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 |Making a Misanthrope.| certain of nothing in this life except the passing moment. I even do not 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 handsome youthful |Immorality a Novelty in New York.| detective to enmesh me. 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 subterfuge and endeavored by every |Intellectual Aristocrat Browbeaten by Plebeians.| means to betray me into confession of the secrets of my 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 years of such depression. |Absurd Legal Superstitions.| But, as you see, Ralph, it 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 tormenting |Publicity Would Remove a World of Woe.| people whose views differed from their 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.