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@girlicbread.bsky.social
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salty girl with butter and spices, regrettably stuck in the 2nd closet politics-free (mentally healthier) account: @girlicbutter.bsky.social
salty girl with butter and spices, regrettably stuck in the 2nd closet politics-free (mentally healthier) account: @girlicbutter.bsky.social
![On the basis of different visits to an upper room permanently rented by the CERCLE HERMAPHRODITOS, I am going to build up a typical hour's conversation in order to disclose into what channels the thoughts of ultra-androgynes run when half-a-score find themselves together. The reason for its unnatural ring is that I omit the nine-tenths that were prattle, retaining only the cream that I consider of scientific value.
It was about eight o'clock on an evening of April, 1895. Some of the hermaphroditoi were still in male apparel; some changing to feminine evening dress and busy with padding and the powder-puff; some in their completed evening toilette ready to descend to the beer-garden below to await a young-blood friend.⁷⁶
[font changes to indicate textbook author commentary]
One of the "hermaphroditoi" remarks how common it is for "rather mannish women [to] fall in love with us Mollie Coddles." An androgyne named Angela Phyllis is reminded of the murder of a young heiress, a "gynander" (in modern terminology, a "Lesbian"). Lind notes that this "anecdote deals with only one of a number of similar occurrences in New York, Gynanders, as well as androgynes, are doomed to suffer murder at the hands of hare-brained prudes because of the false teaching of the leaders of thought." Phyllis recalls the story:
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"Perhaps you read in the papers two years ago how a New York young woman disappeared, and the utmost efforts of the police were not rewarded with the least trace. She was of that mannish type....
"I myself have no doubt of the fate of the poor girl. When the papers were full of rumors and hypotheses about her, I repeatedly wrote my theory to her father, When he ignored my letters, I gave the police my theory. They likewise thought it absurd and refused to investigate along the lines I suggested.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ngxxzq2xxrhfbjwmufqhipdc/bafkreigaibpo7jkny5qdhwesqxiecjyzokgfqhl46an3odxqeqwdzjd2sq)
![c. 1895: EARL LIND (Ralph Werther/Jennie June, pseuds.);
The Cercle Hermaphroditos;
To "unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution"
Two autobiographical works by the pseudonymous Earl Lind (who also called himself Ralph Werther/Jennie June) propose arguments for the legal and social acceptance of homosexuals. Lind's Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) and The Female Impersonators (1922) present the life history of this "feminine". identified and eccentric male homosexual born in 1874.⁷³ These rare accounts also convey a sense of the social attitudes toward homosexuals, and of one aspect of the underground Gay life in New York City at the turn of the century.
Lind argues that homosexuality, as a congenital condition, carries no moral guilt, cannot be spread by example, and harms no one, therefore legal and social penal ties should be abolished. However, his own shame and guilt often led him to consider suicide and into various forms of self-punishment, including the decision to have himself castrated at age twenty-eight. His extravagant "feminine" role-playing was based upon an acceptance and extreme exaggeration of the most traditional concept of "femininity." What Kate Millett has said of the homosexual characters of Jean Genet may be applied to Earl Lind: "Because of the perfection with which they ape the 'masculine' and 'feminine' of heterosexual society, [Genet's] homosexual characters represent the best contemporary insight into its constitution and beliefs." Millett adds: Genet's homosexuals "have unerringly penetrated to the essence of what heterosexual society imagines to be the character of 'masculine' and 'feminine,' and which it mistakes for the nature of male and female, thereby preserving the traditional relation of the sexes,"⁷³](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ngxxzq2xxrhfbjwmufqhipdc/bafkreibg7qwwqlmn4ujmydx2zwsaucylij5crznjssopccyisa7cfqlwqa)
![Although it is difficult to know exactly where Earl Lind's accounts pass from fact to fiction, his comment on "Paresis Hall" as a homosexual "resort" in New York City in the late 1800s is documented by another reliable source.⁷⁴ Lind's account of "the Hall" includes a description of a group which may be, if not apocryphal, the earliest American prototype of a homosexual emancipation organization, the "Cercle Hermaphroditos," formed by "androgynes" (feminine-identified male homosexuals) to "unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution":
[the font changes to indicate direct excerpt from primary source]
Evenings at Paresis Hall.
During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the headquarters for a vocational female-impersonators [male homosexual transvestites] of the upper and middle classes was "Paresis Hall," on Fourth Avenue several blocks south of Fourteenth Street. In front was a modest bar-room; behind, a small beer-garden. The two floors above were divided into small rooms for rent....
Paresis Hall bore almost the worst reputation of any resort of New York's Underworld. Preachers in New York pulpits of the decade would thunder Philippics against the "Hall," referring to it in bated breath as "Sodom!"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ngxxzq2xxrhfbjwmufqhipdc/bafkreif7nvcsnnifqqm422nmgyxsgiminz3ami6af5lpshjc7vhzzh55ra)
![[They were] laboring under a fundamental misapprehension. But even while I was an habitué, the church and the procured the such a war against the resort that the "not-care-a-damn" politicians who ruled little old New York had finally to stage a spectacular raid. After this, the resort, though continuing in business (because of political influence), turned the cold shoulder on androgynes and tolerated the presence of none in feminine garb.
But there existed little justification for the police's "jumping on" the "Hall" as a sop to puritan sentiment. Culturally and ethically, its distinctive clientele ranked high. Their only offence—but such a grave one as to cause sexually full-fledged Pharisees to lift up their own rotten hands in holy horror—was, as indicated, female-impersonation during their evenings at the resort. A psychological and not an ethical phenomenon! For ethically the "Hall's" distinctive clientele were congenital goody-goodies, incapable (by disposition) of ever inflicting the least detriment on a single soul... But the "Hall's" distinctive clientele were bitterly hated, and finally scattered by the police, merely because of their congenital bisexuality [in modern terminology, "homosexuality"]. The sexually full-fledged were crying for blood (of innocents), as did the "unco' good" [those professedly strict in matters of morals] in the days of witch-burning. Bisexuals must be crushed-right or wrong! The subject does not permit investigation!...
... The full-fledged had innumerable opportunities for the satisfaction of their instincts. Androgynes had only "the Hall' with the exception of three or four slum resorts frequented by only the lowest class of bisexuals who had never known anything better than slum life.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ngxxzq2xxrhfbjwmufqhipdc/bafkreia5f7p3v6gipf42ybsef4nhqm5iidmo6gcrulvwfcylfn5vkahicm)
![the y-axis of a graph, labeled "Flux density (Jy)" [note: Jy = Joule-year]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ngxxzq2xxrhfbjwmufqhipdc/bafkreifiotsp6fexapvuoc43nu56ls7g2qni3kygtd24yc5htlri7l6mrm)
