Androgynes Nabobize Menials.
After the Masked Ball of ten years ago, Tony Neddo continued, for a longer period than any other young fellow, to be my adopted son and soul-mate. With the exception of his initial roguery, he rang true. Of course the consideration that I loaded him with benefits exercised an enormous influence. He realized that solely by cultivating my affection, he could play a good thing for all it was worth. My ambition to educate him for a profession was doomed to disappointment. While sufficiently intelligent in practical affairs, he lacked the gray matter for acquiring book knowledge.
The immediate reason for my incarceration was merely an indiscretion. I had resided two years on the continent of Europe, where every individual comprehends bisexuality and nobody oppresses those so unfortunate as to be afflicted therewith. That tolerance unfitted me for residence in the United States, where the words “sex” and “sin” are synonyms. I erroneously opined I could be as overt in New York as in Paris.
Therefore, while continuing to reside with my aged parents, I, soon after adopting Tony (not legally of course) leased for him a furnished apartment at a high-class residential hotel. Two successive hostelries finally refused to rent further to Tony and me. In the third year, we were in our third caravansary. But its personnel proved of unexampled bigotry—because the manager was a narrowminded Methodist. He opined that simply expelling Tony and myself ignominiously was not sufficient. He was busybody to the extent of praying for my incarceration. Therefore he engaged an unusually handsome youthful |Immorality a Novelty in New York.| detective to enmesh me. Attired as a Beau Brummel, the sneak first scraped acquaintance and then insinuated himself into my confidence. Soon he succeeded in seducing me where it was possible for a confederate to employ a camera without my suspecting anything. It was on the basis of that photograph that I was sentenced. My accomplice, who had been the sole occasion of the so-called felony, and who alone had proceeded deliberately and wilfully, received merely the thanks of the court and of society.
You inquire about the element of suffering during my incarceration. The first week in the Tombs jail, I lay awake half of every night in mental anguish, for I realized I was a martyr. Every one was accusing me of deepdyed depravity when my life was actually on a high ethical plane. All the journals announced in big headlines that I had been surprised in a double life—intimating wilful immorality. “Immorality”! “Immorality”! That was the keynote of all newspaper accounts of myself, as if hitherto “immorality” had been an unknown quantity with Knickerbockers. People could not get through singing the refrain: “At last a New Yorker has been discovered who is infected with immorality!!!” The journals stated that I had been incarcerated in the Tombs to await trial, the evidence against me being so incontrovertible and the felony charged so revolting that bail had been refused. At the time I was unenlightened as to what that evidence was and a thousand possibilities coursed through my stream of thought, none of which, however, emerged in my subsequent trial.
I was terribly browbeaten by the plebeian police. They resorted to subterfuge and endeavored by every |Intellectual Aristocrat Browbeaten by Plebeians.| means to betray me into confession of the secrets of my heart that they suspected. They adopted insulting language. They inquired point-blank over and over again in the common indecent expressions whether I had not with such and such persons (particularly Tony) been guilty of what jurists denominate ridiculously, though solemnly and with bated breath, “the crime against Nature,” when in fact nothing is more natural than the conduct in question. It is exclusively Nature’s feat. But I scrupulously guarded myself from making a single incriminating statement. I refused in any way to admit being a bisexual—because all my inquisitors presented evidence that they considered that condition the most horrible of crimes.
This was before I ascertained the existence of the photograph and I fully expected to elude incarceration. And the result proved that they were impotent to lay their hands on any other legal evidence beyond the detective’s statements.
That first week in the Tombs I would have committed suicide if I had been vouchsafed an instrument. For I was continuously immersed in the deepest melancholia. But the jailers were careful to deprive me of my pocket-knife and everything else by which it was possible to do myself harm. Even while at meals, I was continuously observed lest I utilize the table knife on my body.
“Who ne’er his bread in sorrow ate,
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers!”