“Grinning kid!”
“You look like a frightened bunny!” (While being teased. I was always the favorite subject for teasing by full-fledged males. In school, university, and office (the latter down to my middle forties only) they teased me as they would a girl. Moreover, my face expresses my emotions in an uncommon manner.)
“Your breasts are certainly beauts! You must be half woman!”
“Look, Ralph, Ed is throwing kisses at you!”
“Ralph, I was just going to ask you for a kiss!”
“Ralph, you are nothing but a child half-a-century old!” (When impressed by my childish grimaces and childlike way of going about everything.)
“Say, Ralph, won’t you favor me with the recipe for perennial youth? I never saw such a contrast between apparent and actual age!” (During my early forties.)
“Ralph, you are a tub of mush! You look like a fat frau in the last stage of pregnancy!” (The reader will pardon the vulgarity occasioned by my wish to |Simultaneous Life as Three Persons.| give the exact words used by an office associate to describe my figure after the age of forty-three.)
Nearly all my professional life has been under my legal name. It has been completely apart from my avocation of female-impersonator. I have sometimes thought I might be an instance of the dual personality recognized by psychologists. Only, while living out either side of my own duality, I have always had a complete memory of the other side and recognized the oneness of my ego in my two widely opposed careers.
In my middle twenties, I lived under three names and personalities. I worked seven hours a day for a legal journal as “Earl Lind.” Because under that name I had called on its editor to persuade him to publish my Autobiography of an Androgyne, representing myself as merely its author’s agent. The editor was in his sixties, and happening just then to need an assistant, immediately hired me, never questioning the truthfulness of my representations as to who I was. He was at the time also one of the leading criminal lawyers in New York City. He employed me in all sorts of confidential capacities and let me into many of the secrets of his clients. Of course I would never have proved false to his trust, even though he never knew who I really was and where I lived. I attended court with him as his clerk. I learned all the intricacies of establishing a false alibi for a wealthy androgyne whom he represented in a case originating in blackmail by an adolescent. I was his assistant while he was defending a client from prosecution by Anthony Comstock, when the latter gentleman was personally acquainted with me under the name of “Earl Lind,” and knew I was trying to get the |Court Employee Was Ultra-Criminal.| Autobiography of an Androgyne published, which he had already interdicted.