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 |Is Bisexuality the Worst of Crimes?| a grave one as to cause sexually full-fledged Pharisees to lift up their own rotten hands in holy horror—was, as indicated, female-impersonation during their evenings at the resort. A psychological and not an ethical phenomenon! For ethically the “Hall’s” distinctive clientele were congenital goody-goodies, incapable (by disposition) of ever inflicting the least detriment on a single soul. They were of the type in the United States, by every-day associates totally ignorant of the secret sexual practices of Nature’s step-children, denominated “innocents;” and in France, “little Jesuses” even though in that country their sexual character is an open book, since there the sexual appetite is regarded as no more shameworthy than the alimentary. But the “Hall’s” distinctive clientele were bitterly hated, and finally scattered by the police, merely because of their congenital bisexuality. The sexually full-fledged were crying for blood (of innocents), as did the “unco’ good” in the days of witch-burning. Bisexuals must be crushed—right or wrong! The subject does not permit investigation! The fact that it is race suicide justifies the denial of all mercy! Let Juggernaut’s car crush out their lives!
It was Nathan’s parable of the ewe lamb all over again. (Second Book of Samuel, chapter 12.) The full-fledged had innumerable opportunities for the satisfaction of their instincts. Androgynes had only “the Hall” with the exception of three or four slum resorts frequented by only the lowest class of bisexuals who had never known anything better than slum life.
Why deprive cultured androgynes of their solitary rendezvous in the New York metropolitan district and |Homosexuals No Worse Than Heterosexuals.| give carte blanche 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. The prevalent diagnosis, by physicians, |Cause of Androgynism.| of androgynism as insanity is as rational as for a male alienist to pronounce all women insane because their psyche differs radically from his own. As already stated, androgynism is a mere matter of arrested development, due to imperfect internal testicular secretion, in the natural sex differentiation that begins in the early fœtus and ends at puberty. This arrest has for its result an adult homo more or less bisexual—a sexual intermediate, whose existence the bigotry of the leaders of thought has hitherto prevented their recognizing.
At the university, the student is taught all about the anatomy of the frog, but the prevalent view among the leaders of thought that everything connected with sex is taboo has prevented even the professors of physiology from investigating androgynism, which touches the social body so intimately. They have turned their backs because “the subject leaves a bad taste in the mouth!”
You milk-and-water hypocrites! Is it nothing to you that innocent androgynes are pining in prison an aggregate of thousands of years, and being continually murdered by prudes, like Harvey Green, because you have taught them that no punishment is too bad for so-called “homosexuality”? For prudery is common to some ultra-criminals and to the leaders of thought.[[36]] In the sight of God, you latter, when deliberately refusing to hearken to the wailing of bitterly persecuted |Leaders of Thought Are Murderers.| androgynes, are morally on a par with Harvey Green and the murderers of X, Y, and “Jimmie Q”, the latter being three bisexuals whose cases are outlined at the close of this volume.
Paresis Hall was never my own headquarters. I visited it only now and then. I had too early become wedded to the “Hotel” Comfort. Moreover, I wandered more widely, and in some respects flaunted my androgynism to a greater extent, than any other female-impersonator of my day. I took greater chances than any other, except in the appearing in public places in feminine apparel, but was never arrested in the Rialto because always careful never to render myself liable. Never for a moment did I forget the possibility of being arrested. I was even hypersensitive in this matter. A common dream was that of being arrested. But this hypersensitiveness probably saved me, since others of my type were continuously being arrested and sent to the penitentiary. But the cultured androgyne is almost never caught by the police. Only those of poor mentality.
On one of my earliest visits to Paresis Hall—about January, 1895—I seated myself alone at one of the tables. I had only recently learned that it was the androgyne headquarters—or “fairie” as it was called at the time. Since Nature had consigned me to that class, I was anxious to meet as many examples as possible. As I took my seat, I did not recognize a single acquaintance among the several score young bloods, soubrettes, and androgynes chatting and drinking in the beer-garden.
In a few minutes, three short, smooth-faced young men approached and introduced themselves as Roland |Earmarks of Androgynism.| Reeves, Manon Lescaut, and Prince Pansy—aliases, because few refined androgynes would be so rash as to betray their legal name in the Underworld. Not alone from their names, but also from their loud apparel, the timbre of their voices, their frail physique, and their feminesque mannerisms, I discerned they were androgynes. Indeed effeminacy stuck out all over Prince Pansy. Manon Lescaut’s only conspicuous anatomical feminesqueness was extraordinary breadth of hips. While Reeves’ trunk and legs were not so feminine, he excelled in womanly features, with such marine-blue eyes and pink-peony cheeks as any beholder regretted should be wasted on a member (?) of the sterner sex. Moreover, Reeves alone, of the two score ultra-androgynes that I at different times met at Paresis Hall, was naturally beardless.
While Roland, Manon, and the “Prince” looked to be between twenty and twenty-five, I later ascertained the first mentioned was thirty-seven. As already observed, perennial youth is an earmark of ultra-androgynism.
Roland was chief speaker. The essence of his remarks was something like the following: “Mr. Werther—or Jennie June, as doubtless you prefer to be addressed—I have seen you at the Hotel Comfort, but you were always engaged. A score of us have formed a little club, the Cercle Hermaphroditos. For we need to unite for defense against the world’s bitter persecution of bisexuals. We care to admit only extreme types—such as like to doll themselves up in feminine finery. We sympathize with, but do not care to be intimate with, the mild types, some of whom you |The Cercle Hermaphroditos.| see here to-night even wearing a disgusting beard! Of course they do not wear it out of liking. They merely consider it a lesser evil than the horrible razor or excruciating wax mask.
“We ourselves are in the detested trousers because having only just arrived. We keep our feminine wardrobe in lockers upstairs so that our every-day circles can not suspect us of female-impersonation. For they have such an irrational horror of it!”
On the basis of different visits to an upper room permanently rented by the Cercle Hermaphroditos, I am going to build up a typical hour’s conversation in order to disclose into what channels the thoughts of ultra-androgynes run when half-a-score find themselves together. The reason for its unnatural ring is that I omit the nine-tenths that were prattle, retaining only the cream that I consider of scientific value.
It was about eight o’clock on an evening of April, 1895. Some of the hermaphroditoi were still in male apparel; some changing to feminine evening dress and busy with padding and the powder-puff; some in their completed evening toilette ready to descend to the beer-garden below to await a young-blood friend.
I do not recall that a single hermaphroditos was man enough to use tobacco, or even to spit. They affected foreign languages, particularly French. I recall one whose favorite method in beginning a conversation was: “Mes cheris, qu’est ce que c’est que vous savez de nouvelles?”
A second: “Have you observed the new styles? Very |Androgyne Talk.| narrow skirts,[[37]] and very large hats. The material saved on the skirt goes into the chapeau.”
“Nothing could be more beautiful,” Angelo—Phyllis, the most effeminate of the hermaphroditoi, opined softly and sweetly, “than a feminine face framed in a picture hat set sidewise, with rim reaching below the shoulders. How I do like to stalk Fourteenth Street myself with such a chapeau![[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 |A Gynander’s Fate.| stupidity of some women! This actress has just divorced her husband and is looking around for a new alliance. If I happened to have been born a marrying man, I could make her my wife, although all the 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 |Gynanders Love Androgynes.| police my theory. They likewise thought it absurd and refused to investigate along the lines I suggested.
“When some mannish women find it impossible to marry an effeminate man, they adopt some petite cry-baby woman as their soul-mate. The papers stated that the last trace of Mollie Dale was her carrying away from O’Neil’s several purchases. The latter immediately struck me as such alone as a gallant would buy to present his lady-love. When I told the police, they said: ‘Absurd! Who ever heard of one woman being in love with another!’
“On leaving O’Neil’s, Mollie Dale absolutely dropped out of sight for all time. It was as if the earth had suddenly yawned for her body and closed again so rapidly as to be unseen by the people nearby. Or as if she, absent-minded, had stepped into an open sewer man-hole and no one happened at the moment to have his eyes on the spot.
“My theory, hermaphroditoi, is that Mollie went right from O’Neil’s to her cry-baby chum’s. Probably within walking distance, because every soul in New York was asked through the newspapers over and over again if they had met on any public conveyance the morning of Mollie’s dropping out of sight a young lady of her description, so detailed as to give even the pattern of her shoes, besides her much published photographs. Her disappearance was at the time the seven-days wonder of New York and every one was discussing it.
“The rule with men-women[[40]]—as with us women-men—is |Solution of Mollie’s Disappearance.| never to breathe to any one of their every-day circle a word about their sweethearts because of the misunderstanding and horror evidenced by people ignorant of psychology. As a rule the soul-mates of us better-class bisexuals belong to a much lower social stratum. Very likely Mollie’s lived in one of the thousands of tumbledown tenements within walking distance of O’Neil’s.
“According to my theory, hermaphroditoi—and I have seen a hundred times more of life than the average man, and possess some sense notwithstanding people not knowing me well set me down as only a high-grade idiot because of my outward frivolousness and an unfortunate infantile carriage—the cry-baby’s husband or father had only just learned of what he, as well as ninety-nine out of every hundred men, mistakenly regarded as the horribly corrupting influence of the poor martyr Mollie on the hare-brained cry-baby. Ignorant that men-women are victims of birth and that their so-called ‘depravity’ brings not the least harm to any one, and insanely angry with Mollie into the bargain, he that very morning bludgeoned her in his apartment. And he happened to succeed in disposing of the corpse.
“I thought of Mollie when last week the papers told about an unrecognizable female body, bent double, having been found in a trunk filled with salt that for two years had rested unclaimed in the trunk-room of the third-class Hotel X—just the type that a tenement-dweller would select to harbor such a trunk. The murderer was evidently a meat-packer, familiar with the processes of salting down.
“In such strange ways a continuous string of both |Man’s Prudery Causes Many Murders.| men-women and women-men are being struck down in New York for no other reason than loathing for those born bisexual. And public opinion forbids the publication of the facts of bisexuality, which, if generally known, would put an end to these mysterious murders of innocents.”
“Hello, Mith Nighty!” several called as one of the tallest, oldest, and most brunette of the hermaphroditoi entered the Cercle’s dressing-room. The androgyne who had adopted the name of a romantic woman had, during his twenties, before becoming thick-set, been a female-impersonator on the vaudeville stage.
“Mith Nighty!” one of the youngest hermaphroditoi shouted in a falsetto. “Queenie and I want you to coach us in female-impersonation. Next Friday at the Masked Ball we make our debut as public 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 feminine legs are monstrosities! If you’ll pardon |Common Androgyne 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, |An Androgyne Outcast.| but think only the scum of mankind could be guilty. Impossible in the case of a high-minded intellectual!
“Here’s Plum. Plumkin, you look as if you had lost your last friend!”
The 23-year Mollie Coddle sobbed: “Everything looks dark. Two days ago I was fired. I have hardly slept a wink since. I have hope for the future only in the grave. Some bigot denounced me to the boss. He called me into his private office. As this had never happened before, I guessed the reason....”
Plum outlined his conference. I have listened to several similar confessions. The following is a composite.
Plum: “I confess to being a woman-man and throw myself upon your mercy.”
Fairsea: “That confession is sufficient, and proves you an undesirable person to have around!”
Plum: “It will be hard to find a new job, since I have been with you for five years and must depend on your recommendation.”
Fairsea: “Knowing your nature, Plum, I could not recommend you even to shovel coal into a furnace!”
Plum: “But you have steadily advanced me for five years! Why should to-day’s discovery make any difference in your opinion of my business ability?”
Fairsea with a sneer: “An invert ought to leave brain work for others! He ought to exhaust himself on a farm from sunrise to sunset so that the psychic movings would be next to non-existent. He should pass his life in the back woods; not in a city. He has no |Bigotry Unparallelled.| right in the front ranks of civilization where his abnormality is so out of place!”
Plum: “You mean that he should commit intellectual and social suicide in obedience to the 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.
“How do you define ‘depraved’, Mr. Fairsea? |Reasons for Non-Segregation.| If in such a way as to exclude Socrates, Plato, Michael Angelo, and Raphael, then you exclude me also.”
Fairsea: “But the phenomenon works against the multiplication of the human race. Nature, with this in view, instilled in all but the scum of mankind this utter disgust for the invert. To the end of the continued existence of the race, he must be condemned to a life of unsatisfied longing. For this reason he should be imprisoned for life, not for only ten or twenty years as the statutes now provide!
“We strictly segregate diphtheria and scarlet fever, Plum. Why should we not similarly quarantine against inversion?”
Plum: “Because there is a vast difference. Contagious disease, if not strictly segregated, would occasion death and acute suffering to many additional persons. Whereas the bisexuals’ being at liberty occasions not the least detriment to any individual, nor to the race as a whole.
“A second reason: The quarantining of contagious disease is only a matter of shutting up a few persons for a few weeks in their own homes. It causes no serious privation or suffering. Whereas the segregation of bisexuals would affect for a 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 have put |Leaders of Thought Ignore Evidence.| three wives under the sod through your beastly, excessive demands!
“Can it be that you shut your eyes to all evidence? Do ocular proofs count for nothing? Hasn’t the human race survived the best decades of classic Greece? While the Greeks are acknowledged by all modern historians to have attained the highest development of mind and body ever known, they at the same time gave to the women-men who happened to be born among them—as among all races of all ages—an honorable place. And by far more place, both in their personal and social life, than in the case of any other nation of the ancient or modern world.”
Fairsea: “But I had hoped that the human race had evolved above this phenomenon! I hate to believe it of the human race! Because the phenomenon lowers humanity down to the lowest levels of animal life! I——”
Plum: “So does eating!”
Fairsea: “I detest it! My disgust is innermost and deepseated! To begin now to show any mercy to the invert, after having for two thousand years confined him in dungeons, burned him at the stake, and buried him alive, would be a backward step in the evolution of the race!
“Plum, the invert is not fit to live with the rest of mankind! He should be shunned as the lepers of biblical times! If generously allowed outside prison walls, the law should at least ordain that the word ‘UNCLEAN’ be branded in his forehead, and should compel him to cry: ‘UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!’ as he walks the streets, lest his very brushing against decent people contaminate them!”
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.