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 |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.
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 |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.
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.”
“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. |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.
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.
Rear View of Author at Thirty-three
(Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt)
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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.
I later adopted “Earl” primarily because it rhymes with “girl”, the creature of enchantment that I longed to be, and secondarily because it arouses noble ideas. I adopted “Lind” after Jennie Lind, one of my models.
Perhaps these fancies about names are proof of insanity. A medical reviewer of my Autobiography of an Androgyne, who devoted only five minutes to the 70,000 words, declared me “clearly insane.”
When I transferred my female-impersonations from Mulberry Street to the Fourteenth Street Rialto, incredulity occasioned my transliterating the fancy “Raphael” to prosaic “Ralph.”
As a result of my 1905 court martial making the names “Ralph Werther” and “Jennie June” known to some army heads, I found it advisable, when in 1907 renewing my kind of army life for seven years, to choose new masculine and feminine names. I feared it might become known to the army heads that the fairie “Jennie June” had transferred “her” stage for female-impersonations to a distant military post. Hence the substitutions of “Earl Lind” and “Pussie.”
On a single day I have had to sign myself with four different names. Always after writing my signature, I must review it painstakingly to make sure I have put down the proper one. Only once I have made |Two Handwritings.| a mistake. In receipting for a registered letter addressed “Earl Lind, General Delivery,” I signed my legal name. To the clerk’s inquiry I replied that I had been authorized by Lind. He sent word to Lind for written authorization, which was promptly despatched.
I have had to acquire two entirely distinct handwritings—the second for my numerous love letters.[25] None were ever written more mushy than those of “Jennie June” and I guarded against their ever being traceable to the intellectual and puritan “Ralph Werther” (by which name I refer to my every-day self in my books). I have often, within an hour, written letters in the two different hands.
Confidants: Throughout the three decades of my double life, I have, outside several physicians, disclosed it only to nine confidants of my every-day circle. One expressed his amazement that I should disclose it at all, affirming that even my best friend would be likely to get me thrown out of my economic and social position. All my lay confidants, however, proved helpful and compassionate excepting one, who, while never disclosing my secret, dropped me from his friendship, although we had been the very closest of Platonic friends. One physician brought about my expulsion from the university and made me a Bowery outcast and fairie.
Because of the terrible persecutions inflicted by the criminally-minded “saints” who happened to be born sexually full-fledged, hardly a single cultured androgyne ever betrays his bisexuality to a single confidant |Author’s Contribution to Sociology.| of his every-day circle excepting the tremendously virile bachelor whom he may have chosen as soul-mate. I am an exception in outspokenness. Decades ago I rose above the prudery and bias with which most leaders of thought are to-day bound hand and foot. I desire that men interested in the improvement of the human race, and in the question of justice to all classes, have the opportunity of getting at the facts concerning the atypic and atavic types with whom I have been intimately thrown through having been foreordained to pass a large part of my life in the Underworld.