15. GARDEN OF PANSIES
If you’re wondering where your wandering semi-boy is tonight, he’s probably in Washington.
The good people shook their heads in disbelief with the revelation that more than 90 twisted twerps in trousers had been swished out of the State Department. Fly commentators seized on it for gags about fags, whimsy with overtones of Kinsey and the odor of lavender. We pursued the subject and we found that there are at least 6,000 homosexuals on the government payroll, most of them known, and these comprise only a fraction of the total of their kind in the city.
The only way to get authoritative data on fairies is from other fairies. They recognize each other by a fifth sense immediately, and they are intensely gregarious. One cannot snoop at every desk and count people who appear queer. Some are deceptive to the uninitiated. But they all know one another and they have a grapevine of intercommunication as swift and sure as that in a girls’ boarding school. Since they have no use for women in the main, and are uneasy with masculine men, they have a fierce urge, even beyond the call of the physical, for each other’s society. They have their own hangouts, visit one another, and cling together in a tight union of interests and behavior.
Not all are ashamed of the trick that nature played on them. They have their leaders, unabashed, who are proud queens and who revel in their realm. Your reporters, after years around show business, are familiar with those of their breed, unembarrassed in their presence. But, with the exception of crude male prostitutes whom they have encountered in police courts and on the sidewalks of New York’s Lexington Avenue and in Harlem, they still had a whisper of an illusion left: they got the idea, because they had met so many with marked talent, that by a pathological compensation many of them possessed artistic traits.
In Washington they found this false. The exceptional ones do drift to Broadway and to Hollywood. But they are no more representative of their numbers than are the gifted men and women who find their places in the arts of the great mass of people from whom they become detached to follow the livelier professions.
Now we have found out where the dull, dumb deviates go. We had assumed that, as they grew up in small communities where they soon became obvious and odious, they took flight for the stage, the screen, interior decorating, exotic literature and other fields centered in the metropolitan market-places. That is not true. Only a few can and do enter the avenues where their talents make them equal, often superior.
So, what becomes of the marked twilight-sex, unwelcome at home, pariahs afar? We might ask what becomes of the club-footed or pock-marked girl similarly situated. She is in a panic about the present, still more so about the future, and she searches for security. Where can that be captured? Nowhere else as surely as in the civil service. There, in the mediocrity and virtual anonymity of commonplace tasks, the sexes—all four of them—are equal in the robot requirements and qualifications. There is no color line, no social selectivity; not even citizenship is always a prerequisite. Once the precious appointment is filed in a machine which knows no discrimination, there it stays for life.