Thus I was, in a sense, a court employee of New York City, while at the same time one of its greatest criminals—according to a statute that is a legacy from the Dark Ages.
Simultaneously with my career as lawyer’s clerk, I taught school five evenings a week under my legal name, and every Saturday evening took up my avocation of female-impersonator under the name of “Jennie June.”
Though I passed as three separate personalities within the same week, they had—poor things—to share the identic body alternately.
Necessity of Aliases: I have used five: Raphael Werther, Ralph Werther, Earl Lind, Jennie June, and Pussie. When I began my double life, I told the Underworld my legal name was Raphael Werther. I named myself after “the Prince of Painters,” because he was the greatest ultra-androgyne who ever lived. He was my idol—my ideal. I wished him to pass through the earthly life all over again in my body. I further named myself after “the Prince of Amatory Melancholiacs” since I was myself such during my teens. Werther was Gœthe himself, the most brilliant and most versatile man, “the Prince of Men,” born subsequently to the Shakespeare-Author (Francis Bacon).
As for the genesis of my first feminine name, I chose “Jennie” at four. I have always considered it the most feminine of names. When I began my double life, I appended “June.” I adopted that surname because of its beautiful associations, as well as |Choosing Aliases.| because of the repetition of the j and n. I have always considered “Jennie June” as the most exquisite of names: the poetic name; the magic name; the “divine” name (in the sense that we speak of the “divine” or “godlike” human form). I later substituted the feminine “Pussie” because so nicknamed, much to my delight, by the tremendously virile.
I later adopted “Earl” primarily because it rhymes with “girl”, the creature of enchantment that I longed to be, and secondarily because it arouses noble ideas. I adopted “Lind” after Jennie Lind, one of my models.
Perhaps these fancies about names are proof of insanity. A medical reviewer of my Autobiography of an Androgyne, who devoted only five minutes to the 70,000 words, declared me “clearly insane.”
When I transferred my female-impersonations from Mulberry Street to the Fourteenth Street Rialto, incredulity occasioned my transliterating the fancy “Raphael” to prosaic “Ralph.”
As a result of my 1905 court martial making the names “Ralph Werther” and “Jennie June” known to some army heads, I found it advisable, when in 1907 renewing my kind of army life for seven years, to choose new masculine and feminine names. I feared it might become known to the army heads that the fairie “Jennie June” had transferred “her” stage for female-impersonations to a distant military post. Hence the substitutions of “Earl Lind” and “Pussie.”
On a single day I have had to sign myself with four different names. Always after writing my signature, I must review it painstakingly to make sure I have put down the proper one. Only once I have made |Two Handwritings.| a mistake. In receipting for a registered letter addressed “Earl Lind, General Delivery,” I signed my legal name. To the clerk’s inquiry I replied that I had been authorized by Lind. He sent word to Lind for written authorization, which was promptly despatched.