Poor deluded youth that you were in 1895! I almost weep whenever I reflect what you have missed in life through your poor judgment in robbing, and even aiming to murder, your would-be benefactor. For a few dollars worth of trinkets and for the satisfaction of torturing effeminacy, you turned your back on benefits to which could be attributed a money value of at least ten thousand dollars. But I freely forgive. Like the soldiers who crucified the world’s Savior, you did not know what you were doing.
The Fairie Boy.
V. Evenings at Paresis Hall.
During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the headquarters for avocational female-impersonators of the upper and middle classes was “Paresis Hall,” on Fourth Avenue several blocks south of Fourteenth Street. In front was a modest bar-room; behind, a small beer-garden. The two floors above were divided into small rooms for rent. In 1921 I visited the site, as well as that of the “Hotel” Comfort (the two Rialto resorts with which I was most intimately identified) in order to take photographs for publication in this book, but found both structures supplanted.
Paresis Hall bore almost the worst reputation of any resort of New York’s Underworld. Preachers in New York pulpits of the decade would thunder Philippics against the “Hall,” referring to it in bated breath as “Sodom!” They were laboring under a fundamental misapprehension. But even while I was an habitué, the church and the press carried on such a war against the resort that the “not-care-a-damn” politicians who ruled little old New York had finally to stage a spectacular raid. After this, the resort, though continuing in business (because of political influence), turned the cold shoulder on androgynes and tolerated the presence of none in feminine garb.
But there existed little justification for the police’s “jumping on” the “Hall” as a sop to puritan sentiment. Culturally and ethically, its distinctive clientele ranked high. Their only offence—but such |Is Bisexuality the Worst of Crimes?| a grave one as to cause sexually full-fledged Pharisees to lift up their own rotten hands in holy horror—was, as indicated, female-impersonation during their evenings at the resort. A psychological and not an ethical phenomenon! For ethically the “Hall’s” distinctive clientele were congenital goody-goodies, incapable (by disposition) of ever inflicting the least detriment on a single soul. They were of the type in the United States, by every-day associates totally ignorant of the secret sexual practices of Nature’s step-children, denominated “innocents;” and in France, “little Jesuses” even though in that country their sexual character is an open book, since there the sexual appetite is regarded as no more shameworthy than the alimentary. But the “Hall’s” distinctive clientele were bitterly hated, and finally scattered by the police, merely because of their congenital bisexuality. The sexually full-fledged were crying for blood (of innocents), as did the “unco’ good” in the days of witch-burning. Bisexuals must be crushed—right or wrong! The subject does not permit investigation! The fact that it is race suicide justifies the denial of all mercy! Let Juggernaut’s car crush out their lives!
It was Nathan’s parable of the ewe lamb all over again. (Second Book of Samuel, chapter 12.) The full-fledged had innumerable opportunities for the satisfaction of their instincts. Androgynes had only “the Hall” with the exception of three or four slum resorts frequented by only the lowest class of bisexuals who had never known anything better than slum life.
Why deprive cultured androgynes of their solitary rendezvous in the New York metropolitan district and |Homosexuals No Worse Than Heterosexuals.| give carte blanche to the thousands of similar heterosexual resorts?
Paresis Hall was as innocuous as any sex resort. Its existence really brought not the least detriment to any one or to the social body as a whole. More than that: It was a necessary safety-valve to the social body. It is not in the power of every adult to settle down for life in the monogamous and monandrous love-nest ordained for all by our leaders of thought. For example: The existence of Paresis Hall was due chiefly to the fact that in about one out of every one-hundred-and-fifty presumed males, the internal testicular secretion has failed to be of the right consistency.
While in this book I use the resort’s popular name, androgyne habitués always abhorred it, saying simply “the Hall.” The full nickname arose in part because the numerous full-fledged male visitors—it was one of the “sights” for out-of-towners who hired a guide to take them through New York’s Underworld—thought the bisexuals, who were its main feature, must be insane in stooping to female-impersonation. They understood “paresis” to be the general medical term for “insanity.” The name also in part arose because in those days even the medical profession were obsessed with the superstition that a virile man’s association with an androgyne induced paresis in the former, it not yet having been discovered that this type of insanity is a rare aftermath of syphilis.