Surely we androgynes, who for two thousand years have been despised, hunted down, and crushed under the heel of normal men because they have misunderstood biblical condemnations of homosexuality, have no reason to be ashamed of our heritage. America’s foremost poet; the world’s greatest sculptor subsequently to Athens’ golden age; the two greatest ethicists and two out of the three greatest intellects of ancient Greece and Rome; two out of the three greatest conquerors of history; the greatest painter of all ages; and—to cap the climax—the greatest intellect that the English-speaking world ever produced and the greatest literary genius of all time (these two distinctions united in Francis Bacon)—ALL WERE ANDROGYNES.[[11]]
And to you full-fledged males I say: “What God hath cleansed [through endowment with sublime talents] call not ye ‘Unclean!’”
IV. Man Is a Passional, Rather Than a Rational, Being.
The Third Sex.
Twentieth-century psychologists are coming around to the view that even the leaders of thought are governed by instinct and mores rather than reason. Even for intellectuals, truth is what is intuitive or what satisfies their prejudices and instincts. Still in the twentieth century, the leaders of thought bow down before intellectual idols, although other than those overthrown by Francis Bacon. Still to-day—as in the generation of Roger Bacon (13th century)—conservatives yearn to imprison, or even burn at the stake, those in whom a purer reason than their own operates.
My own is thus a Herculean task: To be an intellectual iconoclast. To break down the last remnant of cultured man’s savage, criminal instincts and mores. But, like Roger Bacon, I may comfort myself with the thought that my views are centuries in advance of my time; but, like him, I am therefore bitterly persecuted.[[12]]
Prudery Triumphant.
“Away with any one who attempts to bring out the truth about sex!” cry the conservatives. “Crucify him! Crucify him! Sex is a theme too disgusting for discussion!”
In the university I took an extended course of lectures on physiology. But not a word was said about sex. The professor would not have thus befouled his mouth, nor corrupted the morals of his students. Martin’s Human Body, the standard text-book of the time, had to be published in two editions: (1) That which treated of human sexuality as viewed in the Dark Ages, and (2) that which imagined the genus homo to be asexual.