I learned Hercules’ entire history—providing what he narrated was true. To my joy he told me he had been reared in a village in the Mohawk valley. Through heart-to-heart talks with hundreds of strange young bloods in New York’s Underworld I discovered that boyhood environment makes a vast difference in adult honesty and altruism. The country-bred adolescent manual-laborer is apt to be far less vile-mouthed and pugnacious, and far less likely to assault and rob one of Nature’s step-children than a young-blood product of city slums.
Only after I had been able to form a favorable judgment of Hercules’ disposition, I began to disclose, by my talk, that I was an androgyne. From my dress and mannerisms, however, any city-bred youth would have already judged my sexual status. Hercules later told me he had, but had feared saying something offensive. He said he had been impatient for me to declare myself.
Author’s Flirtations Mushy.
The following conversation serves to illustrate and analyze the hero-worship of the androgyne. It is admittedly mushy. The question is whether the reader wants the mushy or the untrue. Ordinarily conversation with a sexual counterpart made me silly. All my flirtations were mushy. The following phraseology is very close to the actual except that I have semi-translated Harvey’s dialect into ordinary English. Further, the reader must educate himself to judge justly even that with which, as he reads, he does not like to identify himself or make his own sentiment. For example, two confidential, Platonic literary friends told me that my original songs published in my Autobiography of an Androgyne were “sickening.” They could not sympathize with the androgyne sentiments and therefore the songs were “shoddy.” Likewise the following conversation must be judged objectively and the reader’s verdict be based on absolute reason, not on personal bias—not on the basis of the reader’s ability to put himself in the place of the Hercules or myself. It is a conversation to be analyzed scientifically.
“Beau, see how much bigger your hands are than mine! And how horny the palms! I bet you would give a good account of yourself in a fight!”
“I’ve had lessons in pugilism. Besides I come from a strong-built family. Me father’s piano-mover and me only brother steeple-Jack. Meself has worked as riveter on sky-scrapers.”
“So you have wielded a sledge-hammer!” I exclaimed enthusiastically because of his more and more marvellous revelations.
Hero-worship.
“All day long while steel-worker’s helper on the sky-scrapers.”
“O you are such a wonderful young fellow! Wonderful alone in your being brave enough to mount the sky-scraper skeletons! And still more wonderful in possessing the muscle necessary for wielding a sledge-hammer all day! May I feel your biceps? I am anxious to have my hands on the very muscle that slung the sledge-hammer!”