[15]. For me it was extreme temperance, considering my natural sexual ardor. For most people it would have been gross intemperance. Extreme temperance might be defined as the denial of six-sevenths of one’s strong fleshly desires. That is what it was with me. Professional fairies commonly indulge more than ten times as often per year as I did. But as a result, they go early to the grave.
[16]. Fellatio.
[17]. Particularly during my teens, I have worried and grieved a thousand times as much as the average individual. I say for the solace of fellow melancholiacs who retain their reason that at my present age of forty-seven, I show not the least sign of thinning or whitening hair. But this may be due to my being an ultra-androgyne, a subspecies blessed with perennial youth. Strangely also in my own case intense grief (except the agonies in my Garden of Gethsemane, for which see close of this chapter) has seemed to put physical strength into my usually weak body. I feel also that it sharpens my wits and adds to my wisdom and literary ability. “There’s not an ill wind but blows some good.”
At the age of forty-seven my conviction is that great sorrows, after the lapse of a score of years, are recognized to have been blessings in disguise. My life experience has demonstrated that “there is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.” My life experience has demonstrated that the biblical teachings about human life are in general true, and that either the Christian or Jewish religion is practically necessary to save from despair and suicide men and women foreordained to drain the cup of anguish to the dregs. My personal faith in Christian doctrine, and my habit, instilled in infancy, of “taking everything to God in prayer,” have saved me from suicide a thousand times and made the deepest of sorrows tolerable.
The upshot of my very exceptional life experience is: (1) “Praise God from whom all blessings flow;” and (2) Even pain, sorrow, and death are blessings in disguise. The heart of the universe is beneficent.
As I have had an unusual religious experience, one of the numerous books I plan to write, if my life is spared, will be entitled: MY SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY. I have made many discoveries in religion and ethics which I long to proclaim to the world. As already stated, I have always been ultra-religious and a deep student of the Bible. Another book I plan to write will be entitled: THE BIBLE AND THE SEXUAL INSTINCT. In the latter I will seek to demolish the Church’s chief stumbling block. As already stated, I was cut out for a preacher.
[18]. After my conversion at fifteen, I fought against my sexual attraction toward schoolmates as few others have struggled against the ruling passion. I was no longer a coquette, although desiring as much as ever to be such. My passion for loud apparel, however, was not suppressed since I did not recognize in it any sin.
[19]. I had in mind possible predestination to be a fille de joie—the career which haunted me, off and on, every year of my life after my second, even years before I heard of the existence of such filles. I had already had an intensive five years career (third to seventh years). Another foreshadowing (that of my actual career from my twenty-sixth to fortieth years) was a common dream, from about my ninth to fourteenth years, of being chased through streets and fields by youthful soldiers, who would finally catch me, and great terror would result. The dream occurred so often that in my waking hours I resolved, the next time I had that dream, to tell the soldier boldly: “I am not afraid of you, because this is only a dream!” Repeatedly in my dreams did I tell that to the soldier who had grabbed me, but he replied (as I dreamt): “You are mistaken. This is not a dream. It is the real thing!” And then I would become as terrified as ever. My dream would always end a second or two after being grabbed, and generally I would wake up as if from a night-mare.
[20]. Anglo-Saxon leaders of thought have hitherto been of the opinion that the domain of sex is “terra interdicta,” just as those of Roger Bacon’s time (priests and monks exclusively) would have believed it sacrilege to use a telescope or microscope—“to see what God meant man should never see.” Roger, although having invented these instruments, did not dare tell his generation because the leaders of thought would have burnt him alive for invading terra interdicta.
[21]. However, as described in detail in my AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ANDROGYNE, the congenital extraordinarily keen edge on my intellect was progressively and permanently dulled from the age of sixteen to twenty-three by emissions during sleep twice a week. It is necessary to add that I always had acute horror of self-abuse.