Note 11 — I. How This Book Came to Be Written.

For twenty-five years, the author has combed the medical press for information on androgynism. This chapter is the |Are Androgynes Super-men?| fruit. I made no notes, never expecting to publish the results. At the present writing, I lack the necessary month for research to the end of making a complete list of my sources. For Socrates, see Plato’s Symposium and Phædo, Xenophon’s Symposium, and Haller’s Die Rede des Sokrates in Platon’s Symposium. For Plato, see his Dialogues, particularly the Symposium; Grote’s Plato; Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, page 229; The Sexuality of Plato in Journal of Urology and Sexology, 1916, page 201. For Cæsar, see Dr. Wm. Lee Howard’s Pederasty vs. Prostitution in Journal of the American Medical Association, May 15, 1897, and Suetonius’ Lives of the Cæsars, written about A. D. 120. The latter work is a revelation of the pederasty with which the best Roman society was honeycombed. I believe conditions are about the same to-day in all civilizations above the barbarous, although in Christian nations one has not been permitted to publish the facts. They are really not horrible, nor portentous of ruin for society; merely imagined to be so. They are not really conducive to the detriment of society, and have existed practically as now throughout history. It is all because Nature has created the phenomenon of androgynism, really beneficent to society, but sorely misjudged by writers grossly ignorant of the phenomenon. Its final investigation in the twentieth century can do no hurt; only a world of good.

For Michelangelo, see his Sonnets and his biography by J. A. Symonds. For the Shakespeare-Author, see his Sonnets and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H., published in Blackwood’s in 1889, as well as that same article expanded in a monograph published by Mitchell Kennerly in 1921. For Whitman, see his Leaves of Grass and Drumtaps.

Mrs. Havelock Ellis, in her New Horizons in Love and Life, says: “Inversion [sexual] and genius have a sort of affinity. They certainly both tend to belong to the neurotic group.” [R. W’s comment: As a rule both androgynes and gynanders, but particularly the former, are bundles of nerves.]

The valuable popular exposition of the philosophy of sex, Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming-of-Age (published by Boni and Liveright) did not come to my attention until after THE FEMALE-IMPERSONATORS was written. The following are excerpts from the chapter, The Intermediate Sex, the bracketed words being my own: Page 124: “Charles G. Leland (“Hans Breitmann”) in his book, The Alternate Sex (1904), insists much on the frequent combination of the characteristics of both sexes in remarkable men and women, and has a chapter on “The Female Mind in Man,” and another on “The Male Intellect in Woman.” [I once read the statement in a medical journal, name not recalled: “Homosexualists are particularly common among authors.”]

Page 139: “The instinctive artistic nature of the male of this class [urnings or androgynes], his sensitive spirit, his |Androgynes’ Angelic Disposition.| wavelike emotional temperament, combined with hardihood of intellect and body ... may be said to give them ... through their double nature, command of life in all its phases, and a certain freemasonry of the secrets of the two sexes which may well favor their function as reconcilers [of the full-fledged males with the full-fledged females] and interpreters [of human nature, particularly from the standpoint of sex]. Certainly it is remarkable that some of the world’s greatest leaders and artists have been dowered either wholly or in part with the Uranian temperament [that is, either ultra-androgynes or ultra-gynanders or else psychic hermaphrodites]—as in the cases of Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar, or, among women, Christine of Sweden, Sappho the poetess, and others.”

It is noteworthy that tremendously virile males—who alone, as a rule, have been intimate with the extreme type of androgyne—have named him “fairie” in English-speaking countries and “petit-jesus” (Little Jesus) in France, largely because of his having, innate, the disposition of an angel; while the most common scientific term for androgynes in general has been “urning”, from Greek ouranos, meaning “heavenly being.” The originator of the term “urning”, however, was himself a bisexual, K. H. Ulrichs, an Austrian, the originator, about 1880, of the scientific study of sexual intermediates, and author of several published papers on the theme.

A lesser historic character than those listed in my text, Lord Cornbury, cousin of Queen Anne and colonial governor of New York, had the fad of attiring himself in feminine finery for a stroll on the capital city’s principal promenade. One of the most prominent judges (now deceased) of the Atlantic coast was declared to me, by a citizen of his own town, to be a psychic hermaphrodite. An official once high up in the government at Washington was declared to me, by a citizen of his native place, to be an androgyne. One of the greatest factors in world politics to-day is merely a grown-up infant and an androgyne, though at the same time a genius.