Depicts life in New York’s poorest immigrant quarters and tenements—in its reality because he saw it as an insider, the denizens of the slums and the Underworld shamefacedly veiling the fundamental facts of their existence from charity and sociological investigators, but admitting the author to everything because he mingled with them as a non-intellectual and fairie.

Depicts life in the lowest type of slum lodging-house, once the author’s home, and the night life in general of the Bowery at the height of the latter’s vogue as New York’s principal red-light street, the author at the time being one of its “filles de joie.”

The Riddle of the Underworld.

Depicts, lastly, in great detail, his career as female-impersonator in New York’s slums and red-light and white-light districts and the life of “bosom friends” of the Underworld: Young bloods sowing their wild oats; middle-aged extreme alcoholic wrecks; extreme drug addicts; intellectual mild androgynes during the hours when Nature drives them to a double life in the Underworld; low-class “fairies”; filles de joie in their hey-day; wrecks of such in their thirties; “confidence men”; gangsters, gunmen, and burglars (whom Providence gave the author as soul-mates).

THE CLOSING VOLUME OF THE TRILOGY DEPICTING THE LIFE EXPERIENCE OF A BISEXUAL UNIVERSITY “MAN”

INDEX

(and., abb. for androgyne or androgynism)

[1]. Continental European civilizations are, on this subject, a half-century ahead of Anglo-American.