I. Angelo Angevine’s Debut as Public Female-Impersonator.
That fancy masculine name was only an alias, androgynes having a penchant for such as are musical and of exalted connotation. Further, its first element was after Michelangelo, an arch-bisexualist.
In 1895, Angelo—Phyllis divulged what I have here recorded as nearly as I can remember. As I said in the first chapter of this book, I remember only the general outlines of the originals of the monologues I give. But I have listened to numerous confessions of the sort of which I now present a sample. Where definite memory fails me, I have had recourse to my sea of general memories of the way the hermaphroditoi talked, how they looked upon life, what they did, and what befell them. I aim at a fairly full, but essentially true, portrayal of the inner history and life experience of cultured female-impersonators who were my bosom friends during my own hey-day in that avocation in the Rialto. In order to economize the reader’s attention, I present all of Angelo—Phyllis’s life-story as if confessed to me at one sitting.
In referring to Frank White it seems more natural to use the masculine alias and pronoun, but |Cross-Dressing.| the feminine with Phyllis. For the latter was conspicuously womanish: beardal growth sparse and always clean-shaven, if not eradicated; breasts as large as in some women; hips very broad; spine disproportionately long and legs correspondingly short. “His-her” body approached the feminine to a higher degree than that of any other androgyne I ever set eyes on with the possible exception of myself. Phyllis surpassed me in meagreness of beardal growth, sissie voice, feminine strut and gestures, and craze and taste for feminine finery. As a cross-dresser and female-impersonator, the bisexual now to be portrayed was one of the two or three extreme hermaphroditoi, while ranking low in erotic furor.
[In a physical male, cross-dressing is the instinctive wearing of feminine apparel, or, in default, of the loudest and fanciest male styles. In a physical female, it is similar adoption of masculine habiliments, or in default, of feminine attire and aspect approaching the masculine as nearly as possible: hair bobbed, stiff linen collar, a man’s neck scarf, and always severely plain tailor-made waist and skirt. The reader will recall such photographs of brilliantly intellectual women, particularly authoresses. Cross-dressing is generally an earmark of sexual intermediacy. It is not at all due—as bigots claim—to moral depravity, but entirely to irreproachable instinct. It is not at all due to childhood’s training, such as the stories of parents’ bringing up their boy or girl as a girl or a boy when they particularly wished a female or a male heir. Such child, as soon as he or she became old enough, would wholeheartedly rebel against such a travesty. In nearly every case, cross-dressing is due to the fact that Nature injected a psyche of the one sex into a corpus of the other. The cross-dresser is not usually conscious of the oddity of taste for apparel. His or her manner of dressing indicates what he or she considers artistic. All ultra-androgynes—such as made up the membership of the Cercle Hermaphroditos—would always, if society permitted, clothe themselves as women.]
Phyllis’s Antecedents.
In 1895, Angelo—Phyllis was a plump little body looking to be a decade younger than “his-her” thirty-three, and of decidedly brunette, Mediterranean type.
Ralphie, mon cheri, the sexual cripple now speaking was born in 1862 and brought up in a town of 50,000 within 300 miles of New York City. I did not move here until twenty. As soon as I became financially independent of father, I chose New York as the stage for my career because only in a great city can an instinctive female-impersonator give his overwhelming yearnings free rein incognito and thus keep the respect of his every-day circle.
Father was one of the leading lawyers in my home town and wanted me in his office, for he seemed blind to my being a sissie. But just because of this fate, I could not stand living in my home town. Furthermore, I had no taste for law, and pined only one year in father’s law office after leaving high-school. I was all for Art, with a capital A! Art! Art! Which taste turned me into millinery channels as soon as I began life in New York in 1882.