IV. I Grow into The Fairie Boy.
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.
Coddled in College.
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.”
Childlike and Womanlike.
“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.
Man, Woman, and Infant in One Body.
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)