Like immigrants from foreign lands, for these people are aliens in their own, they attract—more often send for and finance—those who speak their language and live their kind of lives. Congressman A. L. Miller, of Nebraska, a physician, author of the District’s new bill to regulate the homos, enunciated with an oratorical flourish the deathless statement that, “birds of a feather flock together.” William Jennings Bryan came from Nebraska, too.
The 6,000 who made the perennial payroll drew many more thousands who flunked it. Like pug-nosed, freckle-faced girls of no distinction, who become waitresses and car-hops, these inverts who are washed in with the tide and beached in the mud become clerks in shops, hairdressers, waiters, bartenders, most often in the places habitually patronized by those of their own stripe.
The Washington vice squad had listed 5,200 known deviates. Dr. Ben Karpen, psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, believes they are in the tens of thousands.
Their chief meeting place is in leafy Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. They make love under the equestrian statue of rugged Andrew Jackson, who must be whirling on his heavenly horse every time he sees what is going on around his monument. Lafayette Square is no bohemian section, like Washington Square in New York. The three sides not surrounded by the White House have such buildings as the Cosmos Club, formerly the home of Dolly Madison; the national headquarters of the League for Political Education of the American Federation of Labor; the Hay-Adams House, one of Washington’s finer hotels, and other dignified structures.
How the fairies happened to pick this place for their rendezvous, and how the cops let them get away with it, no one can trace.
The police keep making arrests, but it does not deter the homos from hanging out around the square. They make pick-ups there and quite often engage in immoral acts practically under the eyes of the sparrow cops.
They also foregather in Franklin Park, a few blocks away, in the center of the business district.
There is no geographic section where degenerates generally live. That is part of the general picture, everything, everywhere, in Washington.
Many rich fairies and lesbians live in expensive remodeled Georgetown homes, the nearest thing to a left-bank neighborhood. This is also a left-wing center.
Some parties which take place in Washington pervert sets are orgies beyond description and imagination. Every invention of Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade has been added to and improved upon, and is in daily use. Weekends find the pansies and lady-lovers on broad, baronial estates of wealthy perverts in nearby Virginia and Maryland. Many of the third sex journey regularly to New York, where they have friends in esoteric circles.