All impersonators belonging to the middle and upper classes also choose a masculine alias, represented in the Underworld to be their legal name. They do not wish to risk disgrace to their family name. Moreover, on their sprees in the bright-light districts, they are careful to wear nothing containing their every-day initials.
Except for a few weeks, I myself was only an avocational impersonator. I gave to it only three hours a week, as compared with 109 waking hours to my student (or later, professional) life. I did not adopt the avocation until near the close of my sophomore year. Almost throughout the preceding twenty-four months, however, I had fought violently against almost irresistible tendencies to disappear for an evening in the Underworld on a female-impersonation spree. But my ultra-puritan education had injected into me such a moral horror of female-impersonation that I was able to resist the tendencies for two whole years after the date that Nature ordained them to begin.
The “French doll-baby” spirit had dwelt in my brain since birth. Throughout my life down to nineteen, it had manifested itself strongly, although after fourteen I had struggled to crucify it. At nineteen, it refused longer to be suppressed. I (the puritan, book-worm spirit in me) had to arrange a compromise. I promised to yield my physical and mental powers to it only one evening each week. And the doll-baby spirit was satisfied. Previously I had been the most melancholy person in the university. But dating from the |My Dual Personality.| compromise, my life flowed on peacefully and blissfully. Only occasionally—moments while suffused with ambition to make a name for myself in the intellectual and philanthropic world—would I turn against the doll-baby spirit with abhorrence, and ask myself how I could ever give place to it.
For the serious work of life, I realized that I must practically strangle the feminine side of my duality outside the three hours a week during which I conceded to it full possession of my personality. While at my every-day tasks, I sought to forget the doll-baby spirit that dwelt in my brain side by side with the scholar spirit.
The Fairie Boy.
II. A Typical Female-Impersonation Spree.
The one evening a week on which I (the scholar spirit) surrendered, I called “going on a female-impersonation spree.” The typical spree did not occur until the December (1894) of my senior year. I had become somewhat adept in the art of impersonation through a year’s apprenticeship in the Mulberry Street Italian quarter. As that training has been detailed in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld, I omit it here.
On the afternoon preceding a spree, I would be overwhelmed with dread and melancholia. I dreaded disclosure, which I realized would mean expulsion from the university because of the full-fledged man’s horror of a sexual cripple. I dreaded possible disfigurement by blows—or even murder—by one of the numerous prudes who detest extreme effeminacy in a male (supposed). I was melancholy because about to embark on something that my puritan training had impressed me as in the highest degree disgraceful, and that I secretly wished I did not have to undertake. But to be contented and even happy for the following week and to guarantee that tranquillity necessary for the best scholarly success, the weekly spree was unavoidable.
Only a handful of upper-class female-impersonators adopt feminine attire for street wear. For myself (being a university student, and subsequently an honored member of a learned profession) it was too |Fairies Are Extreme Dressers.| risky. I merely kept some feminine finery locked up in my room for occasional decoration of my person while I gazed in the mirror. But during the eighteen months that my sprees were staged in the Fourteenth Street Rialto and the six years on or near military reservations in New York’s suburbs, my attire was as fancy and flashy as a youth dare adopt. Fairies are extreme dressers and excessively vain. To strange adolescents whom I passed on the street I proclaimed myself as a female-impersonator through always wearing white kids and large red neck-bow with fringed ends hanging down over my lapels.
I would set out from my lodgings with the feelings of a soldier entering a terrific battle from which he realizes he may never return. As the car carried me farther and farther from where I staged the puritan student life and nearer and nearer to where I staged the “French doll-baby” life, my overwhelming melancholia would gradually give way to a sense of gladness that in a few minutes I would find myself again on “Jennie June’s” stamping-ground. I had left at home all my masculinity (a very poor variety). The innate feminine, strangled for a week in order that I might climb, round by round, the ladder to an honored place in the learned world, now held complete sway.