Rear View of Author at Thirty-three
(Photo by Dr. R. W. Shufeldt)
V. The Boy Who Never Grew to Be a Man.
How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator.
For the most part, the present chapter covers my twenty-sixth to thirty-second years, during which my most descriptive nickname was The Soldiers’ Friend. For I was foreordained to a sort of army life for many years, detailed in my Autobiography of an Androgyne, but omitted in the present volume. Here I limit myself to some related personal description.
Physique and Psyche: My career as avocational female-impersonator during the second half-dozen years of my physical prime was even more remarkable than during the first (outlined in Part Three). My quasi-public career as female-impersonator ended at thirty-one—at its very zenith—because I deemed myself too old longer to play the part of “French doll-baby,” and because the instinct thereto progressively weakened from the age of thirty. My being able to play that part down to thirty-one was possible only because Nature had endowed me with the proper physique and psyche, already described. Less extreme androgynes lack the qualifications, while practically all the extreme (commonly known as “fairies”, “fags”, or “brownies”) lack the necessary good sense, modesty, temperance, and high grade of general morality that were mine because of my puritan childhood and youth and university education.
The proneness of the eternal feminine greatly to understate her age made me in my twenty-sixth year, |Infantilism, etc., a Bar in Business.| when impersonating a doll-baby, pass as twenty-one, and in my fortieth, as twenty-eight. An unmarried female, as long as she has hopes of lassoing a husband, never gets beyond the lingering years of twenty-eight or twenty-nine.
Simultaneous “Male” Professional Life: In my twenties, thirties, and forties, I have worked hard in three successive learned professions. At nineteen I had already relinquished my amateur work of preacher of the Gospel on being forced by Nature into the avocation of female-impersonator. Simultaneously with my satisfying my frivolous and coquettish instincts of French doll-baby, I also met the demands of my male intellectual spirit by doing brain work of a high order. My three successive professions have seemingly been adopted by chance, although during “boyhood” I manifested special aptitude for all three, besides that of preacher. I did not choose them. They were only makeshifts after I was barred from my choice: preaching the Gospel. I can not name them lest I disclose my identity.
I have achieved the average professional success. But my extreme effeminacy and both facial and psychic infantilism have prevented employers meting out the full advancement that past work merited. Men less capable than myself have been promoted over me because my chiefs had the impression that I was merely “a grown-up child”—that is, moron-like, although as a matter of fact I possessed the intellectual qualifications.
Office associates have now and then commented in my hearing on my feminesqueness notwithstanding they have not usually entertained the least idea |Feminesqueness Recognized in Business.| that from nineteen to thirty-one, I impersonated, an average of one evening a week, a French doll-baby. Some remarks, however, even down to my middle forties, indicated that some suspected the truth about my sexual life. But I never betrayed that life to any of my business associates excepting three or four confidants, who—I must explain—were mere Platonic friends. I was too much ashamed to ape the woman before those acquainted with my intellectual accomplishments. The following are samples of remarks of office associates:
“Good morning, Baby!”