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 publishers. But they refused to do anything |Enemies of Truth and Justice.| toward 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, I was fated to be a Nature-appointed |Author Repository for Underworld’s Secrets.| amateur 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 particularly immoral. Conditions |Why an Underworld.| 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.”