I began to frequent one evening a week the fort where he was stationed, but we disclosed to no one that I was other than an ordinary young man. I was, moreover, so fascinated with him that I did not seriously consider flirtation with his comrades. We exchanged numerous passionate love letters—my first essay in this field. I was also now inspired to compose my first amatory ballads, which were in praise of my “Man behind the guns,” and transmitted to him.
Our intimacy continued for several months, until, having become an outcast and penniless, I was unable to make him presents, and he consequently became negligent in keeping his appointments.
During this year 1896, I read Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis,” besides a number of articles on inversion which had been published in American and European journals. I availed myself of the library of the New York Academy of Medicine. Some years later I read there Havelock Ellis’s “Sexual Inversion.”
My Twenty-Third Year.
This autobiography has now reached my twenty-third year. I had received my baccalaureate degree with honors, and was in my second year of graduate study. I had not really degenerated morally or religiously. For the entire year ending at the date at which I had now arrived, the aggregate time devoted to female-impersonation and coquetry was approximately one hundred hours, as compared with about twenty-one hundred devoted to my studies and two hundred and fifty to the worship of my Creator and religious culture. Surely I was not to be tabooed as a moral leper. While the average church member, through lack of understanding of the conditions surrounding my life, would have branded me as a hypocrite, I sincerely believed and lived up to the fundamental truths of the Christian religion.
I still enjoyed an unblemished reputation. I associated with all my beaux, including my soldier friend, incognito. Always on returning home after an evening passed as “Jennie June,” I took precautions that I was not followed.
The wreck of my happy and highly successful student-career was now brought about by a physician whom I had consulted in hope of a cure for my inversion, but not one of the two gentlemen already named. He happened to number the president of the university among his friends, and whispered to him that I ought not to be continued as a student. I was immediately expelled.
Expelled from University.
I earned my living in a minor capacity in the university, and expulsion also meant that my income was cut off. The shock of expulsion rendered me a mental wreck. But I did not have the courage to return to my village home. Nor could I even apply to my father for money. Since soon after my arrest two years prior to the present date, he had, as already described, displayed a pronounced antipathy for me, rendering my visits home almost intolerable. In addition, because of the double-life my nature forced me to lead, I decided I must remain in New York.
I removed to a part of the city where I would not be likely to encounter any of my college acquaintances, and began to look around for means of support. I spent several hours every day in answering advertisements. I would have been only too glad to accept such a position as shoveling coal into a furnace, but at the end of a month, had found nothing. In applying for positions, I was abashed in the consciousness that I was ranked as a degenerate and an outcast from society. I could not name as reference any member of the university or let it become known that I had been a student there. After my expulsion I called on the two professors with whom I was most intimate, and asked if I could refer to them. One replied: “Knowing your nature, I could not recommend you for any position, however menial. You cannot be trusted.” (And yet shortly afterward I was for thirty months in the employ of a millionaire in the most confidential capacity, and was surpassed in faithfulness by no employee.) The other: “You must realize that you are an outcast from society.”