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