Often I went around Robin Hood’s barn to avoid this particular embarrassment.
Arrived in the girls’ yard, I felt as if freed from captivity and in my proper element. Shyness and fright gave way to gleefulness. Moreover, I cared only for the less strenuous games of the gentle sex.
Several boys mounted the high fence in order to tease me. “Ralph, I promise you my sister’s doll carriage to push to school!”... “Heigh, Miss Werther, have you finished the mitten I saw you knitting?”... “Say, Ralph, give me a kiss, will you?”
While with girls, I liked nothing better than such bantering. I out-girled them in our reaction to the boys’ teasing. We finally succeeded in provoking the boys to chase us—my wish all along. To be chased by boys was the highest of childhood’s pleasures.
I was always the ringleader of my girl clique, never reflecting on its unnaturalness. They never regarded me as a normal boy—only a “girl-boy.” We would even discuss our boy favorites.
Fifth year: My parents thought that if I were shut up closely with boys and away from even the sight of girls, I would be cured of my effeminacy. Thus my fifth to eleventh years of school life were staged at a boys’ “prep” several miles from my home village and numbering about a hundred students. But I was only a day-pupil except during my senior year.
Childhood Female-Impersonation.
The first week, it was an ordeal on a par with being forced into breeches. I was in a state of chronic fright. When addressed, my reply was inaudible six feet away. But after becoming well acquainted with class-mates, I have seated myself on their laps right in the schoolroom. For they appeared demigods.
They would run a hand up my arm. “Your skin is softer than velvet. And your pencils look as if you had chewed them off with your teeth. And what makes you scream when a fellow merely touches you? Ralph, you certainly ought to have been born a girl! You will never make a man!”
On holidays I would run off to the house of a girl friend. With several of the gentle sex, I would play hide-and-seek in remote nooks, as hay-mows. Later I would exchange clothing with one, and we would seek boy acquaintances that I might display my skill in female-impersonation.