“J. W. ... is a fairie from the slums of Brooklyn, N. Y. ... twenty-three years of age. When fourteen ... the lobes of his ears had been pierced ... for ear-rings, and these ornaments he commonly wears when dressed in female attire.... He invited my attention to the fine development of his breasts, whereas there was not the slightest evidence of gynecomasty.... The impression was left upon my mind that he was morphologically male in all particulars.... I became thoroughly convinced that the man was laboring under ... a most extraordinary delusion.... He claimed to have his menses regularly every month.... [Evidently bleeding piles.]
“In July he admitted that he had never been pregnant; while in November, when he brought with him one of his numerous ‘husbands’ or lovers, he claimed |Yearning for Feminine Attire.| that he had been pregnant a few years previously and been operated on in a hospital and the conception removed ‘through his side.’... I am convinced that this mendacity is due to his delusions.
“... While he could sing soprano well, he could not whistle ... and he threw a stone like a girl. [Common earmarks of androgynism.]... He did not, as he moved about ... give one the impression that there was anything in his demeanor simulating femininity, nor did his behavior in any way betray the remarkable manner in which his sexual life was being lived.... Apart from his extremely meagre education, he is no fool or dullard in other particulars.... It would seem that his trade [professional female-impersonator and fairie] is plied chiefly for the money there is in it.... He claims he has never been arrested or otherwise interfered with by the police....
“... He has always been possessed of the contrary sexual instinct. He always shunned women and girls more or less, while yearning at the same time to assume female attire and enter into their domestic vocations.... Believing himself designed by Nature to play the very part he is playing in life, it was truly remarkable to hear this nervous, loquacious, foul-mouthed, and foul-minded fairie of the most degraded slums of the multi-millioned city chatter about his experiences....
“Few writers in the field of psychiatry have enjoyed what I had next the opportunity to observe.... The putting on of female attire by a contrary sexed male. [The paper details the putting on of the various articles.]... He became very talkative ... telling of some of his recent escapades ... gesticulating as we |A “Man” Transformed into a Soubrette.| often see agitated girls do ... remarking that he was very tired, owing to the fact that he had been ‘ironing all the forenoon.’ [Androgynes gravitate toward peculiarly feminine tasks.]... ‘What do you think of that hat? Isn’t it a dandy? I trimmed it myself.’... He was, without the slightest doubt, thoroughly in earnest in all he said and did, and by no means was he playing a part.... ‘Dear me,’ he said, ‘I’ve forgotten my ear-rings; but you won’t mind that?’ Upon my assuring him that I liked young girls better without them, he seemed relieved and proceeded to fit to his head a ... blonde wig.... As he had recently shaved, his face was quite smooth, and in a twinkling he made it up with ... pink powder, with red pomade for the lips.... ‘Ha!’ he said [after fully transformed outwardly into a soubrette, in the style of costume prevalent among courtesans at the date of J. W.’s appearance before the doctor for wear in their resorts only, but in 1921 affected for street wear by all butterflies of fashion] ‘I feel more like myself now, and I am ready for the picture!’...”
Part Eight:
Androgyne Verse
The first of the following attempts to penetrate into Plato’s “world of ideas” and get at the real essence of things, and then to express them in an ideal manner, was inspired by a chance visit to the Whitestone station in October, 1921. Subsequently I was seized with the desire to try out my muse in incorporating some of my other emotions and experiences in verse. I had essayed no metrical composition since 1905, the year of writing the last of my Fairie Songs, the best of which were published in the Autobiography of an Androgyne.
I understand by “poetry” the version of things seen incorporeally; things spiritualized or with a halo around them; things as they exist in substance, in reality, back of their superficial or phenomenal presentation—the version of things that an individual’s subconscious or subliminal self utters.
At present when I evolve verse, I try to lose myself to the phenomenal world—the domain of sensation—and to let down my bucket into the well of the subconscious, the subliminal; to peer into the eternal, the infinite world (the domain of fundamental substance). The sensuous, material skin or crust of this world of ideas is all that most children of Adam can grasp. Only to poets and metaphysicians has Nature given a rope of sufficient length that their buckets can reach as far as the water level in the well of ideas. Nearly all poets even of the first rank manage to flop into their buckets a few exquisite thoughts as to eternal realities, and clothed in appropriate language, only about once out of a score of attempts. Nineteen-twentieths of their verse would better have been forever withheld from the public’s eyes, since it is merely artificial, nonsense doggerel. In that proportion of their work, these poets of the first rank show themselves up merely as bad rhymesters.
The editor of The Female-Impersonators declared “the book would be better off without” my verse, but has kindly humored my wish to include it. The reader’s verdict may be that I, too, am merely a bad rhymester, and thus put my work on a level with the vast bulk of the outpourings and outdronings of our best poets.