On the basis of different visits to an upper room permanently rented by the Cercle Hermaphroditos, I am going to build up a typical hour’s conversation in order to disclose into what channels the thoughts of ultra-androgynes run when half-a-score find themselves together. The reason for its unnatural ring is that I omit the nine-tenths that were prattle, retaining only the cream that I consider of scientific value.
It was about eight o’clock on an evening of April, 1895. Some of the hermaphroditoi were still in male apparel; some changing to feminine evening dress and busy with padding and the powder-puff; some in their completed evening toilette ready to descend to the beer-garden below to await a young-blood friend.
I do not recall that a single hermaphroditos was man enough to use tobacco, or even to spit. They affected foreign languages, particularly French. I recall one whose favorite method in beginning a conversation was: “Mes cheris, qu’est ce que c’est que vous savez de nouvelles?”
A second: “Have you observed the new styles? Very |Androgyne Talk.| narrow skirts,[[37]] and very large hats. The material saved on the skirt goes into the chapeau.”
“Nothing could be more beautiful,” Angelo—Phyllis, the most effeminate of the hermaphroditoi, opined softly and sweetly, “than a feminine face framed in a picture hat set sidewise, with rim reaching below the shoulders. How I do like to stalk Fourteenth Street myself with such a chapeau![[38]] How the young fellows stare and throw remarks after me! I am glad the petite turbans are going into the rag-bag. And what low necks and short arms the new evening dresses are showing! And the material hardly more than cobweb! One could almost hide an up-to-date corsage in the fist.”
“You seem, Phyllis, to be an expert on lingerie.”
“My woman friends tell me I have the best eye for color effects they ever heard of. Millinery happens to be my business. A star actress whom I happen to know always asks me to accompany her to the modiste’s. I must practically pick out all her robes, as well as hats—including the way they are to be made up. Just the sight of the artistic fabrics, as they are unrolled by the saleswoman, is an exquisite delight. My mind becomes crowded with emotions, and on the spur of the moment I could pen a lyric sur les etoffes jolies that any ladies’ magazine would publish.... The |A Gynander’s Fate.| stupidity of some women! This actress has just divorced her husband and is looking around for a new alliance. If I happened to have been born a marrying man, I could make her my wife, although all the front-row bald-pates are crazy after her. She has given every hint—everything except an actual proposal. But if I did let her marry me, the morning following the bridal night, she would apply to the court for an annulment. She does not even suspect the existence of pseudo-men.”
Another: “It is strange how often a girl falls in love with us women-men. I myself have had three proposals. Girls are particularly prone to fall in love with members of their own sex disguised as men. Of course we are really only girls ourselves whom Nature has disguised as men. Particularly, rather mannish women fall in love with us Mollie Coddles.”
Phyllis: “That reminds me of a young heiress[[39]] whom I knew. Perhaps you read in the papers two years ago how a New York young woman disappeared, and the utmost efforts of the police were not rewarded with the least trace. She was of that mannish type. For months she was the pest of my life. I still have a big pack of letters and poems—all sickening—which she mailed me.