Fairie Adventures in Europe.
I now spent five months in Europe with my employer. I was generally free evenings, and during our stay in the large cities, spent two or three a week with beaux that I came across. I had considerable conversational ability in four foreign languages. In Paris I generally spent my evenings with the adolescent porters of the Gare St. Lazare, and in Berlin with soldiers whom I met in the Tiergarten. Because of indiscretions, I came near being arrested in Berlin and in Naples. In only one instance in Europe was an attempt made to extort money from me, and I yielded rather than get into trouble.
My flirtations in Europe were uneventful. I had to be far more cautious there for fear of getting into trouble, and associate with my beaux clad as a prosperous citizen. As they necessarily knew that I was a person of attainments much higher than the average, I was restrained from going far in impersonation of a young woman or a baby. I found that throughout the large cities, fairies were as well known to the ultra-virile adolescents as in New York, and the latter were equally susceptible to the advances of the former.
In my unusually wide travels in America, I have never been accosted by a pervert or an invert. But during my five months’ sojourn in Europe, I was one evening accosted in one of the great capitals by a fairie sixteen years of age, and in another I was accosted in a park by an urning of twenty-six (that is, a man who craved mutual onanism). My impression is that the inhabitants of the large cities of Europe are more sex-mad than those of American cities of similar size. In one of the great capitals (which I do not name out of charity) inversion and perversion were frightful—incomparably more open, at least, than in New York. It was my impression that there is more evanescent homosexuality—due to lack of opportunities with the opposite sex—than in America. Apparently the denser the population, the more widely extended is homosexuality.
Sexual Impressions of Europe.
In 1899 I was attracted by the German and the Dutch soldiers, but incomparably less than by the American soldier. They did not appear to be as powerfully built or as handsome, nor as wild and reckless. Their uniforms impressed me as far less fascinating. I was not at all attracted by the French soldiers, because I did not like their uniform, particularly the red baggy trousers, and because facial hirsute appendages are decidedly abhorrent to me. Likewise the British, Swiss, and Italian uniforms impressed me as detracting from the masculinity of the wearer instead of powerfully contributing to it, as the American uniform. The German, Dutch, and particularly the American soldiers were the only ones that came up to my idea of demigods.
On a sojourn in the Old World in 1911, I found myself admiring the Moroccan, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian soldiers to about the same degree as I have always admired the American. Indeed the Russians impressed me as the most bewitching in the world, because they are the most gigantic and the most savage-looking. I now came also to find the British and the Italian uniforms rather attractive, but liked the French and Swiss no better than before. In this later lengthy sojourn, I did not once seek a beau, and had only feeble desires to do so, whereas twelve years before I had a fierce, irresistible, obsession to be with them as much as possible. But most of all, I was restrained by the presence of my employer, who left me no good opportunity to seek other company.
First Half of Open Career Ends.
After holding my position as private secretary during my middle twenties for over two years, I was compelled to resign because a tradesman’s driver who frequently delivered goods at the house of my employer chanced to identify me while two ruffians were demanding blackmail on the Bowery. I was denounced to the truck-driver as a ——. Several years afterward I learned that knowledge of the incident probably never reached my employer.