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.
Most Sheltered Two “Went to the Bad.”
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.
How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator.