irresponsible. They are, by birth, not fitted for the puritan society in which
they were brought up. Under present social ideas and usages, the only outlet
for the girls is prostitution and the consequent early loss of health soon
Present Social Rules terminating in death. But their only fault is
Inadequate.
nymphomania. If society had some way by which
it could bring about the satisfaction of these needs of these cultured girls,
the latter could be saved from the shipwreck of life and be useful members
of their community. In my own life I have proved that Christian conversion
and absorption in the teachings of the Bible can not save one from innate
nymphomania. I could suggest a means of salvation for these girls, but dare
not. If only the leaders of thought did not prescribe an identic sex life for
every daughter of Eve, although Nature has created them with such
diversity along these lines! If only the leaders of thought permitted real
sexual problems (as well as namby-pamby) to be investigated, as all other
phenomena are searched out to the very bottom! If only the leaders of
thought permitted the truth to be told about sex instead of continuing to
propagate the hypocrisies and fabrications regnant down from the Dark
Ages!

I have read statements of puritans of the dreadful results that will follow
the common sex relations of children under twelve in city tenements. I have
spent a large part of my life in rural districts as well as in great cities. My
observations are that conditions are the same among children of both types
of environment. Numerous youngsters receive their sex initiation before
twelve. But, unless carried to excess, it does not seem to have any bad
influence, particularly after they become adults. The probability is that the
same practice has ruled among small children for thousands of years. It is
Nature.
Providence’s And the context moves me to remark: It turned
Favoritism Toward
Author.
out that of my several hundred schoolmates (prior
to the university) I achieved in adult life the
highest success. Not as a business man or money-maker, in which line I did
not excel. Not in art or politics. But in the following fields, both
individually and combined: Intellectual and general cultural development;
enjoyment of (but not adeptness in) all species of art; breadth and depth of
life and knowledge of human nature; enjoyment of the society of my fellow
humans, particularly sexual opposites; and, last but not least, fame, or, as
some would prefer to have me say, notoriety. For I feel that I, as an extreme
type of the bisexual, am doomed to live in the minds of savants for scores
of years after every one of my hundreds of schoolmates, and my other
hundreds of university associates, are eternally forgotten.
[Note Added in Galley: I omitted to mention that I have also far excelled in suffering inflicted by
man and in sorrow—which two items together have about counterbalanced the advantages
enumerated.]
But I have achieved this last element (terrestrial immortality) of the
highest success in life denied to all my wide circles of childhood and
adolescence through my “going to the bad”—as the saying is. But though
that was the fate marked out for me by the Architect of the Universe, I was
actually able to restrain my “evil” propensities so as not to make shipwreck
of life. My girl-boy intimate described in the early part of the second
chapter following did make, decidedly, shipwreck of his life, as have many
other girl-boys. My salvation lay in practicing relatively[15] extreme
Temperance the Only temperance in the indulgence of the sexual
Salvation.
propensities except during my Bowery period
described in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and Riddle of the
Underworld. Extreme temperance in indulgence of any fleshly appetite is,

for all humanity, the sole means of salvation from the shipwreck of earthly
life. Overindulgence of any appetite defeats its own end.
Thus while nearly all other girl-boys are doomed to be forgotten by
mankind a few years after their bodies return “dust to dust,” I myself am—I
feel—destined to live in the memory of savants primarily because of my
extensive self-restraint, and secondarily because of my excelling the other
girl-boys in innate brain power.
It was F’ank who initiated me, at two, in the mysteries which gullible
parents think children do not learn before puberty. But down to twelve, I
considered all species of sex relations as the monopoly of naughty children.
All adults had of course outgrown such depths of nastiness.
Down to my present age of close to half-a-century, F’ank has been the
hero in half my many sexual dreams. After I reached seven, we ceased to be
confidential. I therefore never confessed to him that his influence prior to
my seventh year almost wrecked my adult life—probably consigning me to
an irresponsible, intensive fairie career—and a thousand times made me
wish, because a slave to fellatio, that I were dead. For I firmly believe that
Keep Tots Sexually girl-boys, if not repeatedly seduced before puberty,
Clean.
will, as adults, have only weak and controllable
desires for the sexual functioning ordained by Nature for their type. While
they are commonly fellators or else pathics congenitally, only oft repeated
seduction in early childhood makes them, after puberty, irresponsible
psychic nymphomaniacs who recruit the ranks of fairies. But for those
repeatedly seduced in early childhood, the penchant is truly irresistible in
adulthood and would be followed regardless of all legal penalties. Just as
most men would steal a loaf of bread if their only means of salvation from
death through hunger.
Not too often repeated homosexual acts on the part of a small child,
however, are not likely to make him an adult pervert. An innate tendency is
practically indispensable. Early experiences along innate lines merely
strengthen a congenital bias, just as the author became an intensive adult
fairie as a result—I am inclined to believe—of my intense fairieship from
three to six.
While I believe sexual relations of children under twelve when not often
repeated will not render them particularly lustful as adults, an intensive sex
life of a small child—as in my own case—is likely to render him or her

extremely intemperate sexually after puberty. Mothers should therefore
keep a watchful eye over the whereabouts and associates of the “angel
child,” and not allow it in secluded cosy nooks with older children. A
careful watch should be kept over nurse-girls. Children under twelve, and
even under six, need chaperons almost as much as those just past puberty.
Criminal Prudery. Parents should take pains that the “angel child”
regards them as confidants, sharers of its every secret. If this had happened
in my own case, I might have been spared a world of woe after puberty. To
preserve the frankness of the “angel child,” not even a mild rebuke should
ever be administered for its sexual lapses; but kind persuasion alone, and
care that the child does not again come into exciting surroundings.
My own parents and teachers never vouchsafed the least sex knowledge.
I once asked where babies came from. Doctors found them in the street
gutters and brought them to people’s houses. Instinct and older boys were
my only instructors. Parents, teachers, but preferably the school physician,
should begin with children of six a clean initiation into these mysteries—
absorbing even to youngsters of that tender age—to replace the hitherto
regnant nasty one wrought by child lore handed down, from mouth to
mouth, through the centuries, and characterized by unprintable words, in
uttering, seeing, and hearing which numerous children seem to take delight.
Or is the subject of sex irreformable and hopeless? Is it really the crying
shame of the human race?
From my third to seventh year, F’ank and I were drawn toward one
another. I yearned to recline in his arms. “F’ank,” I once said, “I’m not
af’aid on your lap. But I’m af’aid nearly always. I’m af’aid, when I get as
big as papa, hair’ll grow on my cheeks, like on his. How could I ever use a
horrible wazor, like him! I hope I’ll die before I get big!”
I was destined to be a sort of pet with others of the more stalwart boys. It
was because I retained my babyishness—like an idiot—at least down to the
A Wee Girl-Boy’s age of seven, and was, besides, girlish. I commonly
Outlook on Life.
felt myself a little girl and told playmates to call
me Jennie. They have remarked that I was “more girl than boy.” Adults,
however, were blind to my bisexuality. They ridiculed me for carrying a
doll in my arms when I took a walk; etc. Because I was the only child of my
set thus violently crossed, I was the most unhappy. Taunts sometimes drove

me to throw myself on the floor, bang my head, and exclaim: “I wish I were
dead!”
But, on the whole, my early childhood was happy. With F’ank I would
play “papa and mamma.” He would “go to business,” while I took care of
the dolls; etc. I made and laundered their wardrobes. One day a sudden
shower surprised me. Gazing at the ill-fated wash on the line, I sobbed: “Oh
it yains! It yains! And my c’ose’ll get wet!”
The day of thoroughgoing disillusionment came early in my seventh year.
It was the style for boys to wear skirts up to that age. How I loved them!
And I never expected to clothe myself otherwise. Even down to my middle
forties, I have always felt more at home in skirts.
Then I wasn’t to be allowed to go through life as a girl and a woman? I
was up against the choice of spending the rest of life in my bedroom, or
drawing on a pair of the utterly loathed breeches. At first it was the same as
if I had to go on the street in my underclothes. I would dodge behind a tree
when an acquaintance hove in sight. How poignantly I missed petticoats as
a screen for my shameful nether limbs! Not to mention the deprivation of
the pleasure of feeling them dangling about my knees.
How I Came to Be a
Female-
Impersonator.

II. School Days.

First year: How terrible the aspect of the big brick academy! How awe-
inspiring the smell of the newly varnished floor on the first day of my
school life! How my heart jumped to my throat whenever I caught the cold,
stern eye of the school-marm piercing through my own little self! How bold
and bad and rough all the boys were! Why must I sit with them and enter by
their door when I so longed to be with the gentle and soft-voiced girls?
And could I ever bring myself to see what was on the other side of the
sign: “For boys only”? What right had I there? For I already recognized I
was really not a boy! At that age I gloated over being a girl-boy.
There was thus provision for the comfort of the boys. There was
provision for the comfort of the girls. But architects have never thought to
make provision for the girl-boys!
The first week I suffered terribly rather than invade the retreat barred to
all but boys. Then an unprintable experience right at my desk afforded the
room a good laugh and sent me home for dry clothing. I now preferred the
horror of the retreat to being laughed at and sent home. But I made a virtue
of haste and watched for a moment when no other boy was out.
Second year: I sat on a rear seat with a boy whom I stared at and touched
because of the softness and radiance of his hair, the rich red of his cheeks,
Sexual Precocity. and his sturdy build. Now and then we kissed when
no one was looking. But once a loud smack reverberated just after the near-
sighted school-marm had requested such stillness that one could hear a pin
drop. As she had never been kissed by a person of the opposite sex, she
considered a smack the unpardonable sin. My hero-boy took his whipping
with a cynical smile. But I wept for a half-hour.
Third year: I was caught in an immeasurably worse impropriety[16] under
a desk. The teacher thought my parents ought to know. Violently angry, my
father hammered my body with the heel of a boot. In a dozen years, not one
of my numerous brothers and sisters (although I was the only goody-goody

one) suffered such a thrashing. All the rest of my home life, father treated
me the worst of all, notwithstanding I far excelled in school-work. What a
trial to have a girl-boy son? Why had I ever been born? Subsequently there
existed a lifelong coolness between father and me.
Fourth year: [A typical spring afternoon.] After school, the west
playground was thronged with boys. I alone hastened directly to the street,
embarrassed as a little girl alone with two hundred boys. One calls out:
“Ralph, hurry to the girls’ yard where you belong!” Another: “Ralph, your
legs are as shapely as a girl’s. You would make a good-looking girl!” A
third throws his arms around me and exclaims: “Kissing you is as good as
kissing a girl!”
My embarrassment prevented my relishing these attentions at the
moment. But I always gloated over them after I got to bed.
Nature Indicated
Rearing as a Girl.
I had not quite reached the gate when a ball rolled to my feet and the
players shouted for it. With beet-red face on account of what I knew would
be said, I gave the ball an awkward toss. “Hah hah hah! You throw just like
a girl! Miss Nancy!”
Often I went around Robin Hood’s barn to avoid this particular
embarrassment.
Arrived in the girls’ yard, I felt as if freed from captivity and in my
proper element. Shyness and fright gave way to gleefulness. Moreover, I
cared only for the less strenuous games of the gentle sex.
Several boys mounted the high fence in order to tease me. “Ralph, I
promise you my sister’s doll carriage to push to school!”... “Heigh, Miss
Werther, have you finished the mitten I saw you knitting?”... “Say, Ralph,
give me a kiss, will you?”
While with girls, I liked nothing better than such bantering. I out-girled
them in our reaction to the boys’ teasing. We finally succeeded in provoking
the boys to chase us—my wish all along. To be chased by boys was the
highest of childhood’s pleasures.
I was always the ringleader of my girl clique, never reflecting on its
unnaturalness. They never regarded me as a normal boy—only a “girl-boy.”
We would even discuss our boy favorites.

Fifth year: My parents thought that if I were shut up closely with boys
and away from even the sight of girls, I would be cured of my effeminacy.
Thus my fifth to eleventh years of school life were staged at a boys’ “prep”
several miles from my home village and numbering about a hundred
students. But I was only a day-pupil except during my senior year.
Childhood Female-
Impersonation.
The first week, it was an ordeal on a par with being forced into breeches.
I was in a state of chronic fright. When addressed, my reply was inaudible
six feet away. But after becoming well acquainted with class-mates, I have
seated myself on their laps right in the schoolroom. For they appeared
demigods.
They would run a hand up my arm. “Your skin is softer than velvet. And
your pencils look as if you had chewed them off with your teeth. And what
makes you scream when a fellow merely touches you? Ralph, you certainly
ought to have been born a girl! You will never make a man!”
On holidays I would run off to the house of a girl friend. With several of
the gentle sex, I would play hide-and-seek in remote nooks, as hay-mows.
Later I would exchange clothing with one, and we would seek boy
acquaintances that I might display my skill in female-impersonation.
Adult intimates would point the finger of scorn in vain. To pass life as far
as possible like a girl was the very essence of existence, for which I was
willing to sacrifice everything else.
The instinctive manner of coasting is a criterion of psychic sex. Every
boy of my set, excepting myself, rode bellyflops—too strenuous for the
soft-muscled and timid girls. As I possessed their physical and psychic
softness, I also coasted upright.
In ascending the hill, I kept with the girls. I enjoyed talking about only
their interests. As the boys passed, they would call out: “Girl-boy! Mollie
Coddle!”
One afternoon, two snow forts were built fifty feet apart. All the boys,
Outlook on Life at excepting myself, took their stand bravely behind
Eleven.
the breastworks and rained snowballs on the
defenders of the opposite fort. The girls were almost prostrate in the deep
snow behind—out of danger of being hit in the face—packing snowballs for

the throwers. And I, GIRL-BOYWISE, did as they, the eternal impropriety
never dawning on me.
But one of the girls cried out: “Why are you not throwing snowballs with
the boys? Afraid of getting hit, are you? Why don’t you put on petticoats?”
After I retired that night, I had not yet recovered from my speechless
chagrin. “Why was it that I was not taking a boy’s place in life? Why did I
sit upright when coasting? Why did I feel more at home in girls’ attire?
Why did the boys tease me just as they did the girls? Could it be that I was
a girl imprisoned in the body of a boy?
“How could I face manhood? Are men under compulsion to go and vote?
But how could I push my way into the crowd of rough men always hanging
[at that period] around the polling places?
“How terrible to be a boy! Couldn’t I take papa’s razor and in a minute
rid myself of the excrescence? A razor ought to be sharp enough to do the
job! O God, change my body this moment by a miracle! Turn me into a
girl!” I sobbed.
One day, being a goody-goody, I had felt it my duty to tell the teacher on
a mischievous boy. As I left the school for my train, I was seized violently.
“If you were a big, strong fellow like us, we would give you a good
thrashing! We’ll only see if we can lift you off the ground by your hair. The
more you cry, the better we like it. Keep your hands down! Slap! Slap!
Girl-Boys’ Reasons Slap! And stop carrying your books on your arm
for Suicide.
like a girl!”
When they let go their grip, I started off on a run, only one boy pursuing
and shouting out threats. I shall now reveal the girl-boy’s patented secret for
getting out of a predicament. I sprinted to the porch of the first house, gave
the door-bell several violent jerks, and shrieked for help.
Sixth year: I was absorbed in fashioning a doll’s dress. An older sister
angrily exclaimed: “Why don’t you get out on the ball-field like all other
boys? I hate effeminate boys! Mother, I’m afraid Ralph is not normal!”
At the moment I felt ashamed ever to look my disgusted sister in the face
again. So ashamed that I wanted to kill myself. (One of my girl-boy
playmates, because bitterly persecuted on account of his effeminacy,
actually committed suicide at twelve by swallowing rat poison.) “I not
normal? What did my sister mean? Could she have had in mind my queer

habit of sitting on the boys’ laps? I was the only boy that acted so queerly. I
had not realized it could be described as ‘abnormal.’”
On another occasion, I was, with two brothers, skirting a creek on the
way to the swimming-hole. We came to a row of stepping-stones. My
brothers trotted across several times. But I lacked the courage even to set
foot on the first.
We found several “shavers” in the swimming-hole. My two brothers
joined them. But I liked only to recline on the bank and feast my eyes. I
would as soon have stripped before boys as would a little girl. I only got a
“I Want to Die!” sight of the swimming-hole because I had brothers.
For the first time it occurred to a “shaver” to strip and duck me. My
brothers were ashamed of my being a girl-boy and thought it would
contribute toward making a man of me.
“Stop your screeching, Ralph! You’ve got to be stripped so we can see if
you are a real boy! Stop your scratching, or we’ll give you a black eye!...
Now let’s dip him under to stop his yelling!... You can’t come around the
swimming-hole any more unless you get into the water with the rest of us!...
Cry-baby! Cry-baby! You’re a hopeless case!... Clear out of here!”
I half-way dressed and ran off in terror. Their driving home the fact that I
was a hopeless sexual cripple brought on such melancholia as I had never
before experienced. I repeatedly blubbered out as I ran: “I want to die! I
want to die!”
How I Came to Be a
Female-
Impersonator.

III. An Androgyne’s Youth.

It was not until my sixteenth year that I came to a full realization that I
am a male in name only. I had always recognized my girl-likeness and
wished Nature had created me a female. At the same time I had, during my
early teens, sometimes reflected that I would outgrow all my feminine
predilections and be a normal man. But at fifteen my bust development
made me think that perhaps God at last was answering my fervent prayers,
around the age of nine, to be changed into a physical girl. For I was already
one psychicly.
In my middle teens, my desire changed radically, due chiefly to my
having just become a God-intoxicated youth, with the work of a missionary
in China as my goal. I now prayed far more intensely for full-fledged
manhood than I ever had for physical femininity.
Superficially and according to man-made law, ultra-androgynes are men.
According to the unabridged dictionary, they are neither men nor women.
That is, they are capable neither of begetting nor conceiving. But in respect
to mind and feelings, in respect to their protoplasm—and thus essentially—
they are women.
Being neither male nor female, with whom do androgynes associate? Up
to the dawning of puberty, pronounced specimens—like myself—gravitate
toward the gentle sex. As soon as the sexual life is fully developed, the vast
A Village Fairie. majority (not happening to be overconscientious
and ultra-puritan) give that sex the widest berth and lean on the bosoms of
the ultra or tremendously virile of their acquaintance. But they never join in
the sports of the sturdy sex. For in athletics, they are as awkward as girls,
and besides lack the necessary physique.
But Nature happened to make me overconscientious, and my training was
ultra-puritan. While, after I entered my teens, I was ashamed longer to make
myself one with girl acquaintances, and besides was violently repelled by
our both approaching the full flower of our sexuality, my now looking upon

my attraction towards youths as the most heinous of sins, together with my
aversion from masculine interests, forbade association with boys outside the
schoolroom. Thus from the age of thirteen to eighteen, I endured an almost
companionless existence outside the home, the schoolroom, and the church
edifice. I did occasionally take a walk with an androgyne of my own age,
goody-goodiness, education, and social standing. He, however, was not
religious or of puritan parentage, and was even then extensively
promiscuous with the economically better class of the village’s youthful
“sports.”
I myself turned away in deep shame from the propositions of
tremendously virile youths, although secretly I would rather have yielded
than do anything else at all. At middle life, I have had doubts as to whether
I did the right thing in resisting. I believe my health and happiness were
tremendously impaired by my ultra-puritan views which made me obstinate
before Nature’s behests. On the other hand, through yielding I would have
Mine the Most lost my reputation and probably been barred from
Melancholy of
Youthhoods.
“prep” and university. I was expelled from the
latter as soon as the faculty learned that I lived
according to Nature’s behests. The university training is, of course, worth
erotic pleasures ten thousand times over. But during the first two years of
my college course, my health and happiness (as recounted in my
Autobiography of an Androgyne) were sorely wrecked by abstinence.
Does the wrong not after all lie in the groundless intolerance of “prep” and
university for androgynes who obey Nature’s demands, and fill, in an
unobtrusive manner, the niche in the universe for which the Great Architect
predestined them?
Thus being excluded from the pastimes of both the recognized sexes and
from their joint social intercourse—on account of my belonging to a third
and outcast sex—I found my only recreation from an ultra-studious college-
preparatory life in long walks on country roads, during which I often
brooded because Providence had consigned me to membership in the third
sex. From the age of thirteen to eighteen, I endured the most melancholy
existence I have ever heard or read of.[17]
Reasons for
Melancholia.
Can the reader conjure up any worse fate for a youth than to make the
startling discovery that he, though extremely conscientious and offenceless,

is a type of sexual cripple that has always been regarded by the sexually
full-fledged—because of their ignorance and Phariseeism—as the lowest of
the low, a monster of wickedness, and an outcast from society?
Can the reader conjure up any worse fate for a girl—and a very high-
strung one—than for Nature to disguise her as a boy, and foreordain that
she should be brought up as a boy and be, at school, office, etc., always shut
up with the sterner sex?
Can the reader conjure up any worse fate for a girl than to be doomed to
pass through life incarnated in a male body? How grief-provoking for a
mademoiselle to be cursed with a slight growth of hair on lip or cheeks!
Early Consciousness Only a trifling male stigma! How much more
of Deformity.
heart-rending for a mademoiselle to possess the
male physique to such an extent that even all physicians (except a handful
of sexologists) with their present lack of knowledge—or rather their closing
their eyes to all evidence—would declare her a male, and prescribe that she
should in life fill the latter role.
Such was my chronic burden almost throughout my teens. (Subsequently,
with the exception of brief spells of melancholia, I became reconciled to my
fate.) And such is the burden imposed by Nature on one youth out of every
three hundred in every social set of every country in the world. But because
of my intellectuality, high-class environment, and extreme androgynism,
my grief was exceptionally intense. I do not believe the mildly androgynous
are melancholy during their teens. They have not yet become conscious that
they are abnormal.
My chronic lamentation during my seventeenth to nineteenth years was:
“Miserable wretch! Miserable wretch! Miserable wretch! That’s all I am! I
was born with a deformed nature, despicable in the eyes of all people! I am
a soft effeminate youth who is wanted nowhere! I am ashamed to look any
one in the face! I feel like putting an end to my life, or else losing myself, to
all who know who I am, in a distant city where I could live according to my
queer nature. I have nothing to live for! I may be disgraced, disgrace my
family, be compelled to flee, be disowned by my parents, be cursed and be
despised throughout the land!”
An older sister frequently vented her spite on me because of her disgust
Horror of Fire-arms. at my effeminacy. The Sunday school picnic in my
seventeenth year led up to one of the greatest sorrows of my youth. “You

little coward!” my sister the next day began. “Even eight-year-old George
has more pluck! I was so mortified to see you the only boy to refuse to pick
up the rifle in the shooting contest! The others could hardly wait their turn.
And to-day you do look like a freak in that pink ruffled shirt! And with your
hair banged! Trying to doll yourself up as much like a girl as you can, are
you?”
“I am, too, so ashamed of your bangs, Ralph!” my mother chimed in.
“They make you look as if you didn’t know anything!”
“Mother, make him go to C’s party next Wednesday. He stays away from
all gatherings of young people. He will grow up a boor.”
“I would rather be thrashed than go to any party! I do not like to pay
gallantries to women!”
“You will never make a man unless you do, son. I insist that you go to
C’s party.”
Wednesday evening arrived, and with two score youngsters, I was
lounging in C’s parlors. My older sister had managed to have me escort a
girl. Unfortunate female, to be attended by one of her own sex whom
Nature had disguised as a man!
It was extreme torture to have to go into society and put myself forward
as a gallant. Accordingly I grasped the first opportunity to escape to the
garden. I could look into the brilliantly lighted drawing-rooms filled with
the youthful merry-makers. The spectacle moved me to tears.
“To think that Providence permits to all young people excepting myself
I Become a Religious the joys of love and courtship! Because if I
Prodigy.
followed my inclinations along these lines, people
would call me a monster and I would be a pariah![18]
“I wish I might get away from the world and live as a hermit! Then I
would in a way be unsexed, and would be so regarded by the world.
“People see that I am an effeminate youth! An effeminate youth! And my
sister has often expressed her disgust for that type! Who can like them?
“I feel that there is nothing which can henceforth give me interest in life!
I feel so mortified that I am a girl-boy! Oh it looks as if there were no
God!”

At fifteen I developed into a religious prodigy. Until my debut as a quasi-
public female-impersonator at nineteen, I, though the most melancholy
person of my community, was active in church work. During these four
years, I attended seven religious services a week (exclusive of college
chapel every morning during two of these years) and from fifteen to
seventeen, spent two hours a day in private devotions in addition. As early
as fifteen, I was the leader of prayer meetings. I preached from the pulpit a
dozen times at nineteen—a few months before I relinquished all Church
work because instinct drove me to female-impersonation. All the ultra-pious
of my ultra-puritan entourage predicted for me a great career as a herald of
My Life’s Motto. Christianity—to which vocation I had already at
fifteen dedicated my life.
Thus as early as fifteen, I was frequently called upon to lead the
congregation in extemporaneous prayer. Usually my keynote (for my
private prayers as well) was my life’s motto, which I adopted at fifteen:
“My times are in Thy hand,
Whatever they may be;
Pleasing or painful,
Dark or bright,
As best may seem to Thee!”

Tears would course down my cheeks and my voice tremble with emotion.
I never failed to remember that I had the greatest need of all for the rest for
which I pleaded and which Jesus has promised to give “the oppressed and
heavy laden.”
After service, all other youths escorted a girl home and lingered over the
gate for blissful conversation. But I had the habit of making my solitary
way to a desolate abandoned graveyard whose latest headstone was set up
in the twenties of the nineteenth century.
Behold my Garden of Gethsemane, where not merely once, but once each
week, I would throw myself on a grass-covered grave, writhe in an agony of
moans, and even shriek. All my muscles seemed to be rigid, and my fists
were clinched. I would dig my fingernails into my palms, and throw my
arms about wildly.
“Change my nature, O God,” I would cry. “This very moment. By a
miracle. Give me the mind and powers of a man.

My Temptations
Hardly Equalled.
“Am I being ‘tried by fire’ as the Bible predicts for God’s children? Are
others so tried by fire as I have been nearly all my life?”
[After half-a-century of rare opportunities to learn human nature, I have
ascertained that I was tried worse than any one else I have heard of—that is,
by torture of sexual desire that must not be gratified, and practically was not
from seven to eighteen, inclusive. I was tried by fire a hundred times as hot
as the average person ever knows. Probably so hot because of my intense
fairie-ism from two to six. I believe I have, for years together, resisted lust
many times as intense as the average person ever knows.]

My Garden of Gethsemane

In My Garden of
Gethsemane.
“I am experiencing the enslaving power of sin. I now know how to
sympathize with poor drunkards and harlots. I will flog and starve myself in
order to conquer my flesh. [I actually fasted and flagellated myself to

ascertain the effect in deadening my amorousness but found these religious
exercises useless.]
“I feel to-night that I can never become a preacher of the Gospel. I feel
that I must give up all plans for a noble career, and that maybe I shall come
to a disgraceful end!
“Oh that all instinct would die in me! It makes my life miserable. How
gladly would I be free from all desire so that I could make a name for
myself in the world! An extreme girl-boy can hardly become a scholar and a
preacher.
“Is it my divinely appointed task to learn the lesson of resignation in
affliction? To feel myself crushed to earth by the Almighty Hand? Like
Isaac, to be tried in order to see whether I am willing to be slain in my
youth—in my own case morally?”[19]
Man’s Prudery
Almost Fatal.
After an hour of bitter tears and heart-broken pleadings to the Architect
of the universe, I would be in a state of mental and physical collapse for
twenty-four hours. Can the reader wonder that, weighed down by such a
burden, I repeatedly meditated suicide during these four terrible years? And
I realize now—at middle age—that I had to suffer these four years of
melancholia only because of cultured man’s misunderstanding of
androgynism, prohibition of any one’s inquiring into the facts, and bitter
persecution of androgynes.[20]
Events have proved that it was the policy of the All-Wise and All-Good
not to answer my prayers, notwithstanding their almost unexampled
earnestness and repetition. The Eternal foresaw that it was to the best
interests both of the human race and of myself that I should leave to others
the coveted work of preaching the Gospel to the heathen and spend my
physical prime in New York’s Underworld as an avocational female-
impersonator. That was the cross that God willed that I should bear. The
role of female-impersonator is the niche in the universe that its Architect
had created me to fill.
In middle life I have often thought that Providence mercifully spared me
from suicide—the fate of so many youthful androgynes as a result of the
world’s persecution—and foreordained my career of female impersonator
that I might, through publishing the present trilogy, remove the veil of

Innocent Androgynes ignorance and prejudice as regards androgynism
Now in Prison.
that now blinds the cultured, and occasions terrible
persecution to Nature’s inoffensive step-children, who number one out of
every two hundred inmates of our state prisons, having been incarcerated
merely on the ground of homosexuality.
How I Came to Be a
Female-
Impersonator.

IV. I Grow into The Fairie Boy.

At sixteen, I entered a college in New York City. I alone was responsible
for the scene of my university training. I had frequently visited New York
and wished to reside there. But I had then no intention of ever yielding to
my detested instincts for female-impersonation. I had not realized that
residence in a great city would make temptation far stronger than in a
village. My being fated to make my home in New York almost throughout
my adulthood has had a tremendous influence on my life, particularly from
nineteen to thirty-one.
My father gave me every educational advantage because in the fairly
large “prep” that I attended from my tenth to sixteenth years, I attained the
highest scholarship in the history of the school. In an address to the
students, the principal named me as the youthful scholar to be patterned
after by the other boys (!!!).
I know I shall be accused of exaggerated ego for the way I talk about
myself in this and the next chapter. But seven articles have been published
about myself in medical journals, exclusive of numerous reviews of my
Autobiography of an Androgyne. How many people can go into a library,
call for magazines, and gaze at pictures of themselves within their covers?
How many people have had a three-volume autobiography published? With
such a record, I suspect that I am either insane or else one of the half-dozen
The Author’s Brain. most remarkable sexual curiosities of my
generation. On the latter chance, I am moved to leave on record a full
account of both my inner and outer rare life experience.

Front View of Author at Thirty-three

(Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt)

As to bragging about my intellect, my experience of half-a-century is that
in general, Providence makes compensations in the lives of men so that as
they, one by one, pass on to the next world, all have fared equally as
concerns Heaven-sent boons and the opposite. As a counterweight to having
created me a bitterly persecuted sexual cripple (for His inscrutable but
surely wise ends) the Architect of the universe endowed me with a brain of
such capacity as found in only one out of twenty-five university graduates. I
wrote stories at eight. At thirteen I was confident I would become an author
and my name be chiselled on the walls of fame.[21]
My college associates commented on my feminesqueness and
infantilism. I perceived that I was looked upon as a curiosity.
I am a curiosity in that while throughout life remaining a species of
moron,[22] certain cerebral lobes have nevertheless progressed to a high
development enabling me to graduate from a university almost at the head
of my class notwithstanding my general psychic infantilism and my
The Author a suffering from acute spermatorrhea and (during my
Curiosity.

freshman and sophomore years) acute melancholia. If my physical health
had been as good as that of the three men who outstripped me, I might have
led my university class.
I am a curiosity in that down to twenty-five, I was a fair specimen of
physical infantilism or lilliputianism. I was said to possess the skull and
facial lines of an infant. Down to twenty-five, I never weighed more than
110 pounds on a height of five feet five. Nearly all my brothers and uncles
have been six-footers.
I am a curiosity in that I possess the light female osseous structure. Even
before I began to develop adipose tissue after twenty-five, I would float on
fresh water without moving a muscle, my observation being that the slim
normal boy must vibrate his hands.
I am a curiosity in that form of skeleton and contour of body are mostly
feminine, particularly the bust.
Not until the age of nineteen, when I went successively to two medical
college professors and implored them to make me a complete male, did I
learn that practically all the tissues of my body are of characteristically
feminine texture. My muscles, judged by their weakness and my using them
in general woman-fashion, are those of a female. The beardal growth is
normally male except that it could never reach the length of an eighth of an
inch and has no stiffness. If I had not shaved or eradicated the beard, I
would have been, after seventeen, one of the dog-faced boys of the circus.
Although the hair cells seem as dense as on my scalp, I could never have
exhibited virile whiskers.
Coddled in College.
Another feminine resemblance is that at the age of half-a-century, I show
not the least tendency to baldness.
Several of my college associates coddled and babied me. They would
throw an arm around me and cry: “Child!” They would hold me on their
laps. With the three ultra-virile with whom I became most intimate and
confidential, I would often in private throw myself into their arms and
pillow my head on their bosoms, while they would exclaim: “Lovesick
boy!” They never betrayed my strange conduct to others or appeared less
friendly. Only one of the three made greater advances than I myself—the
only one belonging to the tremendously virile class. What chiefly kept me
from even hinting at extremes was fear of expulsion in case it should

become generally known. But I was also strongly influenced by the dictates
of society and the teaching of the Bible—as I then erroneously understood
the latter.[23]
“You still possess the real childlike naiveté,” students have remarked.
“And you possess childlike features to harmonize with your decidedly
childlike manner of going about things. You are certainly The Boy Who
Never Grew to Be a Man.”
Childlike and
Womanlike.
“I like to watch you because of your childlike grimaces. That is why the
fellows are continually teasing you; because it is just like teasing a child or
a girl. You react with a sort of pleased childlike pride at being the object of
attention.”
“Your voice, though hoarse, has a feminine timbre. It possesses the
penetrating and carrying power of a child’s voice. It often breaks and
changes, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. From being masculine, it
suddenly changes timbre and becomes decidedly feminine, passing over
from a bass to a treble. Your voice is sentimental, bland, caressing. It is the
kind of voice a dying woman would choose to hear.”
“I never saw the chevelure [as they shoved their fingers through it] so
fine and silklike in any one else who wore trousers. Your hands [as they
would hold them] are as soft and hairless as those of a girl. And you have
the arms of a woman [when my sleeves were rolled back]. And you blush
just like a woman. And you sob like her. I never saw tears run down the
cheeks of any other man as he sat in the class-room.”
I have jokingly replied with a smile at my classmate’s mystification:
“You do not know but what I am a woman!” But I shrank from any serious
disclosure of the secrets of my sex, such a mystery to many of my every-
day associates.
If I live to old age, I intend to call the present trilogy to the attention of
some of my associates of early years who have indicated great curiosity to
know the secrets of my sex life. I have permitted only three friends (of
course the closest) who know me under my legal name to read my
Autobiography of an Androgyne, and one of the three dropped me from his
Feminine Figure friendship. Men are so biased on the subject of sex
Recognized.
that I can not let my friends read the secrets of my

life until I reach an independent old age when they can not make me suffer
much on account of my androgynism.
In college, I was compelled to exercise in the “gym.” I hid my form. It
was a terrible ordeal to have to strip before the physical director, who
remarked: “Your figure is feminine.” Apparently he did not suspect the
sexuality that was bound up with that figure. If military drill had been
required—as in 1917—I would have quit the university.[24]
Since nineteen my yearning for skirts has been in part met by habitually
wearing about my home an ornamental dressing-gown. Thus clad, I have
often gazed in a mirror, imagining myself a complete female. I have taken
pleasure in hearing the gown rustle, like a silk dress; in feeling it strike
against my legs; and in holding up the front in ascending the stairs.
The Fairie Boy was my nickname from nineteen to thirty-one outside my
every-day circle. And outside I was far more widely known. Inside I had the
reputation of being an insignificant, puritan, unpractical book-worm and
Mollie Coddle who knew nothing of life and human nature. Outside I
achieved wide notoriety as an amateur actor—or, properly speaking,
actress.
Man, Woman, and
Infant in One Body.
That the distinction, among the sons of Adam, of being The Fairie Boy
came to me, is nothing for which I can take credit to myself. It was merely
because Providence had made me, as an adult, physically as well as
psychicly, one-third man, one-third woman, and one-third infant.
Providence endowed me with a “small-boy” aspect, the subject of comment
in my every-day circle down to my early forties; freshness of complexion
down to thirty; innocent expression of features and marvellous absence of
animality (in appearance only); cry-baby mentality; eternal childlikeness
even in my professional life; and slender, lithe, and lilliputian figure down
to twenty-five.
The Fairie Boy! To be frank—I am proud of the pretty nickname. This
Providential distinction is part of my compensation for my almost
unparalleled sufferings from persecution at present inseparable from the lot
of an ultra-androgyne.

Rear View of Author at Thirty-three

(Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt)

V. The Boy Who Never Grew to Be a Man.

How I Came to Be a
Female-
Impersonator.
For the most part, the present chapter covers my twenty-sixth to thirty-
second years, during which my most descriptive nickname was The
Soldiers’ Friend. For I was foreordained to a sort of army life for many
years, detailed in my Autobiography of an Androgyne, but omitted in the
present volume. Here I limit myself to some related personal description.
Physique and Psyche: My career as avocational female-impersonator
during the second half-dozen years of my physical prime was even more
remarkable than during the first (outlined in Part Three). My quasi-public
career as female-impersonator ended at thirty-one—at its very zenith—
because I deemed myself too old longer to play the part of “French doll-
baby,” and because the instinct thereto progressively weakened from the
age of thirty. My being able to play that part down to thirty-one was
possible only because Nature had endowed me with the proper physique
and psyche, already described. Less extreme androgynes lack the
qualifications, while practically all the extreme (commonly known as
“fairies”, “fags”, or “brownies”) lack the necessary good sense, modesty,
temperance, and high grade of general morality that were mine because of
my puritan childhood and youth and university education.
The proneness of the eternal feminine greatly to understate her age made
Infantilism, etc., a me in my twenty-sixth year, when impersonating a
Bar in Business.
doll-baby, pass as twenty-one, and in my fortieth,
as twenty-eight. An unmarried female, as long as she has hopes of lassoing
a husband, never gets beyond the lingering years of twenty-eight or twenty-
nine.
Simultaneous “Male” Professional Life: In my twenties, thirties, and
forties, I have worked hard in three successive learned professions. At
nineteen I had already relinquished my amateur work of preacher of the

Gospel on being forced by Nature into the avocation of female-
impersonator. Simultaneously with my satisfying my frivolous and
coquettish instincts of French doll-baby, I also met the demands of my male
intellectual spirit by doing brain work of a high order. My three successive
professions have seemingly been adopted by chance, although during
“boyhood” I manifested special aptitude for all three, besides that of
preacher. I did not choose them. They were only makeshifts after I was
barred from my choice: preaching the Gospel. I can not name them lest I
disclose my identity.
I have achieved the average professional success. But my extreme
effeminacy and both facial and psychic infantilism have prevented
employers meting out the full advancement that past work merited. Men
less capable than myself have been promoted over me because my chiefs
had the impression that I was merely “a grown-up child”—that is, moron-
like, although as a matter of fact I possessed the intellectual qualifications.
Office associates have now and then commented in my hearing on my
feminesqueness notwithstanding they have not usually entertained the least
Feminesqueness idea that from nineteen to thirty-one, I
Recognized in
Business.
impersonated, an average of one evening a week, a
French doll-baby. Some remarks, however, even
down to my middle forties, indicated that some suspected the truth about
my sexual life. But I never betrayed that life to any of my business
associates excepting three or four confidants, who—I must explain—were
mere Platonic friends. I was too much ashamed to ape the woman before
those acquainted with my intellectual accomplishments. The following are
samples of remarks of office associates:
“Good morning, Baby!”
“Grinning kid!”
“You look like a frightened bunny!” (While being teased. I was always
the favorite subject for teasing by full-fledged males. In school, university,
and office (the latter down to my middle forties only) they teased me as
they would a girl. Moreover, my face expresses my emotions in an
uncommon manner.)
“Your breasts are certainly beauts! You must be half woman!”
“Look, Ralph, Ed is throwing kisses at you!”

“Ralph, I was just going to ask you for a kiss!”
“Ralph, you are nothing but a child half-a-century old!” (When
impressed by my childish grimaces and childlike way of going about
everything.)
“Say, Ralph, won’t you favor me with the recipe for perennial youth? I
never saw such a contrast between apparent and actual age!” (During my
early forties.)
“Ralph, you are a tub of mush! You look like a fat frau in the last stage of
pregnancy!” (The reader will pardon the vulgarity occasioned by my wish
Simultaneous Life as to give the exact words used by an office associate
Three Persons.
to describe my figure after the age of forty-three.)
Nearly all my professional life has been under my legal name. It has been
completely apart from my avocation of female-impersonator. I have
sometimes thought I might be an instance of the dual personality recognized
by psychologists. Only, while living out either side of my own duality, I
have always had a complete memory of the other side and recognized the
oneness of my ego in my two widely opposed careers.
In my middle twenties, I lived under three names and personalities. I
worked seven hours a day for a legal journal as “Earl Lind.” Because under
that name I had called on its editor to persuade him to publish my
Autobiography of an Androgyne, representing myself as merely its
author’s agent. The editor was in his sixties, and happening just then to
need an assistant, immediately hired me, never questioning the truthfulness
of my representations as to who I was. He was at the time also one of the
leading criminal lawyers in New York City. He employed me in all sorts of
confidential capacities and let me into many of the secrets of his clients. Of
course I would never have proved false to his trust, even though he never
knew who I really was and where I lived. I attended court with him as his
clerk. I learned all the intricacies of establishing a false alibi for a wealthy
androgyne whom he represented in a case originating in blackmail by an
adolescent. I was his assistant while he was defending a client from
prosecution by Anthony Comstock, when the latter gentleman was
personally acquainted with me under the name of “Earl Lind,” and knew I
Court Employee Was was trying to get the Autobiography of an
Ultra-Criminal.
Androgyne published, which he had already
interdicted.

Thus I was, in a sense, a court employee of New York City, while at the
same time one of its greatest criminals—according to a statute that is a
legacy from the Dark Ages.
Simultaneously with my career as lawyer’s clerk, I taught school five
evenings a week under my legal name, and every Saturday evening took up
my avocation of female-impersonator under the name of “Jennie June.”
Though I passed as three separate personalities within the same week,
they had—poor things—to share the identic body alternately.
Necessity of Aliases: I have used five: Raphael Werther, Ralph Werther,
Earl Lind, Jennie June, and Pussie. When I began my double life, I told the
Underworld my legal name was Raphael Werther. I named myself after “the
Prince of Painters,” because he was the greatest ultra-androgyne who ever
lived. He was my idol—my ideal. I wished him to pass through the earthly
life all over again in my body. I further named myself after “the Prince of
Amatory Melancholiacs” since I was myself such during my teens. Werther
was Gœthe himself, the most brilliant and most versatile man, “the Prince
of Men,” born subsequently to the Shakespeare-Author (Francis Bacon).
As for the genesis of my first feminine name, I chose “Jennie” at four. I
have always considered it the most feminine of names. When I began my
double life, I appended “June.” I adopted that surname because of its
Choosing Aliases. beautiful associations, as well as because of the
repetition of the j and n. I have always considered “Jennie June” as the most
exquisite of names: the poetic name; the magic name; the “divine” name (in
the sense that we speak of the “divine” or “godlike” human form). I later
substituted the feminine “Pussie” because so nicknamed, much to my
delight, by the tremendously virile.
I later adopted “Earl” primarily because it rhymes with “girl”, the
creature of enchantment that I longed to be, and secondarily because it
arouses noble ideas. I adopted “Lind” after Jennie Lind, one of my models.
Perhaps these fancies about names are proof of insanity. A medical
reviewer of my Autobiography of an Androgyne, who devoted only five
minutes to the 70,000 words, declared me “clearly insane.”
When I transferred my female-impersonations from Mulberry Street to
the Fourteenth Street Rialto, incredulity occasioned my transliterating the
fancy “Raphael” to prosaic “Ralph.”

As a result of my 1905 court martial making the names “Ralph Werther”
and “Jennie June” known to some army heads, I found it advisable, when in
1907 renewing my kind of army life for seven years, to choose new
masculine and feminine names. I feared it might become known to the army
heads that the fairie “Jennie June” had transferred “her” stage for female-
impersonations to a distant military post. Hence the substitutions of “Earl
Lind” and “Pussie.”
On a single day I have had to sign myself with four different names.
Always after writing my signature, I must review it painstakingly to make
sure I have put down the proper one. Only once I have made a mistake. In
Two Handwritings. receipting for a registered letter addressed “Earl
Lind, General Delivery,” I signed my legal name. To the clerk’s inquiry I
replied that I had been authorized by Lind. He sent word to Lind for written
authorization, which was promptly despatched.
I have had to acquire two entirely distinct handwritings—the second for
my numerous love letters.[25] None were ever written more mushy than
those of “Jennie June” and I guarded against their ever being traceable to
the intellectual and puritan “Ralph Werther” (by which name I refer to my
every-day self in my books). I have often, within an hour, written letters in
the two different hands.
Confidants: Throughout the three decades of my double life, I have,
outside several physicians, disclosed it only to nine confidants of my every-
day circle. One expressed his amazement that I should disclose it at all,
affirming that even my best friend would be likely to get me thrown out of
my economic and social position. All my lay confidants, however, proved
helpful and compassionate excepting one, who, while never disclosing my
secret, dropped me from his friendship, although we had been the very
closest of Platonic friends. One physician brought about my expulsion from
the university and made me a Bowery outcast and fairie.
Because of the terrible persecutions inflicted by the criminally-minded
“saints” who happened to be born sexually full-fledged, hardly a single
cultured androgyne ever betrays his bisexuality to a single confidant of his
Author’s every-day circle excepting the tremendously virile
Contribution to
Sociology.
bachelor whom he may have chosen as soul-mate.
I am an exception in outspokenness. Decades ago I
rose above the prudery and bias with which most leaders of thought are to-

day bound hand and foot. I desire that men interested in the improvement of
the human race, and in the question of justice to all classes, have the
opportunity of getting at the facts concerning the atypic and atavic types
with whom I have been intimately thrown through having been
foreordained to pass a large part of my life in the Underworld.

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, chicken-
hearted 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
The Fourth Sex. 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
Female- make all anatomical males of like passions. What
Impersonation
Instinctive.
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.
Depilation.
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
Obedience to Nature purely physiological and psychological
Gave Peace.
phenomenon, it is incorrectly regarded as
deepdyed 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 every-day 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
twenty-four 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, book-worm 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
My Dual dating from the compromise, my life flowed on
Personality.
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 doll-baby
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.
The Fairie Boy.

II. A Typical Female-Impersonation Spree.

The one evening a week on which I (the scholar spirit) 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
Fairies Are Extreme some feminine finery locked up in my room for
Dressers.
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.
During the last decade of the 19th century, the Fourteenth Street Rialto
ranked second only to the “Tenderloin” as an amusement center in the entire
metropolitan district. While it still holds the same rank in 1921, its present
night life is only a shadow of what it was. A quarter of a century ago, New
York was wide-open, whereas for more than a decade, the lid has been
The Fourteenth down tight. Promenading the Rialto on an evening
Street Rialto.
of 1921, the pedestrian would conclude that no
such phenomenon as sex attraction existed. But during the period that I was
an habitué, the Fourteenth Street Rialto was as gay as European bright-light
districts, which I was fated to explore.

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.)

The Rialto is confined principally between Third Avenue and Broadway.
While I was an habitué, 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

Female- opportunity to join some tremendously virile
Impersonators
Popular.
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 habitué 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
Female- impinge on one’s ear. Bright young men brought
Impersonators
Gifted.
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 out-womaning 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.”
The Hotel Comfort.
“Jennie, let’s walk around to the ladies’ parlor of the Hotel Comfort[26]
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.
No Alcohol, No
Venereal Disease.
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!
Female-Impersonate
Intoxication.
“‘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!’”[27]
“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
Man and Woman in modulation as a result of my body being both male
One Body.
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.[28]
Being “Dogged”.
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.
Note.—See “Memories” in Part VIII.
The Fairie Boy.

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 portrayed 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
New York’s Beau whom I mingled in the Rialto. He became my
Brummel.
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!”[29]
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 SOULMATE.” For no soft hair, no rosebud cheeks
Apostrophe to Lost in a male, no arched eyebrows—ever surpassed
Soul-mate.
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
The Gambler’s legal name, I would not disclose it. It was the alias
Antecedents.
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.
Fairie a Bachelor of
Arts.
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 highfliers 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,[30] 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
“Things Are Not were the more inclined to respect my disinclination
What They Seem.”
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
Gambling a Master manoeuvre tending to hypnotise them) who
Passion.
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 tear-bedimmed 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 half-way 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
In New York’s Monte sin to set foot on it. The ebony furniture was inlaid
Carlo.
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. That 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
Crooks Are Boastful. an eyeopener. 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 soul-mates a long list of questions in
case they did not spontaneously overflow. But it is an earmark of crooks to
be garrulous with their soul-mates. 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 soul-mate. 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,
Fairies Best Stool described in my Autobiography of an Androgyne
Pigeons.
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.
The Abraham Myers
Adventure.
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
Blarney Triumphant. 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 hayseed 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 awful 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....
How They Milk Cows
on Fourteenth Street.
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 red-blooded and would
A “Reub” Seeing not back down in any manly undertaking. Like
New York.
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.
“Death to the
Traitor.”
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.
A Sadder, but Wiser
“Reub.”
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.
The Fairie Boy.

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 soul-mates when having no more use for them.
Furthermore, during this single summer that I frequented the Rialto, I found
it a barren stamping-ground 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
An Unrivaled park as if I were a full-fledged mademoiselle. I was
Hercules.
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 female-impersonator. 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
Influence of every red-headed adolescent I ran across,
Environment.
particularly if his cheeks were covered with
pimples.
In order to ascertain the trustworthiness, goodheartedness, 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.
Author’s Flirtations
Mushy.
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.
Hero-worship.
“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!”
“O 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![31] 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!”
A Rare Find.
“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 haven’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 mustn’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
Full-fledged’s endowment that are for me a magnet. You will be paying for all I do
Instincts Equally by merely allowing me to gaze at your marvellous build a few
Unæsthetic. 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 high-minded 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.[32] 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
Common Type of Supreme Man—you must be decorated with it. For you appear to be
Sexual Insanity. 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! 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 store-yards. 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-
The Ultra- impersonation apprenticeship on Mulberry Street
Unexpected
Happens.
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
A Seance with a feel this terrible scar. And then reach it here and
Burglar.
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 didn’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, didn’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 didn’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
Method of Robbery. 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.”

Neighborhood Where Harvey Green Thought He “Finished” Jennie June

“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 immediately
Author Robbed Two take you around to my room and put into your
Hundred Times.
hand a hundred dollars I have locked in my desk.”
“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 didn’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
Experiencing Death. received several sledge-hammer 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.[33] Fortunately without encountering anybody, I
mounted the several flights of stairs and secured my room-key from its
Struggling to Save hiding place. On arrival in my own snug harbor,
Reason.
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!”
My Visage the Most For two weeks I had to keep to my room. Never
Marred.
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.[34]
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.[35]

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
Apostrophe to the permitted me to commune. I never met your equal
Supreme Man.
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.
The Fairie Boy.

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 habitué, 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
Is Bisexuality the sexually full-fledged Pharisees to lift up their own
Worst of Crimes?
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
Homosexuals No York metropolitan district and give carte blanche
Worse Than
Heterosexuals.
to the thousands of similar heterosexual 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 habitués
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 præcox, or other psychic disease.
Cause of The prevalent diagnosis, by physicians, of
Androgynism.
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.[36] In the sight of God, you latter, when deliberately
refusing to hearken to the wailing of bitterly persecuted androgynes, are
Leaders of Thought morally on a par with Harvey Green and the
Are Murderers.
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
Earmarks of introduced themselves as Roland Reeves, Manon
Androgynism.
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-

The Cercle night even wearing a disgusting beard! Of course
Hermaphroditos.
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,[37] and
Androgyne Talk. 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![38]
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
A Gynander’s Fate. 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 front-row 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[39] 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
Gynanders Love likewise thought it absurd and refused to
Androgynes.
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[40]—as with us women-men—is never to
Solution of Mollie’s breathe to any one of their every-day circle a word
Disappearance.
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
Man’s Prudery women-men are being struck down in New York
Causes Many
Murders.
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 female-impersonators.”
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, knock-kneed
Common Androgyne feminine legs are monstrosities! If you’ll pardon
Practices.
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,[41] 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 hero-confidant 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 homosexuality, but think only
An Androgyne the scum of mankind could be guilty. Impossible in
Outcast.
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
Bigotry the back woods; not in a city. He has no right in the
Unparallelled.
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 æsthetic 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.
Reasons for Non- “How do you define ‘depraved’, Mr. Fairsea? If
Segregation.
in such a way as to exclude Socrates, Plato,
Michael Angelo, and Raphael, then you exclude me also.”

Fairsea: “But the phenomenon works against the multiplication of the
human race. Nature, with this in view, instilled in all but the scum of
mankind this utter disgust for the invert. To the end of the continued
existence of the race, he must be condemned to a life of unsatisfied longing.
For this reason he should be imprisoned for life, not for only ten or twenty
years as the statutes now provide!
“We strictly segregate diphtheria and scarlet fever, Plum. Why should we
not similarly quarantine against inversion?”
Plum: “Because there is a vast difference. Contagious disease, if not
strictly segregated, would occasion death and acute suffering to many
additional persons. Whereas the bisexuals’ being at liberty occasions not
the least detriment to any individual, nor to the race as a whole.

“A second reason: The quarantining of contagious disease is only a
matter of shutting up a few persons for a few weeks in their own homes. It
causes no serious privation or suffering. Whereas the segregation of
bisexuals would affect for a life-time tens of thousands of our most useful
members of society. It would occasion, among these already accursed by
Nature, additional intense mental suffering, despair, and suicide.
“Any one who can suggest the latter segregation is unable to see farther
away than the end of his nose.
“And as to race suicide, Mr. Fairsea. You should be the very last to
lecture anybody on that subject! You are the father of only two children and
Leaders of Thought have put three wives under the sod through your
Ignore Evidence.
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!”
Bias Rules in Sex
Domain.
Plum: “All that is only bigotry and bias! Nearly every man’s conduct is
still governed by bias!”
Fairsea: “I even acknowledge that it is bias! For bias is justifiable in
matters of sex!... You say that medical writers have declared inverts
irresponsible! That declaration proves that they know nothing about them!
You say inverts are assaulted and blackmailed! They deserve to be! It would
be wrong for any one at all to show any leniency! Their existence ought to
be made so intolerable as to drive them to lead their sexual life along the
lines followed by all other men! Your case, Plum, fills me with such disgust
that I could not rest knowing you were around the office!”

Roland brought the conversation to a close: “Mankind are so steeped in
egotism! Whatever they are not personally inclined to is always horribly
immoral! Whatever they are instinctively inclined to is always supremely
right!
“Why not go to the root of the matter and take revenge on Nature, instead
of her irresponsible and pitiable step-children? Nature alone is to blame for
the existence of sexual cripples. Why not marshal every son and daughter of
Adam for the work of honeycombing the entire crust of the earth with
galleries to be filled with dynamite? And then set off the world-wide charge
simultaneously so as to destroy all terrestrial Nature at one coup, humanity
included. This would constitute man’s sole logical vengeance on
bisexuality.

“But man is truly a passional, rather than a rational, being.”
The Fairie Boy.

VI. Thoughts Suggested by the “Hermaphroditoi” in General.

I associated with the hermaphroditoi less than a year. Paresis Hall then
happened to be raided by the police and the hermaphroditoi—who
happened to be the police’s chief quarry—afterward gave the resort a wide
berth for fear of arrest.
The hermaphroditoi numbered about a score. All were highly cultured
ultra-androgynes varying in age from eighteen to forty. Half-a-score have
given me their life-story. But the careers of only two were particularly
tragic. I have therefore, in PARTS FOUR and FIVE, detailed the life-stories
of these two as nearly as I can remember, having of course taken no notes at
the time.
In the lives of some hermaphroditoi, nothing particularly remarkable had
ever transpired beyond their chronic female-impersonation sprees. For
example, Roland Reeves, the most brilliant, was, in every act, moderate and
sensible. He was of the type of cross-dressing androgyne that possesses
little animality. He was by no means a coquette—as were most of the
hermaphroditoi. People would say that he had more self-restraint and moral
backbone than the coquettes. But my unusually wide observations have
taught me that sexual moderation is as a rule due to weak instinct when not
to lack of opportunity.

The Author at Thirty-four

(Amateur Photo)

A prime regulator of the sexual intensity of the adult androgyne—as
Parents, Take Time probably of all humans—consists of the influences
for Your Children!
toward sexual expression during childhood. My
own adult career had its prototype in my intense fairie-ism from two until
seven. Sexual impressions of early childhood have often a powerful
influence down through middle life. In large measure they determine the
course to be taken by the adult sexual life. Parents can not be too
watchful of the secret practices of small children, and of the influence
of servants.

Androgynes, during childhood, are particularly prone to fall into bad
habits (fellatio; or pathicism in pædicatio) because always confined with
their sexual opposites. What would one expect of the chastity of a high-
strung girl of twelve marooned for a summer on an island with merely a

dozen ultra-virile youths? That is the identical situation of youthful
androgynes.
As a rule, when an androgyne reaches the middle thirties, the instinct to
dress and pose as a mademoiselle gradually becomes feeble. Age sobers
many and they become practically asexual. I have observed the same thing
in ultra-virile men during my twelve years career as their mignon. Their
craze for the opposite sex is strongest from twenty to twenty-five (just at the
time when Christian custom interdicts the propensity) after which it
gradually declines. It is the same with animals. Poulterers cut off the heads
of all but “adolescent” roosters. I have myself been a Guinea pig fancier. I
discovered that the males gradually lose their virility at middle age.
Indeed I have observed that as androgynes approach fifty, they
sometimes become more masculine than they ever were, and will even
marry. It seems that in rare cases mild virility supplants sexual passivity as
“Change of Life” fifty is approached. On the other hand, I have
(Climacteric).
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
My Personal castrated. The virility that occasionally for the first
Menopause.
time surges up in ultra-androgynes at “the change
of life” could not go very far with me. After six months, I renounced the
pseudo-courtship entirely, with disgust at the feminine sex, but particularly
with the young female who had done her best to rope me in as her husband.
For she did most of the courting. I merely let myself almost fall into her
trap.

Even in my twenty-second year—the period when I belonged to the
Cercle Hermaphroditos—I had already written a brief Autobiography. But
the bigotry of cultured man made me wait twenty-three years for
publication. Already—because I happened to be an ultra-androgyne myself
—I had selected androgynism as my special field in science and literature. I
therefore desired to collect all the data possible, although not yet having
acquired the habit of note-making.
In order to draw out atypic individuals—particularly androgynes—I
made it a practice first to reveal my own secrets. This frankness generally
led them to confide to me what they never breathed to another—people in
general, and particularly cultured androgynes, having an absurd reluctance
to discuss the sexual side of their lives. (Androgynes for fear of persecution
and prosecution, not by reason of prudery.) And the human race has
suffered so greatly as a result of this obsession!
When God created human nature, his handiwork was so horrible that
mankind, as soon as they reached the stage of civilization, have thrown a
blanket over their own nature, after the example of Shem and Japheth with
Man Ashamed of His their father Noah’s drunken nakedness. Cultured
Nature.
man has interdicted human nature’s coming out
into the light of day because of its inexpressible ugliness.
Even in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world, next to
nothing is known about human sexuality. At least with the exception of a
handful of sexologists. Each individual simply knows his own sexual life,
refuses to divulge it because of its “nastiness,” and is unable to overcome
his shame to inquire whether other humans (men and women, respectively)

are of like passions with himself. He assumes yes. But the truth of the
matter is that on the sexual side of life, every individual is sui generis. And
if a man or woman does chance to discover that an associate is different
“from me,” right away he or she is crazy to murder the associate for daring
to be different! On no side of life is charity so much needed as on the
sexual.
But Frank White (or Eunice)—whom, out of deference to the
predilections of the general reader, I am going to let tell “his-her” own story
in Part Four—needed, by exception, little urging to draw him out. He told
me piecemeal. But I hand it on to my readers without a break. Moreover, I
endeavor to reproduce his unconscious hifalutin, Johnsonese style of
expression.
At the time he epitomized his life for me, Frank—Eunice (as he was
known in the Underworld) was a comely blonde around forty, and five feet
five tall. His physique was not noticeably feminine. He possessed merely a
small-boy air and appearance, notwithstanding his hair was nearly white,
Frank White though not thin. The beardal growth was sparse,
Introduced.
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

Part Four:
Frank—Eunice

I. Debut as Adult Female-Impersonator.

Ralph, I was ushered into this mundane sphere in the year of our Lord
1854. I was a lucky dog to be brought up on the upper West Side a few
blocks from Central Park [New York City]. As a diminutive urchin, I dolled
myself up in feminine habiliments at every opportunity. Eunice was my
favorite playmate. I opined her appellation the most melodious that ever
impinged upon my eardrums and regretted it was not mine personally.
Whenever I flaunted myself in skirts, I adopted it.
In my early teens, father escorted me to a physician that the latter might
query me concerning my feminine predilections and ridicule me out of
same. Simultaneously father, through severe castigation, imposed a finis to
female-impersonation in my own clique. I therefore commenced, during
periods of special obsession to be a puella, the practice of perambulating
the slums, first by daylight, and later after the shades of night had fallen.
During these insensate peregrinations, there would swarm through my mind
visions of flirtations with the ruffians around my age that I encountered.
These “huskies” riveted my gaze. They fascinated me. But not until the fifth
The Pugilists’ or sixth peregrination could I screw up courage to
Haven.
insinuate myself into the confidence of one of
these magical intelligences.
I chanced for the first time to run across a Bowery bar-room, the
“Pugilists’ Haven,” which, I had read in the papers, was the rendezvous of
prize-fighters, gamblers, and gunmen [the most desperate type of gangster
who will murder for pay]. The press advocated its obliteration. Curious that
just because of this reputation, I was immediately insane to enter. For it was
unholy ground. I reflected: “In this lowest of dives, they may accept me as a
puella, although superficially a boy.” Because all early influences, Ralph,
had made me opine that taking the part of a girl was the very lowest thing a
boy could descend to. I further pondered: “Between the luxurious mansion
of pater familias and this dingy dive, give me the latter! For here alone I
might be able to pass as a puella. In my own cultured, Christian circle,

female-impersonation is castigated. But would not the attitude of the
offscouring of our mundane sphere—the Pugilists’ Haven gunmen—be
different?”
And how crazy I was to insinuate myself with the adolescent gunmen,
whom I had only read about! The very supposition of their presence just
within that latticed door attracted me as a potent magnet snatches steel
filings to itself. I passed and repassed the dive, continuously imagining
what would transpire if I should penetrate this unholy of unholies, and
having delectable visions of every species of flirtation with the demigods
who made the saloon their rendezvous.
I finally emboldened myself to thrust aside a leaf of the latticed portal. It
“A Cat in a Strange was my first appearance inside a saloon, and I
Garret.”
never had tasted any intoxicant. In my diffidence
and ignorance of the proper course to pursue, I subsided into the first vacant
fauteuil. For, on one side, against the wall, were rude, wooden fauteuils,
almost all occupied by middle-aged cherry-nosed individuals. Extending the
full length of the other side was a bar crowded with fast-looking younger
men, each with a glass before him. Doubtless because of my verdancy,
several commenced eyeing me, making remarks, and laughing. The nearest
bar-tender immediately inquired: “Doll-baby, what’ll yer have ter drink?”
“Nothing.”
“Jackass! Every bloke dat comes inter dis here joint has ter take
somethink!”
“Then give me a glass of beer,” I replied hardly above a whisper. In my
embarrassment, I imbibed the beverage almost at a swallow. That gave all
the witnesses hysterics. They assured me: “We only sip it!” They addressed
me as “Siss!” “Pet!” “Fairie!” I did not immediately perceive the
significance of the last appellation. I was encircled. Particularly two sailors
ingratiated themselves. They requested me to purchase “schnapps” for them
because impecunious. I provided glass after glass, for they were
bewitchingly gallant. All the other individuals were kidding me: “The doll-
baby likes the blue-jackets, sure Mike!” “Sailor-boy, take off your suit and
make it a present to her!” “How I wish I was one of Uncle Sam’s boys and
I’d git steeped in schnapps too!” I was mortified by such observations, and
as soon as the sailor-boys invited me, departed under their escort.

A Transformation I hired a chamber at a third-class hotel nearby. I
Not Bargained For.
gave them funds to secure another. For we did not
desire that the clerk perceive that we were all to occupy the identic room.
We pretended the sailors and I were unacquainted....
They finished by inserting a handkerchief into my buccal cavity, tying a
strip of the bed linen over it, binding my hands behind my back, and
fastening my lower extremities to the bed springs so that I could not even
kick. They then departed with my wallet and outer clothing.
After an hour of helplessness, I discovered that the partition to the
adjacent chamber was scarcely more than cardboard. Because I perceived
sounds of the entrance of an individual. I could even hear his breathing. I
discerned the words: “How I wish I had three hundred dollars!”
I commenced a continuous jouncing up and down. The uninterrupted
tintinnabulation of the springs attracted the individual’s attention and he
addressed me. I could respond only with a low gurgling. The clerk soon
liberated me. I had to confess everything. But he manifested sympathy and
donated a nickel for carfare.
One blue-jacket was of about my own measurements. Evidently he
intended to desert. For he had abandoned his uniform. I was compelled to
attire myself therein and boarded a car for my domicile.
My house-key had remained in my appropriated habiliments. How to
enter was my problem. If I rang, my arrival at midnight costumed as a sailor
would disclose everything. I hoped the butler had neglected to secure the
covering of the coal-hole in front of the basement windows.
Androgynes
Resourceful.
Every one had retired. Able to raise the covering, I dropped to the coal-
pile. I discovered that the door at the head of the cellar stairs was also
fortunately unsecured. With trepidation and in absolute silence, I ascended,
in stocking feet, to my chamber and devoutly thanked Providence for
restoration to my family without a hair injured.
I had only recently purchased the appropriated habiliments. The
subsequent day I visited the same establishment and succeeded in securing
an exact duplicate so that my family would not observe the disappearance
of the original.
Frank—Eunice.

II. The Pug Heaven.

I henceforth visited the Pugilists’ Haven one evening each week. After
the appropriation of one good suit, I always attired myself rather shabbily.
After seven o’clock dinner, I would change to the cast-off apparel and
noiselessly glide down the two flights of stairs from my chamber.
Fortunately father always had prayers after dinner. While the family were in
the prayer-room and all the servants in their dining-room, I succeeded in
engineering my exit for an evening’s revel with little risk, in my poverty-
stricken disguise, of encountering any individual in the halls. No one ever
suspected the reason for my absences. It was several times remarked that I
had been out late. But I threw the observer off the scent by the pretext of a
perambulation to obviate insomnia.
As I proceeded rapidly from my domicile, I would, if I detected a
familiar figure advancing, cross to the other side of the street and make a
feint of ringing a door-bell. In order, in my dilapidated apparel, to avert the
danger of encountering on the public conveyance some one acquainted with
my identity, I would perambulate more than a mile in order to attain the
Bowery by an east-side car. On the way I would conceal my house-key and
an emergency greenback in a crevice in the Central Park stonewall—always
the identic cavity in order to be regained with ease.
At Pug Heaven—as my dive was nicknamed—I was universally given a
A Female with Male hearty welcome and secured the society of
Genitals.
adolescent ruffians fairly clean and sprucely
attired. Of course they always ransacked my pockets the first chance that
offered. Before it could happen, I had treated liberally half-a-dozen of the
handsomest, and thus insinuated myself into their good graces. I always
kept a reserve five-dollar bill sewed in the waistband of my trousers—a pair
worn on these sprees alone because too shabby to be a temptation for
appropriation.
On my second appearance at Pug Heaven, the heroic gunmen entertained
me with episodes about other female-impersonators they had encountered. I

particularly remember stories about the “Duchess of Austria,” from whom,
they recounted, “some lucky guys had pumped” hundreds of dollars. One
narrated anecdotes of a physician located south of Fourteenth Street. Young
fellows would visit his office to be medicated and he would reveal his own
bisexuality. My pals did not marvel at all over my strange appetencies. They
entreated me to bring around other female-impersonators. They were
merely anxious for the money it would bring them. When I apologized for
my queer penchant, they said: “It is nothing. It is Nature.” Ralph, those
adolescent Pug Heaven sluggers knew more about the psychology of
instinctive female-impersonators than all the M. D.’s in America combined!
From that single hour’s conversation, I ascertained more about my own
personality than in my prior fourteen years pilgrimage on this planet. For
the first time, the riddle of my existence was solved; I perceived that I had
been born a biological sport—a female with male genitals.
I soon acquired half-a-dozen permanent favorites. These adolescent
Impersonators sluggers and gunmen lost no time in assuring me:
Expert Actors.
“You’re only a doll-baby, Eunice, and so need us
big, strong fellows to fight your battles. But you must stay with our gang! If
we should catch you running around with any other, we’d murder you!”
I coveted to be their slave, Ralph, and did all I could for them without
disclosing that I belonged to a wealthy family, because a female-
impersonator of a higher social stratum associating incognito with gangsters
must conceal his status. At Pug Heaven, I became an expert detective and
actor—an accomplishment requisite for every upper-class impersonator
destined to sprees in the Underworld.
A thousand times I desiderated female corporeality so that I could have
married one of these magic gunmen. How I have envied many a young
mother before my eyes with babe in arms! How could a God of love have
created me physically a male when I have always so coveted personal
female corporeality, and, in adulthood, the mothering of offspring!
These weekly female-impersonation explosions continued more than two
years, when my father relegated me to a university several hours from New
York. I leave it nameless—to spare it the disgrace of having once numbered
“Frank White” among its students. These evenings in Pug Heaven were the
most beatific feature of life. During college vacations, and for several years
following graduation, I occasionally visited the joint. But finally, on my

return from an extended residence in Europe, I discovered a haberdashery
occupying the site. I was informed that an application for renewal of license
had been denied. Its habitués became thus scattered.
Frank—Eunice.

III. A University Friendship.

Would it interest you, Ralph-Jennie, to hear how I was blackmailed in
college? The episode commenced only in my junior year. Throughout the
first two years, because of the safety-valve I possessed in the Pug Heaven
gunmen, I had succeeded in restraining my appetencies and presenting no
occasion for chantage. But early in my junior year, the janitor of my
dormitory happened to be an exquisite chocolate cream-drop. Only twenty,
and with such a “divine” countenance! I could have gazed into it throughout
eternity without a second’s intermission—until I detected the rascality
underneath! Such dreamy brown eyes! Perfect, arched eyebrows! Sun-
flower cheeks! And soft chestnut hair! Ralph, you never saw anything so
fascinating! For weeks I experienced anguish at being denied a declaration
of my admiration! I then commenced making the “divine” creature presents.
And it was then not long before I began inviting him around to my room
after all the other students had retired and there was little risk of any
individual discovering the unequal friendship. For I would have been
ostracized for entertaining a janitor. And again it was not long before Jack
manifested a roguish streak in his character, which any one but an intimate
would have opined equally beautiful with his countenance and figure. After
I discovered his true character, my fascination died down. But there was
absolutely nothing to do but tolerate him up to graduation.
Anglo-American Law
Unintelligent.
In the course of my two decades of adulthood, I have repeatedly fallen
victim to the physical charms of some adolescent stalwart menial in my
every-day environment. I have lived much abroad. In the United States and
Great Britain, three out of four, if of generally good reputation, demonstrate
themselves diamonds in the rough. They refuse to take advantage of a step-
child of Nature whose secret they happen to unearth. But on the continent
of Europe, the proportion is as high as nineteen out of twenty. There a
correct knowledge of sexual intermediates is widely disseminated and the

courts deal out justice to the woman-man. Even the Paris apache realizes
that these bisexuals are worthy of commiseration and not responsible for
their idiosyncrasies. But English-speaking countries give carte blanche to
every prude actuated to pillage and even murder us women-men. We are
outlaws; enjoy no police protection; and are denied recourse to the laws and
courts. In English-speaking lands, as already in other civilized countries,
even the scum of society should be educated, first by newspaper
propaganda whenever the murder of an intermediate is described, and then
from mouth to mouth, that the woman-man and the man-woman are
irresponsible for their exceptional sexuality and should not be tortured on
account of it.
Notwithstanding that I immediately entered into an arrangement by
which Jack benefited fifty dollars a month, I soon perceived evidences of
whisperings that “Frank White is abnormal!” An exasperated classmate
once even exclaimed sarcastically: “You are not a proper person to associate
with!”
Persecution of In my senior year, I failed of a much coveted
Androgynes.
election to a senior society—an election which
many indeed had prophesied on the basis of my wealth and scholarship. The
failure was explicable only in the rumors apparently being circulated. But
fortunately they were only rumors. In my college days, I would never have
been so reckless as to have permitted any individual ever to discover me,
even for a second, in conversation with such as Jack. Thus Incredulity
followed closely on the steps of Rumor. Because of my general goody-
goodiness, the fellows probably thought it impossible for me to be so utterly
depraved! But the actuality was far beyond rumor. The only mistake was
the rumormongers a priori assumption of deepdyed depravity. I was not a
whit more corrupt than those Pharisees themselves! The worst of the matter
was that I am a girl incarnated in a fellow’s body, and nevertheless doomed
to be segregated exclusively with males. If the world could only realize that
nearly all their anxieties and horrors are as groundless as this abhorrence of
myself in the university!
Because no busybody engaged a detective to ferret out my secrets, I was
privileged to graduate. But commencement day was like that of my own
funeral. For I realized I was bidding alma mater a farewell forever. First, on
account of Jack’s treacherous character, who had remained with the

university because of his advantages with me; and secondly, on account of
my questionable reputation. Tears even trickled down my cheeks during the
commencement exercises, Ralph. For I felt that I was in my death throes so
far as the university is concerned. I was compelled henceforth to keep out
of touch, including all alumni gatherings. In all class letters and address
Wiles of Androgynes. lists published the first five years, I engineered
things so that there appeared after my name: “Whereabouts unknown.”
Otherwise Jack might have ferreted me out. The Pharisees doubtless
concluded my “depravity” had wrecked my life. But the fact was that I rose
rapidly in my business career.
Primarily in order to give Jack the slip, I spent the year after graduation
in Europe—for the most part in Paris. I despatched Jack several cards in
order to put him on a false scent.
On resuming residence in New York, I had to make the best of its
Overworld. I ascertained that they are incredibly bigoted as compared with
the liberalism of continental Europe. Only a person who has resided there
has acquired the acuteness of vision to discern the legend on the hatbands of
upper-class New Yorkers: “I am holier than thou!”
I had heard that the Rialto is New York’s stamping-ground for amateur
female-impersonators. Accordingly I commenced devoting one or two
evenings a week to its resorts. As soon as I learned that “the Hall” is the
home of cultured female-impersonation, I made it my own headquarters.
Frank—Eunice.

IV. The Masked Ball.

You inquire, Ralph-Jennie, if I have been blackmailed during my
business career. I confess I have been more negligent than most cultured
women-men, and as a punishment, have suffered more blackmail. I have
insanely betrayed my secret to several dishonest young bloods who knew
who I am and therefore forced large sums out of me. I shall describe the
most remarkable case.
But first, why have I been the victim of blackmail? Because my strongest
passion is to get into feminine finery now and then and play the coquette. I
also occasionally yield to instinct in the way Nature ordained for me. But in
all this I transgress not in the least against God or man. Of course I have
offended against laws that are a legacy from the Dark Ages.
No man should cast a stone at me who indulges in marital joys more than
once a week. For since my Pug Heaven apprenticeship, I have not myself
averaged once a week. True I have changed partners about thirty times. But
if circumstances had rendered it possible, I would have been satisfied with a
solitary permanent one. But in the case of women-men, there do not exist
the reasons for monandry and the permanency of the bond.
But while I have been guilty of nothing to be ashamed of in the eyes of
the All-Wise, I have—owing to irrational laws, fear of imprisonment, and
Androgynes’ particularly of bringing bitter disgrace and sorrow
Families
Unsuspicious.
on my family—suffered myself to be bled
unmercifully.
Ever since resuming residence in New York, I have taken advantage of
all the public masked balls to gratify my instinct to pose as a belle. Even
those under the humble auspices of the Draymen’s Union, the “Tonsorial
Artists,” and the “Société Universelle des Cuisiniers.”
A particularly great event has been the annual Masked Ball of the
Philhedonic Society. Every pair of trousers may attend which can scrape
together $10 for self and “lady.” The patrons range from scions of the

aristocracy out for a lark, to crooks bent on thievery. For conditions at the
Philhedonic Ball are ideal for the light-fingered fraternity, particularly
because every patron is in disguise, with a mask covering at least the upper
third of the face, and the millionaire and the thief dance and flirt together.
Our families have, of course, no suspicion that we hermaphroditoi are
only pseudo-men. While marvelling because we have never courted a girl,
they have not been so far enlightened as to discern what that signifies. That
they may always remain in their ignorance, we hermaphroditoi—as you are
aware—set out from our respective domiciles for a public Masked Ball in
masculine attire. Later, with hired masculine escort, we depart from
[Paresis] Hall bewigged, bepadded, bepowdered, bejewelled, and begowned
to shine as belles on the bewaxed floor of X——Garden. After arrival there,
we associate, without waiting for an introduction, with whatever pair of
trousers—that is, presumably—appears fair to look upon. We
hermaphroditoi do our best to converse like real belles. An accidental gruff
America’s Most note does sometimes betray us. But usually the
Impious.
gallant comprehends, sympathizes, and merely
laughs at a good joke on himself.
The Philhedonic Ball is the spectacle of a life-time. I do not approve all
that transpires. The two large orchestras, playing alternately, pour forth
continuously into the inebriated ears of the three thousand revellers the
thrilling music of the most voluptuous dances, rightly tabooed by all decent
society. The revellers are as impious a crowd as ever gathers in America. I
would approve the police’s radically restricting the present license. I am
sure we hermaphroditoi are not among those who give the ball a bad name.
Some of the costumes have been ordered from Paris and London. Many
have already graced the Mardi Gras of New Orleans or Nice. Practically
every romantic or grotesque character ever heard of is on the floor:
monkeys, parrots, geese, yellow kids, foxy grandpa, Happy Hooligan,
Cupid, Mephistopheles, and a thousand others.
At a Philhedonic Ball of about ten years ago—at which the most
remarkable blackmail episode of my life had its origin—I impersonated
Euterpe. Down to my debacle, money fortunately came easy with me. I
therefore endeavored to adorn every Masked Ball with the most elaborate
feminine costume on display there. My Euterpe gown, terminating at the
knees, was of turquoise satin. It was ornamented with several flounces of

miniature sleigh bells washed in gold. Whenever I moved, they emitted a
melodious jingle. My silk, open-work stockings were of an azure hue, and
the pumps of purple kid, with mother-of-pearl buckles. My chevelure was
The Belle of the surmounted with a goldplated lyre, studded with
Ball.
hundreds of Paris diamonds, which, under the
myriad gas flames, scintillated dazzlingly. I had had my beardal hair
eradicated so that I could glory in a countenance of an infantile softness and
an exquisite glabrity.
Until about three, everything transpired after a beauteous fashion. My
unrivalled costume had attracted a score of flirts, begging a dance with me.
I finally fell to chattering with an individual in a bearskin. He soon declared
his conviction that I was merely a female-impersonator. But by exception
he manifested irritation at being hoodwinked, and nausea at the very idea of
cross-dressing. A panic supervened upon his strident tones. I was
overwhelmed with mortification and trepidation on discovering myself in
the clutches of what I supposed one of those charlatans who attend the
function in order to unearth a moneyed female-impersonator of some
prominence with chantage as objective. I lost all heart for mimicking a
belle. Most terrible of all, the fellow next denuded my face of the mask.
Horrified lest my identity be disclosed, I pressed the lacerated fabric to my
countenance and proceeded toward the dressing-room.
In the corridor, the fellow blurted out: “I think I know you. Those eyes of
yourn—how far apart they are! They give you a queer look that no guy kin
forgit who has seen you several times. Any bloke’d recognize you
anywhere, even with a girl’s wig on. I have often passed you down on Wall
Street.”
Though actually employed a stone’s throw from that street and
promenading it almost every lunch hour, I responded almost inaudibly, I
Tony Neddo. was in a state of such trepidation: “You are in error.
I am employed on 42d Street.”
“Don’t think I’m a fool! I’m so sure of meself that I’m goin’ to hang
‘round Wall Street till I run into you agin. And I’m sure comin’ up to say
‘Hoddo!’ Sure I remember your sissie stride and, most of all, the way you
stare at young fellers as if you were goin’ to eat them up! I work on that
street meself; elevator man in the Z—— Buildin’. Me name is Tony Neddo.
I’m not ashamed to let any one know who I am! But you! Do you know

you’ve done an awful dirty, disgustin’ thin’ in comin’ to the ball in a girl’s
rig? For this you’ll have to pay dear! But if you know on which side your
bread is buttered, no guy’ll ever be the wiser on account of what I’ve just
found out.
“But get rid of your tremblin’! You needn’t be ’fraid of me. I ain’t the
mean guy you think. When you meet me in my every-day clothes, you kin
see for yourself. You’ll see I’m a young feller of strong, pure manhood.
You’ll see I’ve the build of a pugilist. Whoever you are, Mr. Skirt, I know,
from the diamonds in your harp, you’re rich! On the other hand, I know I
kin do for you far more than you kin for me. Any how, let’s you and me be
best friends? We’ll part now, but you’ll sure see me comin’ up to you on
Wall Street soon. Bye-bye, sweetheart!”
O Ralph-Jennie, the fellow was really cute as he took his departure. He
captivated me by his good-humored farewell. It dissipated all my
depression. While I realized he would descend to chantage, I already
perceived he possessed innumerable compensating characteristics. Every
Infatuation. individual is derelict in some respect. Tony had
never been enlightened on the immorality of chantage. So I hardly devoted
a second thought to his cupidity. At the time I possessed no “best friend”—
no “adopted son”, as we older hermaphroditoi designate our sweethearts. I
immediately commenced to gloat over Tony as my conquest—my boy! How
proud I already was of him, although not yet having visioned his
countenance! But he had strutted away in such a manly fashion and
possessed such a deep bass, ultra-masculine voice! I could perceive he was
athletic and a little larger than the average man. And I was particularly
obsessed with his blatant, nonchalant description of himself: “Strong, pure
manhood”!
Henceforth my stream of thought was surfeited with visions of
conversing with him again. But the opportunity did not supervene until two
awfully long hours—in the closing half-hour of the ball. The floor was
ankle-deep with confetti, rendering further dancing impracticable. A goodly
proportion of the revellers were anyway too tipsy or too fatigued to be on
their feet. The hundreds promenading the arena, besides the couple of
thousand in the boxes and balconies, were sprinkled with red, white, and
blue confetti and wound round and round with paper streamers of all colors.
A steadily flowing river of humanity was discharging into the street. I

would myself have already taken my departure, but had devoted the last
half-hour to dragging myself wearily to every nook and corner in search of
my bear.
Finally, in the main corridor, a handsome adolescent stepped smilingly
Chantage. out of the stream of humanity slowly moving
streetward: “Are you looking for me, sweetheart? I am Tony Neddo.”
He dared excuse himself, for a moment or two, from his “lady”—
considering to what class she belonged! We withdrew out of her hearing. I
was tickled to death on now beholding what I had drawn in the lottery. I had
known the fellow was ultra-masculine. But not until that moment did I
discover that he was handsome into the bargain. Indeed he was indisputably
the best looker of the hundreds of young fellows who, with their “ladies,”
streamed by as we whispered together.
“How old are you?” I began.
“Nineteen is all.”
“Eleven years younger than myself. Just my ideal age for a young man to
be adopted as my son. Tell me frankly: Did anybody ever tell you that you
are unusually good-looking?”
“That’s not for me to say. But you yourself see me now when I have my
own clothes on. I don’t look as if I belonged to the weak, crippled sex—as
you do yourself—do I? I look to be a he-man, don’t I? While you are one of
those awful she-men! Mr. Skirt, just think of your own shameful, disgustin’
nature! Your secret and character have come into me power. And it wouldn’t
do you any good to hit back. I have nothin’ at all to lose.
“But I’m only talkin’ business now. Every bloke puts his foot into it now
and again. And I did at our first meetin’. Because I was then just crazy for
money. That’s all. But it only looks as if I’m after your money. What I really
and truly want is the chance to make your life happy. I want to be your best
Boon of an “Adopted friend. Just let me see what you would do for a
Son”.
young feller who would give himself to you, body
and soul. No one is poorer than me these days. All I got is the suit on me
back. I only rented that bear rig for the evenin’.”
“Well, Tony, how much would you expect?”
“Two hundred bucks a month.”

I argued for one hundred—all that at the time I cared to part with,
although my infatuation soon after augmented so that I voluntarily
presented him three times my first offer. But on this first night I repeatedly
assured him coaxingly, though sincerely, that he was just the type of young
fellow that appealed to me. Over and over again he replied: “I wouldn’t sell
me goodwill so cheap! All your fine talk, Mr. Skirt, doesn’t get us
anywhere. It doesn’t have the least effect on me. Only money talks. If you’ll
part with two hundred bucks, I’ll know you think that much of me. Besides,
if we don’t fix up matters now, don’t ever show your face again on Wall
Street!”
But when he had bluffed to his limit, he accepted my first offer. And I
didn’t mind the promise of that stipend to him—so winsome and handsome
and assuring me he would be my soul-mate.
Because his “lady” was dancing attendance, our conversation had to be
broken off before the end of five minutes. In parting, I said: “The more I
have heard you converse, the better I like you, Tony. You are a pretty smart
boy. I would be glad to give you an education, so that you can rise to my
own social level instead of continuing in the servant class. We shall not
regard our agreement as blackmail. Instead I now adopt you as my sole
Now Man; Now well-beloved son. I will even be your slave. We
Woman.
shall enjoy together all the good things of life. But,
remember, you must never do anything to betray my character and our
relations to anybody. And, Tony, always call me ‘Frank.’ I would prefer that
in private you called me ‘Eunice,’ but if you acquired the habit, you would
sometimes make a break before people.”
Frank—Eunice.

V. Frank—Eunice’s Indiscretion.

Would you like, Ralph-Jennie, to be enlightened as to how I came to
reside, five years of my prime, within prison walls? You have censured me
for black-guarding the Church and religious people. But do you marvel
thereat after I disclose that it was they who were instrumental in robbing me
of five years of man’s all too brief sojourn on earth? In my youth, I was
naturally religious. While no longer a church member, not a Sunday passes
but I attend morning service. I continue to be a disciple of Christ in my own
way, and estimate church attendance as one of the greatest privileges of
existence. But religious people, the Church, and the Bible have occasioned
me such terrible persecution that I can no longer do aught than revile them
for their hypocrisy. And the average preacher, while meaning well, is so
bigoted! Only recently I heard one declaim about the deluge: “God then
drowned humanity as rats with the exception of Noah’s family because
MONSTERS were being born in considerable numbers.” He claimed that
“monsters” is the correct translation for “giants” of King James’ version.
And he made evident that he understood by “monsters” us bisexuals. Must
we poor sexual cripples bear the blame not alone for the decline and fall of
nations, but also for the Noachian deluge?
You ask, Ralph-Jennie, my philosophy of life. First: To brighten the lives
of unfortunates. Secondly: To get out of existence all the good times one
can without transgressing against any one else. We are certain of nothing in
Making a this life except the passing moment. I even do not
Misanthrope.
know that you exist, Ralph, otherwise than as a
percept in my stream of thought.
My incarceration supervened, but not immediately, upon my reception of
Tony Neddo as adopted son. Nature created me impotent. I could never
possess wife and children. And for the reason that I accepted the only
alternative of an adopted son, society incarcerated me! Ralph, do you call
that Christianity and enlightenment? You, Ralph, recognizing that I am a
congenital goody-goody, are in condition to accept my declaration that I

have never in all my earthly pilgrimage transgressed against a solitary
individual. In addition, Mother Nature endowed me with such cerebral
capacity that at the university I was one of the leaders in scholarship.
Nevertheless policemen and jailers—who of course are not responsible for
their meager education in the rural districts of Ireland, where they were
instructed merely to spell out the primer and scrawl their own names—have
tyrannized over me, handcuffed me, and compelled me, when absolutely
guiltless of any offence against the Deity or society, though having
transgressed against mediæval jurisprudence, to accompany them whither I
strenuously did not desire, and to perform hard labor for years without
remuneration, and to abide in a cell, amid vermin, and subsist on disgusting
nourishment! Do you marvel that such impositions, continued for years,
have rendered me a misanthrope? For while I sympathize with and alleviate
the sufferings of humanity up to my capacity, I experience only detestation
for hypocritical humanity surfeited with exuberant health and in influential
positions.
Androgynes
Nabobize Menials.
After the Masked Ball of ten years ago, Tony Neddo continued, for a
longer period than any other young fellow, to be my adopted son and soul-
mate. With the exception of his initial roguery, he rang true. Of course the
consideration that I loaded him with benefits exercised an enormous
influence. He realized that solely by cultivating my affection, he could play
a good thing for all it was worth. My ambition to educate him for a
profession was doomed to disappointment. While sufficiently intelligent in
practical affairs, he lacked the gray matter for acquiring book knowledge.
The immediate reason for my incarceration was merely an indiscretion. I
had resided two years on the continent of Europe, where every individual
comprehends bisexuality and nobody oppresses those so unfortunate as to
be afflicted therewith. That tolerance unfitted me for residence in the United
States, where the words “sex” and “sin” are synonyms. I erroneously opined
I could be as overt in New York as in Paris.
Therefore, while continuing to reside with my aged parents, I, soon after
adopting Tony (not legally of course) leased for him a furnished apartment
at a high-class residential hotel. Two successive hostelries finally refused to
rent further to Tony and me. In the third year, we were in our third
caravansary. But its personnel proved of unexampled bigotry—because the

manager was a narrowminded Methodist. He opined that simply expelling
Tony and myself ignominiously was not sufficient. He was busybody to the
extent of praying for my incarceration. Therefore he engaged an unusually
Immorality a Novelty handsome youthful detective to enmesh me.
in New York.
Attired as a Beau Brummel, the sneak first scraped
acquaintance and then insinuated himself into my confidence. Soon he
succeeded in seducing me where it was possible for a confederate to
employ a camera without my suspecting anything. It was on the basis of
that photograph that I was sentenced. My accomplice, who had been the
sole occasion of the so-called felony, and who alone had proceeded
deliberately and wilfully, received merely the thanks of the court and of
society.
You inquire about the element of suffering during my incarceration. The
first week in the Tombs jail, I lay awake half of every night in mental
anguish, for I realized I was a martyr. Every one was accusing me of
deepdyed depravity when my life was actually on a high ethical plane. All
the journals announced in big headlines that I had been surprised in a
double life—intimating wilful immorality. “Immorality”! “Immorality”!
That was the keynote of all newspaper accounts of myself, as if hitherto
“immorality” had been an unknown quantity with Knickerbockers. People
could not get through singing the refrain: “At last a New Yorker has been
discovered who is infected with immorality!!!” The journals stated that I
had been incarcerated in the Tombs to await trial, the evidence against me
being so incontrovertible and the felony charged so revolting that bail had
been refused. At the time I was unenlightened as to what that evidence was
and a thousand possibilities coursed through my stream of thought, none of
which, however, emerged in my subsequent trial.
I was terribly browbeaten by the plebeian police. They resorted to
Intellectual subterfuge and endeavored by every means to
Aristocrat
Browbeaten by
betray me into confession of the secrets of my
Plebeians. heart that they suspected. They adopted insulting
language. They inquired point-blank over and over
again in the common indecent expressions whether I had not with such and
such persons (particularly Tony) been guilty of what jurists denominate
ridiculously, though solemnly and with bated breath, “the crime against
Nature,” when in fact nothing is more natural than the conduct in question.
It is exclusively Nature’s feat. But I scrupulously guarded myself from

making a single incriminating statement. I refused in any way to admit
being a bisexual—because all my inquisitors presented evidence that they
considered that condition the most horrible of crimes.
This was before I ascertained the existence of the photograph and I fully
expected to elude incarceration. And the result proved that they were
impotent to lay their hands on any other legal evidence beyond the
detective’s statements.
That first week in the Tombs I would have committed suicide if I had
been vouchsafed an instrument. For I was continuously immersed in the
deepest melancholia. But the jailers were careful to deprive me of my
pocket-knife and everything else by which it was possible to do myself
harm. Even while at meals, I was continuously observed lest I utilize the
table knife on my body.
“Who ne’er his bread in sorrow ate,
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers!”

Before I experienced it, I did not believe an individual could survive
Absurd Legal years of such depression. But, as you see, Ralph, it
Superstitions.
turned my hair white. Fortunately it has not
rendered me bald or wrinkled.
And the judge’s charge was so absurd: “The crime of which you, Frank
White, have been convicted, is of such a disgusting character that it can not
even be defined!”
To think of relegating an individual to state’s prison on a charge that no
one comprehended; that no one had ever been permitted even to investigate
—because the subject is beyond investigation, no intellectual even being
willing to define it!
The judge said: “It is as heinous as murder, because it strikes at the very
existence of the race! No one but a criminal of the deepest dye could
descend to it! Frank White, you have been convicted of the awful felony of
race suicide!”——Unreason and prejudice! There was hardly an individual
within the hearing of the judge who had not been guilty of race suicide,
though in a different way from my own! And they for the most part
deliberately, whereas I was compelled by Mother Nature. They imprisoned
me for what they conceded to themselves: Following Nature’s behests other
than solely for the perpetuation of the race!

And then the day following my sentence, in the yard of the Tombs jail,
being thrust into an iron-barred bus along with a score of hardened male
criminals—just as if I were myself a male!—to be driven to the Grand
Central to board a train for Sing Sing. I, the goody-goody girl-boy, having
evolved into a felon!
But my prosecution by self-righteous Christians for what were really
offences against no one—simply to satiate these Christians’ thirst for
Publicity Would tormenting people whose views differed from their
Remove a World of
Woe.
own—had more serious results than my five years
in prison. My life has been a wreck ever since. My
having been incarcerated on a conviction so utterly loathsome to the
ordinary mind—because it has never been permitted access to the truth of
the matter and is governed solely by mediæval bias—completely alienated
every member of my family, who now regarded me as dead, and
disinherited me on the ground of deepdyed hypocrisy and degeneracy. If we
encountered one another on the street, they would not speak.
When liberated from Sing Sing, I was compelled to adopt a new
appellation and strike out into a new field of labor, where it has been
possible only with difficulty to make ends meet.
As for Tony, he escaped to parts unknown immediately following my
arrest. My deprivation of his friendship was the severest blow of all, for he
had shown himself so devoted—but only, as results demonstrated, because
of the fortune he derived from me. He merely left a memo declaring he
would write me some day, but never effectuated his promise.
If only the Javerts who prosecute Nature’s step-children realized the
world of woe they thereby occasion these most unfortunate of mankind,
they would reflect twice before inaugurating the prosecution. But society
prohibits the reasons for the conduct of bisexuals becoming known. Which
knowledge would prove a death blow to such prosecution.

Part Five:
Angelo—Phyllis

I. Angelo Angevine’s Debut as Public Female-Impersonator.

That fancy masculine name was only an alias, androgynes having a
penchant for such as are musical and of exalted connotation. Further, its
first element was after Michelangelo, an arch-bisexualist.
In 1895, Angelo—Phyllis divulged what I have here recorded as nearly
as I can remember. As I said in the first chapter of this book, I remember
only the general outlines of the originals of the monologues I give. But I
have listened to numerous confessions of the sort of which I now present a
sample. Where definite memory fails me, I have had recourse to my sea of
general memories of the way the hermaphroditoi talked, how they looked
upon life, what they did, and what befell them. I aim at a fairly full, but
essentially true, portrayal of the inner history and life experience of cultured
female-impersonators who were my bosom friends during my own hey-day
in that avocation in the Rialto. In order to economize the reader’s attention,
I present all of Angelo—Phyllis’s life-story as if confessed to me at one
sitting.
In referring to Frank White it seems more natural to use the masculine
Cross-Dressing. alias and pronoun, but the feminine with Phyllis.
For the latter was conspicuously womanish: beardal growth sparse and
always clean-shaven, if not eradicated; breasts as large as in some women;
hips very broad; spine disproportionately long and legs correspondingly
short. “His-her” body approached the feminine to a higher degree than that
of any other androgyne I ever set eyes on with the possible exception of
myself. Phyllis surpassed me in meagreness of beardal growth, sissie voice,
feminine strut and gestures, and craze and taste for feminine finery. As a
cross-dresser and female-impersonator, the bisexual now to be portrayed
was one of the two or three extreme hermaphroditoi, while ranking low in
erotic furor.
[In a physical male, cross-dressing is the instinctive wearing of feminine
apparel, or, in default, of the loudest and fanciest male styles. In a physical
female, it is similar adoption of masculine habiliments, or in default, of

feminine attire and aspect approaching the masculine as nearly as possible:
hair bobbed, stiff linen collar, a man’s neck scarf, and always severely plain
tailor-made waist and skirt. The reader will recall such photographs of
brilliantly intellectual women, particularly authoresses. Cross-dressing is
generally an earmark of sexual intermediacy. It is not at all due—as bigots
claim—to moral depravity, but entirely to irreproachable instinct. It is not at
all due to childhood’s training, such as the stories of parents’ bringing up
their boy or girl as a girl or a boy when they particularly wished a female or
a male heir. Such child, as soon as he or she became old enough, would
wholeheartedly rebel against such a travesty. In nearly every case, cross-
dressing is due to the fact that Nature injected a psyche of the one sex into a
corpus of the other. The cross-dresser is not usually conscious of the oddity
of taste for apparel. His or her manner of dressing indicates what he or she
considers artistic. All ultra-androgynes—such as made up the membership
of the Cercle Hermaphroditos—would always, if society permitted, clothe
themselves as women.]
Phyllis’s Antecedents.
In 1895, Angelo—Phyllis was a plump little body looking to be a decade
younger than “his-her” thirty-three, and of decidedly brunette,
Mediterranean type.

Ralphie, mon cheri, the sexual cripple now speaking was born in 1862
and brought up in a town of 50,000 within 300 miles of New York City. I
did not move here until twenty. As soon as I became financially
independent of father, I chose New York as the stage for my career because
only in a great city can an instinctive female-impersonator give his
overwhelming yearnings free rein incognito and thus keep the respect of his
every-day circle.
Father was one of the leading lawyers in my home town and wanted me
in his office, for he seemed blind to my being a sissie. But just because of
this fate, I could not stand living in my home town. Furthermore, I had no
taste for law, and pined only one year in father’s law office after leaving
high-school. I was all for Art, with a capital A! Art! Art! Which taste turned
me into millinery channels as soon as I began life in New York in 1882.
Excepting the years that George Greenwood was with me as “adopted
son,” I have in New York lived all by myself in a 5-room apartment. Thus I

Not Willingly Half- have been able to transform myself into a young
and-half.
woman and set out for a female-impersonation
spree without any one getting wise.
If I had had my say at birth, Ralphie, my lot would have been that of a
full-fledged woman, or, less to be wished, a virile man. Not half-and-half.
But at twenty I cut out the foolishness of all the time shedding tears over
my fate. Those tears were chiefly due to the world’s forbidding a bisexual’s
living according to his-her nature. I could not assume the responsibilities of
a man and pay court to women—an ordeal so horrible, but expected of me
if I stayed in my home town. I balked at having my life forced into a
masculine groove. In New York one can live as Nature demands without
setting every one’s tongue wagging.
I was unconscious of sex until my fourteenth year. Up to that age, I went
to pay school. My dozen schoolmates—including four sisters—were all of
the goody-goody type. No one ever tried to seduce me.
From fourteen to eighteen I went to public high-school. Several boys
hugged and kissed me now and then. While I liked this, I shrunk away for
shame. Now for the first time I felt sorry I was a boy. I stole a sister’s
discarded garb, from corset to hat, which I kept under lock and key in my
room and put on now and again in order to strut before a full-length mirror
and feast my eyes on myself as female-impersonator. Because of shame, I
never told a soul.
So counter to the fate of most hermaphroditoi, I was a virgin until the
Dressing for a Spree. beginning of my female-impersonation sprees.
Because in high-school, morbid bashfulness kept me from becoming well
acquainted with a single boy. Down to twenty I lived as sheltered a life as
any girl. I had really never been under any kind of temptation.
Ralphie, mon cheri, I can never forget the entire day spent in getting
together my woman’s wardrobe on arrival in New York. I went to a ladies’
store in the Ghetto. I lacked the cheek to buy feminine finery uptown. I
gave the Russian Jewess the usual hoax of amateur theatricals. And women
are so dense as to believe it! She helped hugely to the end of my being able
to turn myself into a stunning soubrette.
An evening or two later, in my flat, I dressed for my first spree. I touched
up eyebrows with a stick of charcoal and cheeks with rouge; applied
padding where needed, laced on a corset, and adjusted a soubrette’s wig.

Lastly I put on my art gown, pinned on a picture hat, threw an opera cloak
about me, and was ready to set out.
On my sprees I have always been careful to avoid a clue to my identity.
No one would have ever learned who I really am even if I had been sent to
Sing Sing. Since the world thinks female-impersonation utterly disgraceful,
I had to spare my family all risk. Furthermore, they themselves would
disown me if they ever learned of my mania for cross-dressing and female-
impersonation.
It is bitter to be so misjudged! And people balk at being set right! While I
get much joy out of life, I often feel crushed to earth when seeing how I am
scorned, and now and again weep a full hour. When, in the pride of their
The Bowery a manly vigor, the virile throw at me a glance full of
Magnet.
hatred or of ridicule, I feel like killing myself!
I always closed my hall-door noiselessly and used the stairs. The elevator
boy might have recognized me in my disguise. If, on the several flights, I
heard an approaching footstep, I would slink for a moment to a dark corner
of the spacious hall. Reaching the street, I had my regular hiding place for
my key and a yellow back. It was most necessary to be able to let myself in
on my late return, when the street door was locked, instead of ringing up the
janitor.
On my first spree, Ralphie—as on all for several years—I boarded an
elevated train and alighted at a Bowery station. Several times in later years,
I spied acquaintances of my every-day world either on the train or on the
Bowery. I always gave them a wide berth, although having a great
advantage in means of recognition.
And why, on my very first spree, did I seek the Bowery, Ralphie?
Because only a few weeks before, in my home town, I had seen a comic
opera staged on that avenue, its keynote the oft repeated refrain:
“The Bowery! The Bowery!
There they say such things!
And they do such things!
The Bowery! The Bowery!
I’ll never go there any more!”

So I was dead crazy to bring to pass there the female-impersonation
sprees of which I, for several years, had had merely waking dreams in my
home town. Such realization was why I moved to New York. It was, mon

The Goody-Goody cheri, all because I wanted to live within half-an-
Transformed.
hour’s journey of the enchanting old Bowery!
On my first spree, I made my way up and down the crowded sidewalks
for an hour, staring with all my eyes at the brilliantly lighted fronts of beer
gardens, the many gaudily dressed girls strutting up and down all alone, but,
most of all, the sporty-looking youthful laboring men seeking their
evening’s fun. How longingly and beseechingly I gazed into the latter’s
eyes! A hundred times I had accosting words on the end of my tongue. I but
barely lacked the brass for utterance, notwithstanding that in my every-day
life I had always been morbidly bashful. How I wished I were acquainted
with at least one of these powerfully built—and, to me at least,
bewitchingly handsome—foreign-looking young fellows!
Who, mon cheri, that knew me as a goody-goody boy in my home town,
always going to Bible school twice on Lord’s day, and not merely once as
nearly all children of pious parents, would have foretold that some day I
would be tapping the sidewalks of America’s greatest red-light district as a
common strumpet?[42]
Doctors claim to understand such as me a priori and are too squeamish to
investigate. They would say I am insane. I have never shown any sign of a
diseased brain, nor has there been any taint of insanity in my family. Ours,
The “Rabbit.” mon cheri, is simply the case of half-and-half as to
sex. The only taint in my family is that father is somewhat womanish:
falsetto voice, sissie mannerisms, and never any mind for things thoroughly
masculine. He ought never to have married to perpetuate, and probably
strengthen, his own mild sexual intermediacy.
As I walked the Bowery on that first spree, I was puzzling my mind as to
which of the brightly lighted dance-halls or the dark and fearsome dives—
through whose doors I saw pass only sailors, gutter-snipes, and slovenly
gangsters—would be the best stage for my virgin effort at female-
impersonation. At last I slipped into the least prosperous-looking and, to the
stranger, most uninviting, dance-hall, the notorious “Rabbit.” And why the
“Rabbit”? Because it looked to be the most crime-inviting of all the dance-
halls. I had stood and watched as there passed in and out the most criminal-
faced of the Bowery boys: coal-heavers, dock-rats, and fierce-and-cruel-
stalking gunmen—not to speak of the poor, deluded “fallen angels.”

I dropped into a chair. Almost in less time than I can tell it, four youthful
coal-heavers came up grinning: “Hello Bright Eyes!”
Those three words were the most soulful, the most infatuating, that had
ever fallen on my ears. I was also delighted because so lucky as to take in,
right off, some of the many bewitching Bowery boys I had stared at that
night, and cement them to myself. I smiled back: “Hello!”
For the next few hours, I was in hitherto undreamed-of bliss because of
Phyllis Finds being wooed by all four in their delightfully wild
“Herself.”
and rough way. Ever since my later teens, I have
always yearned to be treated by young fellows as a girl, and on my female-
impersonation sprees now and again, I have had such yearnings fully met.
On that debut at the “Rabbit,” I was for the first time in my life with sexual
counterparts before whom I could be myself because they did not know
who I was. And they treated me as their sexual opposite. They danced with
me in turn. Only after four hours, I had to own up that I was not an out-and-
out female. But that knowledge seemed to count for nothing with these
lovesick coal-heavers.
Already two hours before, I had felt that I had had more than enough
flirtation for one night. All my efforts to get away, however, were useless.
At two A. M., the “Rabbit’s” doors were locked. I had to allow one of my
beaux to escort me somewhere: to the Grand Central waiting-room, for
there I would be safe. I now warned my beau that if he did not leave me, I
would sit there for a week. But it took him two more hours to give up all
hope of my yielding to his goodhearted pleas.[43]
Five minutes after he left, I sought the street. I turned half-a-dozen
corners, lurking a minute around each to see if the coast was clear. I then
boarded a car. I slowly dragged myself up the three flights of stairs and
Leader of a Bowery noiselessly let myself into my flat. Tired out, I
Gang.
threw myself on the bed only half undressed and
slept until noon.
But, mon cheri, I had now found myself. For seven years afterward, I
sought the “Rabbit” or the “Squirrel” once every other week, giving the rest
of my time to business or self-culture. One evening out of fourteen was all I
could spare for the female side of my being. But the balance of my waking
hours were filled with blissful thoughts of my flirtations—memories which
will last as long as I. These sprees have been to me the first thing in life. I

would have given up anything else for them. When now and again
something has blocked my fortnightly spree, I would be the most
melancholy person in New York.
On the Bowery, I always went with the same gang of about a dozen
savages. If any one took a look at me, Ralphie—so soft-spoken, so chicken-
hearted, so wishy-washy—they wouldn’t set me down as leader of a
Bowery gang, would they? But that’s just what I once was. All the members
of my gang were of foreign parentage, sturdy, possessed of well chiselled
features, and tolerably clean. I found nothing disgusting about them. None
had had more than three years’ schooling, or the least training in morality or
religion. Nevertheless they were not a bad lot; far from being as evil-
minded as the upper class would judge from the outside. None was more
than twenty-five while a member of my gang, and none bright enough to
earn his bread at an occupation of higher grade than coal-heaver.
The average age remained low because one after another settled down in
Androgynes’ marriage, having brought to an end his sowing of
Favorites Fortunate.
wild oats, and some budding gangster took his
place with me.
On my fortnightly hegiras, I was well supplied with money so that I
could give all a first-rate treat in exchange for their wonderful kindness.
They kept good friends because I loaded them with gifts. Only after seven
years, a born criminal, who had happened to worm his way into my gang,
now and again sought to dog me home. Twice I had to sit for an hour in the
Grand Central waiting-room to get him off my trail. Up to that time no one
had broken my firm command that I should not be tracked the moment I
chose to fade away for a fortnight. For I was like a good fairy—in the
twinkling of an eye bobbing up in the midst of my gang, gathered by
appointment in the “Rabbit,” and a few hours later as weirdly dropping out
of sight. Of course I could not let any of the gangsters find out in what part
of the city I lived. At last, to put a stop to high-handed and high-figured
blackmail by this one rascal, and, most of all, to escape murder, I was
forced to say goodby forever to the whole Bowery. Of course I did not dare
let even the most trustworthy gangster know that I was never to see him
again. It pained me fearfully to leave them in the lurch, but I could do
nothing else.

I henceforth made the Rialto my stamping-ground when yielding my
bisexual body to the woman in me. And fortunately, for I thus met Roland
and the other hermaphroditoi who had likewise turned to the Rialto to blow
off now and again their ordinarily pent up, but at last overwhelming, craze
for female-impersonation.

II. Jailed for Wearing Petticoats.

Angelo—Phyllis.
A scrape that I like to tell about, mon cheri, although very bitter in the
happening, is my only arrest for flaunting myself in feminine finery. Don’t
you think a jail a queer home for a wishy-washy gentleman and art
connoisseur? A softy whose swatting a fly was the worst act he was ever
guilty of, and he almost had to weep when he did that.
Ever since driven from the Bowery six years ago, I have, one evening out
of fourteen, clad in my beloved feminine finery, tried to get on the string
strange young fellows in the Rialto ladies’ parlors. My nerves need such a
lark now and again. Otherwise years ago I would have gone crazy or killed
myself.[44] In my later teens, while living in my home town, where I had to
crucify my cross-dressing and female-impersonating instincts, I was its
most melancholy being. Because I, a female soul, was imprisoned in a male
body. How dark life looked from inside my male prison! How I pined to be
free! To have my soul wholly clothed in woman’s bone and flesh instead of
man’s for the most part—the latter so hated in my own body, but slavishly
Regimentals worshipped when breathing out yells of joy in
Overpowering.
sport or the cry to battle and the clash of arms!
One evening five years ago in the Rialto I ran across two youthful
artillerymen from Fort Q and spent the evening with them. Regimentals
have always overpowered me. Even when I was as young as ten, when an
acquaintance enlisted in the national guard, his mere donning the
regimentals brought about, in my eyes, a magic transformation. If already
handsome, the young fellow became supremely, unearthly enchanting. If
plain and unattractive in civilian dress, he grew handsome. Blue clothing
and brass buttons surely bring out whatever charm was born in a young
fellow. Furthermore, his taste for warfare, shown by his volunteering,
proves him a demigod. For I think warfare the highest function of the real
man.

Whenever I catch sight of a youthful soldier, I rivet my gaze every
second possible, even halting at the curb to look back at the wonderful
vision. I yearn to fling myself at the soldier’s feet and cry out my worship
of all his magic traits. As the vision fades away, a pang goes through my
heart that he must pass out of my life forever and I never be able to make
known to him that for the rest of my days I shall be continuously burning
incense in my heart to his memory.
O Ralphie, I am overwhelmed when I call to mind the hundreds of the
cream of physical youngmanhood with whom I have flirted, and whom I
wholeheartedly loved! I have to weep at thinking that the way the world is
made, I must be forever barred from them. In spirit, I am eternally joined,
Eternally Dovetailed. knit, dovetailed to every man of them, but in the
flesh, must never lay eyes on the demigods again. How I wish I could have
continued to heap blessings upon them and make their sojourn on earth
happy! But I am not God! In the next world, how I wish, as a reward for my
always having tried in this to make my associates happy, I might be placed
by Providence in the position of a sort of sub-deity to the hundreds of
rough, uncultured young bachelors whom I have made protegés in this life,
in order that I might be the means of affording each the eternity of bliss I so
covet for them!...
I do not lose an opportunity to see a parade of the national guard, and
particularly of regular soldiers, marines, and blue-jackets. I do not give a
straw to see any other type of men marching. But while witnessing warriors
stalk by, I am seized with a craze to prostrate myself in the roadway and
have those fierce, pugnacious young tigers—as they tramp, tramp, tramp!—
trample upon me until dead.
The two artillerymen I met in the Rialto begged me to make an hegira out
to the barracks to give a female-impersonation before their buddies. One
afternoon I made the hour’s journey, clad as an extreme dresser of the
gentle, and at the same time hare-brained, sex.
Around five P. M., I knocked at my friends’ barracks. Being in woman’s
garb, I would not step inside, but jollied with them on the large porch. The
news spread that I was only a female-impersonator and half-a-hundred
crowded around, flirting for all they were worth. That was, mon cheri, my
apotheosis—far above all other adventures. I was overjoyed at hearing at
Female-Impersonate one time from half-a-hundred demigods cries of
Intoxication.

admiration and affection. For I would sacrifice myself more for, and give
more richly to, youthful common soldiers than any other class of men.
When, after half-an-hour, the bugle sounded retreat, how overwhelming,
how unearthly, how infinite and divine, its notes! The bugle-call, because
closely associated with the clash of arms and with that type of human who
shine as demigods, always lifts me up into an unutterably blissful female-
impersonate and cross-dress intoxication. I seem to be raised to the very
zenith of the universe as THE SUPREME WOMAN, THE FAIRIE QUEEN, and to have
all the fighting men that ever lived bowing low in worship of my feminine
attributes. During the minute that the bugle-call resounds and reverberates, I
live infinitely! I live out a whole eternity!
But to come down to earth again, Ralphie: When I went away at the
supper call, my two friends said they would meet me in a beer-garden in a
neighboring village. It was the favorite evening resort of the common
soldiers. My two friends arrived with four buddies. Of the half-a-hundred
patrons, none else, excepting several additional soldiers of my friends’
company who happened to drop in, knew, up to the very last, that I was
only impersonating a female.
But toward eleven, some of my party had drunk a drop too much. Their
behavior became boisterous and improper. When the waiters tried to curb
them, a terrible fight started. The waiters were themselves ex-soldiers and
born fighters. Heavy glass schooners were thrown back and forth. I had to
get under a table.
After several minutes, two constables burst in and put all my party under
The Woman-Man. arrest. I had now to ‘fess up that I was not really a
girl. My faltering words filled the constables with disgust and hatred. This
is not to be wondered at, because village constables do not know
psychology like Bowery and Rialto policemen.
The seven of us were locked up for the night. The next morning the
Justice of the peace discharged my companions with a mere reprimand
because members of the army. But he was wild to punish me for putting on
woman’s garb. He sent a constable with me to the White Plains jail, where I
was to spend thirty days, or until I could pay a hundred dollars fine. The
Justice thought I was a low-down poverty-stricken fairie from New York’s
worst slums. I did not have the brass to tell him I was really a person of

good character, a regular church attendant, well educated, and able to pay
the fine.
The jailer, however, was sorry for me. I felt safe in telling him the worst
of my secrets. I let him feel my woman’s breasts. That made him my best
friend and he helped me get into communication with my New York lawyer.
After only a second miserable night in a cell, the lawyer paid my fine and
escorted me back to the city—even in my feminine “regimentals,” as he had
forgotten to bring along one of my male outfits.
After that scrape, I made an hegira to the barracks now and again, but
always in male garb. The whole fort marvelled at the “woman-man,” as
they called me. They always gave me a great time. Nothing would I have
liked better than to live with them in the barracks as their most devoted
slave. Because they were my farthest opposites.
Angelo—Phyllis.

III. George Greenwood.[45]

Ralphie, I am now going to tell you about the foremost specimen of
young manhood I ever met. If a man show had been held five years ago, on
the model of the horse show, the young fellow I am going to tell you about
would have won first prize.
You know that most of us hermaphroditoi have a single soul-mate. Of
course they are uncultured. Mere diamonds in the rough. For the past four
years, George Greenwood, whom you have seen with me, has been my own
soul-mate. For while I have flirted with many others, he alone has been like
an adopted son—as we older hermaphroditoi look upon our soul-mates. At
present, George is twenty-nine, and in outer attractiveness, only a wreck of
what he was when I “adopted” him.[46]
George’s
Antecedents.
I must explain, mon cheri, that George is not well bred. About twelve
years ago a portrait painter of my acquaintance ran across him selling
papers on Broadway. George was then only seventeen. At first sight, the
artist felt George’s unique beauty and asked him to pose. Later other artists
did George in oils and with the chisel.
He has never known who his parents were. For he was a foundling. When
discharged from the orphan asylum at fourteen, he was apprenticed to an
upholsterer. But on account of George’s quick temper and nasty tongue, he
could hold no position more than a month. When my friend ran across him,
George’s thoroughly bad record had left him only one means of earning his
bread: selling papers. But ever since his ideal physique was discovered by
my friend, George’s path through life has been strewn with roses.
Four years ago I happened to lay eyes on George as he posed in my
friend’s studio. Right away his lines of face, head, limbs, and body—
hitherto even undreamed of—held me spell-bound and I took him into my
home. For I thought George was Michelangelo’s Adam stepped down into
flesh and blood out of the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

Angelo’s nude figures of youthful men have alone approached George’s
ideal lines.
But he has been such a drunkard and high-liver in general that his beauty
—particularly his head and face—is now far below par. For two years he
has not been hired as a model. And he does not want to earn in any other
way. He has leaned wholly on me to keep up his life in the Rialto as all-
around sport.

Defective copy of Michelangelo’s Adam in Sistine Chapel, Rome: An
Androgyne’s Conception of the Ideal Adolescent

Michelangelo’s
Adam.
I breathe to you, Ralphie, under pledge to keep it forever locked in the
chambers of your heart, that George’s face and figure, once driving me
beside myself, have become hideous and loathsome. How I hate his billiard-
Androgyne Platonic ball head! In order to stand his presence, I have to
Marriage.
ask him to keep his hat on. And a man’s wig
disgusts me even more than a bald pate. Three months ago we stopped
living together. I could no longer put up with his all the time scolding and
cursing me, and spitting tobacco juice and vomit on the rugs. While we see

each other now and again—because he wants a few yellow backs—we have
come to hate the very sight of one another.
Ralphie, I heartily wish I were forever rid of the brute beast! It now
comes hard, when I see nothing of the hero in him, to fork over a roll of
bills every few days. Our relations the past year have been hardly more than
a case of blackmail. I do not wholly drop him for fear of his telling abroad
how I pass now as a man and now as a woman.
Most of all I want to get out of George’s clutches because five months
ago I met a wonderful young fellow whom I plan legally to adopt. When I
took George Greenwood, I planned the same thing. But his character proved
so terrible! I am now getting on in life, mon cheri, and my health is delicate.
I need a close intimate in my home to wait on me during my many sick
days. It is difficult for any of us hermaphroditoi to take a wife. One hates so
to explain to a woman that after marriage, the life must be that of brother
and sister. And no woman—excepting only the most old-maidish—would
marry under these conditions. But I know one of us hermaphroditoi—before
your time, Ralphie—who did marry, after thirty, under that arrangement,
and only because he had political ambitions, and his being known as a
married man would give pause to enemies who were backbiting him
because of the indiscretions of his youth. This hermaphroditos was one of
Androgynes Wish a the brightest of men and rose, as a result, to one of
Wife for “Sons.”
the foremost posts in the nation. But if he had not
been married, the politicians and the voters would have turned him down. A
legal marriage surely covers a multitude of sins. But I myself have such a
horror of women that I could not live with one even as a sister.
I have a maiden sister, whom I could get as housekeeper, and who would
take the best of care of me. But I can not receive her into my home for fear
she might discover my bisexuality. I could not allow a servant to live in my
flat any more than my sister. For even at the age of thirty-three, I, although
half the time almost too feeble to drag myself about, do not feel like saying
goodby forever to my female-impersonation sprees. They are still such fun;
about all I have to live for! And God has made young fellows so wonderful,
so charming! I still admire their beauty as much as I did ten years ago. And
it is still so easy to get them on the string, almost as easy as it was ten years
ago. But if I am able legally to adopt Calvin—about whom I will tell you in
a minute—I feel that I then can, having him with me always in my home,

always in my office, always travelling with me wherever I go: I then can
say goodby forever to female-impersonation sprees. For he would be to me
a husband as well as a son. He would be everything to me! I would live
only in and for him! Only to make him, his female wife, and his offspring
happy! For I would not put anything in the way of his taking a full-female
wife in addition whenever he felt like it, because a full-fledged young
fellow is restless without one.
Calvin Luther. Of course I could have another hermaphroditos
live with me, as Ruby, Berenice, and the Duchess live together. But it has
always been my fondest dream to adopt as son a young fellow who comes
up to my ideal.
For several months I have had my ideal under my eyes every day as
stenographer in my millinery house. As “women’s men” are prone to take
for private secretary the prettiest face or “divinest” form among the gentle
sex, likewise I picked out the applicant standing highest as an Adonis. He is
only twenty and possesses golden curly hair; deep-set, marine-blue eyes;
and radiant red cheeks. From his having been baptized “Calvin Luther” you
can tell what kind of parents and breeding he was blessed with. He is
thoroughly pure-minded and unspoiled, having, until fifteen months ago,
lived on a farm.
I slavishly worship the youth. The biased world would tremble at the
thought of the harm I would surely (as they fancy) do this pearl of great
price. For he is truly an angel; God’s child; very religious—a trait so rare
among the strongly virile. I have already made something of a confidant of
him in order to learn his feelings toward a woman-man. Most young fellows
with a puritan bringing up would turn the cold shoulder. But I found Calvin
Luther open to reason. He told me he has always, as a good church member,
struggled against his wanting the gentle sex. While at business school in a
small city, he earned his board by delivering for a baker in the early
morning. A natural thing followed upon his being rarely good-looking. I
barely wormed it out of him when I was administering the third degree. He
’fessed up that a number of servant girls where he delivered played on him
Prudery and Bigotry the trick of Potiphar’s wife on Joseph. Twice—he
Now Regnant.
’fessed up with face as red as a beet—he did not
show Joseph’s strength of character. And I did not think the less of him.

And you, Ralphie, of course know that I would never be guilty of
anything that could bring the least harm to this adored innocent. His health
of body and mind will not be damaged a particle. I shall give him the best
educational and cultural advantages. As I have said, he will some day marry
the girl of his choice, and I shall live with the pair as a parent. He and his
children will be my heirs.
Is such an outlook for a poverty-stricken young fellow just cause for
Pharisees holding up their hands in holy horror?[47] The sexually full-
Phyllis “Passes On.” fledged cannot get into their heads that we women-
men are just as high-minded and conscientious as themselves. They are
continually hurling insults—calling us “degenerates.” But my only thought
is to heap blessings on those whom I worship. I have always lived up to the
maxim: Act in such a way as would be good if universally followed. Those
who through self-righteousness condemn and crush me are a hundred times
worse sinners. Perhaps some day, mon cheri, the world will come to believe
that the actual presence of women-men in all communities—which Nature
brings about—is a distinct blessing to society in several ways.

Author’s Note.—Within a year of the above confessions, Angelo—
Phyllis was found dead in “his-her” apartment. The skull had been fractured
with a hammer.

Part Six:
Newspaper Accounts of Murders of Androgynes

Author’s Note.—These excerpts from New York dailies are presented in
order to impress upon the public that such murders of inoffensive
androgynes are a fairly common occurrence because that public has
tabooed, on the basis of prudery alone, enlightenment of the general reader
on the facts of androgynism. I withhold names of journals and dates of
issue, and cover identities, out of respect for the victims and their families.
But I assure those families that one of my present objects is to avenge, by
enlightening the public, the unmerited assassination of their dear ones and
thus prevent in the future such martyrdom of innocents. The families have
my most sincere sympathy, particularly because I myself have several times
been brought near death’s door in the manner in which their unfortunate—
but not in the least immoral—relatives were put out of the way.
Each of the first three murders was apparently the work of some prude
not at all criminally minded, but feeling himself the mandatory of society in
ridding the world of “a monster of deepdyed depravity,” according as he
was taught by church and synagogue. The hare-brained prude had been
prohibited by public opinion from learning the truth that androgynism is
Androgynes Not solely a matter of abnormal psychology and
Sodomites.
anatomy, and not at all immorality. The term
which best calls up the sensations of revulsion of such a murderer is
“sodomite.” To its highly malodorous and fundamentally false connotation
and application can be traced every year, in every corner of Christendom
(particularly puritan), murders of inoffensive androgynes.
The author’s comments are in brackets.

I. Two Murder Mysteries Which, Strangely Alike in Many
Ways, Baffled All Efforts to Solve.

(Much condensed, and slightly edited for diction, by author of The
Female-Impersonators, from article in a New York daily.)
VICTIMS WERE TWO ELDERLY BACHELORS OF MEANS,
LIVING IN THE SAME SECTION OF CITY—X AND Y WERE
BOTH FOND OF PERSONAL ADORNMENT AND DISPLAY
AND BOTH HABITUALLY CHOSE YOUNG MEN AS
ASSOCIATES—EACH WAS SLAIN IN HIS OWN APARTMENT
—ONLY TWENTY-NINE DAYS SEPARATED THE TWO
MURDERS—MANY CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE TWO CRIMES
BORE CURIOUS RESEMBLANCE
Consideration of recent terrible crimes in New York which have halted
agents of justice at dead walls of mystery must bring to mind the X-Y
murders of a little more than a year ago. They were committed within five
weeks, the scenes within a few blocks on fashionable Murray Hill.
In both, extraordinary interest was stirred by the maniacal savagery
Androgynes Art unleashed. The settings of the crimes were alike
Connoisseurs.
bizarre. The characters of both victims were most
peculiar, yet alike. And the men had been friends. [Androgynes, in all large
cities, form little cliques like the Cercle Hermaphroditos.]
X was a bachelor of fifty-six, an electrical expert, an art connoisseur, and
collector of jewels and weapons. Though in more than comfortable
financial circumstances, he resided entirely alone, doing his own housework
[common manner of life of androgynes] in a 6-room flat on the ground-
floor of the Q Apartments. [I know one androgyne who purposely chose a
ground-floor apartment in a house without hall-boy so he could go and
come in his disguise with less chance of encountering other tenants.] He
had made it his home for ten years. [This proves his outward decency, as
well, as liberality to blackmailers.] The artistic luxury of its furnishings was

striking. The walls were galleries of fine old prints, original oils, and copies
of masters, and displayed a strange collection of swords, sabres, and
barbarian spears. [Well-to-do androgynes possess the most highly
ornamented homes of any class of society. While congenitally too “yellow”
themselves to handle the weapons of warfare, such are generally sexual
fetishes with them, being symbols of the highest function of the true man.]
Live under Sword of
Damocles.
In this handsome, lonely abode, the detectives made a discovery of
significance: X had lived in extraordinary fear of the lawless invasion of his
rooms. [Cultured androgynes, realizing how bitterly they are hated by
prudes, live constantly under the sword of Damocles. Every night they fall
asleep in the fear of being murdered. They are uncommonly careful in
locking themselves in. The author tries his locks twice before retiring.
While a child, he, every night before getting into bed, looked to see whether
there was not a murderer under it. Androgynes are extreme cowards.] For
he had used his expertness with delicate electrical devices to set his rooms
with a maze of traps for any person who might try to enter it by force or
stealth. Doors, windows, etc., were invisibly strung with delicate wires.
With the controlling alarm device set, scarcely an article might be touched
without the ringing of sharp bells of warning.
But that thieves were those of whom he lived in dread was contradicted
by other facts. X, far from being a recluse, frequented hotels and cafes and
was prone to make chance acquaintances, especially of young men, while
going about extravagantly bejewelled and habitually carrying a large roll of
bills which it was a pet vanity to display.
His social hours were spent almost entirely with young men. He had been
known to comment: “I keep young because I associate with the young.” The
Q servants said these young-men callers never behaved boisterously. All
were decorous and well dressed. [A small proportion of cultured
androgynes who live alone in their own homes entertain there adolescents
who bear the earmarks of trustworthy gentlemen. X’s murderer could have
been of no other type, but was in addition an extreme prude so far as
concerns homosexuality. The cultured enjoin extreme noiselessness so as
not to arouse suspicions of co-tenants of the same apartment house. The
uncultured commonly receive any adolescent at all in their homes because
having no fear of disgrace and blackmail. By “young men” the author of the

excerpt evidently means those from eighteen to twenty-five, the age-group
preferred, and almost exclusively cultivated, by androgynes.]
Androgyne Stamping
Grounds.
The Q servants further said that X frequently started alone on strolls,
many times, however, returning with a youthful companion, who would
spend an hour or two with the elderly host. [The favorite New York
localities for evening “strolls” of cultured androgynes for scraping
acquaintance with a strange Hercules or Adonis are, in cold weather, the
Broadway and the Fourteenth Street Rialtos and cafes; and in summer,
Madison Square, Union Square, the southerly quarter of Central Park (the
three park spaces most frequented at night by idle adolescents who would
be glad to pick up a few dollars), the Battery (because frequented by
common soldiers), and other localities frequented by uncommissioned
warriors, the ideal occupation, as I have already said, for a real man in the
eyes of androgynes. In the case of X, the Q men-servants probably saw
through everything. The servant class often respect a cultured moneyed
androgyne who treats them well, and they act only in a protecting capacity.]
Of woman visitors, there could be recalled but one—whitehaired, a few
years older than X, said to be an aunt.
Investigators were astonished by the nicety, the fond care, with which X
had done his own housekeeping. Floors, rugs, and every article were
flawless of dust. In spick and span appearance, thoughtful and orderly
arrangement of utensils, neatness of china closets, refrigerator and provision
store-room, a feature of which latter were shelves lined with jars of
Bent for Woman’s homemade preserves labelled in handwriting, the
Toil.
bachelor’s kitchen was fit to excite a housewife’s
envy. [Androgynes take naturally to woman’s tasks.]

Discovery of the Murder

It was not discovered until many hours after commission. At noon of
[date omitted by author of The Female-Impersonators] the Q janitor saw a
light shining out of a transom of X’s. He was immediately convinced such a
methodical man would not have gone away leaving the light turned on. He
tried X’s entrance and found it unlocked. He went to the room where the

light was burning. Stretched on the floor beside a divan, with a couch
pillow resting on the face, was X. A few feet away was the sabre with which
he had been murdered.
The divan covers were half ripped off where the falling man had clutched
them as he was repeatedly felled—repeatedly, for it was evident X had
fought hard for his life against the sabre-armed assassin. The sabre had been
ripped off the wall of the hall-way of the apartment. The retaining wires
were strong and the hand must have been strong that snapped them.
[Androgynes cultivate only the best physically developed.]
The deduction was made that the assassin had not entered X’s home with
the intent to murder. He was pictured as having, in all probability, left his
host in the “den” and started down the hall to make his exit from the flat
when the resolution to attack and kill—a resolution which the weapons on
the wall may have suggested—came suddenly upon him. Ripping the
weapon from the wall, he is pictured as having dashed back to the “den”
Prudery Gone and surprised X with a fury of murderous attack.
Insane.
[X probably entertained at his home for the first
time that night his well dressed and apparently trustworthy assassin. Only
when the two adjourned to the “den” did X probably disclose his desire, so
nauseating to the unsophisticated and those ignorant of abnormal
psychology. Doubtless a minute after the disclosure, the prude left X’s side
in insane disgust, and on passing through the hall entertained his first
thought to do his “duty by society and put this monster where he could
corrupt no more young men”—an absolutely unfounded way of looking at
the matter. I have myself scraped acquaintance with a youthful Hercules,
who would lead me on hypocritically, and when he got me where there
could be no witnesses, has half-murdered me because of disgust at
androgynism. My adventure with Harvey Green is an example.]
Physical examination disclosed that despite his fifty-six years, X
possessed the preservation of a man of thirty-five. [Perennial youth is an
earmark of ultra-androgynism.]
The autopsy showed that every character of blow had been inflicted—
deep stab wounds, slashes, and fracturing strokes on the skull either with
the broad side or dull back of the sabre. The coat of X, who was fully
clothed when killed, had been slashed to tatters. [The assassin wished not
merely to kill, but to hack X to pieces because of his loathing of

androgynism. I myself have not alone been half-murdered, but mutilation
has been practiced for its own sake. See page 132 of my Autobiography of
an Androgyne.]
Murdered by a Guest.

A Midnight Caller

X’s condition of being fully clothed proves of course that he had not yet
retired. [It also indicates that his assassin had repulsed his amorous
advances immediately after the pair entered the “den.” On such occasions,
androgynes usually undress.] Further evidence was that his web system of
alarms had not been set. It was his invariable custom, on retiring or when he
went out, to do this. There was no sign of forcible entrance of the ground-
floor apartment. Therefore X is believed to have freely admitted the man
who was to murder him—probably such a chance acquaintance as he
appears frequently to have made in his saunterings through the city’s streets
and visits to its resorts.
The examination of medical experts resulted in the hour of the crime
being placed between nine and eleven of the evening previous.

Made No Outcry

It being evident that X had survived the first attack at least for a few
minutes before he finally succumbed under the raining blows of the sabre,
the police were puzzled to understand why, with his life at stake, the man
did not make an outcry. There was only a single wall separating the scene of
combat from the public lobby where were stationed throughout the night a
telephone operator and an elevator attendant. Tests made showed that a
shout of medium volume from the “den” could be distinctly heard in the
lobby. The attendants were positive they had heard no calls for help.
Death Preferred to
Disclosure.
One of the puzzles, therefore, was to determine the character of X’s
murderous guest and the circumstances of his visit. Had X reason so grave
for concealment of the presence of his slayer as to prevent him from calling
for aid even with death immediately upon him? [X’s consciousness of being

a sexual eccentric would likely be an inhibition to his alarming those who
lived in the same house. He probably did not suspect that the servants saw
through everything. Between death and the disclosure to his co-tenants that
he was a sexual eccentric, he probably chose the former.] None of the
wounds was in his throat. The blow that fractured his skull must have been
among the last as indicated by the evidence that X had fought his slayer
long and hard.

Motive Not Clear

A diamond ring, whose value must have been close to $1,000, habitually
worn, together with X’s gold watch and chain, were taken. Very little
money was found in his clothing, whereas it was known he usually carried
large sums. But there were at hand heavy solid silver articles, and gold
ornaments, and valuable jewelry in a frail desk—none of which had been
taken. Only X’s body had been stripped. The police were convinced that the
robbery was committed to conceal another deeper motive, as suggested by
the savage maltreatment of X’s body.
Whatever the motive, the murderer entered the apartment unseen that
night and departed unseen. The police made haste to interview all persons
whom they could trace as having been associated with X. There was a
A Secret Guest. young sailor whom X had lately befriended and
who had been his guest for several days. This youth was traced to his ship
and his presence aboard the night of the murder established.
One clue was a bit of cardboard on which was scribbled, in X’s
handwriting, the latter’s address. It looked as if made hastily for the
guidance of the stranger guest to X’s apartment. [And in the apartment
thrown away as being no longer of use.]
No slightest clue to the identity of the slayer was uncovered.

THE MURDER OF Y

On the night of [date omitted by author of The Female-Impersonators]
just twenty-nine days after the murder of X, Y was slain in his home nearby.

The two murders instantly linked. For the two crimes presented an almost
perfect parallel. The scene was the same—an elaborately furnished “den.”
As with X, Y’s murderer had been his guest. A secret guest—in that nobody
saw him enter Y’s residence, no sound betrayed him in the act of killing,
and he managed to leave the “den” and Y’s house unobserved.
Of astonishingly the same stamp were X and Y. Both were elderly
bachelors and art connoisseurs. [The latter an earmark of cultured
androgynism.] Both had specialized in the collection of ancient and curious
weapons. Both were addicted to an extravagant display of jewelry on their
persons. [Androgynes are loud dressers.] Both lived in dread of attack in
their homes and had made elaborate preparations against the possibility.
Inspection of the lives of both found them oddly empty of attachment to or
Loathing of association with women. Both had a disposition for
Androgynes a
Murder Motive.
the society of much younger men, and had many
such acquaintances.
Living in the same neighborhood, frequenting the same hotels and
restaurants, visiting the same art galleries and antique shops as they were
tireless in doing, it was rather to be expected that they were found to have
been close friends.
The indicated motive for both murders was robbery but in both cases
only the valuables used in personal adornment were stolen, while other
jewels, and silver and gold objects of art and service, plainly in sight, were
ignored. [Robbery being only a blind, loathing of sexual eccentricity being
the true motive.]
In only two particulars did the crimes differ: X was hacked to death; Y
was strangled by the bare hands of his assailant. The marks of relentless
fingers were deeply imbedded in the victim’s neck. The other difference
was that in Y’s case, there had been no struggle. He had had no chance to
put up a fight for his life. He had been taken by surprise and the strangler’s
grip been clamped on his throat before he could make outcry.
Y was fifty-nine years old, and a native of rural Illinois. He had
prospered as owner of a fashionable ladies’ dress-making concern in New
York. But he had retired and at the time he was murdered was renting an ex-
mansion of a millionaire, where he conducted a boarding house of the
highest class. There were twenty lodgers, but scores of additional persons
living in the aristocratic neighborhood took their meals at Y’s. He

frequently organized card parties and dances for his guests, and to these
Murderer Mandatory were always invited freely young men in war
of Society!
service on leave in New York. [Warriors are
androgynes’ special heroes. A common soldiers’ and sailors’ club was
situated next door, where Y apparently made many acquaintances.]
Y’s body was found at seven A. M. [date here omitted] by George, one of
Y’s eleven negro servants. [Y conducted his establishment on the plan of a
multimillionaire’s residence.] It was George’s daily duty to go to his
employer’s room on the first floor, directly over the kitchen, awaken him at
seven, and serve him breakfast in bed. On that morning, George, receiving
no reply to his knock, pushed the door open and entered the elaborately
furnished “den” and bedroom.

Strangled to Death

The bed was in order, and the body of Y on the floor nearby was clad
only in pajamas. [Apparently the assassin had pretended he was going to
retire with Y. Therefore Y got into his night clothes, as also probably the
assassin. But just before the bed covers would have been turned down the
latter fulfilled his mandate from society by “ridding New York of the
monster!”] An autopsy showed that indubitably Y had been strangled to
death. The deep, purple marks on his throat were valueless as furnishing
finger-print evidence, but they did stamp the murderer’s hands as large and
very strong. [Androgynes cultivate only the best physically developed.] Y
had been suddenly attacked by the strangler and immediately choked into
helplessness, for nothing in the room had been disturbed. He had been
borne down to death on the very spot where seized.
A Trusted Murderer.
Y’s “den” was the scene of many late-hour parties, in which young men
figured exclusively as guests. Frequently also he returned very late with a
single companion. His late-hour guests were never boisterous and never
gave cause for complaint by Y’s refined lodgers.
As in the case of X’s apartment, Y’s house gave no evidence of a forcible
entry. Physicians determined that Y’s death had occurred at eleven the night
before the body was discovered. At that hour the outer doors of the house
were always locked. Many of the lodgers and some of the negro servants

had not yet retired, and must have heard, it would seem, a ringing of the
door-bell. None did.

Probably an Expected Guest

The conjecture was consequently made that Y had appointed a late
meeting with his murderous guest and given him a key to his house that he
might enter quietly. Of fully twenty-five persons in the house at the time,
not one heard the slightest sound of distress or noise of any kind from the
“den” at the hour of the murder.
Even more futile than in the case of X were the efforts of the
investigators to round up the many young men [evidently bachelors from
eighteen to twenty-five] whose acquaintance Y was constantly making.
Three diamond rings of a value of $2,000 had been stripped from the
dead man’s fingers, and his gold watch and chain were taken. But as at X’s
assassination, many articles of jewelry and of gold and silver easily
accessible were not touched.
A Conscientious
Murderer.
Alike in mystery, the cases of both X and Y manifest the strong
likelihood that the same man effected both murders, with a suggestion of a
deeper motive than robbery, of a desire to do violence aroused to frenzy,
judging by the stark ferocity with which both crimes were committed.
[The motive of course was to rid New York of androgynes; at least,
extensively promiscuous ones. It is quite likely the same prude was guilty
of both murders. Perhaps at first the assassin had known merely through
hearsay that both X and Y were sexual eccentrics. But he was reasonable
and merciful enough not to put them out of the way until he possessed
ocular evidence. (I have myself associated with torturers who would act
only on such.) For X’s and Y’s murderer was solemnly and conscientiously
acting as the mandatory of society.]
[From the murder of X he had learned that an androgyne might put up
resistance. Therefore in the case of his second quarry, Y, he must adopt a
safer, more sudden, and an absolutely noiseless means of execution. In
sabre-slaughtering, there was too much risk of the victim calling for help.

Moreover, X lived all by himself, whereas Y’s residence was alive with
people. Androgynes like to be treated by their virile associates as if women,
and the ultra-virile always humor that liking. The assassin probably started
in with a pretended “love” embrace, and, before Y could realize, turned it
into a strangling death-grip.]
X and Y Offenceless.
[I will admit that X and Y were extensively promiscuous. But they could
not have been particularly intemperate because my own experience proved
that excessive venery soon wrecks the health of an androgyne. As both were
close to sixty, their lives had doubtless been temperate. They had probably
indulged (the more humiliating role in fellatio) not more than once a week
throughout their adulthood. But although they apparently sought intimacy
with almost every adolescent Adonis or Hercules (only one out of every
twenty adolescents could qualify under either of these types) whose
acquaintance they made, they harmed these youthful rakes not in the least;
nor did they, throughout their lives, bring detriment to any one else since all
androgynes possess the inoffensive psyche of women. For proof of the
harmlessness to an adolescent of an androgyne intimate, I refer to my
Autobiography of an Androgyne, pages 88, 89, and 194.]
[Far from the adolescent suffering harm, he is loaded with material
benefits by the well-to-do androgyne who worships him. He is pre-
eminently a “lucky dog.”]
[X and Y were entirely irresponsible for being androgynes and sexual
eccentrics. Absolutely no harm came to any individual or to society
collectively through their condition or instinctive functioning. They did not
deserve that any one interfere with their life, liberty, and pursuit of
happiness.]
Newspaper Accounts
of Murders.

II. Z Mystery Baffles Inquiry at Every Angle.

(Much condensed, and slightly edited for diction, by author of The
Female-Impersonators, from article in a New York daily.)
NO PROOF OF SUICIDE AND NO MOTIVE FOR MURDER
FOUND IN CASE OF YOUTH STRANGLED ABOARD HIS OWN
POWER YACHT—FRIENDS INSIST DEATH WAS AN
ASSASSIN’S WORK—DRESSING OF THE BODY IN WOMAN’S
CLOTHING FURNISHES NO CLUES TO FAMILY OR POLICE—
FULL DETAILS FOR STUDENTS OF CRIME TO STUDY
After two weeks of many-sided investigation, the death of Z remains as
great a mystery as on the evening of [date omitted by author of The Female-
Impersonators] when his mother discovered him strangled aboard his power
yacht in New York Harbor dressed in woman’s apparel.
“No reason for suicide and no motive for murder—no proof of suicide,
no positive evidence of murder.” Such is the conclusion reached by the
police, private investigators employed by Z’s family, and by newspaper
reporters who have worked on the baffling case unique for its mass of
contradictory theories and circumstances.
A Psychopathic [And to the present writer, himself an androgyne
Individuality.
and instinctive cross-dresser, the strongest of
reasons for suicide and the strongest of motives for murder! Androgynes,
because so terribly misjudged by their associates, are the most melancholy
and prone to suicide of any class of mankind. Moreover, they are often
murdered on the strong motive of intense loathing felt by prudes ignorant of
abnormal psychology, in whose eyes the androgyne is a “sodomite,” with
all the terrible, though false, connotation of that term. Such prudes believe
themselves mandatories of society to rid the world of the “monster.” The
present writer did some detective work in this case “on his own hook.” He
ascertained that in the circle of those who knew Z by sight but were not
personal friends, he had the reputation of being a fellator. I interviewed

several of this circle, but did not dare thrust myself into that of Z’s close
friends.]
The view of the police generally is that the death was clearly suicide. But
as to how the suicide was accomplished, police officers hold theories no
two of which agree.

Family Sure Z Was Murdered

Z’s family, his closest chum, and his friends generally, maintained from
the first, and still believe, that Z was murdered aboard the yacht by an
assassin who secreted himself in one of the cabins and afterwards escaped
in a fashion equally mysterious.
The fact that young Z wore woman’s clothing is to the police the
strongest evidence of suicide and supplies to them evidence of a
psychopathic individuality. [That fact is to myself the strongest evidence of
murder since I have repeatedly witnessed the intense revulsion of prudish
bigots at any cross-sex phenomenon, and have been myself half-murdered
solely on this incentive.]
Families Ignorant of
Bisexual Members.
Opposed to this is the most positive assertion from Z’s family and
friends: (1) That he was a normal boy in every respect. [In nearly every case
of a cultured androgyne in the past, his family have never suspected
anything because of the veil of silence that the deluded public has insisted
be thrown over the phenomenon of androgynism and the consequent
absolute ignorance of the truth about this phenomenon on the part of the
entire Overworld excepting a handful of sexologists. Just to throw their
associates off the scent, some cultured androgynes purposely do some
courting of females, and have even contracted a marriage (of course,
Platonic) as mentioned by Phyllis in the last chapter of Part Five.
Moreover, some androgynes are psychic hermaphrodites and capable of
sincerity in courting a girl, while at the same time Nature insists on
occasional female-impersonation sprees. Z might have been a psychic
hermaphrodite.]
(2) That he had never shown any suicidal tendencies. [Readers of my
Autobiography of an Androgyne know that I probably showed more

suicidal tendencies than almost any one else who has failed to carry them
out; yet I always hid them absolutely from my family and every-day
associates. Androgynes, because they do not want their friends to become
aware of the cause of their melancholia (fearing it would alienate them, as
at present no one can forgive cross-sexism in an intimate) habitually suffer
in silence and seclusion the most intense mental torture.]
Many Female-
Impersonation
Explosions.
(3) That no kind of woman's wear was ever known to be in his
possession. [For years together I have myself kept woman’s wear under
lock and key and occasionally put it on, but none of my every-day
associates ever discovered these facts. Cultured androgynes always conceal
such practices because their every-day bigoted circles would make them
pariahs.]
And as yet nobody has been able to find where Z got the feminine
apparel. [It was later discovered he had bought it of a ladies’ outfitter.]
Nearly every article found on him was soiled and showed unmistakable
signs of wear. [He had probably worn the articles on scores of female-
impersonation sprees. Cultured androgynes never let their families get an
inkling of these psychic explosions.]
Z was twenty-one. The boy received a common-school education, but left
high-school in the second year to work in the large manufacturing
establishment of his father. He had a strong bent for mechanics. He took
care of the family’s three automobiles, as well as a motor-cycle. Three years
ago his father gave him a motor-yacht, which he himself took care of.
During the World War, Z enlisted as mechanician in the navy, but was
assigned to shore duty near New York throughout the war.[48] [There exist all
degrees of psychic effemination in androgynes. I estimate my own
proportions as woman, 80 per cent; man, 20. Evidently Z was around 60,
woman and 40, man, judging by his willingness to take a fire-arm into his
hands, a thing which I would never do, even as a child shrinking from a
cap-pistol. X and Y likewise were less extreme effeminates than myself.
They would put up a resistance if attacked, whereas I depended for escape
Androgyne merely on entreaty or flight (Nature gave me the
Expedients.
legs of a gazelle); or if they failed me, I pretended
loss of consciousness after the first terrific blow. Through this complete

passivity, I came out far better than if I had shown fight, and probably saved
myself, on several occasions, from being one hundred per cent murdered.]
Z often practiced with a revolver at a target in the basement of his home.
[He was pay-master in his father’s factory and often had in his possession
large sums, and had to know how to defend himself from robbers.] His rifle
was found on his boat, together with cartridges, on the day of his death.
Why, if he intended suicide, did he not use his revolver, or else the rifle that
was handy at the time on the boat? [This, to me, is conclusive evidence of
murder or man-slaughter.]
Z possessed the only key to the cabin of the boat. The family say there
were originally two keys, but the duplicate was “lost” about a year ago.
[Possibly Z staged all his female-impersonation sprees on his yacht and so
gave the duplicate to an idol before whom he regularly posed, just as I have
given a trusted idol a key to enter my own apartment whenever he felt like
it.]

In High Spirits

On the afternoon preceding the day of his death, Z took his motor-cycle
apart in order to renew some mechanism. On his last evening alive, he was
in high spirits, setting every one of his circle laughing. So far from being
depressed, he seemed flushed with happiness at the prospect of future
success in business, having only just received a promotion. [His unusual
Androgynes happiness on the very eve of the murder might
Compelled to
Fabricate.
indicate that he had just succeeded in coming to
terms with a new idol, who, however, the next
afternoon, on discovering how “deeply depraved” Z was, strangled him
with the rope. I myself have several times been half-murdered under similar
circumstances. I have also been elevated into the third heaven of bliss on
receiving a favorable message from an idol.]
On the morning of the day of Z’s death, he called on a friend who was to
give a party in a few days, and assured the latter he would be present. He
then ate noon lunch with his family. It was his father’s birthday, and Z
promised to take the family out for an automobile ride in the late afternoon.
Right after lunch, Z remarked: “I’ll first make a trip to the boat to pump the
water out. It hasn’t been touched for a week, and you know how the water

accumulates under the engine. I won’t be gone long.” [It was two miles
from Z’s residence to the boat; twenty minutes, by motor-cycle, to get on
board. The reason given impresses me as a mere pretext to hide his
appointment on the launch and prospective female-impersonation—because
the pretext sounds just like me. I am one who has been compelled to falsify
much because if my associates had been granted the truth, they would have
impiously crushed me. In my university course in ethics, I was taught that it
is proper to tell a lie if the persons deceived have no right to the truth.
Always those whom I deceived had no right, because the truth would have
rendered them insanely cruel.]
In a jovial mood [because about to meet his idol, I suspect] Z departed on
his motor-cycle at 1:30. On the way he stopped at a dealer’s—full of
Probably Man- laughter here also—and filled his cycle tank with a
Slaughter.
gallon of gasoline. [Two indications against
suicide.] At the wharf, he was seen to take oars out of his locker and row to
his power-boat anchored fifty yards out. He was next seen, by two men on a
yacht anchored fifty feet from his own, to disappear down into his cabin.
[The last declaration by any one of having seen Z before discovered dead in
his cabin.] These two men remained on the deck of their anchored launch
all the afternoon until 5:30, and both are positive that Z did not reappear on
his deck. They are equally positive that no one came from or went to Z’s
launch.
The owner of the power-boat continuously anchored on the other side of
Z’s was aboard from 2:30 until 4:30, and is positive no one approached Z’s
boat from that side. The owner of a third power-boat continuously anchored
thirty-five feet from Z’s in another direction also spent the afternoon on
board, and tells the same story. Two men [custodians and renters of boats]
busy all the afternoon around the wharf fifty yards away saw no one go to
or come from Z’s launch.
[To me the most probable solution of Z’s death is that it was neither
murder nor suicide, but accidental man-slaughter. Perhaps Z had the habit,
to satisfy his mania for female-impersonation, of taking on his yacht as an
audience young bachelors who owned launches usually anchored near his
own. Perhaps a launch, on that Sunday afternoon ideal for yachting, was
kept at anchor near Z’s because its owner had plotted to teach Z a lesson,
with the “good” intention of curing him of his habit of female-

impersonation, believing—as nearly every one does at present because
Torturing an prohibited by public opinion from learning the
Androgyne.
truth—that it is a wilful bad habit. When Z had
rigged himself in feminine garb (because the female side of his duality
demanded it), one or more of the young men from one of the anchored
yachts—according to my theory—had tied ropes around him, even around
his neck, the latter merely in order to frighten him and prevent his calling
for help. The newspapers stated that only a “seaman” could display such
skill in tying ropes, and these yachtsmen were amateur seamen. They then,
late in the afternoon, after they had had their “fun” with the pitiable
androgyne, went ashore, having no thought that the rope around the throat
would tighten sufficiently to strangle Z. They designed merely to punish
him for his androgynism (1) through his being compelled to lie helpless on
the cabin floor for several hours, with a rope tight around his neck to
prevent him calling for help, and, (2) more than that, through humiliating
him before his family, who finally, anxious over his not returning home,
would visit the yacht and discover him in his most ignominious garb and
predicament.
[But Z, in his writhings to free himself from his bonds, unfortunately
tightened the rope about his neck and was fatally strangled, the young men
having departed and no one being at hand to succor him in his death agony.
Z was only one more of the many martyrs to the public’s prohibition of the
showing up of the myth that bisexuals are monsters of depravity, deserving
the crudest forms of torture and even murder. Those guilty of Z’s death—
under the theory now being propounded—were fundamentally
Church and Public irresponsible. The guilt lies with the Church and
Opinion Guilty.
public opinion, both of which teach that no
punishment is too bad for an androgyne.
[A few days after Z’s death, I wrote letters to Z’s father giving all my
theories. I desired to do all I could to avenge my brother in calamity by
bringing his assailants to justice. It would not be surprising if Z’s father was
disinclined to press matters because of shame over the son’s being an
androgyne combined with the public’s so terribly misjudging androgynism.
Z’s near neighbor, a young college graduate whom I “pumped,” told me
first that the fact at the bottom of Z’s death “was of such nature that it could
not be discussed”! I could get at the truth only by putting repeated frank
questions, since he labored under the terrible delusion that sex is a subject

beyond discussion. This college man expressed the opinion that Z was
wilfully depraved and “got all that was coming to him.” I interviewed
several others who knew the Z family merely by sight and reputation. They
all showed intense antipathy, being of the opinion that a family’s having an
androgyne relative was sufficient cause for its ostracism.
[A personal parallel: To only one member of my own family—a brother
—have I ever confessed my addiction to female-impersonation sprees. I did
it twenty years ago, at the age of twenty-seven, because I then had enemies
at Ft. X (at the time my regular stamping-ground) who hated androgynism
so fiercely as to be capable of murdering an individual in whom the
phenomenon cropped up. I therefore explained matters to a brother: that if
ever I was found murdered, to look for my assassin among the common
Androgynes’ soldiers of Ft. X. He replied: “Ralph, if you are
Relations Ashamed to
Prosecute.
ever murdered on one of your female-
impersonation sprees, the family would be too
much ashamed ever to take the first step to bring your murderer to justice!”]
At the supper hour, Z’s mother telephoned to the wharf and was informed
her son had not returned from his yacht. Fearing he had met with an
accident, she and her daughter went by automobile to the wharf, arriving at
6:30. It was then almost dark. A boatman rowed the mother, shivering
nervously, to the launch. As Mrs. Z descended the forward hatch, her foot
struck a human body lying at the foot of the steps, face downward. She felt
the hands, which stuck out above the body, and found them cold.
“Linnie has fainted!” Mrs. Z exclaimed. She hastily lighted a lantern,
while the boatman remained at the top of the short flight of stairs,
apparently paralyzed with fear. But having a light, Mrs. Z discovered the
inert body to be clothed in a long blue dress, while the head was covered
with a black oilcloth bag. [Such covering of the head indicates non-suicide.
The man-killer covered Z’s head because, before abandoning him with the
rope around his neck, he (or they) tormented and tortured Z. I have myself
had a handkerchief thrust into my mouth to prevent an outcry and been
thereupon tortured merely because of insane loathing of androgynism.]
Mrs. Z now exclaimed: “Why, it’s a woman! She’s been strangled, and
Linnie’s not here!”
Overcome with terror, she left the boat without further examination. Mr.
Z, when his wife greeted him with the frantic cry: “A woman has been

strangled on our yacht!” immediately visited it. He removed the hood from
Father’s Assertions the form on the cabin floor, and in amazement
Discarded.
recognized the face of his son. Around the neck
was a tightened noose of Manila rope tied with a hangman’s knot. Mr. Z is
positive the knot was at the back of the neck. [This position is an indication
of non-suicide. A suicide would naturally have placed the knot in front.]
Unable to loosen the knot, Mr. Z cut the rope. He noticed that both his son’s
hands were behind the back, apparently tied with a sash cord, although he
did not think to make sure both were tied. For, finding the body cold, he
was convulsed with grief and immediately left without making further
examination.
The next arrivals were policemen.
The Homicide bureau contends that although there was a slip-knot
around the left hand, the right was free and Z used one or both hands to
draw the hangman’s noose about his neck. This theory presupposes that the
knot was at the throat, and discards the father’s assertion that it was at the
back of the neck.
Z’s ankles were tied together with rope, as were his knees and arms. [A
queer way to commit suicide for the victim to take the greatest pains to
make people think he had been murdered! And when there were a rifle and
cartridges on board the launch! And only an hour or two before in a jovial
mood, and laying in a supply of gasoline!] A medical examiner calculated
that death had occurred between four and five P. M. The two men on the
deck of the power-boat on one side of Z’s launch had gone ashore at 5.30,
and the single man on the power-boat on the other side, at 4.30. None had
Z’s Woman’s heard any cry or other sound from the Z launch [35
Apparel.
to 50 feet distant and on an ultra-still Sunday
afternoon when sounds carry unusually well.] When these witnesses went
ashore, Z’s rowboat was fastened to his launch—in the same position as
when his mother arrived.
The woman’s apparel in which Z was found clad consisted of a chemise;
corset; corset-cover with rose-colored baby ribbon running through the lace;
a pair of pink bloomers with ruffles at the knees; high black stockings
fastened by garters to the corset; a pair of high laced woman’s shoes, with
French high heels; and finally, the blue-checked gingham dress. All the
apparel fitted Z well.

The clothing in which Z had left home was found on a bunk in the cabin
—excepting an overshirt, which was pinned over the porthole nearest the
launch fifty feet distant on whose deck two men spent the afternoon. Aside
from this circumstance, the police discovered no sign of disorder in any part
of the launch. They discovered no other articles or circumstances having a
bearing on the case. [Androgynes are in general non-resistant. Z probably
did not struggle against his tormentor, as I myself have always been
absolutely passive on such occasions. Any way he probably did not even
imagine that he was under any risk of death. He probably expected to return
home within an hour—as he had previously done after dozens of female-
impersonation explosions.]
But reporters, who later examined the boat, found a thick hickory club in
a drawer. [My theory is that Z was accustomed to entertain on the boat, in
the absence of any of his family, adolescents before whom he had a craze to
Assassins of High impersonate a mademoiselle—the common
Morality.
practice of the more extreme type of androgyne.
He probably entertained only one at a time. Fearing he might be attacked by
one of these perhaps doubtful characters, he kept the club for self-defence,
as well as the rifle already mentioned. The fact that he did not attempt to
avail himself of these weapons on this occasion indicates that his assailants
were young men whose high morality was known to Z.] In a chest in an
out-of-the-way place, the reporters found a bundle of wrapping paper
stained and torn. Inside was a metal shoe-horn. [My theory is that Z stored
his feminine wardrobe in this paper and chest. The paper was probably that
in which the feminine outfit had originally been brought to the launch and
was preserved for possible use in carrying it away.]
The Z family kept a supply of beer on the yacht, but affirmed: “Linnie
hated beer and never learned to drink it.” [Very androgynesque. Girl-boys
are inclined to be puritans in every respect except female-impersonation
and coquetry.]
The only feminine article that Z wore which the family recognized was a
multi-colored silk ribbon fastened around his waist and belonging to a
sister.
The autopsy showed that death had resulted solely from strangulation. All
the ropes used in binding Z belonged to his yacht. [The reason Z was done
to death with ropes is that there naturally were many on board a yacht and it

was a noiseless death. There was a loaded rifle on the yacht. That a
noiseless method was chosen indicates murder rather than suicide. The use
of ropes also indicates a yachtsman as author of the crime—because
accustomed to handling ropes. He lives and breathes ropes.]
Z of Androgyne
Physique.
Z was five feet four in height and weighed 145 pounds. [Short and plump
build characteristic of androgynes.] The city medical examiner noted that
the lower ribs were “retracted, possibly due to the use of corsets.” He also
noted that “the beard and moustache are scanty.” [Meaning if not shaven
close. Such scantiness is common in androgynes.]
If the murder theory is true, the assassin must have planned to murder
with great care. [It was all done on the spur of the moment, and the death
probably an accident.] He must have had an accomplice who brought him to
the boat before the murder, and took him away afterward, and he must have
known in some mysterious way that Z was going to visit the boat that
Sunday afternoon. [If Z was murdered, he had had an appointment on the
yacht with his assassin. The latter must have arrived before the yachtsmen
who spent the afternoon on the closely encircling decks, and watched that
they go ashore before himself. At dusk he could have swum away without
being seen. At that hour on a Sunday, there were many desolate points on
the nearby shore at which he could have unobservedly emerged. But the
most daring criminal would hardly have committed a murder with several
men only a few feet away on the decks of the encircling yachts. A single
shriek from the victim would have immediately brought several men on
board.]
The care with which the clothing was put on certainly seems to indicate
that Z himself put it on, every article being properly adjusted.
[The authorities, because ignorant of androgyne psychology and habits
Author’s Own and despising a bisexual (myself) too much to
Foretaste of Z’s
Fate.
listen to his-her theories, were on a false scent. At
the date this volume goes to press (December,
1921), the Z mystery—as well as the X, Y, and Q—has not been cleared up
by the authorities, although none of the four is much of a problem to
myself, knowing how the world treats androgynes.

[It is a strange coincidence that about a score of years before Z was
strangled, within two miles of his yacht’s point of anchorage, in a large
patch of woods at night, I was, as an aftermath of a female-impersonation,
being roughly teased by six “young fellows.” To cap the climax, they led
me toward a tree and said they were “going to get a rope and hang” me.
Horrified, I feigned an epileptic fit to save myself. See my Autobiography
of an Androgyne, page 208.

[While I have never believed Z a suicide, it is a possibility. A new idol
with whom he had had an appointment on the yacht that afternoon might
have shown utter disgust at Z’s revelations—as I have myself witnessed in a
confidant—and pitilessly abandoned him. This misguided attitude might
have brought on Z a sympathetic disgust with himself as female-
impersonator and cross-dresser. According to this theory, Z wished to
punish and heap indignities on his own body—just as I have myself, in my
verdant middle teens, taken a whip and chastised my own body because
lustful, homosexual thoughts had invaded my mind, while crying out: “‘O
wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!’”
Perhaps Z wished to punish his own body by depriving it of breath while in
female garb and so publish to the world the despicableness of his own
physical personality. In no other way could Z’s spiritually minded psyche
Suicide Theory. better revenge itself on his carnal body than to
have the latter’s grossness proclaimed on the housetops.
[In case Z was a suicide, the idol who had only a few minutes before
pitilessly scorned his advances was very likely an adolescent spending that
afternoon on one of the three nearest yachts. As I have said, the case came
to a curious abrupt ending in the papers, as if the entire solution had become
known to those immediately interested, but the public was not let into the
secret in order to shield unblameworthy parties.
[If Z was a suicide, I have myself passed through a very similar
experience. (See my Autobiography of an Androgyne, page 235.) Because
heartlessly jilted by a new idol and afraid I would, as “a monster of
depravity,” be cast out of the caravan with which I was travelling in an
uninhabited region of the Rockies, I walked away in the forest alone at dusk
a mile from camp having in mind suicide by being torn to pieces by bears,
with which the forest abounded, and several of which I saw that night
roaming within a hundred feet. Like Z, I had not left behind a single oral or

written word as to suicide. I was acting on the spur of the moment. For
several hours I experienced such depths of sorrow as not one human out of
ten thousand ever tastes. Continuously for an hour, out of hearing of the
camp, I wailed at the top of my voice over my terrible lot in life—that of a
despised, hated, and outlawed “degenerate” (as the hypocritical nine-tenths
of civilized humanity delight to call me)—and over the possibly impending
unfathomable disgrace among a party of rough men with whom I must
travel until we got back to a railroad. I experienced a violent desire to be
Author’s Attempt at devoured by bears. But the All-Seeing overruled
Suicide.
that they did not attack me.][49]
Newspaper Accounts
of Murders.

III. College Student’s Death is Unexplained.

(The following are excerpts from a New York paper. Every few months
the press brings to light a similar death of an androgyne. All because the
world misunderstands and grossly misjudges them, as well as because
public opinion has always deprived them of the means of coming to an
understanding of themselves. Bracketed words and italics are those of the
author of The Female-Impersonators.)
STUDENT’S DEATH MYSTERY BAFFLING—NO KNOWN BASIS
IN Q’S LIFE TO SUGGEST MURDER OR SUICIDE THEORY
Overdone detective fiction seldom presents so many significant but
mostly inexplicable circumstances surrounding the victim of death by
violence as those developed concerning [Jimmie Q], twenty, quiet, studious,
religious [earmarks of androgynism], a [North Atlantic] college junior,
popular, not morbid, a cleancut American youth, whose body was taken
from the river last Thursday night....
Q loved to roam the slums of large cities. [An earmark of cultured
androgynism. They thus roam because realizing that in their Overworld,
they are prohibited outlet for the feminine side of their duality. They roam
with day dreams of how they would like to impersonate a female in the
Underworld, where alone female-impersonators are welcome; and finally, in
many cases, they are carried away by their mania for an actual female-
Female- impersonation spree.]... His college room-mate
Impersonation
Obsession.
commented on the large number of neckties, all Q
had, which the latter was taking along. [As he said,
for a few days’ visit to his father, which visit did not take place. My theory
is that he went to the great city, in whose harbor his dead body was found,
to spend an evening with chance-met gangsters in the slums, as I have
myself done, and he took the many neckties as presents for them, just as I
myself have carried neckties with which to shower them and thus win their
goodwill. The androgyne, of course, wishes the gangsters as an audience for

his loved impersonations. Androgynes always wish an audience of
tremendously virile “young fellows.”]
Q did not drink and never took special interest in any woman. But he did
like to rove about in the districts of big cities in which the poorest classes
live and work.... Whenever he was in New York, he spent most of his time
in such districts....
At the Morgue, Mr. Q identified the effects of his son. When the body
was exposed for his inspection—it appeared to have been in the water about
ten days—the father bowed his head and tearfully exclaimed: “Poor
Jimmie! How you must have suffered!”...
The fisherman who had pulled the body ashore had used a grappling
hook.... To it they attributed the incision which the [City’s] Medical
Examiner had reported to have been made by some weapon. The Medical
Examiner denounced this report and suggested that the police were
forwarding a suicide theory to escape responsibility for solution of a crime.
He declared there was evidence of hemorrhage in this wound not producible
by such an injury inflicted long after death. He further recalled that the left
Methods of Torture. arm of Q was dislocated at the elbow, with the arm
muscles twisted—positive indications of external violence. [I myself have
been tortured by a ruffian’s seizing me by the wrist and twisting around my
arm so that I had to shriek in agony.]
The Medical Examiner declared the absence of water in the lungs
developed by the autopsy showed beyond question that Q was dead when
his body entered the water.... He had seventy-seven cents in his pockets
when his body was found. [Evidence of robbery, considering that he was a
well-to-do youth on a visit to a great city distant from his college. My
theory is, on the basis of intimate knowledge of the practices of androgynes,
that he scraped acquaintance with one or more gangsters, while adopting a
girl’s role. Many gangsters cordially hate bisexuals. Because of this hatred,
as well as to escape prosecution after robbing Q, the gangsters murdered
him and threw his dead body into the river—probably in the vicinity. Again
the fundamental cause of the death of another androgyne is the terribly false
teaching of the Church and public opinion as to the nature of bisexuality.]

Part Seven:
Medical Writers on Androgynism

I. What a New York Official Physician Has to Say about
Fairies.

In Medical Life of December, 1920, I had an article: The Biological
Sport of Fairieism. Readers completely out of touch with Underworld life
evidently thought I was telling a fairy tale. Apparently the editor of the
Medical Review of Reviews appealed for corroboration to a physician
likely to be one of the best authorities in the United States on my subject,
Perry M. Lichtenstein, M.D., Ll.B., Physician to City Prison, “Tombs”
(New York’s principal jail), House of Detention, etc., all of New York City.
Apparently there resulted the valuable and interesting article, The “Fairy”
and the Lady Lover, in Medical Review of Reviews of August, 1921. Its
writer has enjoyed almost unparalleled opportunities for examination of the
very fairies whose existence had been called in question. I quote a small
fraction, but the whole paper should be read by every devotee of
Aesculapius. Knowledge of its contents is very necessary for every
practitioner. I use my spelling of “fairie.” My own comments are in
brackets. The Review for November, 1921, contained quite a lengthy reply
of mine. Dr. Lichtenstein begins his paper:
“Does the ‘fairie’ or ‘fag’ really exist? This question has been asked time
Does the Fairie and again. There is no doubt but that this type of
Really Exist?
degenerate is a reality. [Unprejudiced science has
not yet decided the matter of the degeneracy of the androgyne in general, as
I have already shown in detail. There exists as much evidence that the
bisexual is a super-man or genius as that he or she is a degenerate. The truth
of the matter probably is that degenerates are no commoner per thousand
among bisexuals than among the sexually full-fledged, but that geniuses
occur far oftener.] He is a freak of nature who in every way attempts to
imitate a woman. In my official capacity I have come in contact with
several hundred of such individuals, and have in every instance felt sorry
for the unfortunate being. [Such sympathy indicates that fairies are not
wilfully of that genre, and should not suffer term after term in prison, as

now, for acts that do nobody harm beyond offending the æsthetic sense of
the unsophisticated. Of course, in the matter of accosting on the street, etc.,
they should be treated the same as full-fledged females. But their
punishment should not be augmented because they are “homosexuals”—a
word that is a misnomer.]
“In practically every case I have found the man to be a young person of
age ranging between sixteen and thirty. [“man”!—Only a pseudo-man.
Really a woman whom Nature has disguised as a man; a woman with male
genitals.]... They are by no means mental defectives. Most of them have had
a good education and come from respectable families.... Since early
childhood they have been seclusive and kept close to their mother. They are
emotional and affective.... They ... imitate the female as closely as possible.
Artificial Breasts. They take feminine names, use perfume and dainty
stationery which frequently is scented, and in many instances they wear
women’s apparel.
“Recently one of these individuals was arrested, charged with soliciting.
When he [“he-she” would be the accurate pronoun] arrived in the city
prison, he was searched, and on him were found ... artificial busts, a wig,
and a box containing powder and rouge. This young man [“androgyne”
would be the proper term] was twenty years of age. He was beardless
[evidently natural], had an effeminate voice, and a distinctly feminine walk.
He lisped and in speech closely approached a bashful female.... He ... had
graduated ... from high-school.... He ran away from home and met some
boys [“girl-boys” would be the proper term] whom he considered good
company. These young men [“androgynes” would be the proper term] were
of the same type as he.... In this way [after a fashion, taking the place of the
female of the species], [he] made enough money to live.
“These individuals ... often occupy handsomely furnished apartments
which are paid for by men who patronize them. As a rule several ‘fags’
occupy an apartment. On one occasion ten such individuals were arrested in
a raid by the police.... I had an opportunity to observe them closely. In every
respect they resembled the female. The names they used in calling one
another were feminine.... They had a typical feminine walk.... [Because
androgyne legs are sometimes those of a woman.]
“I can distinctly recall two cases which occurred quite recently.... The
first ... was arrested for soliciting and was sent to the female prison. This

person had wonderful hair which reached to the waist, and it was not false.
Legal Persecution of His face was as smooth as a woman’s [naturally
Androgynes.
beardless evidently], his voice was distinctly
feminine, and his hands and feet were small. He wore high-heeled shoes. In
examining this person the matron insisted that he strip. The prisoner
refused, and thereupon I was notified to make an examination.... When
questioned, he stated that he preferred to dress as a female because he found
that he was effeminately inclined.... He was sent to the workhouse, and after
serving his time was released. Several months later I learned that he had
again been arrested for a similar offence. This time he wore a wig in
addition to the feminine garb. [Because during his prior imprisonment, he
had, under pressure, consented to have his hair cut short, like a man, and
promised to live henceforth as a man—a promise hard to keep since “he”
was psychicly, and in part physically, a female.]
“The next case ... was arrested.... When taken to the female prison, he
refused to allow the matron to search him.... I was called in. I found that the
prisoner wore a wig and artificial breasts. Every bit of his attire was
feminine.... The voice and mannerisms were distinctly effeminate....
“Many of the so-called ‘social elite’ are to be included among these
people....” [“Many” only in the aggregate. Proportionately, only about one
out of one-hundred-and fifty men. But the ratio is probably higher among
the cultured than among manual laborers. They are not at all blameworthy,
because they were born with the strongest kind of instincts in that direction,
and do not thereby harm in the least any individual or society as a whole.
They carefully keep their idiosyncrasy under cover.]
Medical Writers on
Androgynism.

II. What One of America’s Foremost Medical Writers Has to
Say about Fairies.

Dr. Robert W. Shufeldt, author of Studies in the Human Form, has
included at least one fairie among the many human beings the results of his
physical examination of whom he has published. The following are excerpts
from his valuable and interesting article, Biography of a Passive Pederast,
in the October, 1917, issue of the American Journal of Urology and
Sexology. I use my own spelling of “fairie.” My comments are in brackets.
Those interested should read the entire original article. Particularly two
photographs of the subject are given, one nude and the other in full
feminine garb.
“J. W. ... is a fairie from the slums of Brooklyn, N. Y. ... twenty-three
years of age. When fourteen ... the lobes of his ears had been pierced ... for
ear-rings, and these ornaments he commonly wears when dressed in female
attire.... He invited my attention to the fine development of his breasts,
whereas there was not the slightest evidence of gynecomasty.... The
impression was left upon my mind that he was morphologically male in all
particulars.... I became thoroughly convinced that the man was laboring
under ... a most extraordinary delusion.... He claimed to have his menses
regularly every month.... [Evidently bleeding piles.]
“In July he admitted that he had never been pregnant; while in
November, when he brought with him one of his numerous ‘husbands’ or
Yearning for lovers, he claimed that he had been pregnant a few
Feminine Attire.
years previously and been operated on in a hospital
and the conception removed ‘through his side.’... I am convinced that this
mendacity is due to his delusions.
“... While he could sing soprano well, he could not whistle ... and he
threw a stone like a girl. [Common earmarks of androgynism.]... He did not,
as he moved about ... give one the impression that there was anything in his
demeanor simulating femininity, nor did his behavior in any way betray the

remarkable manner in which his sexual life was being lived.... Apart from
his extremely meagre education, he is no fool or dullard in other
particulars.... It would seem that his trade [professional female-
impersonator and fairie] is plied chiefly for the money there is in it.... He
claims he has never been arrested or otherwise interfered with by the
police....
“... He has always been possessed of the contrary sexual instinct. He
always shunned women and girls more or less, while yearning at the same
time to assume female attire and enter into their domestic vocations....
Believing himself designed by Nature to play the very part he is playing in
life, it was truly remarkable to hear this nervous, loquacious, foul-mouthed,
and foul-minded fairie of the most degraded slums of the multi-millioned
city chatter about his experiences....
“Few writers in the field of psychiatry have enjoyed what I had next the
opportunity to observe.... The putting on of female attire by a contrary
sexed male. [The paper details the putting on of the various articles.]... He
became very talkative ... telling of some of his recent escapades ...
A “Man” gesticulating as we often see agitated girls do ...
Transformed into a
Soubrette.
remarking that he was very tired, owing to the fact
that he had been ‘ironing all the forenoon.’
[Androgynes gravitate toward peculiarly feminine tasks.]... ‘What do you
think of that hat? Isn’t it a dandy? I trimmed it myself.’... He was, without
the slightest doubt, thoroughly in earnest in all he said and did, and by no
means was he playing a part.... ‘Dear me,’ he said, ‘I’ve forgotten my ear-
rings; but you won’t mind that?’ Upon my assuring him that I liked young
girls better without them, he seemed relieved and proceeded to fit to his
head a ... blonde wig.... As he had recently shaved, his face was quite
smooth, and in a twinkling he made it up with ... pink powder, with red
pomade for the lips.... ‘Ha!’ he said [after fully transformed outwardly into
a soubrette, in the style of costume prevalent among courtesans at the date
of J. W.’s appearance before the doctor for wear in their resorts only, but in
1921 affected for street wear by all butterflies of fashion] ‘I feel more like
myself now, and I am ready for the picture!’...”

Part Eight:
Androgyne Verse
The first of the following attempts to penetrate into Plato’s “world of ideas” and get at the real
essence of things, and then to express them in an ideal manner, was inspired by a chance visit to the
Whitestone station in October, 1921. Subsequently I was seized with the desire to try out my muse in
incorporating some of my other emotions and experiences in verse. I had essayed no metrical
composition since 1905, the year of writing the last of my Fairie Songs, the best of which were
published in the Autobiography of an Androgyne.
I understand by “poetry” the version of things seen incorporeally; things spiritualized or with a
halo around them; things as they exist in substance, in reality, back of their superficial or phenomenal
presentation—the version of things that an individual’s subconscious or subliminal self utters.
At present when I evolve verse, I try to lose myself to the phenomenal world—the domain of
sensation—and to let down my bucket into the well of the subconscious, the subliminal; to peer into
the eternal, the infinite world (the domain of fundamental substance). The sensuous, material skin or
crust of this world of ideas is all that most children of Adam can grasp. Only to poets and
metaphysicians has Nature given a rope of sufficient length that their buckets can reach as far as the
water level in the well of ideas. Nearly all poets even of the first rank manage to flop into their
buckets a few exquisite thoughts as to eternal realities, and clothed in appropriate language, only
about once out of a score of attempts. Nineteen-twentieths of their verse would better have been
forever withheld from the public’s eyes, since it is merely artificial, nonsense doggerel. In that
proportion of their work, these poets of the first rank show themselves up merely as bad rhymesters.
The editor of The Female-Impersonators declared “the book would be better off without” my
verse, but has kindly humored my wish to include it. The reader’s verdict may be that I, too, am
merely a bad rhymester, and thus put my work on a level with the vast bulk of the outpourings and
outdronings of our best poets.
But I, as a would-be poet, labor under the disadvantage of expressing sentiments of an androgyne.
Androgyne Verse. Even if there should really be any poetry in my own outdronings, no
one but another androgyne could recognize the fact, since it is next
to impossible for anybody to appreciate any literature unless they can make its sentiments their own
and identify themselves with one of the characters. And the sexually full-fledged, who constitute
more than ninety-nine per cent of the reading public, are obsessed by an irrational horror of
androgynes.
I therefore beg the reader, in judging the following verse, to bear in mind
that it is not written by a man about men, as the reader first thinks; but about
men by a pseudo-man; by a physical “man” who is psychicly a woman, and
even physically a woman at least thirty-three per cent.

I have read some of Mary Baker Eddy’s verse, which her disciples place on a level with the Psalms
of David. But I think the former weak and the latter perfect. Here again we see that to judge verse to
be good, one has to imagine it one’s own outpouring. I therefore do not expect any sexually full-
fledged person to declare of my verse (even if it were the best ever written) anything else than that it
is “far beneath the worst doggerel. The mere thought of it is painful!”
For—I repeat—it is impossible for any one to judge poetry objectively—only subjectively: that is,
not according to the merits of the verse, but according to whether the reader can make the sentiments
his own.
A sexually full-fledged literary confidant, who has read the first two books of my trilogy, declared
of my verse: “If you publish it, it will cast ridicule and contempt on your whole book. In the book,
you have claimed culture, but when your readers come to this verse, they will say that no one with
the culture of a longshoreman would try to pass off such stuff as verse even in fun, and that if you
had the slightest tincture of literary taste, you would realize this. You will go down to posterity in
ridicule, and destroy all the good your books might otherwise do.”
But I persist in including the verse. If the quoted verdict is correct, then I have “a screw loose”
intellectually, as well as being sexually and anatomically “a freak of Nature.” The published pieces
show the psychologist what ultra-androgyne verse is like. Besides, possible androgyne readers may
be able to appreciate this verse.
As three out of the four following “attempts” were first conceived only in January, 1922—after
The Female-Impersonators had gone to press—it has been impossible that they benefit by the
author’s judgment after they have grown cold.

Emotion[50]
(Inspired by sight of Whitestone station in 1921.)

“Holy Ground”

“Old Porte Cochere, with Memories Dear Thou Teemest!”

The Unreplaced Slats on Which the Author Communed

Still stands the selfsame Whitestone station,
So sombre as night’s shades fall;
At its north front do still halt trains,
While brakemen “Whitestone! Whitestone!” call.

My trysting-place in nineteen three
With warriors of the nation,
When I was frivolous and wild,
Was this old Whitestone station.

Yea, holy ground its platform is;
It makes me sigh and ponder;
In my mind’s eye those blue-clad forms
Still wait for me just yonder!

They met me at the train when I
From New York came, directed
To see and stroll about with “braves”
Of manhood unsuspected!

On balmy eves we stalked dark lanes,
No other person near us;
No other’s eye upon us gazed,
No other’s ear could hear us.

What gallant, passionate lovers they!
Considerate of my pleasure!
Uplifting to the highest bliss
That Eve on earth can measure!

Returning to the porte cochere
Of that selfsame old station,
We lingered, till the whistle blew,
In blissful conversation.

What eyesore thou, old Porte Cochere,
To every traveller seemest!
To me, howe’er, thou shelter gave;
With memories dear thou teemest!

The station’s waiting-room with seats
Extending all around it,
‘Whelms me with recollections fond,
Because unchanged I found it!

For ’twas on these rude benches there,
When winter’s winds were hurtling,
And travellers few and far between,
All evening sat we flirting.

In words our conversation lagged;
In substance it was silly!
For all I said the evening through
Was: “How I love thee, Willie!”

We every confidence but breathed,
Lest some strange ear o’erhear us;
They guessed not—travelers—what we said;
There were none very near us.

Whene’er the train I took for town,
And we “Goodnight!” repeated,
“Farewell!” o’erwhelmed me as I left
And in the coach was seated.

Once rode with me a gallant three
To College Point, first station;
To have with me five minutes more
Before farewell ovation.

How charmed was I that period brief!
Its memory ever lingers;
As we sat holding hidden hands,
I felt their horny fingers.

“Three cheers for Jennie June!” they cried,
When finally they must leave me;

“The soldiers’ friend, and sweetheart too!
Let not our parting grieve thee!”

· · · · ·

Gone are ye from my life for years,
You heroes! Wonder boys!
In memory though I hold you fast—
Forever perfect joys!
Farewell!

Recollection[51]
O thou Fair as the sunrise on deep sea’s green surge,
While the whitecaps seem dancing all around!
Fair as sunset from mountain’s sheer precipice’s verge,
Seen o’er maze of high ridges snowbound!
Even Fairer than the rose, of all flowers the fairest;
Beyond Vatican’s Apollo Belvedere;
Bud McDonald, youth’s soul-mate, of beauty the rarest,
Adolescent wert thou without peer!

First, Beau Brummel wert thou, so fussy about clothes,
O immaculate Buddie McDee!
Dirt and slovenness cat, never more than thou, loaths;
Must be brushed every hour from dust free;
Every lock of thine hair with worried care laid in place;
As a girl didst thou prink—I can vow!
But of all the young bloods of Rialto’s fast race,
Not one sweller was costumed than thou!

Beheld one the shining patent leather of thy shoe,
And both hands decorated with rings;
Marked thy wiles through which dude hoi polloi’s favor doth woo,
One would say: “All from effeminacy springs!”
“Not a bit!” I must answer. For Mack, Sport as well,
Was a crack shot with pistol and ball;
How he hunted, coldblooded, dumb beasts he did tell;
Furry creatures clubbed dead; cursed them all!

Best of all:—an Adonis wert thou, Bud McDee,
With incomparable red peachlike cheeks;
Threads of eyebrows so cleancut!—in memory I see—
As o’er her eyes a soubrette alone seeks;
With thy pearls of teeth, cherry lips—beloved sir—
And as well chiselled nose as can be,
How I’ve wondered that thou and I intimates were!—
Explanation:—God gave thee to me!

I again in fond memory behold before me,
Pinkish mountain of loveliness tower;
Buddie’s forma divina, au naturel, see;
How his charms, yea unmatched, did o’erpower!
An “eyeful” his two breasts, with fine gold scraggy hair;
Graceful curves; rotund body and limb;
With his robust ribs bursting through skin O so fair,
And his deep-channeled back breathing vim!

· · · · ·

Once Unequaled “Young Fellow”! Six-and-twenty long years
Now have rolled by since thou wert All That!
Art to-day gibbering sot, maybe suffering jeers,
With foul trousers and torn greasy hat?
For the cup cherished thou that glad makes the sad heart.—
How I wonder! Where sleptest last night?
Is vitality wasted? In grave resting art?—
Us together soon lead, Kindly Light!

“The Boy of the Piave”

(America’s Gift to Italy in
1921)

Memories[52]
I dream to-night of the gay bright lights
Where I sought recreation;
While meek I sat at feet of profs
To gain an education:
I studied hard six dreary eves,
But when the seventh came,
Bade “au revoir” to books and grind,
And skipped to Rialto’s game.

There where lurked pleasure’s devotees
Giant Kill-joy never came;
I met there New York’s wildest swains,
And buxoms of ill fame:
We revelled all the evening through—
Fine fellowship, I say!
I ne’er happed on politer folk
Than in Rialto gay.

And which was I, kind sir, dost ask?
Was I a bad roué?
Or shameless demi-virgin wild,
In paint and powder gay?—
“But I was neither this nor that!”
Such answer here I set;
While youth in form, I chose to take
Diversion as soubrette.

The young bloods pardoned me—they said—
For wearing hated breeches!
“For thou art not a real male;
Thou’rt like yon winking witches

Who throng these noisy promenades
Their favors fair to sell;
And kissing thee we deem as sweet
As kissing ma’moiZelle!

“Lik’st thou that we thee sweetheart call?—
We’ll humor thy desire;
Sit on our laps while we sip wine;
Let’s flirt until we tire;
To break thy shapely corset stays,
We’ll try our best, dear Jenn;
But thou must mimic maid thy best;
For us:—the part of men!”....

To have love made by youthful swains,
To me was highest bliss;
In the bright dives where scores beheld,
No,—shrinked we not to kiss:—
Of yore in gay Rialto’s halls
Knew folk no self-restraint;
Insane e’en sometimes acted fools!
Those dens no place for saint!....

I’m prone to-night to philosophize:—
Why did I gravitate
Toward Rialto’s racy denizens
When moved to dissipate?
’Twas just because I sought and found,
In Rialto’s “swell” gallants,
The opposites and complements
For whom my spirit pants....

O comrade of Rialto’s halls
Of nineties of century past—
Should’st read these lines, some former pal,
“Jennie June” remembered hast;
Now after twenty-six years,
I hail thee with heartfelt greeting;
Beseech Benediction on thine head,
In lieu of present meeting.

French Doll-Baby[53]
Young bloods prom’nade Fourteenth Street’s pave—
Each eve out for a lark;
Their eyes “peeled” for French doll babies;
With whom they sigh to spark;
Why admire the fraidcat babies,
Who weep easily?
The helpless crippled sex e’en seek!—
Hare-brained gentility!....

Cheeks a beauteous red through rouge puff;
Pink powder (pretty, pretty!!!) ‘pon nose;
One inhales as she nigh minceth,
Such soothing scent of rose!
Locks—so silklike—reach to shoulders;
Gown of “art” design;
Coquette extreme must she be sure;
All signs she doth combine.

When a young blood spieth dolly,
Cutely mincing Fourteenth Street;
Then the young blood smileth sweetly,
And, stranger e’en, doth greet:
Replies she smilingly “Good evening!”
Surely she is fly!
Too, overjoyed because of having
Bewitched a stalwart “guy.”

“Little tootsy-wootsy!” cries guy,
“Art ravishingly cute!
Thou art, yea, a pretty Pussie! Pussie, Pussie!!!
Ne’er saw I such a beaut!”
Answereth she in mellifluous voice:
“And I ‘Strong Hans’ thee call!
Thy frame so large and powerful!
Not spindling thou, yet tall!”

They acquainted barely minute,
Such confidences express!
As only hubby—hidden, secret—
Doth glad to spouse confess:
Bold gallant the French doll calls “Wifie!”
While she e’en feels that he
To her already united is—
The twain, twin souls, to be!

Reader, never heardst thou such words!
Much mush! (as “Kiddo! Kiddo!”—“Kitty! Kitty!”[54])
Passing strange the way of young blood
With French doll baby pretty!
That sexual difference existeth
Renders twain insane;
Except for Nature’s procreative plan,
These instincts—how inane!....

Holdeth French doll from “guy” a secret;
Yes, surely she can act!
Only after hour’s deception,
Revealeth she the fact;
When she’s found that she can trust him;
Can reveal her whim:
In burst of laughter doth disclose:
“My real, true name is ‘Jim’!”

ANNOUNCEMENT OF THIRD OF TRILOGY
The Riddle of the Underworld

Sequel to Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Female-Impersonators

By Ralph Werther—Jennie June

Edited by

Alfred W. Herzog, Ph.B., A.M., M.D.

(Editor Medico-Legal Journal)

To be published, in the fall of 1922, by the MEDICO-LEGAL JOURNAL.
At least 65,000 words and a dozen illustrations. Cloth. Price three dollars,
including postage within United States. The three volumes of the
TRILOGY, (an aggregate of over 200,000 words) ordered on the same date,
eight dollars, including postage. The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN
ANDROGYNE, ordered on the same date with one other of the TRILOGY,
six dollars. Price of AUTOBIOGRAPHY alone, four dollars including
postage.
The author of the Trilogy, one of the half-dozen most remarkable
bisexuals known to medical science, while living in New York City as
college student and subsequently professional “man,” had, incidentally, a
six years’ variegated experience (age nineteen to twenty-five) in the
The Riddle of the Underworld of the metropolis. In the
Underworld.
Autobiography, besides an exhaustive analysis of
his own intuitions, beliefs, courses of reasoning, emotions, penchants, and
instincts, the author merely outlined his manner of life and adventures,
particularly while impersonating a female. In The Female-Impersonators,

he undertook little more, in description of Underworld life, than to detail
the experiences of cultured ultra-androgynes.
In the Riddle of the Underworld, the author of the Trilogy—
Gives the history of New York’s white-light and red-light districts since
the beginning of the nineteenth century; analyzes the causes of vice
and crime on the basis of his intimate mingling with the
Underworlders; shows why a “vicious tenth” exists in all cities, and
how the Overworld (which constitutes nine-tenths of the population
of Christian lands) should regulate the former.
Depicts life in New York’s poorest immigrant quarters and tenements—
in its reality because he saw it as an insider, the denizens of the slums
and the Underworld shamefacedly veiling the fundamental facts of
their existence from charity and sociological investigators, but
admitting the author to everything because he mingled with them as a
non-intellectual and fairie.
Depicts life in the lowest type of slum lodging-house, once the author’s
home, and the night life in general of the Bowery at the height of the
latter’s vogue as New York’s principal red-light street, the author at
the time being one of its “filles de joie.”
The Riddle of the
Underworld.
Depicts, lastly, in great detail, his career as female-impersonator in
New York’s slums and red-light and white-light districts and the life
of “bosom friends” of the Underworld: Young bloods sowing their
wild oats; middle-aged extreme alcoholic wrecks; extreme drug
addicts; intellectual mild androgynes during the hours when Nature
drives them to a double life in the Underworld; low-class “fairies”;
filles de joie in their hey-day; wrecks of such in their thirties;
“confidence men”; gangsters, gunmen, and burglars (whom
Providence gave the author as soul-mates).

THE CLOSING VOLUME OF THE TRILOGY DEPICTING THE LIFE
EXPERIENCE OF A BISEXUAL UNIVERSITY “MAN”

INDEX

(and., abb. for androgyne or androgynism)

Abraham Myers adventure, 124
Abstinence induces melanch., 44, 72
Absurd legal superstitions, 196
Acquired or congenital, 16, 199
Actors, androgynes as, 87, 97, 100, 177, 206
Adam of Angelo, 215, 216
Adonises, 114, 236, 257, 258
“Adopted sons”, 187, 214, 257, 258
Aesthetes often effeminate, 25
Aestheticism of and., 17, 200, 224, 231
Age-group sought, 226
Age sobered me, 256
Alcoholics, 109
Aliases, choosing, 94
necessity of, 93
Ambition, author’s, 79, 83
American aborigines, 47
AM. JOURNAL OF SEXOLOGY, 266

An Adonis or a Hercules?, 258
Anatomy of author, 84, 86, 87, 91
Alexander the Great, 29, 30, 38
America’s most impious, 184
Anaphrodites, 13
“Androgyne” and “gynander” terms, 155
Androgyne expedients, 241
outcast, 159
Platonic marriage, 217
stamping grounds, 226
talk, 153
Androgynes, 15 et al.
are æsthetes, 17, 224
are goody-goodies, 51
banishment of, 42
benefactors, 36, 220, 221
compelled to fabricate, 242
(cultured), 146 ff., 158, 164 ff., 198 ff., 237 ff., 259
gifted, 36, 37, 48, 161
in war, 255
linguists, 152
loud dressers, 104, 131, 223, 225, 231
more numerous among cultured, 43, 265
nabobize menials, 193
not Sodomites, 223
not to marry, 20, 205
resourceful, 174
wish wife for “sons”, 218
Androgynes’ angelic dispo., 38
families unsuspi., 183, 239
favorites fortunate, 176, 178, 193, 208, 256, 257
one offence, 50
relatives ashamed to prosecute, 246

Androgynism, causes of: See Cause of and.
nationally healthful, 48
not degeneracy, 46
stigmata of: See Stigmata of and.
Angel to fiend, 138
Angelo—Phyllis, 153, 198 ff.
Anglo-American law unintell., 179
Apollo, 25, 26
Apostro. to lost soul-mate, 116
to the supreme man, 145
Apotheosis of an and., 211
Are androgynes supermen?, 37
Army, bobtailed from, 255
Arrest of androgynes, 150
Arrested development, 49, 149
Artificial breasts, 264, 265
Assassins of high morality, 249
Assault and battery, 141 ff., 256, 261
Associates (author’s) of Bowery, 285
childhood, 54, 59
Fourteenth Street, 118, 130, 215
Stuyvesant Square, 113, 130
Association of and., 146 ff., 232
Astigmatism (mental) of and., x
Author a repository for Underworld’s secrets, 5
robbed two hundred times, 141
Author’s attempt at suicide, 252, 253
contribution to sociology, 96
conversations with opposites, 256

flirtations mushy, 133
foretaste of Z’s fate, 251
menopause, 166, 167
third “adopted son”, 257
trilogy, 3
visage the most marred, 144
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, vii, x, xi, 3, 16, 43, 50, 59,
72, 83, 86, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 122, 131, 133, 166, 228, 236, 239,
251, 252, 253, 255, 258
Aversion to feminine society, 75, 119, 183, 201, 231, 260

B. A. a fairie, 118
Bacon, Francis, 34, 35, 49
Roger, 39, 80
Badge of fairie-ism, 104
Ball games, 65, 257
Banishment of and., 42
Battery Park, 226
Beard growth of author, 84
Beardless men (natural) 19, 29, 32, 151, 264, 265
Beard scanty, 169, 199, 250
Bears, 252, 254
Beer-garden adventure, 212 ff.
Being dogged, 112, 113
Belle of the ball, 185
Benighted lawyers, 196
leaders of thought, 41
physicians, 74, 176, 204, 220
Bent for woman’s toil, 224, 227, 257, 268

Bias rules in sex domain, 163
Bible and sex instinct, 13, 14, 15, 44, 73
on homosexuality, 51, 160
Biceps unrivalled, 134
Bicycle race, six-day, 124
Bigotry (sexual), 2, 22, 23, 39, 41, 51, 52, 72, 73, 74, 80, 87, 95, 139, 147,
149, 154, 159 ff., 160, 167, 168, 180, 191, 193, 195, 197, 202, 209, 213,
220, 222, 239, 240, 245
“Biog. of Passive Pederast”, 266
“Biol. Sport of Fairieism”, 262
Blackmail, viii, 158, 163, 178 ff., 182, 185 ff., 217, 224, 257
Blarney triumphant, 125
Bobtailed from army, 255
Boon of an “adopted son”, 189
Bowery, 169, 207
a magnet, 203 ff.
assoc, of author, 284, 285
“boys”, 172, 176, 205, 207, 285
Brain, author’s, 83
Breasts (artificial), 264, 265
Bright intellects, 36, 258
Broadway Tenderloin, 104, 125, 226
Brownies, 89
Buffalo Bill’s show, 254
Bugle, 212
Burglar alarm, 225
Business career of author, 90 ff., 253, 255

Cæsar, 31, 37, 38
“Calvin Luther”, 217, 219 ff.
Caravan, 253
Carpenter, Edward, 17, 37
Castration, 16, 67
Catamite, 27
Cat in a strange garret, 172
Cause of androgynism, 18, 46, 49, 60, 70, 73, 147, 148, 149
female-impersonation, 99, 100, 101, 148
sex intensity, 78, 164, 165
Central Park, 226
Cerc. Herm., 151 ff., 200, 224
Change of life, 165, 166
Chantage: See Blackmail
Chevelure, feminine, 264
Chevelure of author, 85, 86
Childhood female-impersonation, 62, 66, 170
Childhood’s sex influences, 165
Childlike and womanlike, 86
Childlikeness of author, 83, 85, 88, 91
“Child of the Devil”, 136
Child sex expression, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 78
Choosing aliases, 94
Christians’ morality, 196
Christine of Sweden, 38
Church and public opinion guilty, 245, 261
Clerical profession, 42, 43, 44, 191

Climacteric, 166
Coasting, 66
Coddled in college, 85
College course, 82
preparation, 65, 72
Common and. practices, 158
type of sexual insanity, 137
Compens. by Providence, 83, 256
Comstock, Anthony, 92
Conclus. from life exp., 73
Confessions to author, 5, 256
Confidants of every-day circle, 91, 95, 144
Congen. or acquired, 16, 199
Conscientious murderer, 235
Cont. Europe contrast, 179
Conversations, sample, 107 ff., 133 ff., 152 ff., 188 ff.
with sexual opposites, 256
Cornbury, Lord, 38
Corsets, 250
Court empl. ultra-crim., 93
Court martials, 94, 257
Cowardice of and., 67, 68, 75, 224, 225
Cowboys, 253, 254, 258
“Crime against Nature”, 195, 196
Criminal prudery, 61
ultra-, 113, 138 ff.
Crooks are boastful, 122, 123

Cross, author’s, 143
Cross-dressing, 62, 66, 67, 75, 87, 103, 104, 108, 131, 135, 152, 157, 165,
170, 199, 200, 201, 202, 209, 211, 237, 239, 240, 244, 246, 248, 250,
264, 265, 267
Cultured and., 146 ff., 158, 164 ff., 170 ff., 198 ff., 259, et al.
Cure for homosexuality, 16, 20
Curiosity, author a, 84

Dalliance, 256
Damocles, sword of, 225, 231
Dark ages, 39, 80, 93, 160, 220
Daughter of regiment, 255
Day dreams, 113, 170, 203, 259
Death experienced, 142
preferred to discl., 230
to the traitor, 128
Decline of nations, 45
Degeneracy, and. not, 46
“Degenerates”, 49, 221, 252, 263
De Joux, 17
Depilation, 32, 100, 152, 169, 185, 199
“Depraved” defined, 160
Detectives, and. as, 123,
author as, 5, 238, 284
Development, arrested, 49, 149
Disclosure to “every-day” associates, 91, 95, 144
Disposition of and., 38, 51
Diversions of girl-boys, 62, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72

Divorce, 7, 12
Does fairie exist?, 263
Dog-faced boys, 84
Dogged, 113, 208
Double life, 97, 101, 104, 118, 119
Dressing, cross: see Cross-dr. for a spree, 202
Dress-making of and., 68, 232
Dual personality, 92, 97, 101, 102, 112, 119
“Duchess of Austria”, 176

Early consc. of deform., 74
Earmarks of and.: See Stigmata
Ear-rings, 266
Effects of abstinence, 44, 72
child sex expression, 78, 164, 165
Effeminacy common in æsthetes, 25, 231
that is culpable, 47
Egotism, 163, 168
Ellis, Dr. Havelock, 37, 48, 50, 158
Elmira Reformatory, 138
Endocrinology’s testimony, 16
Enemies of truth & justice, 4
Enlistment in army, 257
Environment, infl., 132
Epworth League, 127
Erotic pleasure’s value, 72
Eternally dovetailed, 211

Eunice, 168 ff., 206
Eunuchs, 20
Europe, continental, 179
Euterpe, 184 ff.
Every-day circle of author, 85, 91 ff., 95, 102, 118, 119, 144
Experiencing death, 142
Exp. from univ., author’s, 95

Fabrication of and., 242
Fags: See Fairies
Fairie apprenticeship, author’s, 103
bachelor of arts, 118
does he really exist, 263
Fairieism, badge of, 104
“biological sport of”, 262
“Fairies”, 89, 109, 150, 255, 262 ff., 266 ff., et al.
Fairies best stool pigeons, 123
extreme dressers, 104, 131, 231, 268
Fairsea, Mr., 159 ff.
“Fairy and Lady Lover”, 262
“Fallen angels”, 114, 118, 205, 285
Families ignorant of bisexual members, 62, 183, 239
F’ank, 54, 59, 61
Faro, 127
Fasting, 79
Father’s assert. disc., 247
Favorites of androgynes, 7, 107 ff., 114, 130, 131, 208, 209 ff., 214 ff., 227,
232, 233, 234, 236, et al.

“Fed up” on falsehoods, 254
Fellatio, 59, 60, 64, 182, 228, 235, 236, 238, 255, 256
effects of, 99, 235, 256
Female-impersonate intoxication, 104, 106, 111, 212
Female-impersonation, 32, 46, 66, 93, 99, 100, 101, 103 ff., 131, 150, 157,
171, 177, 183 ff., 201 ff., 205 ff., 209 ff., 235, 243, 256, 261, 263, 267, et
al.
cause of, 99, 100, 101, 148
in childhood, 66, 170
instinctive, 99
obsession, 260
sprees, 103 ff., 170, 175 ff., 201 ff., 207, 211 ff., 218, 240, 241, 248, 251,
255, 259
Female-impersonators, gifted, 108
popular, 107
Female with male genitals, 176
Femin. anat. of and., 64, 66
Feminesqueness of author recognized by business associates, 91
Feminine chevelure, 264
figure recognized, 87
Fire-arms, horror of, 75
First real. of abnor., 70, 73
Flagellation, 79
Flirtation, 107 ff., 130, 133 ff., 166, 207
Fort X, 245
Y 255 ff.
Fourteenth St. Rialto, 98, 104, 106, 117, 118, 130, 208, 215, 226
Fourth sex, 98
Frank White, 168 ff., 206
Freaks of nature, 84, 263, 270

French doll-baby, 91, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 153, 280
French leave, 197, 257
Freq. of and., 17, 18, 253
fairie-ism, 107
Frigidity of and. toward women, 226, 231, 260
Full-fledged instincts equally unæsthetic, 136

Gamblers, 114
Gambler’s antecedents, 117
Gambling a master passion, 120
Gangsters, 171 ff., 205 ff., 260, 261
Ganymede, 27
Gas-house district, 137
Genius, 36, 263
George’s antecedents, 215
Gethsemane, author’s, 77 ff.
Girl-boy diversions, 62, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72
reasons for suicide, 68
God will avenge androgynes, 52
God-intoxicated youth, 70, 73, 76, 77, 79, 143
Gœthe, 93
Goody-good. of and., 51, 180
a “fille de joie”, 204
transformed, 204
Grabowsky, Dr., 17
Grand Central, 206, 208
Union, 129
Great cy. desir., 200, 201, 203

delusion, the, 168
Greeks, 27, 47, 48, 162
Guest murders, 227, 229, 234, 250
Gun-men, 171
Gynanders, 98, 154 ff., 199
love androgynes, 154, 155
Gynander’s fate, 154 ff.

Hacked to death, 228
Half-and-half as to sex, 15, 19, 22, 201, 205, 209
Hanging and., 251
Hangman’s noose, 247
Hare-brained sex, 211, 280
Harmlessness of and. and inversion, viii, 28, 42, 50, 147, 161, 192, 209,
220, 221, 236, 263
Harvey Green, 131 ff., 144, 149
Health of author, 99, 235
Hercules, 236, 257, 258
an unrivalled, 131 ff.
Hermaphrodites, 21
psychic, 19
Hermaphroditoi, 151 ff., 164 ff.
Hermaphroditos, 27
Cercle, 151 ff., 200, 224
Hero-worship, 134
Herzog, Dr. A. W., i, vii ff.
Hirschfeld, Dr. M., 18
Homocide Bureau, 247

Homos. at climacteric, 166
Bible on, 44, 51, 160
(chronic) congenital, ix, 16, 20, 46
cure for, 16, 20
“Homosexuals” a misnomer, 254
no worse than hetero., 148
Hon., author’s bosom friend, 85
Hotel Comfort, 109
Hotel X, 156
Housekp. of and., 201, 226, 257
How milk on 14th St., 126
Howard, Dr. W. L., 27, 37
Hypocrites, 11, 115. See also Pharis.

Immoral. novelty in N. Y., 194
Imprisonment of and., 81, 149, 191 ff., 209, 213, 263 ff.
Incognito necessary, 200
Indian country, 258
Industry of author, 255
Infantilism, 38, 61, 84, 88, 90, 156
Infatuation, 187
Inherited lechery, 56
In high spirits, 241, 242
Inquis. author, 122, 132, 150, 167
Instinct. female-imp., 99
Intellect of author, 82, 83
androgynes, 36, 83, 263, 267
Intellectual aristocrat browbeaten by pleb., 195

Intoxication, female-impersonate, 104, 106, 111, 212
Irresponsibility of and., 163
Is bisex. worst crime?, 147
“I want to die!”, 69

Javerts, 197
“Jennie June”, origin, 93
Jennie Lind, 94
Jesus, 15
Jilted, 115, 138, 251, 252, 254
Joseph (of Egypt), 220
JOURNAL OF SEXOLOGY, 37, 110

Kant, 14
Keep tots sexually clean, 60
Key stolen, 142
Knit souls, 122, 123, 210
Krafft-Ebing, Dr., 15, 158

Lake Ontario, 117
Law, Ang.-Amer., unintell., 179
Law clerk, 92
Laws, change of, viii, 1
Lawyers, benighted, 196
Leader of a Bowery gang, 207
Leaders of th’t benight., 41
ignore evidence, 162

murderers, 150, 209, 245, 261
Lecturer on sexo., author, 256
Legal adoption, 217, 218
persecution of androgynes, 1, 93, 143, 161, 162, 179, 196, 213, 265
superstitions, 196
Leland, Chas. G., 37
Lichtenstein, Dr. P. M., 16, 262
Life-story told sweeth., 256
Lind, Earl, 92, 94, 95
Loathing of androgynes, 228, 238, 242, 245, 246, 251, 253 ff., 261
a murder motive, 157, 232
Lohengrin, 137
Lotharios, 107 ff., 118, 130
Love letters, author’s, 95
LOVE’S COMING-OF-AGE, 17, 37, 48
Lumbering camps, 253

Madison Sq., 226
Garden, 124, 254
Male figure more artistic, 157
qual. that knit fem., 258
Man and woman in one body, 112
ashamed of his nature, 168
not rational, 39 ff., 163
-slaughter, 243
transf. into soubr., 268
woman, & infant in one, 88
Man’s prudery almost fatal, 80
causes many murders, 157

Mandatory of society, 222, 233, 235, 238
Manner of life of and., 200, 224, 257, 264
“Manon Lescaut”, 151
Many fem.-imp. expl., 240
Mardi gras, 184
Marriage covers sins, 218
of and., 20, 29, 31, 217
Marry, androgynes not to, 20, 205
Martin, 118
Masked ball, 157, 182 ff.
Match-heads eaten, 255
Maternal instincts, 177
McDonald, B., 116, 119 if., 275
Medical exam., 250, 260, 261
superstition, 20
MEDICAL LIFE, 262
MEDICAL REV. OF REVIEWS, 262
MEDICO-LEGAL JOURNAL, vii ff., 4
Melancholia of and., 44, 62, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76 ff., 80, 101, 103, 104,
195, 201, 202, 209, 239, 252, 254
Menopause, 166
of author, 166, 167
Men-women: See Gynanders.
Methodists, 117, 193
Method of robbery, 140 ff.
Michelangelo, 32, 37, 38, 161, 215, 216
Mildly androgynous, 18, 151
virile, 11, 220, 221

Military prison, 257
Millinery of and., 200, 268
Miners, 253
Misanthrope, making a, 192
Missionary work of author, xi, 1, 2, 81, 167, 245
Mistresses, 253
“Mith Nighty”, 157
Modesty of girl-boys, 64, 68
Mohawk valley, 132, 138
Moll, Dr. A., 17
Mollie Dale, 155 ff.
Monandry not for and., 182
“Monsters”, 1, 42, 180, 191, 222, 233, 238, 244, 252, 254
“Monte Carlo”, 120, 126 ff.
Morality of and., 49, 51, 180, 222
of Christians, 196
Morgue, 260
Moron, 83, 90
Most and. ultra-relig., 43
shelt., 2
went to bad, 55
Mr. Skirt, 186 ff.
Mulberry St., 103, 138
Murder motive in loathing of and., 157, 232
Murdered by a guest, 227, 229, 234, 250
Murderer (consc.), 235, 249
mand. of soc., 222, 233, 235, 238

Murd. and. not necessary, 254
Murders of and., viii, 1, 142, 149, 157, 162, 208, 221 ff., 227, 231, 235, 237
ff., 254, 256, 259 ff.
Muscles of author, 84
My life’s motto, 77
tempta. hardly eq., 78
Myers, Abraham, 121, 124 ff.

Nabob. by and., 236, 256, 257
Names of and., 93, 100, 101, 151, 157, 176, 219
Nathan’s parable, 147
Nations, decline of, 45
Natural monogamy, 12
polygamy, 10
Nature indic. rear. as girl, 65
to be blamed, 163
Nature’s nobleman, 254
Neckties, 104, 260
New York Harbor, 237
Beau Brummel, 115 ff.
Newton, Isaac, 14
No alcohol, no ven. dis., 110
Non-congenital homos., ix
Non-resist. of and., 206, 241, 248
Non-segregation, 161
Not cause decl. nat., 47
Not willingly half-and-h., 201
Now man, now woman, 3, 190

Nursing by and., 255
Nymph. (psy.), 60, 169, 257

Obed. to Nat. gave peace, 101
Occupations of and., 16, 43
Onanism, 12, 83
Onanists (mutual), 20
One offence of and., 50
Opposites attract, 258
Outcast and., 159
Outlook on life at 11, 67
Over-conscientiousness, 71, 220

Parents killed by offs., 254
take time for children!, 165
Parents’ duty, 60, 61
Paresis, 148
Hall, 146 ff., 181
“Pass. pederast, biog. of”, 266
Pathics, 60
Paul (author’s soul-mate), 118
Paul, St., 14
Pederasty (active), 20
(passive), 20, 266
Pedro, 126 ff.
Perennial youth of and., 91, 151, 228, 255
Persecution of and., 149, 180, 193, 197, 244, 246, 251, 261

Personality (dual), 92, 97, 101, 102, 112, 119
Petits-jesus, 51, 147
Phariseeism of public, 4, 11, 23, 159 ff., 181, 193, 252
Phyllis, 153, 198 ff.
antecedents, 200
finds herself, 206, 207
passes on, 221
Physicians
dicta, 16, 49, 74, 143, 149, 204, 220 ff.
narrowminded, 144
Physique of author, 84, 89, 108
Plato, 27, 29, 37, 161
Plat. mar. of and., 166, 217, 239
Plum, 159 ff.
Plumpness of and., 20
Policeman, 213, 247, 260
Portrait painter, 215
Potiphar’s wife, 220
Poultry bisexuality, 24
Predest. of aut. to career, 79, 80
Present soc. rules inadeq., 57
Prince Pansy, 151
Prodigy (muscular), 134 ff.
Professional life of author, 90 ff., 253, 255
Promisc. and., 182, 235, 255
Prostitutes, 253
Provid. compens. aut., 58, 256
praised, 73, 113, 143

Prudery, 40, 61, 220, 228, 238, 245, 256
murders, 149, 225, 227, 235, 245, 253
Pseudo-hermaphrodites, 21
Psyche, author’s, 89
Psych. effem., degrees, 240
hermaphrodites, 19, 239
Psychop. individuality, 238
Public opinion guilty, 245
Publicity would remove a world of woe, 197
Pug Heaven, 175 ff.
Pugilists’ Haven, 171 ff.
Punishments for and., 144
Puritanism of and., 45, 106, 118, 249
Pussie (origin of name), 94

Q Apartments, 224
Q’s murder, 3, 259 ff.

“Rabbit”, 205 ff.
Race suicide, 49, 161, 196
“Ralph Werther”, origin, 93, 94
Raphael, 33, 49, 93, 161
Rare find, 135
Rebellion, War of, 255
Recogn., mutual, of and., 158
Recogn. after 16 yrs., 255
Regimentals overpowering, 210

Rejec. from Chr. ministry, 80
Relat. ashamed prosec., 246
Religiosity of and., 43, 73, 143, 191
Religious prodigy, author was, 70, 73, 76, 77, 79, 143
Reporters, 248
Resourceful and., 176, 181
Reticence, sex, 167, 168, 222, 239, 245, 259
Reubs, 119 ff.
Rialto: See Fourteenth St.
RIDDLE OF UNDERWORLD, 4, 59, 98, 103, 114, 118, 123, 204
Robbers’ vic. 200 times, 141
Robbery, 140, 173, 176, 230, 232, 234, 256, 261
Rockies, 252, 253, 258
Roland Reeves, 150 ff., 158 ff., 164, 208
Ropes, 249

Sadder but wiser “Reub”, 129
Sailors, 172 ff., 230, 240, 249
Saint Paul’s sex teachings, 14
School days (author’s), 63, 82
Seance with a burglar, 139
Secret guest, 231
Segregation of and., 161
Sex bigotry: See Bigotry
doctrine of Bible, 13, 14, 15, 44, 73
domain ruled by bias, 163
expression in childhood, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 78

fourth, 98
influences of childhood, 165
instinct’s decline, 165
intensity, cause of, 78, 164, 165
scale, 22
Sexology tabooed: See Reticence
Sexual insanity, 137
precocity, 64
the worst crippling, 2
Shakespeare-author, 34, 37, 38
problem, 35
Shame of and.’s rel., 245, 246
Shufeldt, Dr. R. W., 82, 89, 110, 266
Sikhs, 48
Simul. life as 3 persons, 92
Sing Sing, 196, 202
Skeleton of author, 84
Social elite, 265
Sociology, aut’s contr., 96
Socrates, 28, 37, 161
Sodomites, 45, 146, 223, 238
Softness of and., 66, 84 ff., 254, 255
Soldiers, 11, 30, 31, 47, 79, 87, 104, 210, 226, 233, 255 ff.
“Soldiers’ Friend”, 89
Solut. of gyn. disapp., 156
Sons (“adopted”), 187, 214, 257, 258
Songs of fairie, 133, 269
Soprano voice of and., 267

Soul-mate of author (lifelong in dreamland), 54
Spencer, Herbert, 14
Spermatorrhea, 83
Spiritual auto. of author, 73
“Squirrel”, 207
Stamping grounds of and., 226
Stigmata of and., 19, 100, 151, 199, 231, 250, 255, 259, 264, 265, 267
Strangling of and., 232 ff., 237 ff., 242, 249
Struggling to save reason, 143
Stuyvesant Sq., 113, 130 ff.
Suetonius, 37
Suicide of and., viii, 1, 62, 68, 74, 195, 209, 237 ff., 251 ff., 254, 255, 260
Super-men
are and.?, 37
Supreme man, 136, 145
woman, 212
Susa, 114

Talk of and., 153 ff.
Temperance only salv., 59
Tenderloin (Broadway), 104, 125, 226
Testicular secretion, 16, 149
Things not what seem, 119
Throwing act of and., 65, 67, 267
Tobacco, 152
“Tombs” (N. Y. City), 194 ff., 262
Tony Neddo, 186 ff., 193, 197

Torture of and., method, 244, 261. See also under Persecution.
Tracy, 126 ff.
Transform, not bargained, 173
Tremend. vir., 7, 107, 122, 221
attitude toward and., 172, 176, 186 ff., 201, 206, 221, 235, 253, 256
Trilogy (author’s), 3
Trusted murderer, 234
26th to 32d yrs. of aut., 89 ff.
Two handwritings, 95

Ulrichs, K. H., 38
Ultra-androgynous, 19
crim. court employee, 93
unexpected happens, 138
virile, 9
Underworld’s sec. confi. aut., 5
Union Square, 226
University and., 103 ff., 118, 158, 180
author expelled from, 95
“Urning” term, 38

Value of erotic pleasure, 72
Village fairie, 71
Virile: See Tremend. v. & ultra-v.
Virility confers bravery, 255
Visage aut. most marred, 144
Visit to Ft. Y in 1921, 255
Voice of author, 86, 111

Walt Whitman, 30, 36, 37, 255
War and and., 30, 32, 87, 255
Warning to and., 206
Whistling, 267
Wilde, Oscar, 18, 28, 49
Witch-burning, 41
Weapons a fetish, 224
Wee girl-boy’s outlook, 62
“Werther”, origin, 93
Why androgynes are hated, 45
an Underworld, 6
Wig, 202, 217, 265, 268
Wiles of and., 158, 181, 239, 240, 241, 251
Womanlike, author, 86, 87
Woman-man, the, 213
Woman-soul, 253
Woman’s toil, bent, 227, 257, 268
World War, 255
Wyoming, 254

“X and wife”, 158
X offenceless, 236
X’s murder, 223 ff.
Xenophon, 29

Y offenceless, 236

Y’s murder, 231 ff.
Yearning for feminine attire, 267. See also Cross-dressing.

Z of and. physique, 250
Z’s fate, aut’s foretaste, 251
murder, 237 ff.
woman’s apparel, 248

1. Continental European civilizations are, on this subject, a half-century ahead of Anglo-
American.

2. See Part VI, chapter III.

3. A physician of wide experience who read the above before publication argued that in the
United States, only five per cent are mildly virile. I stand unconvinced that my proportion is in error.
The proportion surely differs with racial types and environment. The physician has always lived in
New York City and practiced among liberal-minded, non-church, pleasure-loving people of Teutonic
or Latin parentage. My own every-day associates, particularly in the village where I was brought up
and which I still frequently visit, have been, almost entirely, ultra-puritan Anglo-Saxons. When I
maintained their sexual temperance, the physician declared them hypocrites, whose secret practice is
the same as “worldlings.” I have been intimately acquainted with hundreds of these male puritan
church-devotees, and am convinced they are hypocrites solely in supposing their sexual moderation
due to their own superior morals. Sex has naturally small place in their lives.

4. Do not confuse with anaphrodites the excessively rare men who are attracted by female
beauty and manners, marry, but then desire merely Platonic relations. Such are rather cases of
impotence. The genuine anaphrodite never even courts a woman.

5. The author has always preferred to read biography to fiction. If his life is spared, he will write
an extensive work on the sexuality of noted men and women. An unusually large proportion of
geniuses have been either anaphrodites or androgynes. For example, Sir Isaac Newton and Immanuel
Kant appear to have been anaphrodites.

6. I take no stock in the theory advanced by some medical writers that androgynism (generally
termed male sexual inversion) is acquired and not congenital. The exceptional method of sexual
expression can be acquired only by individuals congenitally on the very borderline between
androgynes on the one hand and anaphrodites or mildly virile on the other. The latest proponent of
the “acquired” theory, Dr. P. M. Lichtenstein, in the August, 1921, issue of MEDICAL REVIEW OF
REVIEWS, suggests that masturbation in boyhood may produce in adulthood a fairie or ultra-
androgyne. In my physical prime, I was a fairie of extreme type. I never masturbated as a child or as
an adult because of acute horror. My own pudenda never had any part in my sexual ardor—any more
than had my vermiform appendix.
Dr. Lichtenstein’s suggestion of the correction by parents of feminine predilections in small
boys is futile. Those feminesque traits, when congenital, as I believe they always are in ultra-
androgynes, can not be suppressed. Likewise his advice that the adolescent girl-boy seek the
company of the gentle sex as a cure is as futile. In my teens, I forced myself to it, but it had not the
least curative value.
Note Added in Galley: I just came across a scrap of a recent NEW YORK WORLD Sunday
magazine, containing “Glands That Govern Our Lives”, name of author missing. I quote: “The not
uncommon phenomena of the smooth-faced man with a feminine voice and a figure resembling that
of a woman, and of the deep-voiced, hairy-faced masculine woman, are produced by abnormalities in
the development of these glands.” Only in the third decade of the twentieth century is the
comparatively new branch of medical science, endocrinology (the study of glands, particularly the
ductless) coming forward to maintain the irresponsibility of “homosexualists” for their idiosyncrasy.
It has also only just been brought into the limelight that the testicles are invigorating (as well as
masculinizing) to the individual possessing them and the prime reason for man’s being physically
stronger than woman. I myself, for several years after castration at the age of twenty-seven, observed