I have had to acquire two entirely distinct handwritings—the second for my numerous love letters.[[25]] None were ever written more mushy than those of “Jennie June” and I guarded against their ever being traceable to the intellectual and puritan “Ralph Werther” (by which name I refer to my every-day self in my books). I have often, within an hour, written letters in the two different hands.
Confidants: Throughout the three decades of my double life, I have, outside several physicians, disclosed it only to nine confidants of my every-day circle. One expressed his amazement that I should disclose it at all, affirming that even my best friend would be likely to get me thrown out of my economic and social position. All my lay confidants, however, proved helpful and compassionate excepting one, who, while never disclosing my secret, dropped me from his friendship, although we had been the very closest of Platonic friends. One physician brought about my expulsion from the university and made me a Bowery outcast and fairie.
Because of the terrible persecutions inflicted by the criminally-minded “saints” who happened to be born sexually full-fledged, hardly a single cultured androgyne ever betrays his bisexuality to a single confidant |Author’s Contribution to Sociology.| of his every-day circle excepting the tremendously virile bachelor whom he may have chosen as soul-mate. I am an exception in outspokenness. Decades ago I rose above the prudery and bias with which most leaders of thought are to-day bound hand and foot. I desire that men interested in the improvement of the human race, and in the question of justice to all classes, have the opportunity of getting at the facts concerning the atypic and atavic types with whom I have been intimately thrown through having been foreordained to pass a large part of my life in the Underworld.
Part Three:
The Fairie Boy
I. Female-Impersonation.
In Part Three, I shall outline what kind of adult career is the natural sequel of the childhood and adolescence described in Part Two; what kind of adult career is bound up with the physique and psyche with which I am endowed. I shall disclose what Providence had in store for the youthful religious prodigy of the Connecticut hills—the delicate, lilliputian, chicken-hearted girl-boy—after he had been swallowed up in New York’s millions.
Since ultra-androgynes are, in a sense, instances of dual personality—a male soul and a female soul inhabiting the same brain and body—it is natural for them to live a double life.
Moreover, as the “classy,” hypocritical, and bigoted Overworld considers a bisexual as monster and outcast, I was driven to a career in the democratic, frank, and liberal-minded Underworld. While my male soul was a leader in scholarship at the university uptown, my female soul, one evening a week, flaunted itself as a French doll-baby in the shadowy haunts of night life downtown.
Since my student and subsequent professional career were prosaic, I leave them almost unmentioned |The Fourth Sex.| throughout Part Three. I, however, always gave them first place in my life. But I here confine myself to what I experienced and learned while impersonating a French doll-baby because it constitutes something novel to most readers.
Indeed Parts Three, Four, and Five portray the social life and diversions of the most cultured New York coterie of THE THIRD SEX during the last decade of the nineteenth century. For, while little has yet been published about instinctive female-impersonators because of the prudery of the sexually full-fledged, they form (necessarily sub rosa) quite a large class of society—about one out of every three hundred physical males. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Fourteenth Street Rialto was their chief stamping-ground in the New York metropolitan district. I became acquainted with them because during the decade indicated, I was myself in my prime as a female-impersonator in two out of the three principal bright-light quarters of the metropolitan district.