Earl Lind (Ralph Werther-Jennie June): The Riddle of the Underworld, 1921

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THE RIDDLE OF THE UNDERWORLD

PROLOGUE

How I Came to Write This Book

My three books, Autobiography of an Androgyne, The Female-Impersonators, and The Riddle of the Underworld form a trilogy. They together set forth all phases of the life experience of a bisexual university “man.” To only a trifling extent do they overlap. The scientific reader who is interested in my psychology and life experience should read all three. For I was predestined by Providence to an unusual role in the great drama we call “life.” I was brought into the world as one of the very rare humans who possess a strong claim, on anatomic grounds as well as psychic, to membership in both the sexes. I was foreordained to live part of my life as a man and part as woman.

The first of the trilogy, the Autobiography, was published in January 1919. In June 1919 I began a supplement. On first typing, the subject matter of the present second and third members of the trilogy was intended to appear within the same covers. But several who read the crude draft advised me to separate the matter into at least two separate works, in general along the lines that I have actually followed. The Female-Impersonators and The Riddle have thus been elaborated into their final form almost simultaneously. Into the former I put the “milk for babes” that St. Paul speaks of. Into the latter I put the “meat for strong men.” I wrote the former in a popular style for the general reader. I wrote the latter in the style suitable for the scientific investigators to whom my Autobiography was addressed. In the Autobiography I was almost exclusively occupied with a frank exposition of what life meant to me personally. In the two later works I have been chiefly occupied with characters with whom I associated intimately in the Underworld and who, almost exclusively, belonged to the so-called “vicious tenth.” Practically all of the “Overworld” fail to recognize that many of the sexual delinquents among that tenth are fundamentally irresponsible and really innocent of harm to a single soul.

My unique life experience has given me material for a dozen books and I actually have a fourth work on the third typing. With the exception of Jack London and half-a-dozen widely traveled men I have had the most adventurous life of any writer of the twentieth century. Providence has determined as my peculiar literary field the “Underworld.” I have been fated to explore it in many cities, as no other writer has. I have thought it worth the attention of the leaders of thought to become acquainted with the results of my unparalleled explorations.

For reasons that I explored the Underworld so extensively and, for the six years of my physical prime (age nineteen to twenty-five), took as my bosom friends prostitutes, “fairies,” burglars, gunmen and other atavics were not because I was morally depraved. Mother Nature caused me always to be a “goody-goody.” I could not help being so. I deserve neither praise nor blame. The reason I chummed with the atavic lasses named was solely that I was born bisexual. The Overworld makes of the bisexual a pariah. The Underworld gives the bisexual a hearty welcome. Ergo.

And my career as a female-impersonator happened to be staged in numerous cities and several countries because I was fated to be something of a globetrotter. Having been for years in New York’s Underworld I was curious to explore the Underworlds of other large cities where I have sojourned. And if my sojourn happened to be long enough I plied my instinctive avocation in the Underworlds of the cities visited.

My method of composition in the case of the second and third members of the trilogy is primarily the sub-conscious. My conscious personality is the mere scribe or typist. My conscious self merely writes down what is inwardly dictated by my subliminal self. While writing one line of the primary scribbling I am in general entirely ignorant of what the content of the next line will be.

It is probably, to a large extent a case of subconscious memory. The psychological laws of association bring into the stream of consciousness memories of perceptions that I previously thought I had forgotten and that had not entered my head for a score of years. All that I, without any effort or act of volition, set down on paper springs out of my life experience. If providence had not vouchsafed my unusually checkered and adventurous life I would have been unable to write books, no matter how I had perfected myself in English composition.

But after the crude outpourings of subconscious memory have been scribbled down my training in English composition comes into play. I consciously reflect upon and seek to improve every phrase that I hope some day will be published.

It was otherwise in writing my Autobiography of an Androgyne. Then it was a matter of sometimes having to cudgel my brain to get a book out of it. But my writing that first book a score of years ago seems to have made the composition of books second nature. My brain gives them birth without conscious effort or volition. But this involuntary cerebration exhausts my brain. After four or five hours at high pressure I can do no more that day because of brain-fag.

Practically always I first scribble down what comes as if by inspiration. Then I revise before the first typing. I have tried original composition on the typewriter but find it less economical of time and brainpower. My first three books have had the benefit of three typings before publication.

As already indicated, the subject matter of the present book, as of its two predecessors, will be some of my adventures and acquisitions of knowledge of human life, generally of denizens of the Underworld, while living out the necessary “Mr. Hyde” side of my earthly pilgrimage. But there exists this difference from Stevenson’s dual personality: Instinct. even transformed me occasionally into an Actual personality other than my every-day self and into a feminine personality, whereas I lived out my everyday life as a male. This feminine personality, on an average of about one evening a week for six years, traveled about in New York’s Underworld under the name of “Jennie June.” Under that name and as a representative of the gentle sex, my personality had a tremendously more remarkable career in its journey through life than that achieved in New York’s Overworld: as a hard worker in three successive learned professions by the “Dr. Jekyll” side of my dual bisexual nature. That is, the puritanical bookworm to which, in my publications I assign the name “Ralph Werther,” in point of time my second masculine alias.

Since my scholarly career was like that of thousands of others who are models of industry and morality I give that side of my dual life almost no space in my three books. Only my experiences while impersonating a female are of as yet an unheard-of character to the vast majority of readers. As the medical world said of my Autobiography, 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.”

PART ONE: MULBERRY STREET

I. Adult Female-Impersonation Apprenticeship Begins.

In 1893 at the age of nineteen I count my adult life to have begun. In 1893 I finally concluded that medical science was helpless in the matter of rescuing me from the hands of Destiny. And I now ceased to struggle against Destiny. Further, my appetencies became now for the first time absolutely uncontrollable. For details of my almost un-heard-of struggle against them, extending through the first five years of my adolescence, I refer to my Autobiography. My non-sexual bosom friend from my thirty-fourth to forty-sixth year, who read that work a decade before it went to the printer and whose own life I have epitomized in the present work in the chapter on Voyeurism, declared (he being a literary man) that this long account of my struggles against the “Mr. Hyde” in me was the best part of my Autobiography of an Androgyne.

For I did not at all desire to be a quasi-professional female-impersonator. If Providence had permitted me to follow my own will I would have passed my adult life as a proclaimer, in China, of the gospel of “peace and good-will to men.” During my first two years in college I was a student volunteer for foreign missions, besides giving half-a-dozen hours a week to city-mission work.

As the biased Overworld considers a bisexual as an outcast, I was driven, right from the start of my adult career as a member of the gentle sex, to the Underworld of New York, in which city I was fated to reside from the age of sixteen to thirty-one as well as from forty down to the date of the present writing (1921) when I am in my forty-seventh year. Perhaps the greatest charm of Underworld life is that it is carefree. The individual does whatever he most wants to regardless of consequences to himself and of the interests of others. He lives only for the passing moment and is usually one hundred per cent selfish. For example, he does not particularly care if he inoculates a healthy chance-met companion with an incurable disease, or even makes a mother out of a young unmarried woman whom he will never meet again.

Moreover, he is generally ignorant and at least oblivious of the fact that the devotee to the pleasures of appetite in the Underworld thereby shortens his stay on earth by from one to four decades, depending on the avidity with which he drinks at its fountains.

My female-impersonation apprenticeship chanced to fall in the very center of the principal foreign-born Italian quarter of New York and within a radius of a quarter of a mile of the present Police Headquarters. In 1893 the latter’s site was occupied by a city market, closed evenings. Some of my earliest impersonations were staged on the very site.

If, after my death (for during my lifetime I can not expect to obtain much attention from the reading public: man is such a biased animal) I ever attract a few hundred sympathetic readers, it would be a good joke, as suggested by my non-sexual bosom friend whom I once took on a tour of the scenes of my New York Underworld career, for them to collect pennies for a bronze tablet to be affixed to the Grand Street façade of Police Headquarters:

ON THIS SITE SOME OF THE EARLIEST FEMALE-IMPERSONATIONS OF THE ADULT RALPH WERTHER WERE STAGED. HIS DEBUT AS AN ADULT IMPERSONATOR AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN TOOK PLACE AT THE ARCHED PORTAL OF THE WAREHOUSE AROUND THE CORNER OF MULBERRY STREET, TWO HUNDRED FEET EAST.

I do not wish to imply that my pristine stamping ground was or is a red-light district. I knew of only three filles de joie who in 1893 flourished on the block on which most of my female-impersonating time was then spent. For reasons patent to the cognoscenti, I drifted into the circle of the most vicious score of inhabitants out of the three thousand - - all of foreign parentage and the vast majority born in Italy - - living at the time on that block. Outside my immediate circle, the inhabitants, although not ten per cent could read English, were, with about the same number of exceptions to be found among the residents of Fifth Avenue, of good morals. I became slightly acquainted with a hundred outside my immediate circle in cafés, etc. And I was able to get a glimpse through the open doors of not a few homes I never entered. Particularly the sexual morality of nine-tenths of the adults was of the highest. For, among all classes and all races, chastity and honesty are

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… ninety-five per cent of the population were Italian, and only five per cent Irish. The adult foreign-born Italians hardly spoke a word of English. But it was with their offspring, born in New York that I associated. Further, about one-half of my score of pals were stalwarts of Irish parentage.

At intervals along the block, narrow covered alleys or mere planked halls which never possessed doors at front or back gave access to the rear tenements. A small paved court separated the front and rear structures. In 1893 each court was adorned with two or three timbered, highly malodorous and indescribably nauseating out-houses: common privileges of the sixteen families who called either the front or rear tenement “casa” (home) as well as of whatever wanderer from the street should find himself suddenly in dire need.

By inspection in 1920 I ascertained that this stretch of Mulberry Street has greatly improved during the lapse of twenty-seven years. On my block, I could find not a single alley remaining and very few rear tenements. More than one-third of the antique and unsightly three-story brick tenements have been supplanted by five-or-six-story multi-family houses, some of which boast of imposing facades. While sometimes dirty and out of repair on the inside, they present on the exterior the appearance of health, comfort, and prosperity. The greenhorn Italians have been mostly replaced by American-born of Italian blood. Asphalt has succeeded cobblestones and powerful electric street lamps, the dim flat-flame gas.

In 1893, the bread and but… spaghetti (for butter was almost unknown) of the population were provided by the male janitors of stores and warehouses, the middle-aged, exhausted–looking women who cleaned the office-buildings of New York in the evening or early morning, the small boys and lads who shined shoes on the streets, the push-cart vendors of fruit and vegetables on Manhattan Island south of Fourteenth Street, but most important of all, adult males who were shipped out temporarily, under numbers not under names, to points all over the United States east of the Mississippi to supply the elbow grease for the construction of railroads.

My apprenticeship on Mulberry Street lasted about a year. These experiences when the “Mr. Hyde” in me temporarily ousted the “Dr. Jekyl” and took possession of my mind and body, I named “female-impersonation sprees.” They occurred one evening per week while I spent all the rest of my waking hours as a university “grind” and prize-winner, having relinquished my avocation of city missionary as soon as my female-impersonation sprees demonstrated themselves to be inevitable.

My associates on these sprees were always the “Arch Gang” of stalwarts, varying in age from sixteen to twenty-one and numbering a score. In addition, three filles de joie constituted a species of “hangers on.”

During a decade after circumstances carried my female-impersonations to other stages and I in general saw no more of my Mulberry Street pals, I occasionally yearned to be back there with these fellow performers of my female-impersonation apprenticeship. Even at the date of the present writing (1921) twenty-eight years subsequent to that apprenticeship, a swift succession of pictures flashes through my brain as I turn my attention back to my Mulberry Street nights. I will endeavor to put several of these pictures into words.

I. “THE BOY IS FATHER TO THE MAN.”

In the traits and appetencies of the individual boy, it is possible for the psychologist to read the approximate career of the future man. In the individual boy there already exist “the promise and potency” of the particular man into which he is to develop. In other words, his life is, in the main, foreordained by birth although there still remains wide scope for individual effort.

Particularly in my own case, the proverb that forms the title of the present chapter proved true. From the age of three to seven my life was a remarkably faithful prototype of my adult career, particularly from the age of nineteen to twenty-three. That is, both during my early childhood and during my “young manhood,” I manifested, as my most remarkable trait, female-impersonation.

During my early “boyhood” none of my adult associates gave any evidence of a suspicion that I was other than a normal male child. Though I was thus always treated (by my elders only) as a boy even from the age of three to seven, I refused to regard myself as one and told my playmates to call me “Jennie.” Up to the age of six I never entertained the least idea of attiring myself otherwise than in skirts all my life. And I was determined, as much as a child under seven can be, to identify myself with the female sex throughout life.

Naturally therefore, when my parents, after I had entered my seventh year, locked up the beloved petticoats and there was nothing available with which to cover my nether unmentionables excepting a pair of breeches -- at the time nauseating to me from the point of view of wearing them myself, but even then fascinating as a decoration of the legs of the true boy -- it proved a heart-breaking experience. It was indeed a most melancholy disillusionment that made me at times wish I were dead.

But for the following six years I found it feasible to don a sister’s garb occasionally in order the better to impersonate a little girl. Because of this and my girl-like predilections in general, playmates of both sexes have remarked that I was “more girl than boy.” And from the age of ten to fourteen some of the warmer-natured boys would throw their arms around me with the remark: “Kissing you is as good as kissing a girl!”

From the age of ten to fourteen I prayed a thousand times most earnestly that the Creator would turn me into a girl in the twinkling of an eye by a miracle such as the granting of sight to the blind man at the gate of Jericho. In my middle teens, when my bust began to develop along feminine lines I almost believed that my prayers were in process of being answered. But the pudenda never changed. They have, however, always remained rather infantile and not at all erectile even when, in adulthood, I was in bed with a fille de joie. On such occasions we were as two sisters reclining together. Sexually we were mutually abhorrent.

From the age of nine to sixteen my parents sent me to a fairly large boys’ prep school several miles from my hometown. But in only my senior (sixteenth) I boarded there. The students were almost exclusively high-strung, wealthy boys of the type that parents cannot manage at home and so send away to boarding school having a reputation for strict discipline. It was customary at the school for the most incorrigible boys to be taken to the attic by teachers and flogged. The boys slept generally two in a room. But the teacher in charge of the dormitory, probably because he had observed that I was a girl-boy through my having attended the school for several years as a day pupil, saw to it that I had a room to myself -- except on three nights by reason of emergency.

But the boys who had arrived at puberty were quite frank with one another in their sexual talk. I perceived that paedicatio was fairly common but fellatio non-existent -- at least practically. Among the forty boys in the “grammar” department there were two. Several times tremendously virile adolescents approached me but I always repulsed their advances simply because I was at the time a God-intoxicated youth. Both partners in paedicatio were therefore always of the tremendously virile class. They endured the passive role simply in the absence of the gentle sex. An adolescent commonly known to be addicted to occasional paedicatio was not in the least scorned.

But the school sentiment was for ostracism for any boy guilty of the more humiliating role in fellatio. Only a congenital girl-boy could stoop to it. But the boys, like their fathers, thought it could be due only to deep-dyed moral depravity. While that humiliating role was throughout my school life my terrible temptation I realized that my yielding would be likely to drive me out of the school in such disgrace as I could shake off only by suicide. My congenital ultra-religiosity and goody-goodiness, and my keen realization of the boys’ detestation of a fellator thus enabled me to pass through my seven years at the preparatory school without seriously damaging my reputation for “sanctity.”

My nickname was “the Innocent” just as at the university it was “Anthony Comstock,” on account of my apparent prudery, my girl’s mind giving my face a very much shocked expression whenever any sex talk of the students reached my ears. And just as later in a large office where I worked for seven years, mostly with university graduates, it was “Cato the Censor,” on account of my austere morality, except along sexual lines of which latter phenomena my everyday circle even suspected nothing.

On my first night as a boarder emergency placed me in the same bed with a boy around my own age. Fortunately his looks were repulsive to me and I therefore experienced only a weak desire to touch him. But on account of the strangeness of being in bed with someone I lay awake almost the entire night. Since he was repulsive I did not wish to talk and made him think I slept. While so thinking he passed his hands over my body several times. While it became common knowledge among the boys that my breasts were abnormally full that fact was not recognized as anything particularly extraordinary. Merely, boys asked me a few times to let them see my breasts but I, always in deep shame carefully concealed my entire anatomy except when in swimming.

Only at the age of fifteen could I bring myself to go in swimming with the boys in a bathing suit whereas they were often naked. While I became an expert swimmer at eight I did not learn to take a single stroke until fifteen. My brother became an expert swimmer as early as the age of nine. From nine to fifteen I merely accompanied them to the swimming hole as a feast for my eyes! I always, out of their sight, clad myself.

Later, in my senior year at prep, emergency one night put a fairly attractive adolescent in the same room though in a separate bed. I lost my senses and requested to get into bed with him, hinting at the more humiliating role in fellatio. But he cordially loathed the idea. Always afterward he was my bitter enemy and sought to his utmost to hurt my standing among the boys. For several weeks I was almost heart-broken but the matter blew over without my suffering other than fear and remorse. My being the prize-scholar and preeminently “the Innocent” of the school caused me to “win out.”

Two years later while I was at the university I was visited by a former schoolmate with whom I unexpectedly, on this one night’s visit became extremely confidential, as described on page 55, following, of my Autobiography of an Androgyne. Only on that epochal night my guest informed me that the prude of two years before had tried to get me expelled from the preparatory school. If he had succeeded I would probably have committed suicide because my family must have learned of my dire disgrace. Six years subsequent to my adventure with the prude, when I was expelled from the university for being an androgyne, I came within an ace of suicide although believing that none of my family even suspected my expulsion; I having explained that my New York physician had ordered me to rest my brain on account of neurasthenia, which malady the expulsion had immediately occasioned as a matter of fact.

I BEG ALL ADULTS, PARTICULARLY SCHOOL OFFICIALS, TO BE EXTRAORDINARILY CHARITABLE AND SYMPATHETIC WITH GIRL-BOYS AND OTHERS SEXUALLY ABNORMAL BY BIRTH WHO MAY SEEM TO HAVE LOST THEIR SENSES. GUARD AGAINST DOING ANYTHING THAT WOULD LEAD THE DISGRACED TO COMMIT SUICIDE, WHICH EVENT IS FAIRLY COMMON AMONG THESE “STEPCHILDREN OF NATURE.”

I believe that the fairly common homosexuality in boarding schools attended by high-strung boys is without permanent effect on the sexuality of those indulging. Only such boys become adult active pederasts, pathics, or fellators as are sexually abnormal by birth. At the most, the boarding-school adventures throw over into inversion adolescents whom Nature placed on the very border-line between girl-boys and the weakly virile because no two adult males possess the identic degree of virility, all being theoretically arrangeable along a scale from the most tremendously virile at one pole to the ultra-androgyne at the other; the virility of the latter individual being a negative quantity.

Thus providence kindly overruled that I should graduate from the preparatory school. And Providence compensated me for my being scorned as a weak girl-boy by enabling me to obtain, in all tests without exception during the last four years of my course, the highest marks and a general average for my entire seven years’ course: the highest ever achieved in that school. My teachers told me that I was an intellectual prodigy as well as a religious prodigy. The principal, in a speech before the ninety boys of the school, named me, in my presence, as an example of a youthful scholar for their emulation (!!!).

But I had an advantage over the other boys. I possessed a girl’s ordinary brain, which becomes mature several years earlier than a boy’s. At the same age the average girl outranks in scholarship a boy of exactly the same quality of gray matter. Girl-boys are exactly like girls in respect to period of development of the various functions of the brain. Besides girl-boys, like girls, are natural “grinds.” They have no other interests than their studies while the normal boy cares more for sport and playing pranks on the teacher.

I had a craze to reside in New York City, which I had often visited since it was only an hour by express train from my native village. I therefore, at the age of sixteen, chose a college in that city. Some of my warmer-natured classmates would throw an arm around me and cry: “Child!” They had declared me “half-woman” but never indicated any suspicion that I was an invert probably because not aware of the existence of that biological sport. For my entire undergraduate course I stood fourth in my class in scholarship, notwithstanding that during the first two years I was a nervous wreck on account of acute melancholia over my being a sexual cripple, and acute spermatorrhea.

I did not arrive at a relatively full understanding of myself - - that I am a biological sport both anatomically and psychically, known to medical science as an “androgyne,” physically two-third s man and one-third woman. And psychically only one-fifth man and four-fifths woman until at the age of eighteen, overwhelmed with remorse in the realization that I was sexually abnormal, I went successively to two New York medical professors (Dr. Prince A. Morrow and Dr. Robert. S. Newton) and pleaded that they make a genuine man out of me.

Up to the date of my “experiencing religion” or “being converted” at the age of fourteen, my ardent desire and oft-repeated earnest prayer, as already stated, were along the line of being transformed into a physical female. But at the age of fourteen I became a God-intoxicated youth. For a year or two I gave from one to two hours every day to private religious devotions. Such intensity of religiosity I have never even heard of in any other youth. From the age of fourteen to nineteen I regarded all my feminine predilections as the most heinous of sins, fought against them as earnestly as any soul ever fought against the “Mr. Hyde” in himself, and went to physician after physician to see whether medical science could transform me into a normal male. Months of treatment by all means then known proved in vain.

The alienist Dr. Robert S. Newton was the third physician whom I consulted but the first who had any inkling of the true nature of my malady. His frankness put an end to my chronic melancholia. I thenceforth merely suffered from it at rare intervals. I ceased the worse than useless longing and praying for a different nature than it had seemed good to the All Wise to predestinate. The alienist opened my eyes. He taught me that the androgyne’s proclivities are not the depth of depravity that every one, even the two preceding medical advisers, had previously given me to understand.

• * * * * * * * * *

For a detailed account of my childhood and youth I refer to my Autobiography of an Androgyne. Since its publication I have read that, according to the Mendelian law, an effeminate son is likely to be the offspring of a mannish woman. That is probably true. But my own mother and grandmothers were not in the least mannish. But my father, though having begotten eleven children, was naturally monogamous, only mildly virile, religiously and morally a puritan and a great “home body,” spending all his time outside of business in the bosom of his family. Even from boyhood I have been told he took no interest in sport or other manly pleasure - - only in religion and in making money. A significant fact is that my mother married him for his money. He lacked good looks and was decidedly not her choice for a husband. Repeatedly through my childhood she gave evidence of not loving him. My mother has always been an unusually beautiful woman. At the date of my birth my mother was twenty-eight and my father thirty-two. I was their fourth child. I was endowed with the best brain of their children. Only one other has been minimally successful in life and given evidence of possessing a rare variety of gray matter. At middle life I have achieved considerably the highest success of all, notwithstanding that the edge was taken off my innate keen mentality by emissions during sleep on an average of twice a week from the age of sixteen to twenty-seven, at which latter age I was driven to castration to save myself from idiocy (For details, see my Autobiography, page 196). I was never guilty of self-pollution. ________________________________________

II. SEXUAL INTERMEDIATES IN GENERAL

An androgyne is a human possessing the male primary sexual determinants, ordinarily undersized and not erectile in contact cum femina with no trace of the female conformation of these organs but usually with feminine earmarks in the rest of the body. His psyche, tastes, and manners are more or less conspicuously feminine. On the sexual side of life the ultra-androgyne desires so far as possible to pass for a woman. The ultra-androgyne always feels himself to be a female and is always attracted only toward the ultra-virile or the tremendously virile as a male around his own age. But when he becomes older (still under thirty), almost without exception prefers the society of such ultra-men to that of the best-favored women. Ultra-androgynes are women with male pudenda. They ordinarily pass their lives as men in masculine attire of rather loud color and design. But those of some social standing are prone to disappear for short periods from their everyday circle while on a female-impersonation spree, often in feminine apparel.

In the female sex the androgyne’s counterpart is known as a gynander. In only the rarest instances are an androgyne and a gynander mutually attractive so that marriage is possible.

Uncultured androgynes let their idiosyncrasy become common knowledge in their everyday circle. But the cultured, realizing that their sexually normal associates are subject to fits of temporary insanity on witnessing any evidence of androgynism in another and bitterly persecutes any individual so unfortunate as to betray the earmarks of androgynism, seeks to hide their idiosyncrasy from their every-day circle. They, like the present author, are thus driven to live a double life.

I have resided in nearly every of the United States and Europe of over 200,000 inhabitants. I have lived for years in millionaires’ families, but only for months in Bowery lodging houses. I spent an average of an evening a week for six years in New York’s Underworld. I have explored the Underworld in many other cities, “knocked up against” an unusual array of atavic and atypic individuals. I estimate that about one adult possessor of male pudenda out of every three hundred is predominantly female psychically, feels more at home in feminine apparel, and instinctively impersonates a female when the sexual period comes on provided he can find occasion. If occasion is lacking he is likely to suffer a brain-storm. Opportunity for a female-impersonation spree now and then is likely to be necessary for his efficiency in his everyday tasks.

But androgynism, as well as its counterpart, gynandrism, exists in all degrees. I myself happen to be a rather extreme type of androgyne.

In addition to the ultra–androgynes who are distinguished by, among other things, horror feminae, the male psychic hermaphrodites of whom Oscar Wilde was a type, number around one out of every three hundred adult possessors of male pudenda. Psychic hermaphrodites are instances of only mild androgynism. Pseudo-hermaphrodites, on the other hand, constitute the limit toward which androgynism and gynandrism tend, and the meeting of the two phenomena.

The ultra-gynanders and the female psychic hermaphrodites probably constitute each about one out of every three hundred adult possessors of female pudenda.

The method of ultra-androgynes is ordinarily fellatio or pathic in paedicatio; of the mildly androgynous, often the active role in paedicatio or inter femora; of both types of gynanders, manustupration on the beloved or cunnilingus but sometimes the (I believe very rare) use of an artificial priapudendum.

Hitherto the civilized world has attributed sexual intermediacy to moral degradation, made outcasts of its victims when found out, and even imprisoned those possessing male pudenda. In former centuries, the “high-brows” burnt the unfortunates at the stake or buried them alive just as today the benighted savages of Africa, animated by horror and loathing, bury alive as soon as born, an albino infant. Only since the latter part of the nineteenth century a handful of sexologists have been bold enough to proclaim that intermediates are often victims of birth and irresponsible for their idiosyncrasy.

But the vast majority of even the medical profession are still, in 1921 lifting up their pharisaical hands in holy horror and saying: “The subject is too nauseating to be investigated! Better that tens of thousands of these intermediates pine in prison, be persecuted until they rid the world of their unwelcome presence through suicide, or be murdered by some prude merely on the ground of the latter’s nausea, than that we decent men should have our own stomachs turned even for a second!”

An intermediate can reach as high a level ethically and religiously as the sexually normal. Except on the sexual side of life the intermediate is like all other people. And on this one side which, exclusive of those thoughts, ordinarily claims only a small fraction of the men’s, women’s, or intermediate’s time, it is not a whit more immoral or irreligious to live in the manner ordained for “him-her” by Destiny than for the normally sexed to live as ordained for them. The latter have no right to prohibit to the intermediate what they permit themselves. That is: following instinct except solely to the end of childbirth.

The claim that intermediates constitute a horrible menace to the perpetuation of the race and on this ground alone it is right for the normal very vast majority to smother out their lives is, as I have shown in detail in my Autobiography of an Androgyne, an absolutely false premise. From the dawn of history intermediates have existed in about the same proportion as today and yet the human race has vastly multiplied. Perhaps without exception only those individuals enter the ranks of the intermediates who are thereto foreordained from birth. ________________________________________

VII. VOYEURISM.

A voyeur is a human, almost always of the male sex, who does not relish personal coitus but is obsessed with a mania for witnessing the act between others. In the Underworld it is common for genuine voyeurs - - as well as for depraved men who are sexually normal - - to pay for the satisfaction of such mania a price equal to that for which they could have been a “party of the first part.” I remark incidentally that in the Underworld it is a common thing for patrons to pay high prices to witness a variety of “stunners.” The same people who do not mind parting with a five dollar bill to witness a stunner occupying less than a minute of time would perhaps not be so extravagant as to pay two dollars for an orchestra chair in a theatre; a fifty-center in “Nigger Heaven” being good enough for them! Some of the sexual play that men pay to witness in the Underworld is beyond anything that mildly virile men (the kind who have never stepped inside a house of ill fame) can imagine. These indescribable orgies cannot be blamed to Mother Nature. I who have been well acquainted with the type of men and women who stage them attribute them to moral depravity although dense ignorance of the participants is partly to blame. These terrible orgies are common to every Christian nation of the world (I am no authority on the non-Christian). They represent the apotheosis of the sexual organs and are to be deplored. The nobler elements of human nature should be kept on the throne: the universal practice of your author, an instinctive fairie except during his weeks as Bowery outcast. But genuine voyeurism (i.e., excluding sexually normal men who sometimes stoop to be “Peeking Toms”) is not a matter of moral depravity. Mother Nature is alone to blame. The best evidence is the following case of my most intimate friend from my everyday world subsequent to my undergraduate days. For five years we were closely associated in the same room of a large office and kept up the closest of friendships for eight subsequent years until his lamented death in his intellectual prime before he had accomplished his life's mission. He was the writer of Appendix I to my Autobiography of an Androgyne: Impressions of the Author, by a Business Associate. Our two lives were an open book to one another. We confessed our innermost secrets to one another (particularly the sexual) as I have myself done with only one other confidant of my everyday world during the thirty years of my adulthood. Namely: my ultra-virile university classmate whom I tried to win as my lifelong one and only husband before violent instinct (unappeasable in my everyday circle) drove me out to my hecatontandrous career in New York's Underworld. He was the university associate, extracts of my letter to whom are given on page 207 ff. of my Autobiography. While I coveted the latter university confidant as a husband (absolutely in vain) my later business associate confidant and myself experienced intense sexual repugnance for one another. While my earlier confidant was a university man he was not of decidedly intellectual tastes. He went to a university because his father sent him, not because he craved knowledge. He was of splendid physique and one of the leading athletes of the university, whereas my business-associate confidant, while not in the least effeminate was ultra-intellectual, an ultra-bookworm, muscularly clumsy and of weak physique. That type of purely intellectual man, almost without exception deficient in physical stamina, has always been intensely repugnant to me from the sexual point of view because I am myself ultra-intellectual. As ordinary friends, I have always much preferred brainy people. But my sexual mates must not be brainy, but brawny. My most intimate non-sexual friend subsequent to my undergraduate days was an extreme type of voyeur. Armed with field glasses he would spend hours gazing at night into rooms brightly lighted which, after long-continued searching, he had discovered to be the stage on which something in his line was transpiring. Of course it could only have been where “the parties of the first and second part” had neglected to draw the shade entirely down in the knowledge that no one could peek in from close by. I have reason to believe that my friend, though a very busy man, would - - when he happened to hit upon a newly married couple who spent the latter part of the evening in their room foolishly including the oversight of a loophole in their window through which my friend could direct his field glasses - - for such a rare treat I say neglect his numerous more important interests for four or five evenings in succession. Of course, an evening did not furnish a steady performance. It was a case of my friend’s gazing into blankness fifty-nine minutes out of each hour. But he felt that this terrible loss of his valuable time was fully paid for by the momentary tidbit once an hour or so when the principals happened to move into his field of vision. Here I am moved to say that the life motto of voyeurs is the biblical text: “What is stranger than the way of a man with a maid!” A few moments in life of the enjoyment of such scenes by proxy to them equal the entire balance of even three-score-years-and-ten.

My friend told me how, when a picnic of the uncultured would be held in a grove, particularly of the emotional African race who were numerous in the large city in which we then resided, armed with his field glasses he would hide himself at some vantage point commanding a meadow a few steps from the grove to make a study of the young bucks and wenches who, rendered delirious on the dancing platform would seek a few minutes’ rest for their weary feet in the meadow covered by my friend’s glass. He told me how, with a book and field-glass he would early on a warm Sunday afternoon hide himself in the cleft of a rock in a rough piece of ground contiguous to one of the city’s summer resorts. Which rough piece of ground he had discovered to be a favorite retreat on a Sunday afternoon for youthful lovesick couples of the lower class of Caucasians. Every pleasant Sunday afternoon in summer my friend would thus spend in seeking adventures by proxy. He told his ordinary friends that these frequent trips to this resort were due to his love of the scenery! The true reason he confided to me alone. While he confided the best tidbits he never realized that he was sexually abnormal. And I would not have hurt his feelings by telling him so. I merely warned him that he was likely to be beaten up badly some day. He would not have put up any fight at all. Anyway he was a physical weakling. A significant trait was his attending "beauty shows" almost once a week and always sitting in the row nearest the stage. We went repeatedly together to a bathing beach. I have known him to gaze at nearby feminine figures in bathing suits so ill mannerly that a sylph - an entire stranger – once splashed a gallon of water into his face. When not in the water himself, he had the habit of surveying the beach on which hundreds of bathers would be reclining, some in questionable attitudes, with his field glasses for an hour uninterruptedly. (That reminds me that one large bathing beach I have patronized was provided with several conspicuous signs: NO PEEKING TOMS ALLOWED). My unfortunate and sincerely lamented friend was particularly fond of witnessing dancing, both on the stage and on dancing floors of amusement resorts. But never once in his life did he himself dance. With him everything must be by proxy. He was also particularly fond of looking at nude photographs and reading salacious books. When I told him how I had in Europe refused to buy indecent pictures that were almost thrust into my hands (he having himself never been abroad), he reproved me for not having bought them for himself. I gave him the benefit of' my unusual knowledge of the inside of houses of prostitution. I recommended that he visit one himself someday to see the extraordinary "woman show," not at all that he should indulge more than his eyes. But he could not overcome his bashfulness in the presence of filles de joie ever to enter such a house. In his later thirties he confided to me that he had tried coitus cum famina only once in his life at about the age of twenty and in the normal way. While able to accomplish it perfectly, he experienced not the least pleasure. In his subsequent nearly a score years of life he never again attempted it. Indeed he said it was to him a loathsome thing. FOOTNOTE: This exception was also hardly normal sexually. He was editor-in-chief of a large publication for which I worked subsequently to my collaboration with the voyeur. For years my desk was several feet from his own. He was chummy with me and had me to dinner at his house repeatedly. He confided to me that he was naturally polygamous, but was blind to my own androgynism, and I never even hinted at it. It was in another large office where I have been employed that some of the staff expressed their suspicions that I was an androgyne. He was the type of man who maintains two separate families in different parts of the New York metropolitan district. His wife had left him because of his generally erratic character, sexually in particular. He was unconscientious, and guilty of the meanest tricks behind the backs of people he disliked. As to good looks he stood rather low in the scale. But he could write articles for publication more readily than anyone else I ever met. One of my tasks was to edit articles dashed off in a jiffy by his colossal intellect. His first draft required very little editing before publication. But the de facto polygamy referred to should be condoned. These men are not responsible for being polygamous. It is born in them and not in the generality of men. Their polygamy causes not the least detriment to a single soul. They are always men financially able to support more than one ménage. The poorer men of this same stripe have to be satisfied with occasional visits to filles de joie.

At almost forty, he expressed his purpose of marrying someday. His main motive was that a wife would prove an intellectual stimulus and would probably be the only efficacious remedy for his mental laziness (for which I often reproved him), enabling him to realize the promise of his rare literary gifts. He, however, remarked that he would not seek to consummate the marriage before a month after the ceremony and that a dozen acts a year would be all he would care for. I told him hardly one young woman would stand for either proposition. But he died a bachelor at about forty: “a mute, inglorious Milton.” Death came before he had immortalized himself in American Literature. For indeed, this extreme voyeur came the nearest to being a genius of any one with whom I ever associated, with only one exception. He had led his class in scholarship at large university, and later became instructor in English Composition at another university. During the five years of our collaboration, we were both on the staff of a large periodical. He was its brain though not nominally at the head. Besides his large number of unsigned publications, he achieved considerable prominence under his own name. But death overtook him before he had brought forth the masterpiece of which he was capable. The Appendix he wrote for my Autobiography was a hasty piece of work. Once his voyeurism occasioned his rude handling by a policeman but he never suffered arrest. He was normally masculine in every respect except his abhorrence for coitus. He was a ravenous feeder on feminine beauty. As to personal good looks he stood near the bottom of the scale. Never during the five years of our daily collaboration did I learn of his committing the least offence against his fellow man. Apart from his voyeurism and related idiosyncrasies, his entire life had probably been perfect ethically. He was the only child of an ultra-puritan clergyman of weak sexuality. During his university days he became an extreme agnostic. But that religious change never had the least effect on his morality. These two sexual freaks (and geniuses into the bargain) happened to be professional writers. But they constitute no evidence that such freaks are unusually numerous in that profession. I merely discovered them in that profession because most of my won bread-winning career has been staged there. My own impression, however, is that sexual intermediates occur far more often among the brainy than among the brawny. Moreover, I once read the declaration of a sexologist that “sexual inversion is particularly common among authors.” But to return to voyeurism: In my thirty years of adult life, I have numbered among intimates of my everyday world no other decided voyeur and only one slightly thus inclined. Of course a. person could make such discovery only among close friends who were extremely confidential. The mild voyeur was also highly intellectual, highly literary, and highly moral (outside the sexual sphere), though an agnostic. He was a divorced man under thirty at the time he confided to me the tidbits of his patient observations with a field glass into the chambers of his careless neighbors shortly before "lights out." He was naturally polygamous, but only mildly given to extra-marital relations. Both these voyeurs confided to me their sexual secrets only because I first confided mine to them. The ultra-voyeur had been my most intimate friend for nearly two years and I had found him to be unusually broad minded and sympathetic before I decided, because of my longing for sympathy to help me bear my terrible fate of being an androgyne, to make him my confidant. The mild voyeur was also, previously to my confiding in him one of my best non-sexual friends and a co-laborer in the same office for about two years, one of the most magnanimous and most liberal men I ever met. But I had never had any ideal of confiding to him the terrible secret of my life, the most horrible of facts: that I am bisexual. But on occasion when I had to avoid my everyday circle for an entire week on account of a face terribly disfigured by a “husky”* with whom I had scraped acquaintance on the street and afterwards sought "A lodge in a vast wilderness," this friend called on me since I had sent word to the office that I was ill. I was compelled to tell him the truth about things. But he proved a sympathetic and reliable confidant.

• American slang meaning a powerfully built “beefy” young blood. The word is a favorite in cultured androgynes to denote their chance-met sweethearts.

________________________________________ In my years in the Underworld, I was thrown with less than a dozen ultra-voyeurs. I had no opportunity to learn their other traits. In Chapter ?? I have told how New York’s large parks are frequented on warm summer evenings by youthful lovesick couples pining to get away from every strange human eye. But besides such couples male voyeurs spend hours concealed under bushes or in the crevices of rocks on a pleasant moonlight evening in the portions of the park they have ascertained to be frequented by their quarry. For the most part they seek adventures in the parks in pairs. Voyeurs naturally drift together then become chums. For there would be a good chance of a solitary voyeur’s departing with a bloody nose through contact with the fist of the male side of the animal aux deux dos. 1*

1* I have once read in the paper, however, that in the environs of New York an eavesdropper - -more likely motived by robbery than by voyeurism - - murdered a male side. I also read in the paper how a pugilistic eavesdropper on couples passing part of a summer’s night sprawling on one of the city’s beaches made it a practice of palming himself off on the uncultured and probably immigrant coupes as a city detective and demanded as the price of freedom from arrest for their “disorderly conduct” the bestowal on himself of the young woman’s favors. One of the more intelligent male victims being suspicious finally complained to the police. Immediately two detectives - - one attired as a soubrette - - started the practice of spending the first hours of darkness every evening sprawling on the particular beach at night deserted except by the love sick and their pursuers. The pugilistic eavesdropper came along and, as usual, demanded his rights from the supposed young woman. ________________________________________ But these voyeurs are generally undiscovered, and even unsuspected, by the "parties of the first and second part." Years of practice have given the voyeurs incredible skill in approaching noiselessly even over precipitous rocks, near enough to get a good view without themselves being discovered. Practice also makes vision by moonlight or even by starlight rather keen. I know because I have had experience with voyeurs in New York’s large parks. I am in no wise myself inclined to voyeurism. I was however once late in the evening, put under arrest by a park policeman on the charge of being a voyeur. But on the way to the police station I persuaded him that he was mistaken and he released me. Park policeman are charitable toward the lovesick couples sprawling at night on the park lawns. But in their ignorance that voyeurism is not a whit more willful than a normal sexual attraction they usually have no sympathy for the voyeurs. On my own nocturnal wanderings into the depths of New York’s large parks, depths desolate and at night dangerous; depths which no one would seek at night except a couple panting, with Wordsworth, for “A lodge in some vast wilderness,” together with their pursuing voyeurs, I was always accompanied by a brawny pugnacious young bachelor to whom I was incognito. We were ourselves looking for a grassy hillock on which to rest our won weary limbs far from every human eye. Of course such affairs were dangerous to me. On almost every occasion I ran the risk of being murdered, as has been the fate of so many cultured androgynies when they have retire to a desolate spot with a “husky.” Sometimes I had my pockets rifled. I had two watches and chains stolen, after which I never carried a timepiece when I expected to take a stroll with a husky whom I should meet by chance. Several times I was beaten up quite badly into the bargain by the Sir Husky who had been instructed by tradition that sissiness in a male is the unpardonable sin and that no treatment is too bad for sissies. But instinct made me take these terrible risks scores of times. Why did I not take the husky to my room? Because I belonged to the cultured class and always had in my room small objects that would be a temptation to a thief. Several times I had been so insane (for I will admit that I was insane in doing such a rash thing although my bisexuality is not insanity as benighted physicians maintain) as to take the husky to my room and then see him fill his pockets before my eyes with my valuable bric-a-brac in addition to compelling me by threats to fork over a much larger bill than I had promised him for his favors. Why did I not take the husky to a hotel? A common practice with prosperous and cultured androgynes but I wished to recline not more than ten minutes. I did not feel like paying $2 room-rent for ten minutes occupancy. But a more considerable motive was that I shrank from the shame of having the hotel clerk, who generally has his suspicions in such cases, gaze upon me as a monstrously evil-minded sexual intermediate; and I shrank from the risk of his even having me arrested on the charge of being a bisexual, which condition carries a penalty of ten years in state’s prison. And I could not have reclined more than ten minutes. I am unfortunately not one of those cultured androgynes who can live without working. I always had the following day an arduous seven hours of intellectual work in an office. Reclining more than ten minutes would have rendered me, all the following day a physical and mental wreck. The leaders of thought whom instinct alone has saved from such night prowling themselves might care to learn what passes even in Central Park late at night. (New York’s principal park, about a square mile in area, and the city’s only park of at least that size whose entire environs are occupied by a dense population.) At least for a quarter of a century, that is, so far as my personal memory goes back in regard to androgynism as related to Central Park, cultured fellators have resorted at night to that park as being the nearest to the point on the street where they have picked up their adolescent husky. An episode of my own checkered life was employment in a New York law office and as counsel’s clerk in New York’s criminal courts, by the irony of fate at the very height of my fairie career: at night a fairie; during the day, clerk to a great criminal lawyer. One of his cases before my time was the defense of a cultured and moneyed fellator from the charge of fellatio in Central Park. The lawyer merely recounted it to me on an occasion when I was trying to get him interested in the defense of an androgyne acquaintance who was in difficulties. The great lawyer never evidenced a suspicion that I was myself an androgyne, being himself in the sixties at the time he employed me. All that I distinctly remember about the fellator was that he had been actually guilty with a young husky in Central Park. The latter had discovered his identity and was blackmailing him. The fellator had recourse to the courts along the line of ridding himself of the blackmailer. The lawyer and himself together established a false alibi. I shall now describe my most remarkable adventure with voyeurs in a large New York park.

On a particularly mild January evening when no snow was on the ground, I entertained a powerfully built youthful private artilleryman in uniform from the neighboring Tenderloin to whom I was incognito by taking him to a theatre facing Central Park and afterward to supper at a neigh boring restaurant. This was common practice of mine. Usually on such occasions I did not wish to spend the following night at a hotel for reasons already given. All I wanted before bidding the artilleryman goodnight, was to be with him for ten minutes without the possibility of any strange human eye lighting upon us. It was just five minutes before midnight when we left the restaurant. The entrance to the park lay a few feet away, just across Columbus Circle. Only a month before an androgyne had been murdered in that very section of the park after midnight. Consequently the park had been closed to everyone after midnight. The artilleryman and myself just got inside by the skin of our teeth. Three minutes later, by my own observation that night, a policeman took his stand at every park entrance and turned back every soul who sought to enter. Anyway the reader can imagine the only motive for any one wishing to enter after midnight in midwinter, apart from voyeurism or robbery, as “men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.” Strangely, those who entered toward midnight were young couples almost exclusively, and almost always of opposite sex. I had read full details of the murder in the paper and that the police would close the park at midnight. But the artilleryman knew nothing about it and I refused to enlighten him until we emerged from the park half-an-hour later. As I had feared, he asserted that he would not have entered the park if I had recounted the murder in advance! The recent murder had failed to be much of a deterrent to myself. Particularly because I had hundreds of times run the gauntlet of being murdered. I repeat: it was three minutes before midnight when we entered the park. I carried a timepiece that night because I had taken such nocturnal rambles with the particular artilleryman a dozen times before and he had never taken a cent off me. Although I was still incognito I had him on trial as my third “adopted son” (for a detailed account of my first and second refer to my Autobiography of an Androgyne). Again I repeat: It was midwinter, though a balmy evening. A square mile of park lay before our eyes, which one would judge would be practically deserted after midnight in mid-winter. What more natural than the a priori assumption that we could at such an hour, at such a season, find solitude in one of the rocky and at night rather inaccessible nooks, of which there are several within five minutes’ walk from the Columbus Circle entrance? I knew every square foot of the park. We walked a quarter of a mile into the park’s depths. Knowing that we might be dogged by thugs or voyeurs I always took the trouble on such occasions to look toward the rear once every minute. But no one followed. We passed only four persons during the five minutes: two pairs of lovers on benches. We passed several newspapers spread out suspiciously on the oozy ground where there was grass except during the winter. I led my companion to the most desolate path in the southerly quarter of the park through a miniature unlighted rocky canyon because I believed every one else would be scared to tread after midnight, this dark, rocky defile where we had to set our foot each time carefully lest we fall headlong. Of course I would never have trusted myself there after dark without a powerful bodyguard and if it had not been for the existence of a blind, irrational urge, fundamentally irresistible, which Nature has instilled in humans to the end that the race may not die out. We soon halted in a small dark recess in a thirty-foot cliff. Since the trees and bushes were denuded of leaves, we were unable to hide in their shadow. It was a night of overcast sky when the reflection from the cloud blanket, of the city’s tens of thousand of street electric lamps made every square foot of the park outside the shadow of large rocks, as bright as under the full moon. Walkers could be distinguished at a distance of four hundred feet and persons sprawling on the ground at two hundred. But as I had ascertained that no one had followed us and as we had chosen the most desolate of all the paths in the southerly quarter of the park I felt confident that our few minutes’ solitude in the cleft of the rock would not be disturbed now that the small hours of the morning had supervened. All I had to fear in these small hours was thugs! But they never attack an unusually well built soldier in uniform, realizing that common soldiers in general are terrible fellows for fighting. But we had made ourselves comfortable for less than two minutes when my companion, who enjoyed a better outlook than I, whispered that he saw a derby hat and a nose peeking at us from behind a large boulder only twenty feet away. I immediately conjectured the eavesdropper to be a voyeur. But the possibility of his being a detective occasioned me not a little alarm. I have known of municipal detectives following up an androgyne and succeeding with their evidence in getting him a sentence of five years in state’s prison. My companion and I immediately made our exit, passing within three feet of two well dressed men, around thirty years of age in civilian clothes. Neither they nor we addressed a word to one another, my companion and myself, on account of embarrassment over having been surprised in a sacred act that seeks solitude, namely the corporeal flowing into one – transfusion, interfusion, amalgamation of two beings of sexually opposite biochemical composition – the voyeurs, on account of having been detected in what they doubtless regarded as a frailty to be ashamed of. Their attitude proved that they were no detectives. For they had already acquired evidence enough to lodge myself and companion in state a prison for ten years. Whence came the two voyeurs? They certainly had not followed our path within four hundred feet: the limit of my vision. They could possibly have followed us from our entrance to the park by a course across the lawns and through the bushes two hundred feet to one side. But the probability is that they had passed hours hidden in a recess of that very cliff in order to feast their eyes on any pair of lovesick individuals who might wander into those rocky masses. As I have said, this small cliff was particularly desolate and therefore especially attractive to a pair of lovers as it had attracted me. Moreover, the lawns were oozy and grassless and the leafless bushes afforded no screen. In January, every consideration recommended the recesses of this cliff to lovers as a trysting place. My companion and myself now tramped a half-mile farther into the depths of the park. Once every minute I glanced behind to make sure we were not being dogged. We came to a pile of large boulders, where alone in winter we could creep into a shadow. We had again made ourselves comfortable for less than two minutes when my watchful “superman” again whispered that he spied a derby hat a score of feet away trying to get us within range without itself being observed. My companion was a particularly wary young man and possessed a particularly keen night vision. He proved that night that he was able to discern things in the obscurity that escaped myself. We immediately walked away. Two dark figures likewise walked away, at first in a direction at right angles to our own. We walked a half-mile farther into the depths of the park (i.e., northward). This time we gazed once every minute not only immediately to the rear but sidewise. For the entire ten minutes we could occasionally discern, slipping along as much as possible behind bushes and trees, the two voyeurs paralleling our course at a distance of about three hundred feet. They evidently thought they had a rare treat in store. We had to relinquish our own plan as hopeless and retired to the city’s streets. In our ramble of more than a mile, we had not encountered a single policeman: besides the voyeurs only several pairs of lovers. I estimate that the incidence of congenital ultra-voyeurism is about the same as ultra-androgynism. That is: one in about three hundred adult physical males. The phenomenon is far more common than generally supposed by sexologists.

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