the joys of love and courtship! [Sidenote: _I Become a Religious
Prodigy._] Because if I followed my inclinations along these lines,
people would call me a monster and I would be a pariah![18]
“I wish I might get away from the world and live as a hermit! Then I
would in a way be unsexed, and would be so regarded by the world.
“People see that I am an effeminate youth! An effeminate youth! And my
sister has often expressed her disgust for that type! Who can like them?
“I feel that there is nothing which can henceforth give me interest in
life! I feel so mortified that I am a girl-boy! Oh it looks as if there
were no God!”
* * * * *
At fifteen I developed into a religious prodigy. Until my debut as a
quasi-public female-impersonator at nineteen, I, though the most
melancholy person of my community, was active in church work. During
these four years, I attended seven religious services a week (exclusive
of college chapel every morning during two of these years) and from
fifteen to seventeen, spent two hours a day in private devotions in
addition. As early as fifteen, I was the leader of prayer meetings. I
preached from the pulpit a dozen times at nineteen—a few months before I
relinquished all Church work because instinct drove me to
female-impersonation. All the ultra-pious of my ultra-puritan entourage
predicted for me a great career as a herald [Sidenote: _My Life’s
Motto._] of Christianity—to which vocation I had already at fifteen
dedicated my life.
Thus as early as fifteen, I was frequently called upon to lead the
congregation in extemporaneous prayer. Usually my keynote (for my
private prayers as well) was my life’s motto, which I adopted at
fifteen:
“My times are in Thy hand,
Whatever they may be;
Pleasing or painful,
Dark or bright,
As best may seem to Thee!”
Tears would course down my cheeks and my voice tremble with emotion. I
never failed to remember that I had the greatest need of all for the
rest for which I pleaded and which Jesus has promised to give “the
oppressed and heavy laden.”
After service, all other youths escorted a girl home and lingered over
the gate for blissful conversation. But I had the habit of making my
solitary way to a desolate abandoned graveyard whose latest headstone
was set up in the twenties of the nineteenth century.
Behold my Garden of Gethsemane, where not merely once, but once each
week, I would throw myself on a grass-covered grave, writhe in an agony
of moans, and even shriek. All my muscles seemed to be rigid, and my
fists were clinched. I would dig my fingernails into my palms, and throw
my arms about wildly.
“Change my nature, O God,” I would cry. “This very moment. By a miracle.
Give me the mind and powers of a man.
[Sidenote: _My Temptations Hardly Equalled._]
“Am I being ‘tried by fire’ as the Bible predicts for God’s children?
Are others so tried by fire as I have been nearly all my life?”
[After half-a-century of rare opportunities to learn human nature, I
have ascertained that I was tried worse than any one else I have heard
of—that is, by torture of sexual desire that must _not_ be gratified,
and practically was not from seven to eighteen, inclusive. I was tried
by fire a hundred times as hot as the average person ever knows.
Probably so hot because of my intense fairie-ism from two to six. I
believe I have, for years together, resisted lust many times as intense
as the average person ever knows.]
[Illustration:
My Garden of Gethsemane
]
[Sidenote: _In My Garden of Gethsemane._]
“I am experiencing the enslaving power of sin. I now know how to
sympathize with poor drunkards and harlots. I will flog and starve
myself in order to conquer my flesh. [I actually fasted and flagellated
myself to ascertain the effect in deadening my amorousness but found
these religious exercises useless.]
“I feel to-night that I can never become a preacher of the Gospel. I
feel that I must give up all plans for a noble career, and that maybe I
shall come to a disgraceful end!
“Oh that all instinct would die in me! It makes my life miserable. How
gladly would I be free from all desire so that I could make a name for
myself in the world! An extreme girl-boy can hardly become a scholar and
a preacher.
“Is it my divinely appointed task to learn the lesson of resignation in
affliction? To feel myself crushed to earth by the Almighty Hand? Like
Isaac, to be tried in order to see whether I am willing to be slain in
my youth—in my own case morally?”[19]
[Sidenote: _Man’s Prudery Almost Fatal._]
After an hour of bitter tears and heart-broken pleadings to the
Architect of the universe, I would be in a state of mental and physical
collapse for twenty-four hours. Can the reader wonder that, weighed down
by such a burden, I repeatedly meditated suicide during these four
terrible years? And I realize now—at middle age—that I had to suffer
these four years of melancholia only because of cultured man’s
misunderstanding of androgynism, prohibition of any one’s inquiring into
the facts, and bitter persecution of androgynes.[20]
Events have proved that it was the policy of the All-Wise and All-Good
not to answer my prayers, notwithstanding their almost unexampled
earnestness and repetition. The Eternal foresaw that it was to the best
interests both of the human race and of myself that I should leave to
others the coveted work of preaching the Gospel to the heathen and spend
my physical prime in New York’s Underworld as an avocational
female-impersonator. That was the cross that God willed that I should
bear. The role of female-impersonator is the niche in the universe that
its Architect had created me to fill.
In middle life I have often thought that Providence mercifully spared me
from suicide—the fate of so many youthful androgynes as a result of the
world’s persecution—and foreordained my career of female[Sidenote:
_Innocent Androgynes Now in Prison._] impersonator that I might, through
publishing the present trilogy, remove the veil of ignorance and
prejudice as regards androgynism that now blinds the cultured, and
occasions terrible persecution to Nature’s inoffensive step-children,
who number one out of every two hundred inmates of our state prisons,
having been incarcerated merely on the ground of homosexuality.
[Sidenote: _How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator._]
IV. I Grow into THE FAIRIE BOY.
At sixteen, I entered a college in New York City. I alone was
responsible for the scene of my university training. I had frequently
visited New York and wished to reside there. But I had then no intention
of ever yielding to my detested instincts for female-impersonation. I
had not realized that residence in a great city would make temptation
far stronger than in a village. My being fated to make my home in New
York almost throughout my adulthood has had a tremendous influence on my
life, particularly from nineteen to thirty-one.
My father gave me every educational advantage because in the fairly
large “prep” that I attended from my tenth to sixteenth years, I
attained the highest scholarship in the history of the school. In an
address to the students, the principal named me as the youthful scholar
to be patterned after by the other boys (!!!).
I know I shall be accused of exaggerated ego for the way I talk about
myself in this and the next chapter. But seven articles have been
published about myself in medical journals, exclusive of numerous
reviews of my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE. How many people can go into
a library, call for magazines, and gaze at pictures of themselves within
their covers? How many people have had a three-volume autobiography
published? With such a record, I suspect that I am either insane or else
one of the half-dozen most [Sidenote: _The Author’s Brain._] remarkable
sexual curiosities of my generation. On the latter chance, I am moved to
leave on record a full account of both my inner and outer rare life
experience.
[Illustration:
Front View of Author at Thirty-three
(Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt)
]
As to bragging about my intellect, my experience of half-a-century is
that in general, Providence makes compensations in the lives of men so
that as they, one by one, pass on to the next world, all have fared
equally as concerns Heaven-sent boons and the opposite. As a
counterweight to having created me a bitterly persecuted sexual cripple
(for His inscrutable but surely wise ends) the Architect of the universe
endowed me with a brain of such capacity as found in only one out of
twenty-five university graduates. I wrote stories at eight. At thirteen
I was confident I would become an author and my name be chiselled on the
walls of fame.[21]
My college associates commented on my feminesqueness and infantilism. I
perceived that I was looked upon as a curiosity.
I am a curiosity in that while throughout life remaining a species of
moron,[22] certain cerebral lobes have nevertheless progressed to a high
development enabling me to graduate from a university almost at the head
of my class notwithstanding my general psychic infantilism and my
suffering from acute spermatorrhea [Sidenote: _The Author a Curiosity._]
and (during my freshman and sophomore years) acute melancholia. If my
physical health had been as good as that of the three men who
outstripped me, I might have led my university class.
I am a curiosity in that down to twenty-five, I was a fair specimen of
physical infantilism or lilliputianism. I was said to possess the skull
and facial lines of an infant. Down to twenty-five, I never weighed more
than 110 pounds on a height of five feet five. Nearly all my brothers
and uncles have been six-footers.
I am a curiosity in that I possess the light female osseous structure.
Even before I began to develop adipose tissue after twenty-five, I would
float on fresh water without moving a muscle, my observation being that
the slim normal boy must vibrate his hands.
I am a curiosity in that form of skeleton and contour of body are mostly
feminine, particularly the bust.
Not until the age of nineteen, when I went successively to two medical
college professors and implored them to make me a complete male, did I
learn that practically all the tissues of my body are of
characteristically feminine texture. My muscles, judged by their
weakness and my using them in general woman-fashion, are those of a
female. The beardal growth is normally male except that it could never
reach the length of an eighth of an inch and has no stiffness. If I had
not shaved or eradicated the beard, I would have been, after seventeen,
one of the dog-faced boys of the circus. Although the hair cells seem as
dense as on my scalp, I could never have exhibited virile whiskers.
[Sidenote: _Coddled in College._]
Another feminine resemblance is that at the age of half-a-century, I
show not the least tendency to baldness.
Several of my college associates coddled and babied me. They would throw
an arm around me and cry: “Child!” They would hold me on their laps.
With the three ultra-virile with whom I became most intimate and
confidential, I would often in private throw myself into their arms and
pillow my head on their bosoms, while they would exclaim: “Lovesick
boy!” They never betrayed my strange conduct to others or appeared less
friendly. Only one of the three made greater advances than I myself—the
only one belonging to the tremendously virile class. What chiefly kept
me from even hinting at extremes was fear of expulsion in case it should
become generally known. But I was also strongly influenced by the
dictates of society and the teaching of the Bible—as I then erroneously
understood the latter.[23]
“You still possess the real childlike naiveté,” students have remarked.
“And you possess childlike features to harmonize with your decidedly
childlike manner of going about things. You are certainly THE BOY WHO
NEVER GREW TO BE A MAN.”
[Sidenote: _Childlike and Womanlike._]
“I like to watch you because of your childlike grimaces. That is why the
fellows are continually teasing you; because it is just like teasing a
child or a girl. You react with a sort of pleased childlike pride at
being the object of attention.”
“Your voice, though hoarse, has a feminine timbre. It possesses the
penetrating and carrying power of a child’s voice. It often breaks and
changes, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. From being masculine, it
suddenly changes timbre and becomes decidedly feminine, passing over
from a bass to a treble. Your voice is sentimental, bland, caressing. It
is the kind of voice a dying woman would choose to hear.”
“I never saw the chevelure [as they shoved their fingers through it] so
fine and silklike in any one else who wore trousers. Your hands [as they
would hold them] are as soft and hairless as those of a girl. And you
have the arms of a woman [when my sleeves were rolled back]. And you
blush just like a woman. And you sob like her. I never saw tears run
down the cheeks of any other man as he sat in the class-room.”
I have jokingly replied with a smile at my classmate’s mystification:
“You do not know but what I am a woman!” But I shrank from any serious
disclosure of the secrets of my sex, such a mystery to many of my
every-day associates.
If I live to old age, I intend to call the present trilogy to the
attention of some of my associates of early years who have indicated
great curiosity to know the secrets of my sex life. I have permitted
only three friends (of course the closest) who know me under my legal
name to read my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, and one of the three
dropped me from his friendship. [Sidenote: _Feminine Figure
Recognized._] Men are so biased on the subject of sex that I can not let
my friends read the secrets of my life until I reach an independent old
age when they can not make me suffer much on account of my androgynism.
In college, I was compelled to exercise in the “gym.” I hid my form. It
was a terrible ordeal to have to strip before the physical director, who
remarked: “Your figure is feminine.” Apparently he did not suspect the
sexuality that was bound up with that figure. If military drill had been
required—as in 1917—I would have quit the university.[24]
Since nineteen my yearning for skirts has been in part met by habitually
wearing about my home an ornamental dressing-gown. Thus clad, I have
often gazed in a mirror, imagining myself a complete female. I have
taken pleasure in hearing the gown rustle, like a silk dress; in feeling
it strike against my legs; and in holding up the front in ascending the
stairs.
THE FAIRIE BOY was my nickname from nineteen to thirty-one outside my
every-day circle. And outside I was far more widely known. Inside I had
the reputation of being an insignificant, puritan, unpractical book-worm
and Mollie Coddle who knew nothing of life and human nature. Outside I
achieved wide notoriety as an amateur actor—or, properly speaking,
actress.
[Sidenote: _Man, Woman, and Infant in One Body._]
That the distinction, among the sons of Adam, of being THE FAIRIE BOY
came to me, is nothing for which I can take credit to myself. It was
merely because Providence had made me, as an adult, physically as well
as psychicly, one-third man, one-third woman, and one-third infant.
Providence endowed me with a “small-boy” aspect, the subject of comment
in my every-day circle down to my early forties; freshness of complexion
down to thirty; innocent expression of features and marvellous absence
of animality (in appearance only); cry-baby mentality; eternal
childlikeness even in my professional life; and slender, lithe, and
lilliputian figure down to twenty-five.
THE FAIRIE BOY! To be frank—I am proud of the pretty nickname. This
Providential distinction is part of my compensation for my almost
unparalleled sufferings from persecution at present inseparable from the
lot of an ultra-androgyne.
[Illustration:
Rear View of Author at Thirty-three
(Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt)
]
V. The Boy Who Never Grew to Be a Man.
[Sidenote: _How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator._]
For the most part, the present chapter covers my twenty-sixth to
thirty-second years, during which my most descriptive nickname was THE
SOLDIERS’ FRIEND. For I was foreordained to a sort of army life for many
years, detailed in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, but omitted in the
present volume. Here I limit myself to some related personal
description.
PHYSIQUE AND PSYCHE: My career as avocational female-impersonator during
the second half-dozen years of my physical prime was even more
remarkable than during the first (outlined in PART THREE). My
quasi-public career as female-impersonator ended at thirty-one—at its
very zenith—because I deemed myself too old longer to play the part of
“French doll-baby,” and because the instinct thereto progressively
weakened from the age of thirty. My being able to play that part down to
thirty-one was possible only because Nature had endowed me with the
proper physique and psyche, already described. Less extreme androgynes
lack the qualifications, while practically all the extreme (commonly
known as “fairies”, “fags”, or “brownies”) lack the necessary good
sense, modesty, temperance, and high grade of general morality that were
mine because of my puritan childhood and youth and university education.
The proneness of the eternal feminine greatly to understate her age made
me in my twenty-sixth year, [Sidenote: _Infantilism, etc., a Bar in
Business._] when impersonating a doll-baby, pass as twenty-one, and in
my fortieth, as twenty-eight. An unmarried female, as long as she has
hopes of lassoing a husband, never gets beyond the lingering years of
twenty-eight or twenty-nine.
SIMULTANEOUS “MALE” PROFESSIONAL LIFE: In my twenties, thirties, and
forties, I have worked hard in three successive learned professions.
At nineteen I had already relinquished my amateur work of preacher of
the Gospel on being forced by Nature into the avocation of
female-impersonator. Simultaneously with my satisfying my frivolous
and coquettish instincts of French doll-baby, I also met the demands
of my male intellectual spirit by doing brain work of a high order. My
three successive professions have seemingly been adopted by chance,
although during “boyhood” I manifested special aptitude for all three,
besides that of preacher. I did not choose them. They were only
makeshifts after I was barred from my choice: preaching the Gospel. I
can not name them lest I disclose my identity.
I have achieved the average professional success. But my extreme
effeminacy and both facial and psychic infantilism have prevented
employers meting out the full advancement that past work merited. Men
less capable than myself have been promoted over me because my chiefs
had the impression that I was merely “a grown-up child”—that is,
moron-like, although as a matter of fact I possessed the intellectual
qualifications.
Office associates have now and then commented in my hearing on my
feminesqueness notwithstanding they have not usually entertained the
least idea [Sidenote: _Feminesqueness Recognized in Business._] that
from nineteen to thirty-one, I impersonated, an average of one evening a
week, a French doll-baby. Some remarks, however, even down to my middle
forties, indicated that some suspected the truth about my sexual life.
But I never betrayed that life to any of my business associates
excepting three or four confidants, who—I must explain—were mere
Platonic friends. I was too much ashamed to ape the woman before those
acquainted with my intellectual accomplishments. The following are
samples of remarks of office associates:
“Good morning, Baby!”
“Grinning kid!”
“You look like a frightened bunny!” (While being teased. I was always
the favorite subject for teasing by full-fledged males. In school,
university, and office (the latter down to my middle forties only) they
teased me as they would a girl. Moreover, my face expresses my emotions
in an uncommon manner.)
“Your breasts are certainly beauts! You must be half woman!”
“Look, Ralph, Ed is throwing kisses at you!”
“Ralph, I was just going to ask you for a kiss!”
“Ralph, you are nothing but a child half-a-century old!” (When impressed
by my childish grimaces and childlike way of going about everything.)
“Say, Ralph, won’t you favor me with the recipe for perennial youth? I
never saw such a contrast between apparent and actual age!” (During my
early forties.)
“Ralph, you are a tub of mush! You look like a fat _frau_ in the last
stage of pregnancy!” (The reader will pardon the vulgarity occasioned by
my wish to [Sidenote: _Simultaneous Life as Three Persons._] give the
exact words used by an office associate to describe my figure after the
age of forty-three.)
Nearly all my professional life has been under my legal name. It has
been completely apart from my avocation of female-impersonator. I have
sometimes thought I might be an instance of the dual personality
recognized by psychologists. Only, while living out either side of my
own duality, I have always had a complete memory of the other side and
recognized the oneness of my ego in my two widely opposed careers.
In my middle twenties, I lived under _three_ names and personalities. I
worked seven hours a day for a legal journal as “Earl Lind.” Because
under that name I had called on its editor to persuade him to publish my
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, representing myself as merely its
author’s agent. The editor was in his sixties, and happening just then
to need an assistant, immediately hired me, never questioning the
truthfulness of my representations as to who I was. He was at the time
also one of the leading criminal lawyers in New York City. He employed
me in all sorts of confidential capacities and let me into many of the
secrets of his clients. Of course I would never have proved false to his
trust, even though he never knew who I really was and where I lived. I
attended court with him as his clerk. I learned all the intricacies of
establishing a false alibi for a wealthy androgyne whom he represented
in a case originating in blackmail by an adolescent. I was his assistant
while he was defending a client from prosecution by Anthony Comstock,
when the latter gentleman was personally acquainted with me under the
name of “Earl Lind,” and knew I was trying to get the [Sidenote: _Court
Employee Was Ultra-Criminal._] AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE published,
which he had already interdicted.
Thus I was, in a sense, a court employee of New York City, while at the
same time one of its greatest criminals—according to a statute that is a
legacy from the Dark Ages.
Simultaneously with my career as lawyer’s clerk, I taught school five
evenings a week under my legal name, and every Saturday evening took up
my avocation of female-impersonator under the name of “Jennie June.”
Though I passed as three separate personalities within the same week,
they had—poor things—to share the identic body alternately.
NECESSITY OF ALIASES: I have used five: Raphael Werther, Ralph Werther,
Earl Lind, Jennie June, and Pussie. When I began my double life, I told
the Underworld my legal name was Raphael Werther. I named myself after
“the Prince of Painters,” because he was the greatest ultra-androgyne
who ever lived. He was my idol—my ideal. I wished him to pass through
the earthly life all over again in my body. I further named myself after
“the Prince of Amatory Melancholiacs” since I was myself such during my
teens. Werther was Gœthe himself, the most brilliant and most versatile
man, “the Prince of Men,” born subsequently to the Shakespeare-Author
(Francis Bacon).
As for the genesis of my first feminine name, I chose “Jennie” at four.
I have always considered it the most feminine of names. When I began my
double life, I appended “June.” I adopted that surname because of its
beautiful associations, as well as [Sidenote: _Choosing Aliases._]
because of the repetition of the _j_ and _n_. I have always considered
“Jennie June” as the most exquisite of names: the poetic name; the magic
name; the “divine” name (in the sense that we speak of the “divine” or
“godlike” human form). I later substituted the feminine “Pussie” because
so nicknamed, much to my delight, by the tremendously virile.