My mother has said that I was the greatest cry-baby of her eleven children. I have really never outgrown this characteristic. Still in my late forties, I occasionally weep bitterly for a whole hour.
Up to my eighth birthday, timidity made me reluctant to leave my mother’s side to play with other children. Sticking very close to “mother” as a child, and extraordinary devotion to her when adult are common earmarks of androgynism. I have known of no other reputed male so devoted to his mother, even down to his late forties, as I. My mother is still, by |My Life-Long Soul-mate (in Dreamland).| a kind Providence, spared to me. I frequently weep bitterly at the thought of her dying and can not imagine living when she is in the grave. I knew an androgyne who, in his sixties, died from grief a few days after the death of his mother around ninety.
In my early childhood, only one other person attracted me in a comparable fashion—a neighbor’s burly boy, F’ank, five years older than myself. All my life I have seen him at least several times a year, since he has remained a close friend down to the time when we both count about half-a-century of life. His influence is still strong, although sexual relations ceased when I was seven. He was one of the most amorous of boys. From my third to seventh year, he sought me several times a week. Perhaps he also embraced every chance for heterosexual relations—common among the children under twelve in the “best set” of the village, among whom I was privileged to be brought up. And yet all these contaminated youngsters—excepting myself—turned out fairly virtuous adults. The ultra-amorous and active pederast F’ank became, when adult, exclusively heterosexual and quite promiscuous, being of the tremendously virile type. But around thirty, he settled down into absolute monogamy. He, however, never had a child. At past fifty, he stands at perfection in health, strength, and morality.
I say they “turned out”! That is, so far as I ever heard. But they would all have said of me that I passed through my adult life a cold anaphrodite! One can never know! Some might secretly have been addicted to venery as much as I. But they betrayed no external sign. Neither have I.
Most Sheltered Two “Went to the Bad.”
But while all those who indulged in “nastiness” before reaching their teens grew up, so far as I was able to observe, into men and women above reproach, two of “my set”—those who were “kids” at the same time within a radius of five hundred feet of my own paternal roof, the several homosexualist schoolmates elsewhere described having lived outside that radius—the two that had been most carefully brought up and shielded by their mother from corruption by other children, almost the only two that were sexually unblemished as children, “went to the bad” immediately on arrival at puberty. They were brother and sister—the only children of a wealthy, pious couple. The brother became a chronic dypsomaniac and roué. The sister, a beautiful and brilliant girl who had enjoyed a college education, died before thirty as a result of excesses in her chosen profession of fille de joie in New York City. The mother died of a broken heart in her early forties. The father, previously active in church work, became despondent on seeing both his children “go to the bad,” took to drink, and died a sot.
Debauchery was born in these two children, for they had never missed Bible school up to their middle teens. They were unusually innocent prior to puberty. But religious teaching failed to convince them. They thought the “goody-goodies” were trying to rob them of the pleasures of life through false representations. I believe both could have been saved from shipwreck of life if, at puberty, a book, scientific, not goody-goody, could have been put into their hands, demonstrating that alcoholic and venereal excesses bring on ruin and often early death. Children inclined to dissipation on arrival at puberty are far more likely to heed the pronouncements |Inherited Lechery.| of a physician than of a Bible school teacher.
In that same immediate puritan circle in my childhood’s village, I have lately observed a similar case in the next generation. I have known well a certain gentleman of my own age since we were boys together. He is of the tremendously virile type and sowed his wild oats as hardly another young blood in the village. But in his middle twenties he was “soundly converted” in a puritan church (to which I myself belonged) and married one of its purest daughters. In his subsequent life, he attained rare success financially and socially. He has had only two children—both girls around twenty years of age at the date of writing. I know the family intimately. I have direct information that both girls are “fast going to the bad” (notwithstanding they have always been under only puritan influences) and that the father has “backslidden,” evidently being no longer able to restrain his de facto polygamous instincts. The purest of wives is heart-broken and on the borderline of insanity.
Every one says the girls and their father are wilfully depraved and their puritan community has already begun to treat them as outcasts. I say the girls inherited their craze for venery from their father, in whom likewise it was inborn. He is a noble man in every other respect. All three are largely irresponsible. They are, by birth, not fitted for the puritan society in which they were brought up. Under present social ideas and usages, the only outlet for the girls is prostitution and the consequent early loss of health soon terminating in death. But their only fault is |Present Social Rules Inadequate.| nymphomania. If society had some way by which it could bring about the satisfaction of these needs of these cultured girls, the latter could be saved from the shipwreck of life and be useful members of their community. In my own life I have proved that Christian conversion and absorption in the teachings of the Bible can not save one from innate nymphomania. I could suggest a means of salvation for these girls, but dare not. If only the leaders of thought did not prescribe an identic sex life for every daughter of Eve, although Nature has created them with such diversity along these lines! If only the leaders of thought permitted real sexual problems (as well as namby-pamby) to be investigated, as all other phenomena are searched out to the very bottom! If only the leaders of thought permitted the truth to be told about sex instead of continuing to propagate the hypocrisies and fabrications regnant down from the Dark Ages!