Werther, Ralph - Autobiography of an Androgyne (First published 1918)
First printed in 1918, Ralph Werther's Autobiography of an Androgyne charts his emerging self-understanding as a member of the "third sex" and documents his explorations of queer underworlds in turn-of-the-century New York City. Werther presents a sensational life narrative that begins with a privileged upper-class birth and a youthful realization of his difference from other boys. He concludes with a decision to undergo castration. Along the way, he recounts intimate stories of adolescent sexual encounters with adult men and women, escapades as a reckless "fairie" who trolled Brooklyn and the Bowery in search of working-class Irish and Italian immigrants, and an immersion into the subculture of male "inverts." This new edition also includes a critical introduction by Scott Herring that situates the text within the scientific, historical, literary, and social contexts of urban American life in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Tracing how this pioneering autobiography engages with conversations on immigration, gender, economics, metropolitan working-class culture, and the invention of homosexuality across class lines, this edition is ideal for courses on topics ranging from Victorian literature to modern American sexuality.
Quote: During the nineteenth century, gay men began theorizing about themselves, analyzing why they were men who were sexually attracted to other men and not to women, and some developed the belief that they were “a female soul enclosed in a male body,” adopting the hermaphrodite—a physical emblem of the psychological combination of male and female—as a symbol for themselves in art and literature. This is not something that was typically known outside of the gay community at the time, and the few sexologists of the period who investigated it in their works—such as Karl Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis—were closely associated with the gay subculture.
When Henry uses the phrase “Vivian Girls,” it’s not girls that he’s actually thinking about but Vivian belles, fairies, pansies, queers, or queens. In fact, in Henry’s second novel, which also stars the Vivians, the characters who come in contact with them refer to them as “fairies” more often than not. This allows Henry to give them an otherworldly cast as well as anchor them in a queer context. Such ambiguity has been a mainstay of gay art and literature for centuries, and Henry tapped into that strategy and made it his own.
