V. The Boy Who Never Grew to Be a Man.
How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator.
For the most part, the present chapter covers my twenty-sixth to thirty-second years, during which my most descriptive nickname was The Soldiers’ Friend. For I was foreordained to a sort of army life for many years, detailed in my Autobiography of an Androgyne, but omitted in the present volume. Here I limit myself to some related personal description.
Physique and Psyche: My career as avocational female-impersonator during the second half-dozen years of my physical prime was even more remarkable than during the first (outlined in Part Three). My quasi-public career as female-impersonator ended at thirty-one—at its very zenith—because I deemed myself too old longer to play the part of “French doll-baby,” and because the instinct thereto progressively weakened from the age of thirty. My being able to play that part down to thirty-one was possible only because Nature had endowed me with the proper physique and psyche, already described. Less extreme androgynes lack the qualifications, while practically all the extreme (commonly known as “fairies”, “fags”, or “brownies”) lack the necessary good sense, modesty, temperance, and high grade of general morality that were mine because of my puritan childhood and youth and university education.
The proneness of the eternal feminine greatly to understate her age made me in my twenty-sixth year, |Infantilism, etc., a Bar in Business.| when impersonating a doll-baby, pass as twenty-one, and in my fortieth, as twenty-eight. An unmarried female, as long as she has hopes of lassoing a husband, never gets beyond the lingering years of twenty-eight or twenty-nine.
Simultaneous “Male” Professional Life: In my twenties, thirties, and forties, I have worked hard in three successive learned professions. At nineteen I had already relinquished my amateur work of preacher of the Gospel on being forced by Nature into the avocation of female-impersonator. Simultaneously with my satisfying my frivolous and coquettish instincts of French doll-baby, I also met the demands of my male intellectual spirit by doing brain work of a high order. My three successive professions have seemingly been adopted by chance, although during “boyhood” I manifested special aptitude for all three, besides that of preacher. I did not choose them. They were only makeshifts after I was barred from my choice: preaching the Gospel. I can not name them lest I disclose my identity.
I have achieved the average professional success. But my extreme effeminacy and both facial and psychic infantilism have prevented employers meting out the full advancement that past work merited. Men less capable than myself have been promoted over me because my chiefs had the impression that I was merely “a grown-up child”—that is, moron-like, although as a matter of fact I possessed the intellectual qualifications.
Office associates have now and then commented in my hearing on my feminesqueness notwithstanding they have not usually entertained the least idea |Feminesqueness Recognized in Business.| that from nineteen to thirty-one, I impersonated, an average of one evening a week, a French doll-baby. Some remarks, however, even down to my middle forties, indicated that some suspected the truth about my sexual life. But I never betrayed that life to any of my business associates excepting three or four confidants, who—I must explain—were mere Platonic friends. I was too much ashamed to ape the woman before those acquainted with my intellectual accomplishments. The following are samples of remarks of office associates:
“Good morning, Baby!”
“Grinning kid!”
“You look like a frightened bunny!” (While being teased. I was always the favorite subject for teasing by full-fledged males. In school, university, and office (the latter down to my middle forties only) they teased me as they would a girl. Moreover, my face expresses my emotions in an uncommon manner.)
“Your breasts are certainly beauts! You must be half woman!”
“Look, Ralph, Ed is throwing kisses at you!”
“Ralph, I was just going to ask you for a kiss!”
“Ralph, you are nothing but a child half-a-century old!” (When impressed by my childish grimaces and childlike way of going about everything.)
“Say, Ralph, won’t you favor me with the recipe for perennial youth? I never saw such a contrast between apparent and actual age!” (During my early forties.)
“Ralph, you are a tub of mush! You look like a fat frau in the last stage of pregnancy!” (The reader will pardon the vulgarity occasioned by my wish to |Simultaneous Life as Three Persons.| give the exact words used by an office associate to describe my figure after the age of forty-three.)
Nearly all my professional life has been under my legal name. It has been completely apart from my avocation of female-impersonator. I have sometimes thought I might be an instance of the dual personality recognized by psychologists. Only, while living out either side of my own duality, I have always had a complete memory of the other side and recognized the oneness of my ego in my two widely opposed careers.
In my middle twenties, I lived under three names and personalities. I worked seven hours a day for a legal journal as “Earl Lind.” Because under that name I had called on its editor to persuade him to publish my Autobiography of an Androgyne, representing myself as merely its author’s agent. The editor was in his sixties, and happening just then to need an assistant, immediately hired me, never questioning the truthfulness of my representations as to who I was. He was at the time also one of the leading criminal lawyers in New York City. He employed me in all sorts of confidential capacities and let me into many of the secrets of his clients. Of course I would never have proved false to his trust, even though he never knew who I really was and where I lived. I attended court with him as his clerk. I learned all the intricacies of establishing a false alibi for a wealthy androgyne whom he represented in a case originating in blackmail by an adolescent. I was his assistant while he was defending a client from prosecution by Anthony Comstock, when the latter gentleman was personally acquainted with me under the name of “Earl Lind,” and knew I was trying to get the |Court Employee Was Ultra-Criminal.| Autobiography of an Androgyne published, which he had already interdicted.
Thus I was, in a sense, a court employee of New York City, while at the same time one of its greatest criminals—according to a statute that is a legacy from the Dark Ages.
Simultaneously with my career as lawyer’s clerk, I taught school five evenings a week under my legal name, and every Saturday evening took up my avocation of female-impersonator under the name of “Jennie June.”
Though I passed as three separate personalities within the same week, they had—poor things—to share the identic body alternately.
Necessity of Aliases: I have used five: Raphael Werther, Ralph Werther, Earl Lind, Jennie June, and Pussie. When I began my double life, I told the Underworld my legal name was Raphael Werther. I named myself after “the Prince of Painters,” because he was the greatest ultra-androgyne who ever lived. He was my idol—my ideal. I wished him to pass through the earthly life all over again in my body. I further named myself after “the Prince of Amatory Melancholiacs” since I was myself such during my teens. Werther was Gœthe himself, the most brilliant and most versatile man, “the Prince of Men,” born subsequently to the Shakespeare-Author (Francis Bacon).
As for the genesis of my first feminine name, I chose “Jennie” at four. I have always considered it the most feminine of names. When I began my double life, I appended “June.” I adopted that surname because of its beautiful associations, as well as |Choosing Aliases.| because of the repetition of the j and n. I have always considered “Jennie June” as the most exquisite of names: the poetic name; the magic name; the “divine” name (in the sense that we speak of the “divine” or “godlike” human form). I later substituted the feminine “Pussie” because so nicknamed, much to my delight, by the tremendously virile.
I later adopted “Earl” primarily because it rhymes with “girl”, the creature of enchantment that I longed to be, and secondarily because it arouses noble ideas. I adopted “Lind” after Jennie Lind, one of my models.
Perhaps these fancies about names are proof of insanity. A medical reviewer of my Autobiography of an Androgyne, who devoted only five minutes to the 70,000 words, declared me “clearly insane.”
When I transferred my female-impersonations from Mulberry Street to the Fourteenth Street Rialto, incredulity occasioned my transliterating the fancy “Raphael” to prosaic “Ralph.”
As a result of my 1905 court martial making the names “Ralph Werther” and “Jennie June” known to some army heads, I found it advisable, when in 1907 renewing my kind of army life for seven years, to choose new masculine and feminine names. I feared it might become known to the army heads that the fairie “Jennie June” had transferred “her” stage for female-impersonations to a distant military post. Hence the substitutions of “Earl Lind” and “Pussie.”
On a single day I have had to sign myself with four different names. Always after writing my signature, I must review it painstakingly to make sure I have put down the proper one. Only once I have made |Two Handwritings.| a mistake. In receipting for a registered letter addressed “Earl Lind, General Delivery,” I signed my legal name. To the clerk’s inquiry I replied that I had been authorized by Lind. He sent word to Lind for written authorization, which was promptly despatched.
I have had to acquire two entirely distinct handwritings—the second for my numerous love letters.[[25]] None were ever written more mushy than those of “Jennie June” and I guarded against their ever being traceable to the intellectual and puritan “Ralph Werther” (by which name I refer to my every-day self in my books). I have often, within an hour, written letters in the two different hands.
Confidants: Throughout the three decades of my double life, I have, outside several physicians, disclosed it only to nine confidants of my every-day circle. One expressed his amazement that I should disclose it at all, affirming that even my best friend would be likely to get me thrown out of my economic and social position. All my lay confidants, however, proved helpful and compassionate excepting one, who, while never disclosing my secret, dropped me from his friendship, although we had been the very closest of Platonic friends. One physician brought about my expulsion from the university and made me a Bowery outcast and fairie.
Because of the terrible persecutions inflicted by the criminally-minded “saints” who happened to be born sexually full-fledged, hardly a single cultured androgyne ever betrays his bisexuality to a single confidant |Author’s Contribution to Sociology.| of his every-day circle excepting the tremendously virile bachelor whom he may have chosen as soul-mate. I am an exception in outspokenness. Decades ago I rose above the prudery and bias with which most leaders of thought are to-day bound hand and foot. I desire that men interested in the improvement of the human race, and in the question of justice to all classes, have the opportunity of getting at the facts concerning the atypic and atavic types with whom I have been intimately thrown through having been foreordained to pass a large part of my life in the Underworld.