III George Greenwood45
Ralphie, I am now going to tell you about the foremost specimen of young manhood I ever met. If a man show had been held five years ago, on the model of the horse show, the young fellow I am going to tell you about would have won first prize.
You know that most of us hermaphroditoi have a single soul-mate. Of course they are uncultured. Mere diamonds in the rough. For the past four years, George Greenwood, whom you have seen with me, has been my own soul-mate. For while I have flirted with many others, he alone has been like an adopted son—as we older hermaphroditoi look upon our soul-mates. At present, George is twenty-nine, and in outer attractiveness, only a wreck of what he was when I “adopted” him.46
George’s Antecedents.
I must explain, mon cheri, that George is not well bred. About twelve years ago a portrait painter of my acquaintance ran across him selling papers on Broadway. George was then only seventeen. At first sight, the artist felt George’s unique beauty and asked him to pose. Later other artists did George in oils and with the chisel.
He has never known who his parents were. For he was a foundling. When discharged from the orphan asylum at fourteen, he was apprenticed to an upholsterer. But on account of George’s quick temper and nasty tongue, he could hold no position more than a month. When my friend ran across him, George’s thoroughly bad record had left him only one means of earning his bread: selling papers. But ever since his ideal physique was discovered by my friend, George’s path through life has been strewn with roses.
Four years ago I happened to lay eyes on George as he posed in my friend’s studio. Right away his lines of face, head, limbs, and body—hitherto even undreamed of—held me spell-bound and I took him into my home. For I thought George was Michelangelo’s Adam stepped down into flesh and blood out of the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Angelo’s nude figures of youthful men have alone approached George’s ideal lines.
But he has been such a drunkard and high-liver in general that his beauty—particularly his head and face—is now far below par. For two years he has not been hired as a model. And he does not want to earn in any other way. He has leaned wholly on me to keep up his life in the Rialto as all-around sport.
Michelangelo’s Adam.
I breathe to you, Ralphie, under pledge to keep it forever locked in the chambers of your heart, that George’s face and figure, once driving me beside myself, have become hideous and loathsome. How I hate his billiard-ball head! In order to stand his presence, |Androgyne Platonic Marriage.| I have to ask him to keep his hat on. And a man’s wig disgusts me even more than a bald pate. Three months ago we stopped living together. I could no longer put up with his all the time scolding and cursing me, and spitting tobacco juice and vomit on the rugs. While we see each other now and again—because he wants a few yellow backs—we have come to hate the very sight of one another.
Ralphie, I heartily wish I were forever rid of the brute beast! It now comes hard, when I see nothing of the hero in him, to fork over a roll of bills every few days. Our relations the past year have been hardly more than a case of blackmail. I do not wholly drop him for fear of his telling abroad how I pass now as a man and now as a woman.
Most of all I want to get out of George’s clutches because five months ago I met a wonderful young fellow whom I plan legally to adopt. When I took George Greenwood, I planned the same thing. But his character proved so terrible! I am now getting on in life, mon cheri, and my health is delicate. I need a close intimate in my home to wait on me during my many sick days. It is difficult for any of us hermaphroditoi to take a wife. One hates so to explain to a woman that after marriage, the life must be that of brother and sister. And no woman—excepting only the most old-maidish—would marry under these conditions. But I know one of us hermaphroditoi—before your time, Ralphie—who did marry, after thirty, under that arrangement, and only because he had political ambitions, and his being known as a married man would give pause to enemies who were backbiting him because of the indiscretions of his youth. This hermaphroditos |Androgynes Wish a Wife for “Sons.”| was one of the brightest of men and rose, as a result, to one of the foremost posts in the nation. But if he had not been married, the politicians and the voters would have turned him down. A legal marriage surely covers a multitude of sins. But I myself have such a horror of women that I could not live with one even as a sister.
I have a maiden sister, whom I could get as housekeeper, and who would take the best of care of me. But I can not receive her into my home for fear she might discover my bisexuality. I could not allow a servant to live in my flat any more than my sister. For even at the age of thirty-three, I, although half the time almost too feeble to drag myself about, do not feel like saying goodby forever to my female-impersonation sprees. They are still such fun; about all I have to live for! And God has made young fellows so wonderful, so charming! I still admire their beauty as much as I did ten years ago. And it is still so easy to get them on the string, almost as easy as it was ten years ago. But if I am able legally to adopt Calvin—about whom I will tell you in a minute—I feel that I then can, having him with me always in my home, always in my office, always travelling with me wherever I go: I then can say goodby forever to female-impersonation sprees. For he would be to me a husband as well as a son. He would be everything to me! I would live only in and for him! Only to make him, his female wife, and his offspring happy! For I would not put anything in the way of his taking a full-female wife in addition whenever he felt like it, because a full-fledged young fellow is restless without one.
Of course I could have another hermaphroditos |Calvin Luther.| live with me, as Ruby, Berenice, and the Duchess live together. But it has always been my fondest dream to adopt as son a young fellow who comes up to my ideal.
For several months I have had my ideal under my eyes every day as stenographer in my millinery house. As “women’s men” are prone to take for private secretary the prettiest face or “divinest” form among the gentle sex, likewise I picked out the applicant standing highest as an Adonis. He is only twenty and possesses golden curly hair; deep-set, marine-blue eyes; and radiant red cheeks. From his having been baptized “Calvin Luther” you can tell what kind of parents and breeding he was blessed with. He is thoroughly pure-minded and unspoiled, having, until fifteen months ago, lived on a farm.
I slavishly worship the youth. The biased world would tremble at the thought of the harm I would surely (as they fancy) do this pearl of great price. For he is truly an angel; God’s child; very religious—a trait so rare among the strongly virile. I have already made something of a confidant of him in order to learn his feelings toward a woman-man. Most young fellows with a puritan bringing up would turn the cold shoulder. But I found Calvin Luther open to reason. He told me he has always, as a good church member, struggled against his wanting the gentle sex. While at business school in a small city, he earned his board by delivering for a baker in the early morning. A natural thing followed upon his being rarely good-looking. I barely wormed it out of him when I was administering the third degree. He ’fessed up that a number of servant girls where he delivered played on |Prudery and Bigotry Now Regnant.| him the trick of Potiphar’s wife on Joseph. Twice—he ’fessed up with face as red as a beet—he did not show Joseph’s strength of character. And I did not think the less of him.
And you, Ralphie, of course know that I would never be guilty of anything that could bring the least harm to this adored innocent. His health of body and mind will not be damaged a particle. I shall give him the best educational and cultural advantages. As I have said, he will some day marry the girl of his choice, and I shall live with the pair as a parent. He and his children will be my heirs.
Is such an outlook for a poverty-stricken young fellow just cause for Pharisees holding up their hands in holy horror?47 The sexually full-fledged cannot get |Phyllis “Passes On.”| into their heads that we women-men are just as high-minded and conscientious as themselves. They are continually hurling insults—calling us “degenerates.” But my only thought is to heap blessings on those whom I worship. I have always lived up to the maxim: Act in such a way as would be good if universally followed. Those who through self-righteousness condemn and crush me are a hundred times worse sinners. Perhaps some day, mon cheri, the world will come to believe that the actual presence of women-men in all communities—which Nature brings about—is a distinct blessing to society in several ways.
Author’s Note.—Within a year of the above confessions, Angelo—Phyllis was found dead in “his-her” apartment. The skull had been fractured with a hammer.