Z was five feet four in height and weighed 145 pounds. [Short and plump build characteristic of androgynes.] The city medical examiner noted that the lower ribs were “retracted, possibly due to the use of corsets.” He also noted that “the beard and moustache are scanty.” [Meaning if not shaven close. Such scantiness is common in androgynes.]

If the murder theory is true, the assassin must have planned to murder with great care. [It was all done on the spur of the moment, and the death probably an accident.] He must have had an accomplice who brought him to the boat before the murder, and took him away afterward, and he must have known in some mysterious way that Z was going to visit the boat that Sunday afternoon. [If Z was murdered, he had had an appointment on the yacht with his assassin. The latter must have arrived before the yachtsmen who spent the afternoon on the closely encircling decks, and watched that they go ashore before himself. At dusk he could have swum away without being seen. At that hour on a Sunday, there were many desolate points on the nearby shore at which he could have unobservedly emerged. But the most daring criminal would hardly have committed a murder with several men only a few feet away on the decks of the encircling yachts. A single shriek from the victim would have immediately brought several men on board.]

The care with which the clothing was put on certainly seems to indicate that Z himself put it on, every article being properly adjusted.

[The authorities, because ignorant of androgyne psychology and habits and despising a bisexual (myself) |Author’s Own Foretaste of Z’s Fate.| too much to listen to his-her theories, were on a false scent. At the date this volume goes to press (December, 1921), the Z mystery—as well as the X, Y, and Q—has not been cleared up by the authorities, although none of the four is much of a problem to myself, knowing how the world treats androgynes.

[It is a strange coincidence that about a score of years before Z was strangled, within two miles of his yacht’s point of anchorage, in a large patch of woods at night, I was, as an aftermath of a female-impersonation, being roughly teased by six “young fellows.” To cap the climax, they led me toward a tree and said they were “going to get a rope and hang” me. Horrified, I feigned an epileptic fit to save myself. See my Autobiography of an Androgyne, page 208.

[While I have never believed Z a suicide, it is a possibility. A new idol with whom he had had an appointment on the yacht that afternoon might have shown utter disgust at Z’s revelations—as I have myself witnessed in a confidant—and pitilessly abandoned him. This misguided attitude might have brought on Z a sympathetic disgust with himself as female-impersonator and cross-dresser. According to this theory, Z wished to punish and heap indignities on his own body—just as I have myself, in my verdant middle teens, taken a whip and chastised my own body because lustful, homosexual thoughts had invaded my mind, while crying out: “‘O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!’” Perhaps Z wished to punish his own body by depriving it of breath while in female garb and so publish to the world the despicableness of his own physical personality. In no other way could Z’s spiritually minded |Suicide Theory.| psyche better revenge itself on his carnal body than to have the latter’s grossness proclaimed on the housetops.

[In case Z was a suicide, the idol who had only a few minutes before pitilessly scorned his advances was very likely an adolescent spending that afternoon on one of the three nearest yachts. As I have said, the case came to a curious abrupt ending in the papers, as if the entire solution had become known to those immediately interested, but the public was not let into the secret in order to shield unblameworthy parties.

[If Z was a suicide, I have myself passed through a very similar experience. (See my Autobiography of an Androgyne, page 235.) Because heartlessly jilted by a new idol and afraid I would, as “a monster of depravity,” be cast out of the caravan with which I was travelling in an uninhabited region of the Rockies, I walked away in the forest alone at dusk a mile from camp having in mind suicide by being torn to pieces by bears, with which the forest abounded, and several of which I saw that night roaming within a hundred feet. Like Z, I had not left behind a single oral or written word as to suicide. I was acting on the spur of the moment. For several hours I experienced such depths of sorrow as not one human out of ten thousand ever tastes. Continuously for an hour, out of hearing of the camp, I wailed at the top of my voice over my terrible lot in life—that of a despised, hated, and outlawed “degenerate” (as the hypocritical nine-tenths of civilized humanity delight to call me)—and over the possibly impending unfathomable disgrace among a party of rough men with whom I must travel until we got back to a railroad. I experienced a violent desire |Author’s Attempt at Suicide.| to be devoured by bears. But the All-Seeing overruled that they did not attack me.]^[49]

(The following are excerpts from a New York paper. Every few months the press brings to light a similar death of an androgyne. All because the world misunderstands and grossly misjudges them, as well as because public opinion has always deprived them of the means of coming to an understanding of themselves. Bracketed words and italics are those of the author of The Female-Impersonators.)

STUDENT’S DEATH MYSTERY BAFFLING—NO KNOWN BASIS IN Q’S LIFE TO SUGGEST MURDER OR SUICIDE THEORY

Overdone detective fiction seldom presents so many significant but mostly inexplicable circumstances surrounding the victim of death by violence as those developed concerning [Jimmie Q], twenty, quiet, studious, religious [earmarks of androgynism], a [North Atlantic] college junior, popular, not morbid, a cleancut American youth, whose body was taken from the river last Thursday night....

Q loved to roam the slums of large cities. [An earmark of cultured androgynism. They thus roam because realizing that in their Overworld, they are prohibited outlet for the feminine side of their duality. They roam with day dreams of how they would like to impersonate a female in the Underworld, where alone female-impersonators are welcome; and finally, in many cases, they are carried away by their mania for an actual female-impersonation spree.]... His |Female-Impersonation Obsession.| college room-mate commented on the large number of neckties, all Q had, which the latter was taking along. [As he said, for a few days’ visit to his father, which visit did not take place. My theory is that he went to the great city, in whose harbor his dead body was found, to spend an evening with chance-met gangsters in the slums, as I have myself done, and he took the many neckties as presents for them, just as I myself have carried neckties with which to shower them and thus win their goodwill. The androgyne, of course, wishes the gangsters as an audience for his loved impersonations. Androgynes always wish an audience of tremendously virile “young fellows.”]

Q did not drink and never took special interest in any woman. But he did like to rove about in the districts of big cities in which the poorest classes live and work.... Whenever he was in New York, he spent most of his time in such districts....

At the Morgue, Mr. Q identified the effects of his son. When the body was exposed for his inspection—it appeared to have been in the water about ten days—the father bowed his head and tearfully exclaimed: “Poor Jimmie! How you must have suffered!”...

The fisherman who had pulled the body ashore had used a grappling hook.... To it they attributed the incision which the [City’s] Medical Examiner had reported to have been made by some weapon. The Medical Examiner denounced this report and suggested that the police were forwarding a suicide theory to escape responsibility for solution of a crime. He declared there was evidence of hemorrhage in this wound not producible by such an injury inflicted long after death. He further recalled that the left arm of Q was |Methods of Torture.| dislocated at the elbow, with the arm muscles twisted—positive indications of external violence. [I myself have been tortured by a ruffian’s seizing me by the wrist and twisting around my arm so that I had to shriek in agony.]

The Medical Examiner declared the absence of water in the lungs developed by the autopsy showed beyond question that Q was dead when his body entered the water.... He had seventy-seven cents in his pockets when his body was found. [Evidence of robbery, considering that he was a well-to-do youth on a visit to a great city distant from his college. My theory is, on the basis of intimate knowledge of the practices of androgynes, that he scraped acquaintance with one or more gangsters, while adopting a girl’s role. Many gangsters cordially hate bisexuals. Because of this hatred, as well as to escape prosecution after robbing Q, the gangsters murdered him and threw his dead body into the river—probably in the vicinity. Again the fundamental cause of the death of another androgyne is the terribly false teaching of the Church and public opinion as to the nature of bisexuality.]