After I had peddled the script around for two years to a total of ten regular book publishers, the Medico-Legal Journal, publisher of my first book, consented to make the work available for those interested. The long delay in publication was utilized by myself in improving the form.
The third of the trilogy, The Riddle of the Underworld, has been elaborated simultaneously with The Female-Impersonators. Into the latter, I put the “milk for babes” (in St. Paul’s language); into the former, the “meat for strong men.” I wrote the latter in a popular style because addressed primarily to the general reader; the former more in the style suitable for scientists.
In my Autobiography, I was almost exclusively occupied with a frank exposition of what life meant to me personally. In the two supplements, I have been chiefly occupied in depicting characters with whom I associated in the Underworld. The Bible says: “Man is altogether born in sin!” But in Christendom this is really true of only the one-tenth of the race who people the Underworld. The other nine-tenths are comparatively saints. But there exists no reason for the latter’s prevalent Phariseeism. For the most part their moral superiority is hereditary and environmental.
Because of my innate appetencies and avocation of female-impersonator, I was fated to be a Nature-appointed |Author Repository for Underworld’s Secrets.| amateur detective. I enjoyed entrée to the hearts of both male and female denizens of the Underworld, my stamping-ground when I surrendered my bisexual body to the feminine side of my dual psyche. They would whisper into my ears their innermost secrets. Those who happened to be Roman Catholics (because some whom I met in the Underworld were only chance and rare visitors, and ordinarily able to live up to high ideals) have doubtless revealed the mysteries of their inner life to their priest in the vaguest terms. But with me, because as a rule ignorant of the confessor’s identity and not likely to meet him in Overworld life, the confessions of Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and atheist were detailed and exhaustive. Surely my having been thus favored by Providence ought to qualify me to depict little known human types for those who have missed the opportunity of meeting all kinds of people.
Of course, after the lapse of more than a score of years, I can not recall verbatim the individual confessions and conversations. I remember only their general drift. As outlined by me, they are merely representative. But Nature has endowed me with a rare memory. The earliest ascertainable date is the age of two years and three months, when I recall having seen the coffin of a great-grandmother carried out of the house. I still preserve earlier memories, such as being held on my mother’s lap and contemplating her mountainous bare breast. I remember hearing the moon whistle shrilly (the six P. M. factory whistles as I gazed at the crescent moon).
No reader should conclude from my trilogy that New York has been particularly immoral. Conditions |Why an Underworld.| are about the same in all great cities, except that those of the United States are puritan towns compared with Europe. I have explored the Underworld in many cities of both continents, being temperamentally qualified. But in America’s smaller cities west of the meridian of Kansas City, the sexual Underworld is more bold and wields more political power than anywhere else in the United States or Europe.
An Underworld exists in all cities of any size because human nature is what it is, and because of the social usages decreed by the blind Overworld, which happens to include the vast majority of mankind. Man is descended from the beasts, and still retains many of their instincts—particularly true of the atypic or atavic who throng the red-light districts.
As the Medical World said of my Autobiography of an Androgyne, the present work also “will be found a revelation of things undreamed of by most people. It is a contribution to the almost unexplored field of abnormal psychology.”
II. The Place of the Androgyne in the Male Sex Scale.
The Third Sex.