II. A Typical Female-Impersonation Spree.
The one evening a week on which I (the scholar spirit) surrendered, I called “going on a female-impersonation spree.” The typical spree did not occur until the December (1894) of my senior year. I had become somewhat adept in the art of impersonation through a year’s apprenticeship in the Mulberry Street Italian quarter. As that training has been detailed in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld, I omit it here.
On the afternoon preceding a spree, I would be overwhelmed with dread and melancholia. I dreaded disclosure, which I realized would mean expulsion from the university because of the full-fledged man’s horror of a sexual cripple. I dreaded possible disfigurement by blows—or even murder—by one of the numerous prudes who detest extreme effeminacy in a male (supposed). I was melancholy because about to embark on something that my puritan training had impressed me as in the highest degree disgraceful, and that I secretly wished I did not have to undertake. But to be contented and even happy for the following week and to guarantee that tranquillity necessary for the best scholarly success, the weekly spree was unavoidable.
Only a handful of upper-class female-impersonators adopt feminine attire for street wear. For myself (being a university student, and subsequently an honored member of a learned profession) it was too |Fairies Are Extreme Dressers.| risky. I merely kept some feminine finery locked up in my room for occasional decoration of my person while I gazed in the mirror. But during the eighteen months that my sprees were staged in the Fourteenth Street Rialto and the six years on or near military reservations in New York’s suburbs, my attire was as fancy and flashy as a youth dare adopt. Fairies are extreme dressers and excessively vain. To strange adolescents whom I passed on the street I proclaimed myself as a female-impersonator through always wearing white kids and large red neck-bow with fringed ends hanging down over my lapels.
I would set out from my lodgings with the feelings of a soldier entering a terrific battle from which he realizes he may never return. As the car carried me farther and farther from where I staged the puritan student life and nearer and nearer to where I staged the “French doll-baby” life, my overwhelming melancholia would gradually give way to a sense of gladness that in a few minutes I would find myself again on “Jennie June’s” stamping-ground. I had left at home all my masculinity (a very poor variety). The innate feminine, strangled for a week in order that I might climb, round by round, the ladder to an honored place in the learned world, now held complete sway.
During the last decade of the 19th century, the Fourteenth Street Rialto ranked second only to the “Tenderloin” as an amusement center in the entire metropolitan district. While it still holds the same rank in 1921, its present night life is only a shadow of what it was. A quarter of a century ago, New York was wide-open, whereas for more than a decade, the lid has been down tight. Promenading the Rialto on |The Fourteenth Street Rialto.| an evening of 1921, the pedestrian would conclude that no such phenomenon as sex attraction existed. But during the period that I was an habitué, the Fourteenth Street Rialto was as gay as European bright-light districts, which I was fated to explore.
Fourteenth Street Rialto, Stamping-Ground of the Hermaphroditoi
Stuyvesant Square, One of Jennie June’s Stamping Grounds
(Usually the evening was spent on the bench where two girls are seated in picture.)
The Rialto is confined principally between Third Avenue and Broadway. While I was an habitué, theatres, museums for men only, drinking palaces, gambling joints, and worse abounded.
On pleasant evenings, when the sidewalks were thronged with smartly dressed adolescent pleasure seekers, I would promenade—up and down, up and down—until I chanced to meet a coterie of young bloods who invited me to join them. Our evenings would be spent in pool-rooms, gambling joints, beer gardens of ill repute, or worse resorts. Nature made me proof against the vices I there witnessed. My only weakness was the craze for female-impersonation. My greatest joy was to flaunt myself as a bisexual before those who did not know my identity. I realized that every soul among my Rialto associates was turning his or her back on the Creator. But I was always determined to give Him first place in my affections. However, for fear of bringing reproach on religion if I made myself its representative—I, a misunderstood female-impersonator, whom even the Underworld in general regarded as one of the most impious of humans—I never mentioned the theme except under extraordinary circumstances.
If the weather were bad, I would immediately enter a beer-garden and call for sarsaparilla. I would consume it in driblets while watching for the opportunity |Female-Impersonators Popular.| to join some tremendously virile bachelors out for a lark.
On the typical evening I have chosen to describe of my many passed in the Rialto, I happened to run across several youthful Lotharios waiting in front of a theatre for something “to turn up”. Only one adolescent “male” out of three thousand in New York City adopts the role of quasi-public female-impersonator. A Rialto habitué therefore does not often run up against one. Judging by my own experience, a female-impersonator proves an attraction of the first order for young bloods having time hanging heavy on their hands. Thus this coterie—as many others have done—called out jubilantly on catching sight of me: “Hello Jennie June!” ... “Hello sweetheart! That is what you want us to call you, isn’t it?” ... “Let me introduce you to Mr. A and Mr. B. They have never met a female-impersonator, and are dead anxious to see you take off a girl.”
“And you are Jennie June, are you?” A and B exclaimed. “We have heard a lot about you and longed to meet you.”
“Bon soir, messieurs,” I replied. I had a liking for addressing chance-met beaux in a foreign tongue. I happened to be the foremost linguist among the university students.
“Bon soir, Jennie, bon soir!”
“Meine sehr geliebten junge Herren, wie geht’s bei Ihnen?” I continued with a twinkle in my eye.
“Ganz gut,” sounded the reply. New York is a Babel. On an hour’s promenade in the Rialto, conversation in a score of languages would impinge on one’s |Female-Impersonators Gifted.| ear. Bright young men brought up in a New York foreign colony acquire a score of the commonest expressions in several languages.
“I miei amici, siete amati da me,” I next declared in a third language.
“Pee-an-gou, savez? We don’t understand Dago, Jennie. Tell us in American how much you love us.”
I reply in Spanish: “Esto es lo mejor que podemos hacer. Hablemos ingles.”
“Bert, Jennie seems to be a bright fellow—or girl—doesn’t she? All these impersonators seem to be brainy. Jennie, I don’t know whether to call you a fellow or a girl. Which is proper?”
“Girl, of course,” I replied with a smile.
“Well, fellows, Jennie June is part he and part she. He wears trousers, but she has breasts just like a woman and wants us fellows to regard her as a girl.”
“Well, Jennie, if you are a girl, why do you wear breeches? And why don’t you let your hair grow long?”
“Because I have the misfortune to be only part girl. I am only a girl incarnated in a boy’s body. But besides my girl’s mind, my entire body is shaped very much like a girl’s and I possess her bone and muscular systems. Because I am part boy, the law prohibits to me my natural or instinctive apparel. But you will be so kind as to overlook my not appearing before you in gown and picture hat, won’t you? I will make up for that lack by out-womaning woman in my actions. It is my nature to give up all I have, and do all I can, for the entertainment of heroes—as you manly fellows seem to be.”
The Hotel Comfort.
“Jennie, let’s walk around to the ladies’ parlor of the Hotel Comfort[[26]] and have a few drinks.”
We arrived in an artistically furnished room 25 feet by 75. At one side was a bar from which waiters continuously carried drinks to the fifty-odd couples seated around the small ornamental tables which occupied most of the floor. Nearly all the patrons were under thirty, and absolutely all, highfliers sexually. The vast bulk merely smoked, drank, and “chinned.” Only a few were playing cards for money. All were refined and orderly. I have never circulated among more delightful people than I met frequently at the Hotel Comfort.
I had become well acquainted with the proprietor and all his employees. For more than a year the “hotel” was substantially the home of my feminine personality, “Jennie June.” But this refined and luxurious “hotel” would have tolerated only a cultured and outwardly modest female-impersonator. Most examples of that biological sport were far below the standards of the Hotel Comfort, and would have been barred. But I was looked upon as a personality likely to attract a pecuniarily desirable class of patronage.
My five companions and I spent an hour sipping beverages.
[While during my twelve years as quasi-public female-impersonator, my companions always drank intoxicants, I always called for non-alcoholics. The latter’s price was double in order to discourage the consumption of temperance drinks. I had been brought up to loathe alcoholics, and during my twelve years intimacy with heavy drinkers, came to a more and more rational loathing.
No Alcohol, No Venereal Disease.
Alcoholics are by far the greatest curse of the Caucasian race. I have had almost unequalled opportunities for studying venereal diseases. My twelve years of having roues and filles de joies for bosom friends taught me that the presence of alcohol in the blood is the sine qua non of venereal disease. Perhaps my greatest contribution to the betterment and happiness of humanity is the epigram original with myself: No Alcohol, No Venereal Disease. But it is necessary to be a TOTAL ABSTAINER. Mere moderation does not confer immunity. The total abstainer may possibly contract venereal disease, but it is sure to be benign, almost negligible, and inflicting no permanent injury. Dr. Robert W. Shufeldt, who as army surgeon had extensive experience in the treatment of venereal disease, wrote in the Journal of Urology and Sexology, 1917, page 458: “In my opinion, alcohol bears the responsibility more than any other single agent—indeed more than all the others put together—for ensuring venereal infection.”]
“Jennie, why not take a cocktail instead of a lemonade? We want to warm you up. Then you will give us some of your recitations and songs. Won’t you drink a few cocktails for my sake?”
“I would not put the poison into my system for anybody! I do not need that kind of stimulant. You know what kind I need to get warmed up to declaiming and singing!
Female-Impersonate Intoxication.
“‘I am a-thirst, but not for wine;
The stimulant I long for is divine;
Poured only from your eyes in mine!
I am a-cold, and lagging lame;
Life creeps along my chilled frame;
Your love will fan it into flame.
I am a-hungered, but the bread I want;
The food that e’er my thoughts doth haunt;
Is your sweet speech, for which I pant!’”[[27]]
“If that is all the stimulant you need, Jennie, it can easily be supplied.”
We were the merriest party in the parlor. The attentions of my beaux were having their usual effect. To achieve my best success at female-impersonation, the stimulus of an appreciative and responsive audience of youthful Lotharios was necessary. Our hilarity was more and more attracting the eyes and ears of all other guests. Some recognized me as a female-impersonator. Calls began to reach me: “O you Jennie June, give us an impersonation of a prima donna!” The old-timers were remarking to new patrons of the “hostelry”: “The little fellow with the red bow is a fairie!”
Hypnotized by the adulation of those whom I looked upon as demigods, as well as by the well-disposed attention of the other hundred-odd guests attracted by my unique, yet fairly modest, behavior, I broke into the “Old Oaken Bucket”—a song affording unusual opportunity to display my masculine-feminine tones: below middle A, baritone; from A upward, alto; with an occasional soprano and tenor modulation thrown in just to excite wonder. I fancy my singing voice is unusual in its variety of possible modulation |Man and Woman in One Body.| as a result of my body being both male and female. In my singing voice particularly, these two elements are ever striving for the upper hand. One stanza each of several songs then in vogue followed: “After the Ball Was Over”; “Sweet Rosy O’Grady”; “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me”; etc.
Next I recited a dialogue, my naturally bland, sentimental, and caressing voice now aping a cry-baby mademoiselle, and now a stern, hoarse-voiced he-man. Now I burlesqued feminine airs and cadences; and now strove after the most virile and dare-devil effects.
I was, while the focus for all eyes, conscious only of the joy of being alive and in the midst of an admiring group. I experienced a feeling of exultation that for a brief spell I was looked upon under my real character—a bisexual. I was intoxicated with delight because emancipated—though only for a few moments—from a hated dissimulation and disguise, and enabled to be myself. Assuredly another personality than that of my every-day book-worm self was in possession of my body and faculties. I realized I was the same I who was one of the leaders in scholarship at the university. At the same time, I realized I was doing things incongruous with that position.
At midnight, I bade my convives a reluctant adieu. Before boarding an elevated train, I turned several corners abruptly and hid in the first dark doorway to make sure of not being dogged. But no Rialto associate ever did. After alighting from the train, I adopted the same strategy, to make assurance doubly sure.[[28]]
Being “Dogged”.
Arrived in my room, I first dropped to my knees to thank Providence for restoration to my every-day world. I rejoiced that the ordeal of a female-impersonation spree was over for a week. But the following days, while resting my mind for a moment from hard study, I gloated over the memory of my latest associations, as a member of the gentle sex, with the tremendously virile type of adolescent.
Note.—See “Memories” in Part VIII.
The Fairie Boy.