I have read statements of puritans of the dreadful results that will follow the common sex relations of children under twelve in city tenements. I have spent a large part of my life in rural districts as well as in great cities. My observations are that conditions are the same among children of both types of environment. Numerous youngsters receive their sex initiation before twelve. But, unless carried to excess, it does not seem to have any bad influence, particularly after they become adults. The probability is that the same practice has ruled among small children for thousands of years. It is Nature.
And the context moves me to remark: It turned |Providence’s Favoritism Toward Author.| out that of my several hundred schoolmates (prior to the university) I achieved in adult life the highest success. Not as a business man or money-maker, in which line I did not excel. Not in art or politics. But in the following fields, both individually and combined: Intellectual and general cultural development; enjoyment of (but not adeptness in) all species of art; breadth and depth of life and knowledge of human nature; enjoyment of the society of my fellow humans, particularly sexual opposites; and, last but not least, fame, or, as some would prefer to have me say, notoriety. For I feel that I, as an extreme type of the bisexual, am doomed to live in the minds of savants for scores of years after every one of my hundreds of schoolmates, and my other hundreds of university associates, are eternally forgotten.
[Note Added in Galley: I omitted to mention that I have also far excelled in suffering inflicted by man and in sorrow—which two items together have about counterbalanced the advantages enumerated.]
But I have achieved this last element (terrestrial immortality) of the highest success in life denied to all my wide circles of childhood and adolescence through my “going to the bad”—as the saying is. But though that was the fate marked out for me by the Architect of the Universe, I was actually able to restrain my “evil” propensities so as not to make shipwreck of life. My girl-boy intimate described in the early part of the second chapter following did make, decidedly, shipwreck of his life, as have many other girl-boys. My salvation lay in practicing relatively[[15]] |Temperance the Only Salvation.| extreme temperance in the indulgence of the sexual propensities except during my Bowery period described in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and Riddle of the Underworld. Extreme temperance in indulgence of any fleshly appetite is, for all humanity, the sole means of salvation from the shipwreck of earthly life. Overindulgence of any appetite defeats its own end.
Thus while nearly all other girl-boys are doomed to be forgotten by mankind a few years after their bodies return “dust to dust,” I myself am—I feel—destined to live in the memory of savants primarily because of my extensive self-restraint, and secondarily because of my excelling the other girl-boys in innate brain power.
It was F’ank who initiated me, at two, in the mysteries which gullible parents think children do not learn before puberty. But down to twelve, I considered all species of sex relations as the monopoly of naughty children. All adults had of course outgrown such depths of nastiness.
Down to my present age of close to half-a-century, F’ank has been the hero in half my many sexual dreams. After I reached seven, we ceased to be confidential. I therefore never confessed to him that his influence prior to my seventh year almost wrecked my adult life—probably consigning me to an irresponsible, intensive fairie career—and a thousand times made me wish, because a slave to fellatio, that I were dead. For I firmly believe that girl-boys, if not repeatedly |Keep Tots Sexually Clean.| seduced before puberty, will, as adults, have only weak and controllable desires for the sexual functioning ordained by Nature for their type. While they are commonly fellators or else pathics congenitally, only oft repeated seduction in early childhood makes them, after puberty, irresponsible psychic nymphomaniacs who recruit the ranks of fairies. But for those repeatedly seduced in early childhood, the penchant is truly irresistible in adulthood and would be followed regardless of all legal penalties. Just as most men would steal a loaf of bread if their only means of salvation from death through hunger.
Not too often repeated homosexual acts on the part of a small child, however, are not likely to make him an adult pervert. An innate tendency is practically indispensable. Early experiences along innate lines merely strengthen a congenital bias, just as the author became an intensive adult fairie as a result—I am inclined to believe—of my intense fairieship from three to six.
While I believe sexual relations of children under twelve when not often repeated will not render them particularly lustful as adults, an intensive sex life of a small child—as in my own case—is likely to render him or her extremely intemperate sexually after puberty. Mothers should therefore keep a watchful eye over the whereabouts and associates of the “angel child,” and not allow it in secluded cosy nooks with older children. A careful watch should be kept over nurse-girls. Children under twelve, and even under six, need chaperons almost as much as those just past puberty.