Early Teens.
During my early teens also, a few schoolmates hinted at fellatio. Because of shame I gave them no encouragement, although almost insane for love of them. Moreover, about this time, several old and middle-aged men would find occasion to clasp me, cum peni adversum fundamentum meum. They evidently entertained thoughts of pædicatio, but on account of our position in society, they did not go any farther. I abhorred their conduct.
As a consequence of my comparatively solitary life, my association with boys being confined to the school-room, I was very backward in acquiring normal sexual knowledge, never used slang, and was in general a “goody-goody.” Other boys called me an “innocent.” Adults regarded me as exceptionally guileless and pure-minded. The reader will discover in these pages what manner of person I was, but down to my middle thirties my “childlike and bland smile” and my “frank and open countenance” have been harped upon by my every-day associates. Down to the age named they have described me as “mild-eyed,” “inoffensive,” “childlike,” and “lamblike.”
I was probably more a prey to sensual imaginations than any other boy of the community, and yet, without any attempt to deceive on my part, I was judged to be the most pure-minded! Nevertheless, though naturally one of the most sensual, I probably practiced the most self-denial. Later, college associates remarked that they never met any one else with so little of the animal in him, when actually I was then perhaps the most given to venery of them all. I had in myself the germs of two as widely opposed careers as it would be possible to name. I was a born religious and philanthropic worker. On the other hand, no girl was ever more clearly cut out for the life of a fille de joie than was I.
1889—I Become a Religious Prodigy.
The genitals became pubescent as early as the completion of my fifteenth year. Is this not unusually early for a male, but the proper age for a female? Whether or no as a partial effect of this beginning of pseudo-puberty, I simultaneously developed into a religious prodigy, leading the congregation in church in extempore prayer at this early age, and spending a full two hours daily in private religious exercises for the next two years. At this time I definitely chose the Christian ministry in a heathen land as my field of labor when I had finished my education. This greatly increased interest in religion fortunately put a stop to my morbid reveries. I now looked upon my yearning for fellatio as my “besetting sin,” and until the age of nineteen fought against it as few others have struggled to be freed from lustful desires. A popular medical writer has described the girl-boy as “congenitally depraved,” and “secretly vicious.” I would refute this and other slanderers of the girl-boy, cursed by Nature and cursed by his fellow man. Lofty ethical ideals, including self-abnegation, are as common among youthful inverts as among those normally sexed.
From my fourteenth to my seventeenth year, I passed a rather sad and lonely life. I was ashamed longer to mingle with girls as one of them, and still shrunk from companionship with boys. My recreation consisted of long solitary walks through the country during which I brooded over the real and imagined ills of life. Being delicate, I hardly expected to live to reach manhood.
My Gethsemane.
Erotic dreams, with emissions, began at the age of fifteen, and in a few months reached a frequency of twice a week. The fraudulent advertisements in the newspapers held out to me the strong probability of my soon becoming an idiot as a result of these losses, and occasioned me much despondency. Only males have figured in these dreams. They related only to fellatio, never to pædicatio.
It was during my seventeenth year that I first became fully conscious that my unwilling craving for fellatio was deeply rooted, and not to be outgrown; that my feeling for my schoolmates was the procreative instinct, in me misdirected. The realization that I was differently constituted from nearly all other males, and such an individual as during the whole history of the human race—so far as I was then acquainted with the history of the phenomenon—has been abhorred, reviled, and regarded as the lowest of the low, a monster of wickedness, and an outcast, was accompanied by the bitterest sorrow, causing me about once a week to go forth at night to a lonely quasi-abandoned graveyard, throw myself on the grass-covered graves, writhe in an agony of tears and moans, and beseech my Creator by a miracle then and there to take away my perverted instinct and make a virile man of me. These seasons of anguish would exhaust me mentally and physically for twenty-four hours afterward. This was the beginning of three such melancholy years as few are called to pass through, and I meditated suicide repeatedly.