occa- for the first time surges up in ultra-androgynes at "the change of life" could not go very far with me. After six months, I renounced the pseudocourtship entirely, with disgust at the feminine sex, but particularly with the young female who had done her best to rope me in as her husband. For she did most of the courting. I merely let myself almost fall into her trap. ********** Even in my twenty-second year—the period when I belonged to the Cercle Hermaphrodites—I had already written a brief Autobiography. But the bigotry of cultured man made me wait twenty-three years for publication. Already—because I happened to be an ultra-androgyne myself—I had selected androgynism as my special field in science and literature. I therefore desired to collect all the data possible, although not yet having acquired the habit of note-making.
In order to draw out atypic individuals—particularly androgynes—I made it a practice first to reveal my own secrets. This frankness generally led them to confide to me what they never breathed to another—people in general, and particularly cultured androgynes, having an absurd reluctance to discuss the sexual side of their lives. (Androgynes for fear of persecution and prosecution, not by reason of prudery.) And the human race has suffered so greatly as a result of this obsession!
When God created human nature, his handiwork was so horrible that mankind, as soon as they reached the stage of civilization, have thrown a blanket over their own nature, after the example of Shem and
