#earl lind

“Extra 2 o clock. Foul dive on the Bowery. Columbus Hall is a resort for disreputable people of both sexes. After 1 o clock the orgies begin and I wish I could join in but I’m a repressed little cunt! And they won’t let me in”

Rather than make a scathing article on the gangsters who owned the place hiring destitute queer & trans+ kids as prostitutes catering to older men, they instead disparage the womanly behaviour of the patron men, transfems+, & the masculinity of the patron women & transmascs+! And even the fact that the pianist wouldn't wear a jacket really upset the journalist!

That was taken out of the 9th of Jun 1894 issue of The Evening World. "Foul dive on the Bowery"... 392 Bowery, or as it is known today—32 Cooper Square, a smaller (white in the photo) building next to the bigger one that is today the village voice; to its left.

Cooper Sq 32 in 1905, before the renovation (previously called Stuyvesant square until the 1880s or so—not to be confused with the other of the same name)

More than 40 people the 2SLGBTQIA+ activist Jennie June / Ralph Werther called 'ultra-androgyne' and had personally met frequented the area in the years that the Autobiography Of An Androgyne author did so aswell. Ultra-androgyne is a complicated & at this point near archaic term, but it roughly equates to transfeminine+ today, with some caveats of its still somewhat broad encompassing, aswell as being that, as a rule, you kind of also had to be solely attracted to men, or bisexual, but not solely to women—though exceptions did exist that the author mention. Furthermore, the twenty odd members of Cercle Hermaphroditos were also ultra-androgyne, per Jennie; she did not elaborate the number of how many regular androgynes were patrons, nor gynanders & ultra-gynander, as Jennie said her focus was mainly on ultra-androgynes like herself; but the article clearly states that both 'men & women' (or cis men, cis women, transmascs+, & transfems in truth, as they often become a unified category in Kyriarchal contexts, such as with Mollies & Tommies aswell) were patrons of the club, so that must not be discounted.

The Evening World also self-describes itself as taking an active part in reporting on & having various [gay, lesbian & trans+] bars shut down under pretense of 'ridding the city of vice' —crass and colonially derived brigading; that they likely did with the help of the Comstock laws, anti crossdressing laws, anti sodomy laws, and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, aswell as the moral police then, which particularly—along with the police in general—loved to target the queer community; often, a bribe was enough to get them to back off, but other times that was unavoidable, such as the many times author Jennie June & her friends were accosted & beaten.

Though they termed it Columbus Hall and even claimed a sign above it said so! Big blunder! Lazzies and razzies, THIS is anti androgyne & gynander sentiment manifested! Ultra variants included! Look at how blindly they propel their sulphuric spit-laden words at us, good folk! I verily propose a fairy and tommie revolution! For this, an absolute calamity, must be repaid in blo-- it’s about time I go to bed, I think. Stay well and safe! :-)

I thought I had previously published this on the site back in January, but my profile lacking it attests to otherwise ^^ so here it be.

If you want to learn more about Columbia Hall from someone who lived it, I highly recommend 2SLGBTQIA+ activist Jennie June / Ralph Werther's 1918 & 1921 books Autobiography of an Androgyne, & The Female-Impersonators (Trigger warning for upsetting content, though)

Stay well!

As the cover for the book is plain, with only text, I chose one of the self portraits of the author from the book instead.

[Image ID: A black and white picture of the author of Autobiography of an Androgyne swimming naked with their eyes closed. The picture is positioned vertically, so it looks like the author is stepping out of the water instead of swimming. It is captioned The Author at Thirty-four. End ID.]

Triggers

homophobia, transphobia, suicidal thoughts, childhood sexual assault, hate crimes, robbery and muggings, rape and sexual assault, abuse, incest, ableism, mentions of slavery, racism, eugenics, religion, anti intersex language

Summary

Autobiography of an Androgyne is just what the title says. It is both a biography and a medical study of "androgynes" sometimes called passive inverts by Earl Lind/Ralph Werther/Jennie June (all pseudonyms), who identifies the same way. More importantly, it uses the story of Lind/June's sexual and non sexual life and its publishing by a medical journal as a plea for pity and fair treatment under the law for inverts.

A Note on Pronouns and Lind/June's Identity

Forgive me for throwing a bunch of outdated LGBT terminology at you in the last section, I wanted to explain it more in depth on its own here. I'm going to explain the terms Lind/June uses for clarity and also explain why I'm going to use the pronouns I do in my review.

At the time Autobiography of an Androgyne was published in 1918 and Lind/June's life described in the book, the predominate theory of homosexuality was invertism. Homosexuals were inverts in that gay men had female brains in a male body and lesbians had male brains in a female body, also hence the terms androgyne and gynander used in the book. At this time, sexuality and gender identity were conflated. If you were considered a woman in mind if not in body, it would only be natural to love men as a homosexual because women naturally love men. I would say its also pretty easy to draw a line straight from invert theory to the gatekeeping trans women experienced that required them to be heterosexual in addition to extremely feminine. Lind/June also uses the term passive invert, in that they did not seek to be the active role/top in sexual encounters. This is contrasted with active inverts and pederasts (men who were active and also partook in acts of anal intercourse as pederasty was the term at the time, which Lind/June did not seek out or enjoy) and the straight men who sleep with Lind/June.

Transgender was not a word back then, although certainly transgender people existed and Lind/June is likely to have been one of them, but could not identify with the terminology we have today. In Lind/June's own words, they lived a double life, going on female impersonation sprees at varying levels of frequency, they considered themselves 2/3s a woman in mind and in body as they had gynecomastia and thus breasts and 1/3 a man in the rest of their body. Lind/June also makes constant statements despairing that they have been "entombed" as a woman in a man's body. I am hesitant however, to label Lind/June as a trans woman because the language they had was not the same as ours, where trans women and gay men are understood to be completely separate categories because we have separated sexuality and gender in a way the 1900s did not. It is likely if Lind/June had been born today they would identify as a straight trans woman, or a drag queen/female impersonator, effeminate man, or genderfluid or nonbinary as they are content passing as a man except for in their sexual life and even using he/him pronouns, or any number of things. I can't make someone from a hundred years ago fit into our modern conceptions of identity.

I've debated what pronouns to use for Lind/June, but have compromised that I would follow the example they led in life. When I am referring to Lind/June as a whole as both parts of their double life I will use they/them pronouns. When I am talking about Lind as he lives his life outside of his profession as a "fairie" I will use he/him. When I am talking about Jennie June and her exploits as a fairie and her relationships with men I will use she/her.

Links

Openlibrary link - audio book available

An openlibrary link to the authors other book The Female Impersonators - audiobook available

Review

You might already be able to tell from my notes about the pronouns I will use that I find this book fascinating as a time capsule of one LGBT person's life and identity, who felt they had a duty to write about it in defense of their whole community in 1918! Who fought so hard with multiple publishers and their bigotry for years to get this book published mostly uncensored. I say mostly because while Lind/June fought to keep every section in they often censor sexual acts and descriptions in Latin.

I think this extreme desire to write and publish this autobiography is in part due to Lind's religious upbringing and education and his desire to work as a missionary as his way of improving the world. As his expulsion from university because of his identity and his battles with religion and sexuality he was unable to pursue religious life as he wanted it. Instead, like many early and modern LGBT Christians as I am reminded of Anne Lister, he managed to find a unity of his religion and his sexuality that benefited him. To me, it seems that with this unity of his heavenly and earthly goals he was able to abandon a missionary life mostly and instead advocate for other "inverts" from a religious standpoint. Which to modern ears is still extremely homophobic (Lind shoots for pity rather than acceptance and in an appendix throws Oscar Wilde under the bus for his non religious life), the discovery of a text like this from this time is still extraordinary.

When I say a text like this, I mean a text written by an LGBT person for the advocacy of LGBT people. Krafft-Ebing Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) and other studies of sexuality predate Autobiography of an Androgyne, but they were medical studies done by cishets studying LGBT people under a medical and ableist framework. Autobiography of an Androgyne however, written by an LGBT person as both study and advocacy takes what I would call an early "born this way" approach. I would put this book next to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' writing, where we also get the identity for homosexual men "urning" from. Although Lind/June rejects this identity as inaccurate as urning indicated active pederasty or mutual masturbation. There was uh, a lot of lines drawn based on sexual acts in this time I guess.

A lot of this text is sexual, actually, not for gratification but for clarification. June's over 800 partners based on her estimate is detailed throughout the book, as well as the pain she experienced at their hands, oftentimes forgiving men as they used and abused her. Her life is ultimately very tragic, documenting the homophobic and transphobic violence she encountered often and often in extreme degrees. Please heed the content warnings if you do decide to seek this book out. What I find interesting about June's experiences is that some of the culture from her experiences in the late 1800s would still be there and in greater numbers in the 1950s. People who were aware of June's identity would often resort to blackmail and she often had police who would entrap her, which would only increase as the years went by and more people became aware of LGBT people until it exploded at Stonewall.

Another interesting thing is that many of June's experiences took place in lower class areas and lower class bars (although she did have a period as a high class "fairie"). Lind/June was from a high social class, and June would often disguise herself as being poorer than she really was to avoid the risk of blackmail, robbery, and murder. But the mingling of low and high classes due to LGBT relationships and encounters was common, as people who were high class couldn't afford to be recognized, and June notes that lower class people were more tolerant then the people she met in her years as a high class fairie. Fairie is not June's word for a effeminate man/female impersonator sex worker, as she was not a sex worker and even refused to take money, although certainly some others were. She simply used it to denote her time cruising for affection and presenting as a woman to do so. This would also be another similarity with the later gay and trans communities, the presence of sex workers and in June's case, simply cruising for partners using a combined code of apparel (red bows and ties in this case) and speech.

"Cross-dressing (here talking about both trans+ and cis people) is generally an earmark of sexual intermediacy. It is not at all due—as bigots claim—to moral depravity, but entirely to irreproachable instinct. It is not at all due to childhood's training, such as the stories of parents' bringing up their boy or girl as a girl or a boy when they particularly wished a female or a male heir. Such child, as soon as he or she became old enough, would wholeheartedly rebel against such a travesty. In nearly every case, cross-dressing is due to the fact ​that Nature injected a psyche of the one sex into a corpus of the other" (a bit of a generalising, narrow old view but better than most people of her era). "The cross-dresser is not usually conscious of the oddity of taste for apparel. His or her -manner of dressing indicates what he or she considers artistic. All ultra-androgynes—such as made up the membership of the Cercle Hermaphroditos—would always, if society permitted, clothe themselves as women"

"[In a physical male(Androgyne), cross-dressing is the instinctive wearing of feminine apparel, or, in default, of the loudest and fanciest male styles." Crossdressing, as in one's physical body... J-W expressed many times that she was around 90% female in soul/mind, but lamented her male body and wished she was born with a female one. Euphoria from being addressed as a she/her girl is apparent in her writings, too, despite her using he/him for the most part.

"In a physical female(Gynander), it is similar adoption of masculine habiliments, or in default, of feminine attire and aspect approaching the masculine as nearly as possible: hair bobbed, stiff linen collar, a man's neck scarf, and always severely plain tailor-made waist and skirt."

I believe both of the above are mostly, although not entirely, in reference to the ultra variants of androgyne & gynander, as Jennie said that’s what her writings & the usage of the word “androgyne” was focused on, unless stated otherwise; She used the main term for brevity’s sake. One can infer that Ultra-Androgyne & ultra-gynander are most closely synonymous with what we today call transfeminine & transmasculine, respectively.

"In many cases I yearned to become the mother of his child, and often playfully spoke with an associate as if that. Sometimes on meeting a young mother with her infant in her arms, I have wished to be in her place." -Jennie June

“Men call the invert’s (LGBT people attracted to their own AGAB) instincts vice. The invert has just as much reason for calling the normal man’s instincts vice when they are not exercised solely in order to create a new human being. It is only a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In the eyes of the Supreme Being, with whom innate and unreasoning disgust is not a factor, the instincts of the normal man and of the invert are on a par morally and aesthetically.” (ditto)

"It is not at all due to childhood's training, such as the stories of parents' bringing up their boy or girl as a girl or a boy when they particularly wished a female or a male heir. Such child, as soon as he or she became old enough, would wholeheartedly rebel against such a travesty." basically saying you can't make someone trans… and well, who tf would've made Jennie, born in the 1870s in an ultra-religious tiny village, trans? 😭 She knew five other "girlboys" just like her in her village, too.

"In nearly every case, crossdressing is due to the fact ​that Nature injected a psyche of the one sex into a corpus of the other." "psyche" including neurology, aswell, based on other explanations elsewhere in the writings.