The Wall Street hermaphrodite is perched cross-legged comfortably on the couch in his Manhattan penthouse. When asked what it feels like to be possessed of both sexes at once, a small furrow develops upon his brow. It's like being a man and a woman trapped inside an alien body, he muses. It's not being completely either. "I was raised as a man," he says. So I ask Mr. Kryder when it was that he discovered his unique sexuality. In the 6th grade, during sex education, apparently unsatisfied with the diagrams shown to him at school, he came to his parents for a more thorough explanation. They looked at each other wearily, as if the moment they had been dreading all their lives was at hand, as indeed it was. Someone had let the proverbial cat out of the bag, and now it was time to dissect it and study its genitalia. As the theme of "It's Pat" runs through my head, I ask how he, as a heretofore innocent young boy, accepted this knowledge. As a gift, he replies. I nod my head in feigned understanding. He wanted to think of himself as the best of both worlds, having his cake and eating it, too. But the truth is Mr. Kryder felt like a cheap parlour trick, cheated. The truth is sometimes we're given the cake but it's all styrofoam and colored plaster and not edible at all. The truth is, life has often been ugly for this gentle creature who sits calmly smoking his Capri cigarettes, careful not to ash on his $3,000 Peruvian rug. And what of all this opulence? I ask if his being a hermaphrodite has had anything to do with his success on Wall Street. He suddenly throws his head back and laughs a most wicked laugh, and exclaims that of course it gives him an edge, because he is more ruthless than any man or woman could ever be. I shift uneasily in my seat, and he waits patiently, I think, for the $10,000 question, the question burning in the minds of the all talk show junkies playing along with the home game; that being, what is his sexual preference? And when I ask him he merely sighs, takes a deep drag from the cigarette, and replies coyly that he has the equipment to perform any job.
Copyright 1997 Jennifer Chung
All moral and legal rights
reserved and asserted.