[32]. I had graduated more than a year before and was earning a good salary during this summer vacation between my first and second post-graduate years.
[33]. On one spree, when I left the key in my pocket, it had been stolen out of meanness, necessitating the embarrassment, and risk of suspicion, of having to ring at midnight for admission.
[34]. In a later catastrophe, one did call. I was compelled to tell the truth, but he proved sympathetic and respected my confidences. He subsequently asked his physician about homosexuality and was informed it was deepest moral depravity and merited no sympathy. He himself happened to be one of the most broadminded of men. He remarked that physicians as a class are narrowminded since most have not taken a liberal-arts course.
[35]. In a later scrape, after being laid up for a week, I ventured to my large publishing office with practically no skin on my nose, that member having a week before been badly smashed. My physician had furnished me with the explanation that he had applied a mustard plaster for a cold and the nose resulted! But the better joke was that simultaneously another university-trained androgyne working in the same room was limping around with a crutch. He said he had been thrown off a horse, but I never doubted he had been crippled by some sexually full-fledged brute as a punishment for his androgynism.
[36]. Prudery is one of the foremost earmarks of anaphrodites and the mildly virile, to which classes nearly all the leaders of thought belong. The trait is completely absent from the more virile, as well as androgynes. Some of the more virile, as Harvey Green, are prudes only as to homosexuality because taught that fellators ought to be killed.
[37]. In the last decade of the nineteenth century also, there existed a feminine craze for skirts as narrow as a pant-leg. “Merry Widow” hats also had their day then. But in 1921 for the first time in Christendom, respectable women have been crazy to display their bare breasts, bare arms, and next-to-nude legs in the crowded streets. Respectable women have to-day adopted for street wear the garb, for exclusive brothel wear, of filles de joie of a quarter of a century ago.
[38]. See “French Doll-Baby” in Part VIII.
[39]. This anecdote deals with only one of a number of similar occurrences in New York. Gynanders, as well as androgynes, are doomed to suffer murder at the hands of hare-brained prudes because of the false teaching of the leaders of thought.
[40]. The scientific names “androgyne” and “gynander” evidence a blunder of their coiner. The order of their components is the reverse of their English colloquial equivalents.
[41]. Havelock Ellis’s works on sex—the foremost in the English language—had not yet been published in 1895.