Before I experienced it, I did not believe an individual could survive years of such depression. |Absurd Legal Superstitions.| But, as you see, Ralph, it turned my hair white. Fortunately it has not rendered me bald or wrinkled.
And the judge’s charge was so absurd: “The crime of which you, Frank White, have been convicted, is of such a disgusting character that it can not even be defined!”
To think of relegating an individual to state’s prison on a charge that no one comprehended; that no one had ever been permitted even to investigate—because the subject is beyond investigation, no intellectual even being willing to define it!
The judge said: “It is as heinous as murder, because it strikes at the very existence of the race! No one but a criminal of the deepest dye could descend to it! Frank White, you have been convicted of the awful felony of race suicide!”——Unreason and prejudice! There was hardly an individual within the hearing of the judge who had not been guilty of race suicide, though in a different way from my own! And they for the most part deliberately, whereas I was compelled by Mother Nature. They imprisoned me for what they conceded to themselves: Following Nature’s behests other than solely for the perpetuation of the race!
And then the day following my sentence, in the yard of the Tombs jail, being thrust into an iron-barred bus along with a score of hardened male criminals—just as if I were myself a male!—to be driven to the Grand Central to board a train for Sing Sing. I, the goody-goody girl-boy, having evolved into a felon!
But my prosecution by self-righteous Christians for what were really offences against no one—simply to satiate these Christians’ thirst for tormenting |Publicity Would Remove a World of Woe.| people whose views differed from their own—had more serious results than my five years in prison. My life has been a wreck ever since. My having been incarcerated on a conviction so utterly loathsome to the ordinary mind—because it has never been permitted access to the truth of the matter and is governed solely by mediæval bias—completely alienated every member of my family, who now regarded me as dead, and disinherited me on the ground of deepdyed hypocrisy and degeneracy. If we encountered one another on the street, they would not speak.
When liberated from Sing Sing, I was compelled to adopt a new appellation and strike out into a new field of labor, where it has been possible only with difficulty to make ends meet.
As for Tony, he escaped to parts unknown immediately following my arrest. My deprivation of his friendship was the severest blow of all, for he had shown himself so devoted—but only, as results demonstrated, because of the fortune he derived from me. He merely left a memo declaring he would write me some day, but never effectuated his promise.
If only the Javerts who prosecute Nature’s step-children realized the world of woe they thereby occasion these most unfortunate of mankind, they would reflect twice before inaugurating the prosecution. But society prohibits the reasons for the conduct of bisexuals becoming known. Which knowledge would prove a death blow to such prosecution.