The Velvet Underground

"In America, as in Europe, they frequent the larger cities where they can assume protective coloring and where a certain kind of tolerance exists. They have their own bars and clubs, their restaurants, their magazines and newsletters. They even have certain areas of the city where they can flaunt themselves without interference. But this is not enough. This ilk is never content to remain prisoners of their own abnormality. It would seem to be a condition of their aberrant drives that, as some light-skinned Negroes, they should 'pass.' And it is here that they frequently come into open conflict with the law. For it is as at such times that they attempt to raid the ranks of the normal.

It is a fact, long established by historians of sexual psychopathology, through the ages, that decadence in society leads to desexualization. Let us recall the fact that in 476 A.D., when the Roman Empire was falling apart, 50,000 male prostitutes roamed the streets of Rome. In the more recent past, in Germany, fermenting under the impact that was to lead to Hitler's Third Reich -- a monstrosity of a state in which inverts and perverts were leading innovators and helped immeasurably to bring it to power -- I studied the conditions in the 'velvet underground' of Berlin. I had it on the authority of the then district attorney of the German capital that more than ten percent of its population was registered under law 175 as deviates of one kind or another. I visited the night locales where Lesbians flaunted their warped love; I danced with transvestites and did not know I was doing so until I was informed by my conductor; I sat at tables in special bars where old men preened and postured and paraded their young paramours. One café was devoted solely to a clientele of flagellants.

Aside from this I read German daily newspapers whose advertising columns were filled with thinly disguised bids for abnormal sexual companions, and these ads left nothing to the imagination. Weekly and monthly magazines were published, devoted solely to the deviate and circulated openly without let or hinderance. Scattered throughout the country, nudist camps and locales for sundry forms of abnormal nature worship did not bother to conceal or mask the saturnalia of sex. Indeed, the German of Adolf Hitler would have been the paradise of many who are described in The Velvet Underground."