The Author at Forty-four.
Arrived in my 45th year and at practically the close of my vita sexualis, my advice to the youthful invert just embarking on the journey of life is not to be disheartened over his fate. Nature, as in my own case, will bestow compensating boons for her harshness in this one respect. If instinct is strong, it is advisable to follow it in moderation. But it should hold only a secondary place in life. It should be remembered that Nature exacts a penalty in the shape of impaired vigor of mind and body for practically every sexual indulgence—and perhaps as much of the normally sexed as of her stepchildren, the congenitally abnormal. Consider whether indulgence is worth the cost in health.
In My 45th Year.
Comparing in 1918 my sexual lot with that of the normal male, I feel that in the matter of the vita sexualis, Nature has been kind to me. She has compensated me for the unusual amount of suffering bound up with the life of the outcast androgyne.
Comparing my sexual lot with that of the normal woman who bears children, I feel of course that she stands on a much higher plane. Her functioning has an exalted end, the perpetuation of the race, and is attended with infinitely more self-sacrifice than is the androgyne’s.
Why does Nature make approximately one out of every 300 physical males an androgyne or passive invert? The practice of the ancient Romans, as well as my own experience and that of other androgynes whom I have known, suggests the answer. All patrician fathers of ancient Rome provided androgyne slaves as concubines of their adolescent sons. Marriage with a woman put an absolute end to these relations. In the case of myself and my androgyne acquaintances, practically no man beyond the age of 26 ever sought or permitted relations. The function appears to be to fill in the period between the arrival at puberty and the arrival at the age when it is possible to beget unblemished offspring. With the ultra-virile adolescent, it is often a choice between solitary onanism and androgynous relations.
Year 1918.
As this autobiography goes to press in my 45th year, my health is unchanged from what it has been since castration at the age of 28. I am rather feeble, almost a semi-invalid, averaging two days a week when I am in a state of mental and physical collapse. I am, however, an unusually hard worker in my profession during my comparatively well intervals. I have achieved the average business success that comes to university graduates notwithstanding my semi-invalidism and effeminacy. Particularly business has caused me to mingle intimately to a large extent with the very highest class of society, just as my lot has been to mingle intimately and to a large extent with those at the very bottom of the social scale.
As to my personal appearance in my middle forties, my youthfulness is still often commented upon. Recently a new acquaintance, twelve years younger than myself, remarked that he would have taken me, “as for the oldest possible, for twelve years younger than” I really am. I am inclined to think that preservation of a youthful appearance down to middle life is a common characteristic of androgynes. As they are affected more or less with psychical infantilism, this mental trait is likely thus to betray itself somewhat in the physical form. An adult androgyne of my acquaintance has conspicuously the form of skull and face of an infant. Another androgyne acquaintance appears at fifty-five to be under thirty when viewed from a distance of forty feet, but close by his face is seen to be covered with very fine wrinkles such as appear in the face of an ordinary individual only when past the age of eighty.