In My Garden of Gethsemane.
“I am experiencing the enslaving power of sin. I now know how to sympathize with poor drunkards and harlots. I will flog and starve myself in order to conquer my flesh. [I actually fasted and flagellated myself to ascertain the effect in deadening my amorousness but found these religious exercises useless.]
“I feel to-night that I can never become a preacher of the Gospel. I feel that I must give up all plans for a noble career, and that maybe I shall come to a disgraceful end!
“Oh that all instinct would die in me! It makes my life miserable. How gladly would I be free from all desire so that I could make a name for myself in the world! An extreme girl-boy can hardly become a scholar and a preacher.
“Is it my divinely appointed task to learn the lesson of resignation in affliction? To feel myself crushed to earth by the Almighty Hand? Like Isaac, to be tried in order to see whether I am willing to be slain in my youth—in my own case morally?”[[19]]
Man’s Prudery Almost Fatal.
After an hour of bitter tears and heart-broken pleadings to the Architect of the universe, I would be in a state of mental and physical collapse for twenty-four hours. Can the reader wonder that, weighed down by such a burden, I repeatedly meditated suicide during these four terrible years? And I realize now—at middle age—that I had to suffer these four years of melancholia only because of cultured man’s misunderstanding of androgynism, prohibition of any one’s inquiring into the facts, and bitter persecution of androgynes.[[20]]
Events have proved that it was the policy of the All-Wise and All-Good not to answer my prayers, notwithstanding their almost unexampled earnestness and repetition. The Eternal foresaw that it was to the best interests both of the human race and of myself that I should leave to others the coveted work of preaching the Gospel to the heathen and spend my physical prime in New York’s Underworld as an avocational female-impersonator. That was the cross that God willed that I should bear. The role of female-impersonator is the niche in the universe that its Architect had created me to fill.
In middle life I have often thought that Providence mercifully spared me from suicide—the fate of so many youthful androgynes as a result of the world’s persecution—and foreordained my career of female|Innocent Androgynes Now in Prison.| impersonator that I might, through publishing the present trilogy, remove the veil of ignorance and prejudice as regards androgynism that now blinds the cultured, and occasions terrible persecution to Nature’s inoffensive step-children, who number one out of every two hundred inmates of our state prisons, having been incarcerated merely on the ground of homosexuality.
How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator.