Such was my chronic burden almost throughout my teens. (Subsequently, with the exception of brief spells of melancholia, I became reconciled to my fate.) And such is the burden imposed by Nature on one youth out of every three hundred in every social set of every country in the world. But because of my intellectuality, high-class environment, and extreme androgynism, my grief was exceptionally intense. I do not believe the mildly androgynous are melancholy during their teens. They have not yet become conscious that they are abnormal.
My chronic lamentation during my seventeenth to nineteenth years was: “Miserable wretch! Miserable wretch! Miserable wretch! That’s all I am! I was born with a deformed nature, despicable in the eyes of all people! I am a soft effeminate youth who is wanted nowhere! I am ashamed to look any one in the face! I feel like putting an end to my life, or else losing myself, to all who know who I am, in a distant city where I could live according to my queer nature. I have nothing to live for! I may be disgraced, disgrace my family, be compelled to flee, be disowned by my parents, be cursed and be despised throughout the land!”
An older sister frequently vented her spite on me because of her disgust at my effeminacy. The Sunday |Horror of Fire-arms.| school picnic in my seventeenth year led up to one of the greatest sorrows of my youth. “You little coward!” my sister the next day began. “Even eight-year-old George has more pluck! I was so mortified to see you the only boy to refuse to pick up the rifle in the shooting contest! The others could hardly wait their turn. And to-day you do look like a freak in that pink ruffled shirt! And with your hair banged! Trying to doll yourself up as much like a girl as you can, are you?”
“I am, too, so ashamed of your bangs, Ralph!” my mother chimed in. “They make you look as if you didn’t know anything!”
“Mother, make him go to C’s party next Wednesday. He stays away from all gatherings of young people. He will grow up a boor.”
“I would rather be thrashed than go to any party! I do not like to pay gallantries to women!”
“You will never make a man unless you do, son. I insist that you go to C’s party.”
Wednesday evening arrived, and with two score youngsters, I was lounging in C’s parlors. My older sister had managed to have me escort a girl. Unfortunate female, to be attended by one of her own sex whom Nature had disguised as a man!
It was extreme torture to have to go into society and put myself forward as a gallant. Accordingly I grasped the first opportunity to escape to the garden. I could look into the brilliantly lighted drawing-rooms filled with the youthful merry-makers. The spectacle moved me to tears.
“To think that Providence permits to all young people excepting myself the joys of love and courtship! |I Become a Religious Prodigy.| Because if I followed my inclinations along these lines, people would call me a monster and I would be a pariah![[18]]