Earl Lind

“ My second aim was to put a stop to the continuous string of murders of these stepchildren, the assassins laboring under the delusion that homosexuality is due to deepest moral depravity, and feeling that they are mandatories of society in ridding the world of these "monsters." My third aim was to save hundreds of these superlatively melancholy sexual intermediates from suicide as the result of bitter persecution by those who pride themselves on the fact that in their own case, sex has been thoroughly differentiated. ”

“ Socrates is the earliest historic character whom sexologists have declared an androgyne. For centuries, a common designation of male homosexuality has been "Socratic love." In Plato's "Dialogues," Socrates is the teacher. His remarks of extreme affection to his youthful disciples are sickening even to me, though an androgyne myself. Present-day scholars who close their eyes to the facts of androgynism, who cling to mediaeval sex ideas, and hence hold homosexuality to result from deep-eyed moral depravity, have denounced Socrates as the greatest moral leper that ever lived. ”

“ Effeminacy in an entirely different sense, and a kind that spreads rapidly through example, is the actual cause of the decline and fall of nations; in the sense of the weakening of the moral fibre of the males of the upper crust or ruling class through their having grown overfond of ease and pleasure and lost their joy in industry and justifiable fighting. A neighboring nation of superior moral fibre is quick to learn of such effemination and subjugates the decadent one. But these effeminates' fondness for the gentle sex has in no way declined. ”

“ Whenever a male arrived at puberty, the weapons of the warrior and the cooking vessels of the squaw were ceremoniously placed before him that he might choose his future social status. A not inconsiderable number of adolescents (because congenital androgynes) always chose the culinary utensils and passed the rest of their lives as squaws, the hair of the beard being plucked out as fast as it showed itself, and the costume being that of the female sex. Surely savage tribes continuously on the war-path can not be accused of degenerative effeminacy! ”

“ No reader should conclude from my trilogy that New York has been particularly immoral. Conditions are about the same in all great cities, except that those of the United States are puritan towns compared with Europe. I have explored the Underworld in many cities of both continents, being temperamentally qualified. But in America's smaller cities west of the meridian of Kansas City, the sexual Underworld is more bold and wields more political power than anywhere else in the United States or Europe. ”

“ The problem of the bisexual girl-boy or androgyne has been presented for the learned professions in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld. But to accomplish my three aims, it is necessary that the general reader have instilled into his mind that sexual intermediates are not to blame for their cross-sex idiosyncrasies. Such knowledge could not besmirch the soul of the general reader, but only benefit him morally. ”

“ Do you still insist that these sexual cripples continue to suffer physical and mental torture for another century because your own pleasure bulks too large for you to hear and bear the truth about the despairing cross-sexed? ”

“ They have not, like the more virile—to whom alone androgynes gravitate—been eye-witnesses of the entirely innocent, innocuous, and even pitiable sexuality of these pseudo-men.
The mildly virile, constituting the vast majority of all males in "Christian" countries, seek to impose the dictates of their own sexual natures upon all men whatsoever. The sexual mandates of "Christian" society and of the New Testament express the sex feelings in part of the mildly virile, and in part of the anaphrodites. Whatever harmonizes with these feelings is right; whatever fails to, is "bestial." ”

“ Twentieth-century psychologists are coming around to the view that even the leaders of thought are governed by instinct and mores rather than reason. Even for intellectuals, truth is what is intuitive or what satisfies their prejudices and instincts. Still in the twentieth century, the leaders of thought bow down before intellectual idols, although other than those overthrown by Francis Bacon. ”

“ Only bigoted pseudo-scientists have pronounced androgynes degenerates. Only mediæval medicine, not modern medicine. Androgynism is merely an instance of arrested development; or possibly of atavism—an attempt on the part of Nature to return to the original hermaphrodism of man's early antecedents. The androgyne who follows the dictates of Nature is not a whit more degenerate morally than the fullfledged man who marries. It is only the fallible mores which make the full-fledged think that a person with apparently male pudenda who impersonates a female is infinitely below themselves morally. ”

“ The goal for which the race is headed is the minimum of sexual consciousness, coitus for procreation only, just enough offspring to keep the number of the human race on earth stationary, lengthened life, and ever increasing expansion of the intellectual in man at the expense of the physical. With this evolution, the proportion of sterile bisexuals will also increase.
The fighting forces of a nation are almost entirely made up of the two more virile classes, although together constituting only about twenty-five per cent of the total manhood of civilized nations. ”

“ Androgynes and gynanders occupy exactly the middle section, looking toward both the male and the female side.
It is quasi-instinctive with each sex class to scorn members of another class just because they happen to be built on a different plan. It is the same phenomenon prevalent in the religious domain in past centuries, when the Roman Catholic yearned to murder the Protestant and vice versa. Which intolerance the gradual conquest of human affairs by reason is pushing further and further into the background. But still in the twentieth century, reason is a nonentity in the domain of sex. ”

“ Surely we androgynes, who for two thousand years have been despised, hunted down, and crushed under the heel of normal men because they have misunderstood biblical condemnations of homosexuality, have no reason to be ashamed of our heritage. ”

“ It is infinitely easier for an anaphrodite to be a saint than for the ultra-virile to be even decent. St. Paul's sex teachings constitute the greatest stumbling block of the church. They have caused the human race a world of woe. ”

“ As already stated, ultra-androgynes, having a woman's psyche, are goody-goodies. Indeed goody-goodiness may be regarded as their most marked characteristic. For this reason, in France, they are called "little Jesuses" (petite jesus) notwithstanding that the more extreme are public female-impersonators in resorts of ill repute. Ultra-androgynes are incapable of doing any real harm. If all the human race were as harmless, this world would be a far better place in which to live. ”

“ It seems that Nature wishes to preserve to as many of her children as possible the joys of courtship. Often, instead of making cold anaphrodites or female icebergs out of the men and women not needed to perpetuate the race, she brings into the world androgynes or gynanders—as a rule, sterile. ”

“ Even to-day, some of the less extreme androgynes wear a full beard because of horror of a razor.
One of the three charges on which Socrates was condemned to death was that he was "a corrupter of youth;" the identic charge that landed Oscar Wilde in prison. But neither of these geniuses ever corrupted any youth. The prevalent idea that the association of an older androgyne with a sexually full-fledged younger man corrupts the latter is absolutely groundless. The androgyne only benefits, in several ways, the adolescent whom he loves far more than a father loves an only son. ”

“ The artistic instinct—the poetic temperament, "sentimentality" in its highest sense—goes hand in hand with a rounding-off of the sharp corners of masculinity. Artistic or poetic decades have been conspicuous because of a semi-slumbering of fundamental masculine traits, that is, the instinctive relish for wrangling and war. ”

“ It is not necessary to crush androgynes in order to guard against the spread of effeminacy. Effeminacy, in the sense of androgynism, does not spread by example. It is entirely congenital. Only a physical male born with quasi-feminine predilections would adopt the role of a female after becoming adult. An androgyne's predilections and practices are regarded with such repugnance by all full-fledged males that none would stoop to them unless constrained by instinct. ”

“ After prayer for divine guidance and an exhortation by a parson that the Bible taught that witches ought to be ferreted out, the high-brows would seek to determine who of the several bags of bone known to all of them presented the most loathsome appearance, and who should therefore be burned at the stake as the witch responsible for the catastrophe—as the necessary human sacrifice to appease the anger of the Unseen Powers. For even down to the twentieth century there survives in Christendom the pagan superstition of the necessity of a human sacrifice now and then. ”

“ Adult ultra-androgynes tend merely to plumpness as a result of their dwarfed genitalia.
I have heard of ultra-androgynes, who, in their early twenties, on their physician's advice, married a woman, when Nature intended they should marry a man. All high-minded "homosexualists," soon after arrival at puberty, consult a medical man for a cure. From time immemorial it has been one of the profession's superstitions that marriage would cure homosexual tendencies. Some unsophisticated adolescent androgynes put faith in their physician's positive assurance that marriage is a sure cure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If, as a matter of conscience alone, the androgyne promises the physician to marry, he sometimes goes insane over the dread of it, or else commits suicide, either on the eve of marriage, or a few days afterward. But even if the marriage ceremony is performed, the consummation never takes place in the case of ultra-androgynes, and the wedded state proves very unhappy for both parties. At least in the case of the ultra-androgynes, such marriage possesses no curative value. Chronic and extreme homosexuality is congenital and incurable. ”

“ As the status of peoples descends from the enlightened to the savage, the proportion that this class forms of the entire male sex gradually increases. Among enlightened nations, I estimate it at five per cent on the basis of my intimate mingling, in the role of a soubrette, with several thousand young bachelors belonging exclusively to either the tremendously or ultra-virile class, while nearly all my every-day associates have belonged to the mildly virile. ”

“ The cold Anaphrodites are the particles that cling immovably to the banks of the masculine river. [4] They neither progress nor regress. They number about one-half of one per cent of all adult males. Like the ultra-androgynes, they have a horror of women from the sex point of view. But unlike the former, their minds are devoid of hero-worship and they shudder violently at the very thought of any kind of association grounded on sex differences. Their anaphroditism is either an after-effect of an illness in childhood or congenital.
For the most part, anaphrodites are intellectuals. ”

“ The Tremendously Virile cause the surging rapids at the center of the masculine river. Their pre-eminent characteristic lies in excessive venery and excessive promiscuity. Sex holds by far the chief place in their thoughts. A large part of their waking hours is spent in the torture of unsatisfied longing. Their conversation with business intimates tends to sexual lines. They are the "black sheep" of families, never letting an opportunity go by without improving it. They are the seducers of girls under puberty. ”

“ One presumed male out of every three hundred belongs to the third sex, strictly speaking. That is, the ultra-androgynes—the pseudo-men who possess only undersized and non-functional male pudenda, whose body otherwise tends toward feminesqueness, and whose psyche, predilections, tastes, gestures, and postures remind one of a female.
The third sex is a commonplace topic in the Underworld, which comprises about one-tenth the population of "Christian" lands. The Underworlders, however, generally fail to understand the cause of the effeminacy. ”

“ Were Socrates, Plato, Angelo, Raphael, and Francis Bacon monsters of depravity? Ought the Shakespeare- Author to have been buried alive by his hare-brained fellow citizens before he had a chance to pen a line?
The chief charge against androgynes is that they are guilty of "the awful crime of race suicide." But it is the fault of Nature alone that the ultra-androgyne is incapable of doing his part in the perpetuation of the race. ”