Hermaphroditos. (continued 5)

Coitus cum Puella Impossible.

In 1907 I removed to a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants. As I frequently felt a sense of utter loneliness and melancholia during my two years of practical sexual isolation—for I never indulged in even flirtation with adolescents of my every-day circle—I decided to seek a mate at a military post a few miles from the city. I still longed for a mate to the same degree as the average normal individual.

I had several hundred to choose from, and selected the most attractive, a six-foot, curly-haired, large-boned, blonde athlete of twenty years. I easily scraped acquaintance, and thereafter visited him at the fort three evenings a month, but fellatio occurred at hardly more than one-half of our meetings, chiefly because I did not wish to be intellectually dull the next day or two. The most beautiful sight that I ever saw was this adolescent when accoutered to stand guard. I found that he was by far the most tattooed person that I had ever associated with—for me a great attraction. I also found that he possessed the most charming personality, always treating me most affably notwithstanding that I represented myself—as a 237safeguard against possible blackmail—as occupying a far lower station in life than the actual. At almost our first meeting I determined to adopt him as my “kiddo-son” (combination of son and consort). For the first time, I now, at the age of thirty-three, regarded my particular friend in the son-relation rather than in the husband-relation. But I secretly looked upon him as my husband. Relations were, however, not entirely monandrous, as he brought several of his comrades on our walks.

First “Adopted Son.”

Not until after sixteen months of occasional association at the fort did I reveal my true name and status, having found that he was entirely trustworthy. He now regularly visited my home, and continued to manifest a most beautiful and accommodating disposition. He was my jewel—the chief thing to me in life. When his second enlistment expired, he was to come and live with me as my “son.”

In 1914 business took me back to New York. My “son’s” enlistment was soon to expire, and he was to join me there. I had no thought of renewing my visits to Forts X and Y, because practically all the soldiers serve only three years and my friends had doubtless all left. Besides I had become too old (40, though looking to be below 30) for romantic adventures, and my desire for female-impersonation had become comparatively weak.

In due time, my “son” came to make his home with me. We shared a pleasant and refined apartment. I had at last obtained an almost life-long desire—to live with an adored young man as his mate. I told him that whenever he was ready, I expected him to bring a wife to our home, and I was to continue to live with them as a 238parent. I hoped that occasional fellatio would continue unbeknown to the wife. I also told him that his offspring would be to me the same as if they were my own.

Year 1914—At Age of Forty.

But within a few days after we were settled, he, much to my surprise, forbade me to touch him, and insisted that we sleep in separate rooms. My grief was intense. As many as a hundred times a day as I sat in my office or in my home, I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes. Finally he yielded to my tears, and promised that one hour each week I could get close to him, and that all love-making must be confined to that one hour. But I kept an accurate account, and the period averaged only thirty-six minutes a week. I had continually to beg and weep for that morsel of time. I was presenting gift after gift, mostly cash. For every gift, I received a kick—figuratively. He told me that he stayed with me for the six months just for what he could get out of me. He said he could never think of admitting to the bonds of friendship a person abnormal sexually. He would stay in the same room with me an aggregate of only about three hours a week, although I was pining for his mere presence.

He permitted fellatio three times a month, but much preferred the normal with a fille de joie, with whom he spent one night each week, and on whom he spent practically all his money. He stated that he was averse to fellatio because he wished to save all his vita sexualis for the filles.

With the exception of the half-year following my expulsion from the university, this half-year was the most unhappy of my life. The three hours a week that we saw each other were mostly spent in his scolding me and my 239weeping almost continuously. He would say that he hated the sight of me. Tears were generally running down my cheeks even during fellatio. He had broken my heart by proving to be a traitor to our friendship. But my devotion was not at all lessened. After six months he deserted my home—as stunning a blow as the death of a brother.

“Son” Breaks My Heart.

But I pursued him and through cash induced him to call on me twice a month for the following two years, when he removed from New York. Several months after he deserted my home, he showed repentance for the way he had treated me while living there. He became as winsome and accommodating as ever, but did not care to live with me again. He said that he could not stand my continual petting. He gave as the reason for his change from winsomeness to an extremely cruel attitude the influence of a boon companion in the army, who, after expiration of enlistment, also took up his residence in New York and continued to be a chum and a frequent visitor at our home. This companion was one of the few adolescents who feel an intense and incurable antipathy for an effeminate male, and continually sought to poison my “son’s” mind against me, and persuade him to have nothing to do with me.

During the summer of 1916, when my “son” left New York, I became anxious to be possessed of a second. Four evenings were spent hunting in small parks where poor adolescents were accustomed to sit. As I searched I prayed the Heavenly Father to send a suitable adolescent to become my “son.” I still shrank from betraying my androgynism to any adolescent of my every-day circle. I 240desired to reveal it to some brand-new acquaintance among manual laborers, associate with him a few months incognito, and then, if he proved worthy of trust, reveal my identity. Not until the fourth evening did I run across a cleanly good-looking adolescent seated alone—a khaki-clad soldier, my ideal both in respect to type of manhood and in respect to apparel. I immediately entered into conversation. He confided that he was penniless and was spending the evening in the park with the hope that a passive invert would come along and provide him with money. I found him an ideal companion for an androgyne. He had also served an enlistment in the navy, thus uniting the two characters, soldier and blue-jacket, which I have always gone wild over.

Second “Adopted Son.”

After an acquaintance of only one hour, because I found him uniquely acceptable, and because he had to leave the following morning for the Mexican border, the agreement was made that he was to be my “adopted son” and come to live with me when his enlistment expired. At the same time I gave him my true name and address.

In the late fall his enlistment expired, and he returned to New York to live with me. The indications that he would prove to be an ideal adolescent to share the apartment of an androgyne more than came true. He was always good-natured and respectful. But he had had no moral training and was an extreme dipsomaniac. He was the illegitimate son of a mistress of a house of ill fame. I did my best to reform him. He would carry away my personal belongings to exchange for whiskey. He refused to work, depending entirely on me for his support.

My Home is Burglarized.

241One evening after we had lived together a month, I returned from work to find my apartment in the condition in which burglars would have left it, locked closets and drawers broken open, and their contents scattered around. All small objects of some value which could readily be pawned were missing. Particularly the carbon duplicate of this autobiography, the ink original having been sent to Berlin three years before and not heard from since on account of the war. I found the following note:

“Dear friend Ralph,

My friend over in Jersey City told me to do this what I have done. He may come over to see you tonight or soon, for he says I am doing wrong. He tells me you will get ten years for what you have done. I was drunk when I told him.”

I hardly slept that night. It was primarily a wife’s sorrow over desertion by an idolized husband, and secondarily the overwhelming fear of blackmail or else of disclosure with consequent loss of economic and social position. Moreover, I momentarily expected that the Jersey City friend—a former soldier—would call, possibly in order to put me under arrest. I kept my apartment in darkness the entire evening as I lay on my bed immersed in the deepest grief. My only utterance was, over and over again: “The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The following evening I was amazed at learning that the manuscript of this autobiography had been returned by parcels post. The package had been inadvertently opened by my landlord, and I therefore decided to confess 242my androgynism. Moreover, on account of the expected call from criminally-minded blackmailers, it was desirable to appeal to him for protection. His marvellous and hardly expected sympathy greatly relieved my distress. I proposed vacating his house, but he would not hear of it.

Year 1917.

The next evening I was amazed at receiving by messenger a letter from my boy to come at once to his succor. I found him in a terrible plight, recovering from a spree. His “pal” had kicked him out of his home as soon as the money was gone received for my belongings. Blackmail and a ransom for my manuscript had been planned, but relinquished when they had skimmed the story of my life. My “son” had only discovered its existence after he broke the lock where it was in storage. I would have immediately taken him back into my home, but my landlord refused to let a thief and a drunkard into the house again. I supported him for another month, but as he rendered me almost continuously unhappy, I then put him on a train bound for his Illinois home.

To those who have not arrived at a correct estimate of androgynism, I state that if he had continued to live with me as my son, his life would have been enriched along all lines, in particular morally and religiously. In practically every act of my life, I have been guided by the highest moral and religious ideals. Outside of sexual delinquencies, my life has been entirely offenceless. An androgyne, even when living out his nature, can attain the same ethical and religious heights as any other individual.

The Author at Forty-four.

243Arrived in my 45th year and at practically the close of my vita sexualis, my advice to the youthful invert just embarking on the journey of life is not to be disheartened over his fate. Nature, as in my own case, will bestow compensating boons for her harshness in this one respect. If instinct is strong, it is advisable to follow it in moderation. But it should hold only a secondary place in life. It should be remembered that Nature exacts a penalty in the shape of impaired vigor of mind and body for practically every sexual indulgence—and perhaps as much of the normally sexed as of her stepchildren, the congenitally abnormal. Consider whether indulgence is worth the cost in health.

In My 45th Year.

Comparing in 1918 my sexual lot with that of the normal male, I feel that in the matter of the vita sexualis, Nature has been kind to me. She has compensated me for the unusual amount of suffering bound up with the life of the outcast androgyne.

Comparing my sexual lot with that of the normal woman who bears children, I feel of course that she stands on a much higher plane. Her functioning has an exalted end, the perpetuation of the race, and is attended with infinitely more self-sacrifice than is the androgyne’s.

Why does Nature make approximately one out of every 300 physical males an androgyne or passive invert? The practice of the ancient Romans, as well as my own experience and that of other androgynes whom I have known, suggests the answer. All patrician fathers of ancient Rome provided androgyne slaves as concubines of their adolescent sons. Marriage with a woman put an absolute end to these relations. In the case of myself and my androgyne acquaintances, practically no man beyond the age of 26 ever sought or permitted relations. The function 244appears to be to fill in the period between the arrival at puberty and the arrival at the age when it is possible to beget unblemished offspring. With the ultra-virile adolescent, it is often a choice between solitary onanism and androgynous relations.

Year 1918.

As this autobiography goes to press in my 45th year, my health is unchanged from what it has been since castration at the age of 28. I am rather feeble, almost a semi-invalid, averaging two days a week when I am in a state of mental and physical collapse. I am, however, an unusually hard worker in my profession during my comparatively well intervals. I have achieved the average business success that comes to university graduates notwithstanding my semi-invalidism and effeminacy. Particularly business has caused me to mingle intimately to a large extent with the very highest class of society, just as my lot has been to mingle intimately and to a large extent with those at the very bottom of the social scale.

As to my personal appearance in my middle forties, my youthfulness is still often commented upon. Recently a new acquaintance, twelve years younger than myself, remarked that he would have taken me, “as for the oldest possible, for twelve years younger than” I really am. I am inclined to think that preservation of a youthful appearance down to middle life is a common characteristic of androgynes. As they are affected more or less with psychical infantilism, this mental trait is likely thus to betray itself somewhat in the physical form. An adult androgyne of my acquaintance has conspicuously the form of skull and face of an infant. Another androgyne acquaintance appears at fifty-five to be under thirty when 245viewed from a distance of forty feet, but close by his face is seen to be covered with very fine wrinkles such as appear in the face of an ordinary individual only when past the age of eighty.

Conclusion.

Having now (1918) arrived near the close of a half-century of life as an androgyne, I find my vita sexualis practically at an end, and feel thereby liberated from an incubus which has hitherto prevented my making the most of my god-given faculties. As I look back on life, I am of the opinion that I have had a “hard row to hoe.” In occasional spells of anguish, I have been tempted, like the patriarch Job, to “curse God and die,” because He created me a degenerate, a person almost universally despised and hated for proclivities and acts for which he is not really responsible. On such occasions, I have also, in the deep gloom which the realization of my perverted nature brings upon me, importuned the Creator to show mercy on me, who have been appointed to such a terrible fate. In my more spiritual moods I shrink from the memory of the experiences through which my abnormality caused me to pass, and am overwhelmed with despair at the thought of the depths of perdition to which cultured humanity consigns the androgyne who yields to his instincts.

I trust that the publication of my life story will contribute to a correct estimate of androgynism on the part of scientists, the molders of public opinion, and the lawmakers, and to a more kindly treatment by society of those born with this curse. It is only expressing half the truth to say that they are more to be pitied than scorned. They are wholly to be pitied.

October, 1918.

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