III. An Androgyne’s Youth.
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]]
Reasons for Melancholia.
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:
“My times are in Thy hand,
Whatever they may be;
Pleasing or painful,
Dark or bright,
As best may seem to Thee!”
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.
My Temptations Hardly Equalled.
“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.]
My Garden of Gethsemane
In My Garden of Gethsemane.
“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]]
Man’s Prudery Almost Fatal.
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.
How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator.