But Frank White (or Eunice)—whom, out of deference to the predilections of the general reader, I am going to let tell “his-her” own story in Part Four—needed, by exception, little urging to draw him out. He told me piecemeal. But I hand it on to my readers without a break. Moreover, I endeavor to reproduce his unconscious hifalutin, Johnsonese style of expression.

At the time he epitomized his life for me, Frank—Eunice (as he was known in the Underworld) was a comely blonde around forty, and five feet five tall. His physique was not noticeably feminine. He possessed merely a small-boy air and appearance, notwithstanding his hair was nearly white, though not thin. The |Frank White Introduced.| beardal growth was sparse, always clean-shaven, and for special occasions, eradicated. The amative side of life (“erotic ardor”, as he phrased it) was his only fault. In leisure hours he could talk of little else than modern exemplars of adolescent Adonis or Hercules. In this respect he was one of the two or three extreme hermaphroditoi.

Bowery, in the Nineteenth Century America’s Main Red-Light Street, and Stamping-Ground of Frank—Eunice, Angelo—Phyllis, and Ralph Werther—Jennie June

Part Four:
Frank—Eunice

I. Debut as Adult Female-Impersonator.

Ralph, I was ushered into this mundane sphere in the year of our Lord 1854. I was a lucky dog to be brought up on the upper West Side a few blocks from Central Park [New York City]. As a diminutive urchin, I dolled myself up in feminine habiliments at every opportunity. Eunice was my favorite playmate. I opined her appellation the most melodious that ever impinged upon my eardrums and regretted it was not mine personally. Whenever I flaunted myself in skirts, I adopted it.

In my early teens, father escorted me to a physician that the latter might query me concerning my feminine predilections and ridicule me out of same. Simultaneously father, through severe castigation, imposed a finis to female-impersonation in my own clique. I therefore commenced, during periods of special obsession to be a puella, the practice of perambulating the slums, first by daylight, and later after the shades of night had fallen. During these insensate peregrinations, there would swarm through my mind visions of flirtations with the ruffians around my age that I encountered. These “huskies” riveted my gaze. They fascinated me. But not until the fifth or sixth |The Pugilists’ Haven.| peregrination could I screw up courage to insinuate myself into the confidence of one of these magical intelligences.

I chanced for the first time to run across a Bowery bar-room, the “Pugilists’ Haven,” which, I had read in the papers, was the rendezvous of prize-fighters, gamblers, and gunmen [the most desperate type of gangster who will murder for pay]. The press advocated its obliteration. Curious that just because of this reputation, I was immediately insane to enter. For it was unholy ground. I reflected: “In this lowest of dives, they may accept me as a puella, although superficially a boy.” Because all early influences, Ralph, had made me opine that taking the part of a girl was the very lowest thing a boy could descend to. I further pondered: “Between the luxurious mansion of pater familias and this dingy dive, give me the latter! For here alone I might be able to pass as a puella. In my own cultured, Christian circle, female-impersonation is castigated. But would not the attitude of the offscouring of our mundane sphere—the Pugilists’ Haven gunmen—be different?”

And how crazy I was to insinuate myself with the adolescent gunmen, whom I had only read about! The very supposition of their presence just within that latticed door attracted me as a potent magnet snatches steel filings to itself. I passed and repassed the dive, continuously imagining what would transpire if I should penetrate this unholy of unholies, and having delectable visions of every species of flirtation with the demigods who made the saloon their rendezvous.