I. Female-Impersonation.
In Part Three, I shall outline what kind of adult career is the natural sequel of the childhood and adolescence described in Part Two; what kind of adult career is bound up with the physique and psyche with which I am endowed. I shall disclose what Providence had in store for the youthful religious prodigy of the Connecticut hills—the delicate, lilliputian, chicken-hearted girl-boy—after he had been swallowed up in New York’s millions.
Since ultra-androgynes are, in a sense, instances of dual personality—a male soul and a female soul inhabiting the same brain and body—it is natural for them to live a double life.
Moreover, as the “classy,” hypocritical, and bigoted Overworld considers a bisexual as monster and outcast, I was driven to a career in the democratic, frank, and liberal-minded Underworld. While my male soul was a leader in scholarship at the university uptown, my female soul, one evening a week, flaunted itself as a French doll-baby in the shadowy haunts of night life downtown.
Since my student and subsequent professional career were prosaic, I leave them almost unmentioned |The Fourth Sex.| throughout Part Three. I, however, always gave them first place in my life. But I here confine myself to what I experienced and learned while impersonating a French doll-baby because it constitutes something novel to most readers.
Indeed Parts Three, Four, and Five portray the social life and diversions of the most cultured New York coterie of THE THIRD SEX during the last decade of the nineteenth century. For, while little has yet been published about instinctive female-impersonators because of the prudery of the sexually full-fledged, they form (necessarily sub rosa) quite a large class of society—about one out of every three hundred physical males. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Fourteenth Street Rialto was their chief stamping-ground in the New York metropolitan district. I became acquainted with them because during the decade indicated, I was myself in my prime as a female-impersonator in two out of the three principal bright-light quarters of the metropolitan district.
[There exists also A FOURTH SEX, the gynanders. But experience has not qualified me to describe them in detail. That task awaits some brave, high-minded, and brilliant physical female. See, however, chapter on Gynanders in my Riddle of the Underworld.]
The Overworld has enjoined complete silence about female-impersonators because of their thoroughly false view that any adolescent adopting the role must do so from moral depravity. They argue: “If I myself adopted the role, it could only be through unspeakable depravity. Ergo, the same is true for every male.” They overlook the fact that Nature did not |Female-Impersonation Instinctive.| make all anatomical males of like passions. What would be moral depravity for one is not for another.
Instinctive female-impersonators are sexual cripples from their mother’s womb. They had no choice in the matter. Thus they merit pity rather than scorn. Further, since their impersonations occasion no detriment to any one, but are a source of much entertainment to their sexually full-fledged associates, they are a positive ethical good. All beneficent talents that the Creator has distributed among mankind must have been meant for use—not for strangling.
As to the ethical question, I myself, who from the age of nineteen to thirty-one had an intensive career as fairie—female-impersonator, can truthfully state, on arrival in my late forties, that I was not once, during that career, guilty of an irreligious or unethical act—excepting alone that I seriously impaired my own health. But it is doubtful whether the impairment was permanent. In my late forties, my physical vigor is not at a lower level compared with males of my own age than it was during my childhood. My health has always been delicate.
Numerous wives and mothers suffer in health from the sex passion as much as I. If my having had my health wrecked by it proves it immoral for me and to be legally repressed, then the yielding to it by wedded pairs is equally immoral and to be interdicted. If it be objected that the human race is perpetuated by the latter, I answer that this consideration would only permit to married couples a sex-union when offspring was the object—that is, for a cultured couple, from one to three times throughout their married life.
Depilation.
In the description of my own physique and psyche, I have indicated the general characteristics of the extreme type of androgynes foreordained to become quasi-public female-impersonators. But the outstanding feminesque physical stigmata of each “fairie” (as they are commonly called in the United States) tend to be sui generis. In one it is natural beardlessness alone. In another, the possession of female breasts alone. In a third, the female skeletal shape, particularly an over-long spine, short legs, and broad pelvis. In a fourth, natural soprano voice. Etc.
Whoever has beheld an instinctive female-impersonator when keyed up, must confess that this type are born actors—or “actresses,” as they prefer to be called. Their histrionic skill is not primarily the result of practice or instruction.
Their audiences have marvelled because the impersonators’ faces are devoid of any sign of beardal hair. Usually the beard is eradicated. It is allowed to grow for a full week in seclusion. By means of a mask of depilatory wax, every hair is then pulled out by the roots, the outer portion having become embedded, like hair in wall-plaster. For three weeks, the face is as glabrous as a baby’s. Then the week’s seclusion and the final excruciatingly painful yank of the wax mask all over again. The process has no permanent effect, either good or bad.
All the impersonators adopt a fancy feminine name, as Pansy, Daisy, and Lily. Often the names of living star actresses are adopted and “dragged into the mud,” as people say. For while the career of a female-impersonator is a purely physiological and |Obedience to Nature Gave Peace.| psychological phenomenon, it is incorrectly regarded as deepdyed immorality.
All impersonators belonging to the middle and upper classes also choose a masculine alias, represented in the Underworld to be their legal name. They do not wish to risk disgrace to their family name. Moreover, on their sprees in the bright-light districts, they are careful to wear nothing containing their every-day initials.
Except for a few weeks, I myself was only an avocational impersonator. I gave to it only three hours a week, as compared with 109 waking hours to my student (or later, professional) life. I did not adopt the avocation until near the close of my sophomore year. Almost throughout the preceding twenty-four months, however, I had fought violently against almost irresistible tendencies to disappear for an evening in the Underworld on a female-impersonation spree. But my ultra-puritan education had injected into me such a moral horror of female-impersonation that I was able to resist the tendencies for two whole years after the date that Nature ordained them to begin.
The “French doll-baby” spirit had dwelt in my brain since birth. Throughout my life down to nineteen, it had manifested itself strongly, although after fourteen I had struggled to crucify it. At nineteen, it refused longer to be suppressed. I (the puritan, book-worm spirit in me) had to arrange a compromise. I promised to yield my physical and mental powers to it only one evening each week. And the doll-baby spirit was satisfied. Previously I had been the most melancholy person in the university. But dating from the |My Dual Personality.| compromise, my life flowed on peacefully and blissfully. Only occasionally—moments while suffused with ambition to make a name for myself in the intellectual and philanthropic world—would I turn against the doll-baby spirit with abhorrence, and ask myself how I could ever give place to it.
For the serious work of life, I realized that I must practically strangle the feminine side of my duality outside the three hours a week during which I conceded to it full possession of my personality. While at my every-day tasks, I sought to forget the doll-baby spirit that dwelt in my brain side by side with the scholar spirit.
The Fairie Boy.