The female-impersonators /

(Part Two summarizes my pre-nineteen life and my physical and mental traits for those not reading my Autobiography of an Androgyne. Particularly for details of purely medical interest, the scientist is referred to that work, since the present volume is designed primarily for the general reader. Part Two, however, presents many facts not in mind when I wrote the earlier work over twenty years ago.)

I. Reveries Suggested by My Infancy.

Connecticut, famous for its wooden nutmegs and other freak products, gave to the world, in 1874, one of its half-dozen most widely known girl-boys.

My mother has said that I was the greatest cry-baby of her eleven children. I have really never outgrown this characteristic. Still in my late forties, I occasionally weep bitterly for a whole hour.

Up to my eighth birthday, timidity made me reluctant to leave my mother’s side to play with other children. Sticking very close to “mother” as a child, and extraordinary devotion to her when adult are common earmarks of androgynism. I have known of no other reputed male so devoted to his mother, even down to his late forties, as I. My mother is still, by |My Life-Long Soul-mate (in Dreamland).| a kind Providence, spared to me. I frequently weep bitterly at the thought of her dying and can not imagine living when she is in the grave. I knew an androgyne who, in his sixties, died from grief a few days after the death of his mother around ninety.

In my early childhood, only one other person attracted me in a comparable fashion—a neighbor’s burly boy, F’ank, five years older than myself. All my life I have seen him at least several times a year, since he has remained a close friend down to the time when we both count about half-a-century of life. His influence is still strong, although sexual relations ceased when I was seven. He was one of the most amorous of boys. From my third to seventh year, he sought me several times a week. Perhaps he also embraced every chance for heterosexual relations—common among the children under twelve in the “best set” of the village, among whom I was privileged to be brought up. And yet all these contaminated youngsters—excepting myself—turned out fairly virtuous adults. The ultra-amorous and active pederast F’ank became, when adult, exclusively heterosexual and quite promiscuous, being of the tremendously virile type. But around thirty, he settled down into absolute monogamy. He, however, never had a child. At past fifty, he stands at perfection in health, strength, and morality.

I say they “turned out”! That is, so far as I ever heard. But they would all have said of me that I passed through my adult life a cold anaphrodite! One can never know! Some might secretly have been addicted to venery as much as I. But they betrayed no external sign. Neither have I.

But while all those who indulged in “nastiness” before reaching their teens grew up, so far as I was able to observe, into men and women above reproach, two of “my set”—those who were “kids” at the same time within a radius of five hundred feet of my own paternal roof, the several homosexualist schoolmates elsewhere described having lived outside that radius—the two that had been most carefully brought up and shielded by their mother from corruption by other children, almost the only two that were sexually unblemished as children, “went to the bad” immediately on arrival at puberty. They were brother and sister—the only children of a wealthy, pious couple. The brother became a chronic dypsomaniac and roué. The sister, a beautiful and brilliant girl who had enjoyed a college education, died before thirty as a result of excesses in her chosen profession of fille de joie in New York City. The mother died of a broken heart in her early forties. The father, previously active in church work, became despondent on seeing both his children “go to the bad,” took to drink, and died a sot.

Debauchery was born in these two children, for they had never missed Bible school up to their middle teens. They were unusually innocent prior to puberty. But religious teaching failed to convince them. They thought the “goody-goodies” were trying to rob them of the pleasures of life through false representations. I believe both could have been saved from shipwreck of life if, at puberty, a book, scientific, not goody-goody, could have been put into their hands, demonstrating that alcoholic and venereal excesses bring on ruin and often early death. Children inclined to dissipation on arrival at puberty are far more likely to heed the pronouncements |Inherited Lechery.| of a physician than of a Bible school teacher.

In that same immediate puritan circle in my childhood’s village, I have lately observed a similar case in the next generation. I have known well a certain gentleman of my own age since we were boys together. He is of the tremendously virile type and sowed his wild oats as hardly another young blood in the village. But in his middle twenties he was “soundly converted” in a puritan church (to which I myself belonged) and married one of its purest daughters. In his subsequent life, he attained rare success financially and socially. He has had only two children—both girls around twenty years of age at the date of writing. I know the family intimately. I have direct information that both girls are “fast going to the bad” (notwithstanding they have always been under only puritan influences) and that the father has “backslidden,” evidently being no longer able to restrain his de facto polygamous instincts. The purest of wives is heart-broken and on the borderline of insanity.

Every one says the girls and their father are wilfully depraved and their puritan community has already begun to treat them as outcasts. I say the girls inherited their craze for venery from their father, in whom likewise it was inborn. He is a noble man in every other respect. All three are largely irresponsible. They are, by birth, not fitted for the puritan society in which they were brought up. Under present social ideas and usages, the only outlet for the girls is prostitution and the consequent early loss of health soon terminating in death. But their only fault is |Present Social Rules Inadequate.| nymphomania. If society had some way by which it could bring about the satisfaction of these needs of these cultured girls, the latter could be saved from the shipwreck of life and be useful members of their community. In my own life I have proved that Christian conversion and absorption in the teachings of the Bible can not save one from innate nymphomania. I could suggest a means of salvation for these girls, but dare not. If only the leaders of thought did not prescribe an identic sex life for every daughter of Eve, although Nature has created them with such diversity along these lines! If only the leaders of thought permitted real sexual problems (as well as namby-pamby) to be investigated, as all other phenomena are searched out to the very bottom! If only the leaders of thought permitted the truth to be told about sex instead of continuing to propagate the hypocrisies and fabrications regnant down from the Dark Ages!

I have read statements of puritans of the dreadful results that will follow the common sex relations of children under twelve in city tenements. I have spent a large part of my life in rural districts as well as in great cities. My observations are that conditions are the same among children of both types of environment. Numerous youngsters receive their sex initiation before twelve. But, unless carried to excess, it does not seem to have any bad influence, particularly after they become adults. The probability is that the same practice has ruled among small children for thousands of years. It is Nature.

And the context moves me to remark: It turned |Providence’s Favoritism Toward Author.| out that of my several hundred schoolmates (prior to the university) I achieved in adult life the highest success. Not as a business man or money-maker, in which line I did not excel. Not in art or politics. But in the following fields, both individually and combined: Intellectual and general cultural development; enjoyment of (but not adeptness in) all species of art; breadth and depth of life and knowledge of human nature; enjoyment of the society of my fellow humans, particularly sexual opposites; and, last but not least, fame, or, as some would prefer to have me say, notoriety. For I feel that I, as an extreme type of the bisexual, am doomed to live in the minds of savants for scores of years after every one of my hundreds of schoolmates, and my other hundreds of university associates, are eternally forgotten.

[Note Added in Galley: I omitted to mention that I have also far excelled in suffering inflicted by man and in sorrow—which two items together have about counterbalanced the advantages enumerated.]

But I have achieved this last element (terrestrial immortality) of the highest success in life denied to all my wide circles of childhood and adolescence through my “going to the bad”—as the saying is. But though that was the fate marked out for me by the Architect of the Universe, I was actually able to restrain my “evil” propensities so as not to make shipwreck of life. My girl-boy intimate described in the early part of the second chapter following did make, decidedly, shipwreck of his life, as have many other girl-boys. My salvation lay in practicing relatively^[15] |Temperance the Only Salvation.| extreme temperance in the indulgence of the sexual propensities except during my Bowery period described in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and Riddle of the Underworld. Extreme temperance in indulgence of any fleshly appetite is, for all humanity, the sole means of salvation from the shipwreck of earthly life. Overindulgence of any appetite defeats its own end.

Thus while nearly all other girl-boys are doomed to be forgotten by mankind a few years after their bodies return “dust to dust,” I myself am—I feel—destined to live in the memory of savants primarily because of my extensive self-restraint, and secondarily because of my excelling the other girl-boys in innate brain power.

It was F’ank who initiated me, at two, in the mysteries which gullible parents think children do not learn before puberty. But down to twelve, I considered all species of sex relations as the monopoly of naughty children. All adults had of course outgrown such depths of nastiness.

Down to my present age of close to half-a-century, F’ank has been the hero in half my many sexual dreams. After I reached seven, we ceased to be confidential. I therefore never confessed to him that his influence prior to my seventh year almost wrecked my adult life—probably consigning me to an irresponsible, intensive fairie career—and a thousand times made me wish, because a slave to fellatio, that I were dead. For I firmly believe that girl-boys, if not repeatedly |Keep Tots Sexually Clean.| seduced before puberty, will, as adults, have only weak and controllable desires for the sexual functioning ordained by Nature for their type. While they are commonly fellators or else pathics congenitally, only oft repeated seduction in early childhood makes them, after puberty, irresponsible psychic nymphomaniacs who recruit the ranks of fairies. But for those repeatedly seduced in early childhood, the penchant is truly irresistible in adulthood and would be followed regardless of all legal penalties. Just as most men would steal a loaf of bread if their only means of salvation from death through hunger.

Not too often repeated homosexual acts on the part of a small child, however, are not likely to make him an adult pervert. An innate tendency is practically indispensable. Early experiences along innate lines merely strengthen a congenital bias, just as the author became an intensive adult fairie as a result—I am inclined to believe—of my intense fairieship from three to six.

While I believe sexual relations of children under twelve when not often repeated will not render them particularly lustful as adults, an intensive sex life of a small child—as in my own case—is likely to render him or her extremely intemperate sexually after puberty. Mothers should therefore keep a watchful eye over the whereabouts and associates of the “angel child,” and not allow it in secluded cosy nooks with older children. A careful watch should be kept over nurse-girls. Children under twelve, and even under six, need chaperons almost as much as those just past puberty.

Parents should take pains that the “angel child” |Criminal Prudery.| regards them as confidants, sharers of its every secret. If this had happened in my own case, I might have been spared a world of woe after puberty. To preserve the frankness of the “angel child,” not even a mild rebuke should ever be administered for its sexual lapses; but kind persuasion alone, and care that the child does not again come into exciting surroundings.

My own parents and teachers never vouchsafed the least sex knowledge. I once asked where babies came from. Doctors found them in the street gutters and brought them to people’s houses. Instinct and older boys were my only instructors. Parents, teachers, but preferably the school physician, should begin with children of six a clean initiation into these mysteries—absorbing even to youngsters of that tender age—to replace the hitherto regnant nasty one wrought by child lore handed down, from mouth to mouth, through the centuries, and characterized by unprintable words, in uttering, seeing, and hearing which numerous children seem to take delight.

Or is the subject of sex irreformable and hopeless? Is it really the crying shame of the human race?

From my third to seventh year, F’ank and I were drawn toward one another. I yearned to recline in his arms. “F’ank,” I once said, “I’m not af’aid on your lap. But I’m af’aid nearly always. I’m af’aid, when I get as big as papa, hair’ll grow on my cheeks, like on his. How could I ever use a horrible wazor, like him! I hope I’ll die before I get big!”

I was destined to be a sort of pet with others of the more stalwart boys. It was because I retained my babyishness—like an idiot—at least down to the age |A Wee Girl-Boy’s Outlook on Life.| of seven, and was, besides, girlish. I commonly felt myself a little girl and told playmates to call me Jennie. They have remarked that I was “more girl than boy.” Adults, however, were blind to my bisexuality. They ridiculed me for carrying a doll in my arms when I took a walk; etc. Because I was the only child of my set thus violently crossed, I was the most unhappy. Taunts sometimes drove me to throw myself on the floor, bang my head, and exclaim: “I wish I were dead!”

But, on the whole, my early childhood was happy. With F’ank I would play “papa and mamma.” He would “go to business,” while I took care of the dolls; etc. I made and laundered their wardrobes. One day a sudden shower surprised me. Gazing at the ill-fated wash on the line, I sobbed: “Oh it yains! It yains! And my c’ose’ll get wet!”

The day of thoroughgoing disillusionment came early in my seventh year. It was the style for boys to wear skirts up to that age. How I loved them! And I never expected to clothe myself otherwise. Even down to my middle forties, I have always felt more at home in skirts.

Then I wasn’t to be allowed to go through life as a girl and a woman? I was up against the choice of spending the rest of life in my bedroom, or drawing on a pair of the utterly loathed breeches. At first it was the same as if I had to go on the street in my underclothes. I would dodge behind a tree when an acquaintance hove in sight. How poignantly I missed petticoats as a screen for my shameful nether limbs! Not to mention the deprivation of the pleasure of feeling them dangling about my knees.

First year: How terrible the aspect of the big brick academy! How awe-inspiring the smell of the newly varnished floor on the first day of my school life! How my heart jumped to my throat whenever I caught the cold, stern eye of the school-marm piercing through my own little self! How bold and bad and rough all the boys were! Why must I sit with them and enter by their door when I so longed to be with the gentle and soft-voiced girls?

And could I ever bring myself to see what was on the other side of the sign: “For boys only”? What right had I there? For I already recognized I was really not a boy! At that age I gloated over being a girl-boy.

There was thus provision for the comfort of the boys. There was provision for the comfort of the girls. But architects have never thought to make provision for the girl-boys!

The first week I suffered terribly rather than invade the retreat barred to all but boys. Then an unprintable experience right at my desk afforded the room a good laugh and sent me home for dry clothing. I now preferred the horror of the retreat to being laughed at and sent home. But I made a virtue of haste and watched for a moment when no other boy was out.

Second year: I sat on a rear seat with a boy whom I stared at and touched because of the softness and radiance of his hair, the rich red of his cheeks, |Sexual Precocity.| and his sturdy build. Now and then we kissed when no one was looking. But once a loud smack reverberated just after the near-sighted school-marm had requested such stillness that one could hear a pin drop. As she had never been kissed by a person of the opposite sex, she considered a smack the unpardonable sin. My hero-boy took his whipping with a cynical smile. But I wept for a half-hour.

Third year: I was caught in an immeasurably worse impropriety^[16] under a desk. The teacher thought my parents ought to know. Violently angry, my father hammered my body with the heel of a boot. In a dozen years, not one of my numerous brothers and sisters (although I was the only goody-goody one) suffered such a thrashing. All the rest of my home life, father treated me the worst of all, notwithstanding I far excelled in school-work. What a trial to have a girl-boy son? Why had I ever been born? Subsequently there existed a lifelong coolness between father and me.

Fourth year: [A typical spring afternoon.] After school, the west playground was thronged with boys. I alone hastened directly to the street, embarrassed as a little girl alone with two hundred boys. One calls out: “Ralph, hurry to the girls’ yard where you belong!” Another: “Ralph, your legs are as shapely as a girl’s. You would make a good-looking girl!” A third throws his arms around me and exclaims: “Kissing you is as good as kissing a girl!”

My embarrassment prevented my relishing these attentions at the moment. But I always gloated over them after I got to bed.

I had not quite reached the gate when a ball rolled to my feet and the players shouted for it. With beet-red face on account of what I knew would be said, I gave the ball an awkward toss. “Hah hah hah! You throw just like a girl! Miss Nancy!”

Often I went around Robin Hood’s barn to avoid this particular embarrassment.

Arrived in the girls’ yard, I felt as if freed from captivity and in my proper element. Shyness and fright gave way to gleefulness. Moreover, I cared only for the less strenuous games of the gentle sex.

Several boys mounted the high fence in order to tease me. “Ralph, I promise you my sister’s doll carriage to push to school!”... “Heigh, Miss Werther, have you finished the mitten I saw you knitting?”... “Say, Ralph, give me a kiss, will you?”

While with girls, I liked nothing better than such bantering. I out-girled them in our reaction to the boys’ teasing. We finally succeeded in provoking the boys to chase us—my wish all along. To be chased by boys was the highest of childhood’s pleasures.

I was always the ringleader of my girl clique, never reflecting on its unnaturalness. They never regarded me as a normal boy—only a “girl-boy.” We would even discuss our boy favorites.

Fifth year: My parents thought that if I were shut up closely with boys and away from even the sight of girls, I would be cured of my effeminacy. Thus my fifth to eleventh years of school life were staged at a boys’ “prep” several miles from my home village and numbering about a hundred students. But I was only a day-pupil except during my senior year.

The first week, it was an ordeal on a par with being forced into breeches. I was in a state of chronic fright. When addressed, my reply was inaudible six feet away. But after becoming well acquainted with class-mates, I have seated myself on their laps right in the schoolroom. For they appeared demigods.

They would run a hand up my arm. “Your skin is softer than velvet. And your pencils look as if you had chewed them off with your teeth. And what makes you scream when a fellow merely touches you? Ralph, you certainly ought to have been born a girl! You will never make a man!”

On holidays I would run off to the house of a girl friend. With several of the gentle sex, I would play hide-and-seek in remote nooks, as hay-mows. Later I would exchange clothing with one, and we would seek boy acquaintances that I might display my skill in female-impersonation.

Adult intimates would point the finger of scorn in vain. To pass life as far as possible like a girl was the very essence of existence, for which I was willing to sacrifice everything else.

The instinctive manner of coasting is a criterion of psychic sex. Every boy of my set, excepting myself, rode bellyflops—too strenuous for the soft-muscled and timid girls. As I possessed their physical and psychic softness, I also coasted upright.

In ascending the hill, I kept with the girls. I enjoyed talking about only their interests. As the boys passed, they would call out: “Girl-boy! Mollie Coddle!”

One afternoon, two snow forts were built fifty feet apart. All the boys, excepting myself, took their stand |Outlook on Life at Eleven.| bravely behind the breastworks and rained snowballs on the defenders of the opposite fort. The girls were almost prostrate in the deep snow behind—out of danger of being hit in the face—packing snowballs for the throwers. And I, GIRL-BOYWISE, did as they, the eternal impropriety never dawning on me.

But one of the girls cried out: “Why are you not throwing snowballs with the boys? Afraid of getting hit, are you? Why don’t you put on petticoats?”

After I retired that night, I had not yet recovered from my speechless chagrin. “Why was it that I was not taking a boy’s place in life? Why did I sit upright when coasting? Why did I feel more at home in girls’ attire? Why did the boys tease me just as they did the girls? Could it be that I was a girl imprisoned in the body of a boy?

“How could I face manhood? Are men under compulsion to go and vote? But how could I push my way into the crowd of rough men always hanging [at that period] around the polling places?

“How terrible to be a boy! Couldn’t I take papa’s razor and in a minute rid myself of the excrescence? A razor ought to be sharp enough to do the job! O God, change my body this moment by a miracle! Turn me into a girl!” I sobbed.

One day, being a goody-goody, I had felt it my duty to tell the teacher on a mischievous boy. As I left the school for my train, I was seized violently. “If you were a big, strong fellow like us, we would give you a good thrashing! We’ll only see if we can lift you off the ground by your hair. The more you cry, the better we like it. Keep your hands down! |Girl-Boys’ Reasons for Suicide.| Slap! Slap! Slap! And stop carrying your books on your arm like a girl!”

When they let go their grip, I started off on a run, only one boy pursuing and shouting out threats. I shall now reveal the girl-boy’s patented secret for getting out of a predicament. I sprinted to the porch of the first house, gave the door-bell several violent jerks, and shrieked for help.

Sixth year: I was absorbed in fashioning a doll’s dress. An older sister angrily exclaimed: “Why don’t you get out on the ball-field like all other boys? I hate effeminate boys! Mother, I’m afraid Ralph is not normal!”

At the moment I felt ashamed ever to look my disgusted sister in the face again. So ashamed that I wanted to kill myself. (One of my girl-boy playmates, because bitterly persecuted on account of his effeminacy, actually committed suicide at twelve by swallowing rat poison.) “I not normal? What did my sister mean? Could she have had in mind my queer habit of sitting on the boys’ laps? I was the only boy that acted so queerly. I had not realized it could be described as ‘abnormal.’”

On another occasion, I was, with two brothers, skirting a creek on the way to the swimming-hole. We came to a row of stepping-stones. My brothers trotted across several times. But I lacked the courage even to set foot on the first.

We found several “shavers” in the swimming-hole. My two brothers joined them. But I liked only to recline on the bank and feast my eyes. I would as soon have stripped before boys as would a little girl. |“I Want to Die!”| I only got a sight of the swimming-hole because I had brothers.

For the first time it occurred to a “shaver” to strip and duck me. My brothers were ashamed of my being a girl-boy and thought it would contribute toward making a man of me.

“Stop your screeching, Ralph! You’ve got to be stripped so we can see if you are a real boy! Stop your scratching, or we’ll give you a black eye!... Now let’s dip him under to stop his yelling!... You can’t come around the swimming-hole any more unless you get into the water with the rest of us!... Cry-baby! Cry-baby! You’re a hopeless case!... Clear out of here!”

I half-way dressed and ran off in terror. Their driving home the fact that I was a hopeless sexual cripple brought on such melancholia as I had never before experienced. I repeatedly blubbered out as I ran: “I want to die! I want to die!”

It was not until my sixteenth year that I came to a full realization that I am a male in name only. I had always recognized my girl-likeness and wished Nature had created me a female. At the same time I had, during my early teens, sometimes reflected that I would outgrow all my feminine predilections and be a normal man. But at fifteen my bust development made me think that perhaps God at last was answering my fervent prayers, around the age of nine, to be changed into a physical girl. For I was already one psychicly.

In my middle teens, my desire changed radically, due chiefly to my having just become a God-intoxicated youth, with the work of a missionary in China as my goal. I now prayed far more intensely for full-fledged manhood than I ever had for physical femininity.

Superficially and according to man-made law, ultra-androgynes are men. According to the unabridged dictionary, they are neither men nor women. That is, they are capable neither of begetting nor conceiving. But in respect to mind and feelings, in respect to their protoplasm—and thus essentially—they are women.

Being neither male nor female, with whom do androgynes associate? Up to the dawning of puberty, pronounced specimens—like myself—gravitate toward the gentle sex. As soon as the sexual life is fully developed, the vast majority (not happening to be |A Village Fairie.| overconscientious and ultra-puritan) give that sex the widest berth and lean on the bosoms of the ultra or tremendously virile of their acquaintance. But they never join in the sports of the sturdy sex. For in athletics, they are as awkward as girls, and besides lack the necessary physique.

But Nature happened to make me overconscientious, and my training was ultra-puritan. While, after I entered my teens, I was ashamed longer to make myself one with girl acquaintances, and besides was violently repelled by our both approaching the full flower of our sexuality, my now looking upon my attraction towards youths as the most heinous of sins, together with my aversion from masculine interests, forbade association with boys outside the schoolroom. Thus from the age of thirteen to eighteen, I endured an almost companionless existence outside the home, the schoolroom, and the church edifice. I did occasionally take a walk with an androgyne of my own age, goody-goodiness, education, and social standing. He, however, was not religious or of puritan parentage, and was even then extensively promiscuous with the economically better class of the village’s youthful “sports.”

I myself turned away in deep shame from the propositions of tremendously virile youths, although secretly I would rather have yielded than do anything else at all. At middle life, I have had doubts as to whether I did the right thing in resisting. I believe my health and happiness were tremendously impaired by my ultra-puritan views which made me obstinate before Nature’s behests. On the other hand, through yielding I would have lost my reputation and probably |Mine the Most Melancholy of Youthhoods.| been barred from “prep” and university. I was expelled from the latter as soon as the faculty learned that I lived according to Nature’s behests. The university training is, of course, worth erotic pleasures ten thousand times over. But during the first two years of my college course, my health and happiness (as recounted in my Autobiography of an Androgyne) were sorely wrecked by abstinence. Does the wrong not after all lie in the groundless intolerance of “prep” and university for androgynes who obey Nature’s demands, and fill, in an unobtrusive manner, the niche in the universe for which the Great Architect predestined them?

Thus being excluded from the pastimes of both the recognized sexes and from their joint social intercourse—on account of my belonging to a third and outcast sex—I found my only recreation from an ultra-studious college-preparatory life in long walks on country roads, during which I often brooded because Providence had consigned me to membership in the third sex. From the age of thirteen to eighteen, I endured the most melancholy existence I have ever heard or read of.^[17]

Can the reader conjure up any worse fate for a youth than to make the startling discovery that he, though extremely conscientious and offenceless, is a type of sexual cripple that has always been regarded by the sexually full-fledged—because of their ignorance and Phariseeism—as the lowest of the low, a monster of wickedness, and an outcast from society?

Can the reader conjure up any worse fate for a girl—and a very high-strung one—than for Nature to disguise her as a boy, and foreordain that she should be brought up as a boy and be, at school, office, etc., always shut up with the sterner sex?

Can the reader conjure up any worse fate for a girl than to be doomed to pass through life incarnated in a male body? How grief-provoking for a mademoiselle to be cursed with a slight growth of hair on lip |Early Consciousness of Deformity.| or cheeks! Only a trifling male stigma! How much more heart-rending for a mademoiselle to possess the male physique to such an extent that even all physicians (except a handful of sexologists) with their present lack of knowledge—or rather their closing their eyes to all evidence—would declare her a male, and prescribe that she should in life fill the latter role.

Such was my chronic burden almost throughout my teens. (Subsequently, with the exception of brief spells of melancholia, I became reconciled to my fate.) And such is the burden imposed by Nature on one youth out of every three hundred in every social set of every country in the world. But because of my intellectuality, high-class environment, and extreme androgynism, my grief was exceptionally intense. I do not believe the mildly androgynous are melancholy during their teens. They have not yet become conscious that they are abnormal.

My chronic lamentation during my seventeenth to nineteenth years was: “Miserable wretch! Miserable wretch! Miserable wretch! That’s all I am! I was born with a deformed nature, despicable in the eyes of all people! I am a soft effeminate youth who is wanted nowhere! I am ashamed to look any one in the face! I feel like putting an end to my life, or else losing myself, to all who know who I am, in a distant city where I could live according to my queer nature. I have nothing to live for! I may be disgraced, disgrace my family, be compelled to flee, be disowned by my parents, be cursed and be despised throughout the land!”

An older sister frequently vented her spite on me because of her disgust at my effeminacy. The Sunday |Horror of Fire-arms.| school picnic in my seventeenth year led up to one of the greatest sorrows of my youth. “You little coward!” my sister the next day began. “Even eight-year-old George has more pluck! I was so mortified to see you the only boy to refuse to pick up the rifle in the shooting contest! The others could hardly wait their turn. And to-day you do look like a freak in that pink ruffled shirt! And with your hair banged! Trying to doll yourself up as much like a girl as you can, are you?”

“I am, too, so ashamed of your bangs, Ralph!” my mother chimed in. “They make you look as if you didn’t know anything!”

“Mother, make him go to C’s party next Wednesday. He stays away from all gatherings of young people. He will grow up a boor.”

“I would rather be thrashed than go to any party! I do not like to pay gallantries to women!”

“You will never make a man unless you do, son. I insist that you go to C’s party.”

Wednesday evening arrived, and with two score youngsters, I was lounging in C’s parlors. My older sister had managed to have me escort a girl. Unfortunate female, to be attended by one of her own sex whom Nature had disguised as a man!

It was extreme torture to have to go into society and put myself forward as a gallant. Accordingly I grasped the first opportunity to escape to the garden. I could look into the brilliantly lighted drawing-rooms filled with the youthful merry-makers. The spectacle moved me to tears.

“To think that Providence permits to all young people excepting myself the joys of love and courtship! |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 |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:

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.

“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.]

“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]

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|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.