The gang immediately recognized my character, and I became the recipient of chivalrous and amorous attentions from them all. I accompanied them on their way home, down the Bowery to Chatham Square, and then eastward to the neighborhood of Water Street. They repeatedly urged me to enter some low dive with them, but I would not think of it. They were too reckless and vicious a lot, and I was satisfied with being wooed by them on the public street in their delightfully wild and rough way. Finally arrived at a groggery where some of them felt at home, they will no longer listen to a refusal. They drag me inside and down into the cellar.
Has the reader ever perused the account of the deeds of the sons of Belial in Gibeah, performed 3,400 years ago to the detriment of a certain Levite and his concubine, as recorded in the Book of Judges? These modern sons of Belial, these lowest, most ignorant, most animal, and most vicious of all the inhabitants of the modern Babylon, repeated that night on their helpless victim the deeds of the men of ancient Gibeah. I was then carried to the street and abandoned.
This assault proved to be the millstone that broke the camel’s back. I was at last rendered unable to be on my feet owing to spinal trouble, and to excruciating pain in the anus whenever I attempted to walk. I was compelled to enter a hospital.
Year 1897—I Reform.
For several years following, cleanliness required me gerere pannum perpetuo intra subuculam causa incontinentiae defecationis. But it was of little account, by no means rendering me what Beza would denominate “a stinking androgyne.” The liquid excretion did not at all interfere with my pursuits of the scholar or the female-impersonator. As I must keep everything secret, I took upon myself the entire care of the cloths in my room. After a few years, the sphincter again functioned completely.
When able to leave the hospital, I felt satiated for life with coitus, and exceedingly homesick. I yielded to the temptation to find shelter under the parental roof. On my arrival home, which I had hardly expected to see again, I could do nothing but weep for the first half hour, and it was several hours before I could speak without bursting into tears. My mother enfolded her “little innocent boy,” and my father had softened. Of course I never gave a true account of our period of estrangement.
I now believed that my career as a fairie was over. My early religious enthusiasm was renewed, and I began to spend a large part of my time in related studies. As already made known, I had had the career of a foreign missionary in mind from childhood up to the age of nineteen, and before many weeks I felt that now I was loosed from that terrible obsession by the “procreative” side of human life, I could look forward to laboring in the field of missions. After two months of activity in church work in my native village, an opening presented itself in the near-by metropolis.
A Self-Abnegating Religious Teacher.
I thus passed an exceedingly satisfactory summer, and hoped and prayed that this religious enthusiasm might continue indefinitely. What a contrast between this life and that as Jennie June! While the phenomena of the procreative side of life bring to man the highest earthly bliss, they also occasion the intensest misery. The life as Jennie June had been a bitter life apart from all the extraneous suffering. But in a life given for others, seeking not its own, there was everything satisfying, and nothing to regret. Truly there is a glorious salvation from sin and unhappiness in announcing glad tidings to the poor, binding up the broken-hearted, and opening the eyes of the spiritually blind.
But this salvation was not to be mine. It is in the power of the vast majority of the human race to live what are called decent, moral lives; but it is not in the power of all. My “sin” was a disease of the mind, not wilful sin, especially at this and earlier periods of my career. I was a born “nymphomaniac,” if this word may be used of one who has no nymphae. In respect to the strength of the urge after coition, I am akin to the male rather than the female sex. As few others have tried, I tried to overcome the evil inherent in my nature, but in vain. The manner in which this period of religious enthusiasm ended is shown in the following extract from a letter written to my spiritual adviser.