Hermaphroditos.

The fusion in one human being of the distinctive physical and mental characteristics of the two sexes has from antiquity proved to be a phenomenon interesting to mankind. In some of the great museums of the world can still be seen examples of the classical statue of Hermaphroditos, with complete primary male sexual determinants and no trace of female, but with female secondary determinants. The work now in the hands of the reader portrays the inner history and the life experience of such a specimen of the genus homo.

“Androgyne” Defined.

An “hermaphrodite,” according to the original Greek signification of this term, was not an individual—in the modern sense—having both the male and the female organs of reproduction in whole or in part, or a curious fusion of the two, but only those of the male. In other respects, however, the bodily form was that of a female. The hermaphrodite was thus, according to the Greeks, 6a female with male genitals. Because modern usage has diverted the term “hermaphrodite” to a different signification, the word “androgyne” has come into use to denote an individual with male genitals, but whose physical structure otherwise, whose psychical constitution, and vita sexualis approach the female type.

Androgynes have of course existed in all ages of history and among all races. In Greek and Latin authors there are many references to them, but these references are not always understood except by the few scholars who are themselves androgynes or at least passive sexual inverts. About the middle of the 16th century, the celebrated theologian Beza more clearly wrote: “What shall I say of these vile and stinking androgynes, that is to say, these men-women, with their curled locks, their crisped and frizzled hair?”^[1] As is evident in this passage, these men-women, because misunderstood, have been held in great abomination both in the middle ages and in modern times, but the prejudice against them was not so extreme in antiquity, and a cultured citizen having this nature did not then lose caste on this account.

But until Krafft-Ebing published his epoch-making work, Psychopathia Sexualis, in the last decade of the 19th century, European and American medical science was either practically ignorant of or else ignored the existence of androgynism. But that author treated principally of other unusual sexual phenomena. Very little of androgynism came under his observation. I quote from page 389 of the English translation of the 12th edition of his work: “There is yet wanting a sufficient record of cases belonging to this interesting group of women in masculine attire with masculine genitals.”

Ancient Greek Statue of an Androgyne, Called “Hermaphroditos,” Now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

“Fairie” Defined.

7The present work discloses not only the life of an androgyne per se, but that of a “fairie” or “petit-jesus,” the life of which rare human “sport” (in the biological sense) your author was apparently also predestined to live out in a way immeasurably more varied than falls to the lot of the ordinary fairie, having had a limited experience in this vocation in Berlin and Paris and other great European cities, in addition to his extensive experience in New York.

The “fairie” is a youthful androgyne or other passive invert (for they are perhaps not all members of the extreme class of androgynes) whom natural predestination or other circumstances led to adopt the profession of the fille de joie. The term “fairie” is widely used in the United States by those who are in touch with the underworld. It probably originated on sailing vessels of olden times when voyages often lasted for months. While the crew was either actually or prospectively suffering acutely from the absence of the female of the species, one of their number would unexpectedly betray an inclination to supply her place. Looked upon as a fairy gift or godsend, such individual would be referred to as “the fairy.” As the author is one of the first users of the printed word in this derived sense, he has elected to adopt a distinctive spelling.

It is hardly necessary to explain that the sacrilegious 8term, “petit-jesus,” commonly used in France, means “a little Jesus.” This term would naturally be applied to youthful pathics by the irreverent because being psychically female, they are likely to be “saintly” or “goody-goodies,” as were both your author as a youth, and practically all the youthful pathics he has known.

Types of Hermaphrodism.

Contrary to the ordinary view, there exists, in the human race, no sharp dividing line between the sexes, just as there exists none between the vegetable and the animal kingdoms. The two sexes gradually merge into each other. Between the complete physical and psychical man and the similarly complete woman, there are innumerable stages of transitional individuals. As there are organisms which the novice would be puzzled to classify as animal or vegetable, so there are human beings who have a just claim to be classed with the sex other than that with which they are commonly classed. Some examples of these transitional individuals are the psychical hermaphrodite, the pseudo-hermaphrodite, the mujerado of the Mexican Indians, the man-woman of East India, and the virago or amazon, as well as the fairie, already mentioned.

Besides the fact of the existence of the decidedly hermaphroditic or androgynous types named, there exists a continuous scale of mental sexuality along which all human beings might be arranged, the poles of which are thorough masculinity and thorough femininity, respectively. At the masculine pole stand the warrior, the blue-jacket, the pugilist, etc., and it was only such, the tremendously 9virile, who possess no gentle or feminine traits at all, to whom your author was ordinarily attracted. Further down the male side of the scale, after the man of adventure and sport, come, successively, the stevedore and his like, the manual laborer, and the merchant, and still lower, the scholar, which class possesses in general only a comparatively low degree of masculinity and virility. Partaking largely of the feminine type of mind are the male dress-maker and milliner, and the dilettante.

Scalæ Sexuales.

Those at the extremity of the male side of the scale, as the volunteer soldier and sailor, are the most strongly inclined to venery, as a general rule. This is your author’s conclusion after intimate experience with 800 young men, of whom at least one-half belonged to the occupations just designated. He concludes further from his experience that nearly all who associate with a fairie belong to this “tremendously virile” class. It is also probably true that congenital active pederasts belong chiefly to this class. The individuals near the lower end of the male side of the scale, as the college professor, are as a rule continent by birth, and fathers of few children, while those at the lower end, as the male milliner and the dilettante, are likely to be sexual inverts. Your author happens to be a pronounced specimen of the dilettante.

At the beginning of the feminine side of the scale, and likely also to be inverts, stand the woman soldier (surreptitious), the woman marksman, and the woman gymnast. Lower down stands the ordinary mater familias, entirely normal sexually and completely satisfied with monandry. The fille de joie stands still lower, and is as a rule more 10intensely feminine and childlike than the mater familias. Many are also naturally polyandrous. At the feminine pole we find the helpless cry-baby species of woman. The author aspired to be of this type, and always, when impersonating a woman, acted out this type.

Author’s Feminine Characteristics.

As already indicated, the participation of the transitional individuals in the characters of the two sexes varies in all degrees. There may be simply a union of the perfect body of one sex with the susceptibility to such sexual charms as ordinarily attract the other sex alone, or with the mental traits of the other sex. Or the individual may possess the male genitals, but be beardless, or else possess mammary glands, broad pelvis, and sacral dimples; or possessing the female genitals, have a rudimentary moustache, or else meagrely developed breasts, narrow pelvis, etc. Instances have been known of human beings with an ovary on one side of the body and a testicle on the other, and of males who were able to suckle infants.

As to my own feminine characteristics, I have been told by intimate associates from boyhood down to my middle forties—when this book goes to press—that I markedly resemble a female physically, besides having instinctive gestures, poses, and habits that are characteristically feminine. My schoolmates said that I would make a good-looking girl and that kissing me was “as good as kissing a girl.” When I was fourteen, one of them remarked that my calves were “as shapely as those of a girl.” My associates in college have remarked how much I was like a woman in form and manners, though they 11never showed evidence of a suspicion that I might be an invert. They were probably ignorant of the existence of this human sport. “He blushes like a woman,” was said of me. Later, in my fairie days, my associates would remark that my hands felt like a woman’s, and that my skin in general was as soft as a woman’s. They said that my voice, especially when singing, had a feminine timbre. The voice is one of the chief criteria by which to determine abnormal sexuality. I fancy that I can diagnose a man sexually simply by hearing him sing. For example, a male invert, as well as the closely related “eunuch by birth” or anaphrodite, is likely to sing a tenor which is hardly distinguishable from an alto.

Femininity Betrayed in Voice.

I have been told that my speaking voice is a very uncommon one, having the “fulness of a woman’s voice,” and that it often “breaks and changes, sometimes in the middle of a sentence; from being masculine, it suddenly changes timbre and becomes decidedly feminine.” I have myself observed sometimes when in conversation with a young man with whom I was in love that my voice would involuntarily change from a bass to a treble. My voice has also been described as “soothing, sentimental-sounding, gushing, bland, and caressing.” I have been told that when I talk, involuntary—and to myself unconscious—movements of the lips take place not necessary for articulation, and that the same movements take place occasionally even when I am not talking.

Barbers have remarked that my hair is “literally as fine as silk,” that they had “never seen it so fine in any other man.” I believe this to be a general peculiarity 12of androgynes, who also have a predilection for wearing the hair rather long because they think it contributes to their own good looks, while abhorring long hair in a normal male.

Femininity—Physical and Psychical.

I have the feminine slope of shoulders and the feminine angle of arm. Pelvis is broad and limbs loosely hung, as in a woman, and fingers and hands rather feminine in their general fineness of texture, comparative absence of hair, absence of prominent bones and veins, and the softness and pleasing tint of skin.

Features are small like a woman’s, but nose, lips, and ears large in proportion, indicating sensuality. I possess mammary glands and sacral dimples. While my breasts are as large as in some women, the nipples are small, even for a man. I am small-boned, of delicate build, and my muscular system is soft. An anatomist of national reputation who gave me a physical examination at the age of thirty-three, pronounced approximately one-third the exterior lines of my body those of the female, and remarked that any one viewing my naked form from the rear and not knowing my sex, would pronounce me a female.

I was said not to “reason like a man, that is, logically”; to be “fussy and inclined to peevishness”; and to have “great patience for minute details.”

I was said to throw a ball, drive a nail, etc., “just like a girl.” A lead pencil sharpened by me looks as if I had chewed it off with my teeth. I have always had the feminine instinct of screaming at slight provocation. When coasting as a child, I always sat upright after the 13manner of girls. In snowball fights, in which the girls packed the snowballs behind the barrier and the boys exposed themselves in throwing, I instinctively took my place with the girls, the eternal lack of fitness never dawning upon me.

General Physical Traits.

I might mention here some further characteristics which are not peculiarly feminine. I am below the average stature for a man, and unusually light for my volume, weighing only 110 pounds stripped from the age of nineteen to twenty-five, after I had attained my maximum height of five feet five inches. My back is much arched. Penis is below the average size, but entirely normal. Testicles were pronounced of normal appearance by the surgeon who castrated me at the age of twenty-eight.

I am of the brunette type. At the age of eighteen, the growth of hair on my body and limbs became more luxuriant than on the average male, but after the first shaving off of all this hair in my early fairie days, I continued to be far less hairy than the average man even after I ceased the practice of body-shaving.

My lips are a deep red, and my complexion gives the appearance of good health. My eyes are bistre-brown. I have been told that I look like a woman around the eyes, and when youthful have been complimented on their beauty, and my general appearance pronounced not unprepossessing. I have been pursued by women, and have received three proposals of marriage. In general the women who have seemed to be attracted toward me have been a few years older than myself. Havelock Ellis has said (“Sexual Inversion,” page 140) that “women seem 14with special frequency to fall in love with disguised persons of their own sex.” Your author is really a woman whom Nature disguised as a man.

Childlikeness.

As late as my middle forties my “childlike face” has been commented upon, and even more my “decidedly childlike manner.” I have been told that my “face wears expressions not ordinarily seen on persons of [my] age,” that in the office my childishness is a constant source of mirth with my business associates, even those who have not had the faintest idea that I am sexually abnormal and even addicted to fellatio, and that they watch me while I am working because of my childlike way of doing things and my childlike expression. According to one of my business-associate informants, I still had in my middle thirties “the real childlike naiveté.” The term “grown-up child” has also been affectionately applied to me by my office associates down to my middle forties, and they have said that teasing me was “just like teasing a child.” All through my life, even down to my middle forties, when this book goes to press, my male school or business associates—most of whom have not even suspected my inversion—have taken delight in teasing me as older children a younger child, or as brothers tease their sisters, and I generally liked to be thus teased.

My office associates in a “provincial” city in my middle thirties were far more puritanical and unsophisticated than those in New York City of my middle forties, and never gave any evidence that they even knew of the existence of fairies. But those of the later period showed such knowledge, and several times made remarks to me 15indicating their suspicions about myself, but I always sought to counteract them. The knowledge of unusual sexual phenomena is apparently far more widespread in a great cosmopolitan center like New York than in a “provincial” city.

Infantilism.

Further, all my life down to my early thirties, my decidedly virile associates in school and business have babied me. Indeed in some respects I have never ceased to be a baby mentally. I have wept and sobbed a great deal all my life. Up to my early thirties, I yearned to be called “Baby” by decidedly virile males, and to have them treat me as a baby and a weakling. All through my open career as a fairie, I conducted myself with intimates in the same way as a baby of two years towards its mother. Whenever I have seen an infant nursing, I have been seized with a desire for fellatio cum viro of about my own age, and have sometimes even experienced an attack of babyish actions, as panting or cooing in satisfaction, or swayed the head or other parts of the body, a sort of natural graceful dance of these parts. I seem to have retained many of the instincts of the babe which are normally outgrown; only these instincts—the feeling of dependence, the looking for protection, the yearning to be held in the arms and fellatio (in its etymological sense)—were, after the age of four, no longer directed to the mother, but to stalwart males around my own age.

I have aged slowly, successfully passing for twenty-four as a fairie after I had reached thirty-one, and for twenty-nine in my middle forties. When I was thirty-two, 16a lady of forty who did not know my age remarked of me: “Why he is only a boy!” When I was forty-two, a business associate of rather long-standing and only twenty-six years of age remarked that he had “never met any one else so abnormal as [myself] in respect to the discrepancy between apparent and actual age.” I have sometimes thought of myself as “the boy who never grew to be a man.” Before reaching my fortieth year, it was my ambition to preserve my youth indefinitely. In my middle forties business associates have asked me for the recipe for perennial youth. Before reaching my fortieth year, possibly no other male was so horrified as myself at the thought of waning youth and approaching old age. But now (1918), in my middle forties, I am reconciled to growing old.

Perennial Youth—Æstheticism.

I am rather vain, and have been guilty of contemplating my reflection in a mirror. Prior to my middle forties I was of a bashful disposition and lacked self-confidence, except when following out my fairie instincts. Down to my middle forties I have been unusually fond of small animals as pets and have covered their coats with kisses. I likewise am unusually fond of petting children.

I am devoid of practically all interest in sport. In place of this interest, I happen to be an æsthete. My home is an art gallery, with more art objects per cubic foot than I have heard to exist anywhere else outside an art gallery or shop. Few are better endowed than myself in respect to the capacity for deriving pleasure from beauty in art and nature.

Polyglottism.

17Almost every department of human knowledge interests me. I like psychology, sociology, economics, and history least of all, and languages and philology most of all. Metaphysics and theology also stand high in my regard, while the natural sciences occupy a middle position.

The common union of sexual inversion and the aptitude of the linguist has been commented upon by medical writers. I turned out to be perhaps the best linguist of my college class. From childhood I have had a craze for the acquisition of foreign languages. I speak two with considerable fluency, and when having frequent occasion to use them, can carry on a conversation in two others. Besides these four, I have read quite extensively in the original the literature of about a dozen foreign tongues. For more than a decade, I devoted an average of at least ten hours a week to reading in these numerous foreign languages.

Why am I a sexual invert? I have an explanation to offer, which is perhaps more fanciful than scientific. Is there not a difference between the “protoplasm” or cellular tissue of males and of females, which is the ground of the difference in the physical and psychical development of the sexes? Must there not be in the protoplasm of males a specific male “germ” or characteristic, and in the protoplasm of females a different germ, which are the ground of the opposite development of the sexes? Just as we know by the taste that the protoplasm of the muscle of an ox is differently constituted from that of a sheep, likewise must not that of the male and female homo 18differ, although in less degree? If through a surgical operation the breast from a male infant could be grafted in the proper place on a female infant, and the breast from a female infant on a male infant, the two individuals, as they became adult, would develop physically along the lines of his or her own sex except the grafted breast. That of the girl would remain flat, that of the boy would develop a mammary gland and become elevated into a mons. They each have on them a patch of the tissue of the opposite sex. In the passive invert there may exist one or more such patches from birth.

Cause of Inversion.

According to the author’s theory,—whether any individual shall be a male or a female depends on the result of a battle in the embryo between the female corpuscles or germs of the egg and the male of the spermatozoa. From some cause, perhaps the relative state of vitality of the secretory sexual glands at the time of the formation of the particular egg and spermatozoon, either the female germs or the male germs happen to be the more vigorous, and determine the sex of the unborn. If the fœtus develops into a female, it is because the female germs have devoured the male. For some reason, in exceptional cases, the more vigorous set of cells have not succeeded in devouring the other set entirely, and both kinds coexist in different parts of the same individual throughout his existence. In a male there may be only a single patch of female tissue—that is, tissue dominated in its development by the presence of the female bacteria—about the cheeks and neck, rendering him beardless, but with masculine habits of mind and the male sexual 19instinct. To constitute a passive invert, the brain, the physical basis of the psychical nature, must be composed of female tissue, must be a “female brain.”

Female Brain in Male Body.

Can it be denied that the brain of a male is fundamentally different from that of a female, although in outward appearance they are practically alike? The psychical nature of a female is radically different from that of a male, consequently the fundamental nature of certain brain cells of the female must be as different from that of corresponding cells of the male as the psychical nature of a woman is different from that of a man, and as the corpus of a woman is different from that of a man. How can one explain why a six-year-old boy (the author) should class himself as a girl, give himself a girl’s name, fight against his parents’ course of bringing him up as a boy, and grieve because he could not be brought up as a girl, except on the assumption that the cells of his brain were identical with the cells of a girl’s brain and fundamentally different from those of a normal boy?

If a surgeon could interchange the brains of a boy and of a girl, your author believes that the boy would ever afterward feel himself to be a girl, and the girl feel herself to be a boy. But it would be nearer the truth to say that with the implanting of the brain of the opposite sex, the male and female souls were also transposed. We would have an instance of a male human being with a perfect female body except the brain—an artificial amazon. Similarly, a female human being with a perfect male body except the brain—an artificial androgyne. In the natural androgyne, the female brain was formed 20in the male corpus before birth. There are likely, as in the case of your author, to be other patches of female tissue in other parts of the corpus.

Oscar Wilde’s Life Story.

“Active inverts,” improperly so called, have been referred to as cases of “a female mind in a male body,” as in the Introduction to Eekhoud’s “Escal Vigor.” The subject of this novel, as well as Oscar Wilde, whose case evidently forms the theme of the book, were not such instances. Theirs were cases of innate and therefore irresponsible sexual perversion rather than of inversion. They were “urnings.” “Escal Vigor” is of value as portraying the development and inner life of the urning, while this autobiography deals with the passive invert, or “the invert” properly speaking. The urning or active pederast loves an adolescent as a normal man loves a woman, and desires active pædicatio or else mutual onanism. The passive invert loves the adolescent as a woman loves a man, and desires fellatio, or occasionally the part of the pathic in pædicatio.

While reading “Escal Vigor” many years ago, your author was convinced that the book was primarily written by Oscar Wilde and based on his own life experience. This suspicion is confirmed by the name of the book, the two words having the same length as those of the name of the individual; the second and third letters of the first name being the same in both, as well as the second letter of the surname; while the initial V is the French equivalent of the English W, the novel having been first published in French. I have myself built a pseudonym on my baptismal name in similar fashion. The suspicion is 21further confirmed by the rumor of 1918 that Wilde is still alive.

Inversion Is Not Sodomy.

There occur homosexual practices which are really due to moral depravity or to the absence of the opposite sex. This is the true sodomy, an entirely different phenomenon than is present in the case of the congenital invert and urning. Knowledge of the history of the particular individual will readily determine to which of the three categories he belongs.

The author’s criticism of Havelock Ellis’s theory ‘that a condition of diffused minor abnormality in physical structure, consisting in approach to the feminine type, is the basis of congenital inversion; that inversion is bound up with a modification of the secondary sexual characters’ is that in my own case the attraction toward the male sex was powerful as early as the age of three, when there is probably no difference between the physical type of the normal and of the inverted male. This indicates that there is no cause-and-effect relation between the feminine secondary sexual characters and the love for the male sex, but that they are twin effects of a common cause, namely, the presence in the male body of the particular kind of governing corpuscles or germs ordinarily found only in the protoplasm of females.

The girl-boy with diffused minor abnormality in physical structure, consisting in approach to the feminine type, is rather a female who has, along with some other male structures, developed testicles and penis in place of the usual ovaries and cunnus. Here it is not so much a case of a female brain in a male body, but of the female 22brain in a female body with various abnormal developments along the line of male structure. A girl-boy is sometimes even physically perhaps more a female than a male, although the primary sexual determinants and some of the secondary sexual characters are those of the male sex.

Sex Psychical Rather Than Physical.

In a manner similar to that described by Kurella, the author believes the invert is a transitional form between the complete male or the complete female and the sexually undifferentiated homo seen in the early fœtus.

Practically it is all right, but medico-legally it is wrong, to make the genitals the universal criterion in the determination of sex. Medico-legally, sex should be determined by the psychical constitution rather than by the physical form. There are thousands of physical females who feel themselves to be men and have the mental traits of men, and there are thousands of physical males who feel themselves to be women and have the mental traits of a woman. Should any blame be attached to such individuals when they conduct themselves according to their psychical sex? The writer, much against his will, was brought up as a boy, and after becoming adult continued in every-day life to identify himself with the male sex because of his beard and masculine voice, and because of the advantages of passing as a male; but in spite of himself he was occasionally compelled to go off on a female-impersonation spree.

Men call the invert’s instincts vice. The invert has 23just as much reason for calling the normal man’s instincts vice when they are not exercised solely in order to create a new human being. It is only a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In the eyes of the Supreme Being, with whom innate and unreasoning disgust is not a factor, the instincts of the normal man and of the invert are on a par morally and æsthetically. There is no ground for the charge that the passive invert’s practices are aimed at the very existence of the race. In the first place, Nature made him psychically impotent from birth. In the second place, his practices could not be spread by example. They are regarded by all normally constituted males with such disgust and aversion that practically no one would stoop to them except those born with the peculiar cravings. And why place a heavy penalty on one particular practice which might prevent a few births, and give large liberty to other practices with a hundred and a thousand fold more power to diminish the birth rate? The author was addicted to sensuality more than the vast majority of inverts. Nevertheless, if he had never yielded to instinct, there would not be today a single human being more in the world than there are. None of his intimates were given to begetting children, at least on the threshold of manhood, which was the age at which they consorted with him.

Ethics of Inversion.

The invert’s harmless instinctive sexual conduct (generally fellatio, seldom pædicatio) is today regarded as a felony almost throughout Christendom. France, Italy, and Holland are the only Christian nations which have entirely repealed the laws enacted against these unfortunates 24during the Dark Ages. Old English law provided that the guilty one be burnt alive, while other statutes of the same law condemned him to be buried alive. In the reign of Richard III, he was hanged. The death penalty was not abolished until after the reign of George IV. At the present time in England, the maximum penalty is penal servitude for life, and the minimum, ten years imprisonment. In the United States the penalty is from five to twenty years imprisonment. Is it not unjust to keep on the statute books these laws against an unfortunate and harmless class?

Legal Penalties.

I am here reminded of two conferences with Mr. Anthony Comstock, because part of his business while alive was that of hunting down inverts and haling them off to prison. By the irony of fate, I was during my college days nicknamed after this gentleman because on hearing an obscene remark by a fellow student, my features involuntarily expressed shock and disapproval, probably due to my having the mind of a woman. But in 1900, as soon as I had this autobiography ready for publication, I submitted it to Mr. Comstock in order to ascertain whether it could be circulated. He was then a Post-Office Department inspector, with power to prosecute for shipping “obscene” matter by common carrier. He read considerable of the manuscript of this book, and stated on handing it back that he would have “destroyed” it but for the fact that I impressed him “as a person not having any evil intent.”

In words which I wrote down immediately after leaving his presence, he declared: “These inverts are not fit 25to live with the rest of mankind. They ought to have branded in their foreheads the word ‘Unclean,’ and as the lepers of old, they ought to cry ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ as they go about, and instead of the law making twenty years imprisonment the penalty for their crime, it ought to be imprisonment for life. Are they assaulted and blackmailed? They deserve to be. Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis know nothing about them if they say they are irresponsible. They are wilfully bad, and glory and gloat in their perversion. Their habit is acquired and not inborn. Why propose to have the law against them now on the statute books repealed? If this happened, there would be no way of getting at them. It would be wrong to make life more tolerable for them. Their lives ought to be made so intolerable as to drive them to abandon their vices.”

Prevalent Lay Opinion on Inverts.

This attitude of mind is a proper one toward possible male filles de joie who are fundamentally normal in their sexuality, but who through cupidity, or with the purpose of blackmailing those who seek them, offer themselves to take the passive rôle in pædicatio. Your author doubts whether any such males ever lived. But the true invert belongs to a different class, and should have the same standing before the law as the normal individual. He even should be dealt with more leniently, because his passion is often abnormally intense, and his mental eccentricities sometimes lead him into unwise though little harmful, or not at all harmful, acts.

In this autobiography, I may sometimes refer to myself 26as “Ralph Werther.” At the beginning of my career as “Jennie June,” when asked for my real name, I answered “Raphael Werther,” since I did not wish to bring disgrace on my family name. I adopted the name “Raphael” because of its euphony and glorious associations; the name “Werther,” because like Goethe’s hero I was doomed to great sorrow through the passion of love. During my first two years in college, when I often meditated suicide, and was by far the unhappiest person in the college community, Goethe’s “Sorrows of Werther,” the romance of suicide, had a peculiar fascination for me. Later I substituted “Ralph” for “Raphael” since I found the latter sounded too “stagey” to be believed.

Choosing Aliases.

The author may be accused of copying the pen-name of Mrs. Croly in the name that he gave himself when undertaking the role of a girl. But I was not conscious of the existence of this pen-name until after I had selected “Jennie June.” In early childhood I had called myself “Jennie,” always my favorite girl’s name. It has always seemed to me the most feminine of names. I adopted the name “June” because of the alliteration, the beauty of the word, and its agreeable associations. It was first suggested to me while reading one of Cooper’s novels, where it appears as the name of a gentle, extremely feminine squaw. It was suggested to me secondly by my seeing it appear as a surname on the sign of a business house.

At the beginning of my career as a fairie, I debated for some time whether the name of my feminine personality 27should be “Jennie June,” “Baby,” “Pussie,” or the name of a particular one of the foremost prima donnas of history. I enjoyed hugely being called “Baby” by young men. A strange young ruffian one day passed me on the street, and addressed me jocularly: “Hello Pussie!” I cannot express how much it pleased me, and I longed to be called “Pussie” always. As to my impulse to copy the name of the prima donna, I would have day dreams of being such a personage. At the opera I would imagine myself as identified with the leading soprano—that I was she. As is usual with professional fairies, I sought to cultivate a soprano singing voice, though singing a baritone when in my every-day circle.

Year 1874—Birth and Parentage.

The fourth child of my mother’s eleven children, I was born and passed my first sixteen years of life in the most refined section of a large village within fifty miles of New York City. At the time of my birth, each parent was about thirty years of age. My mother appears to have married for money rather than for love. My parents, and indeed all adults who had a molding influence over my early life, were eminently respectable religious people.

I know the history of my stock for several generations back. No member of any of the several families whose blood is mingled in my veins was ever arrested. With the exception of several black sheep, the several families have been composed of exceptionally pious people.

Both my paternal and maternal stock have been very prolific. No relative has ever distinguished himself by reason of his intellect or otherwise, the men having been 28exclusively farmers or retail merchants. I am perhaps the most intellectual individual that has appeared in the several families. My father was the shrewdest man and the most successful at making money of any member of these several families.

Abnormal Relatives.

The following are the only bad strains which I have been able to find in my blood: A maternal great-great-great uncle was half-witted. A maternal great-great uncle was a worthless character, but a good singer, going around from tavern to tavern singing for his grog. Perhaps that is the development a fairie took in his environment. A maternal great uncle, though a good business man, became intoxicated occasionally. A paternal great uncle was half-witted. A maternal second cousin was mildly insane for at least several years. A paternal and also a maternal uncle, besides being extreme dipsomaniacs, lacked the energy to earn their own living, and also never married. The fact that the paternal uncle used to fondle me excessively while I was a boy ten to twelve years of age and hold me clasped in his embrace in such a way as would at the present writing suggest to me that he entertained thoughts of pædicatio, indicates that he was possibly an active pederast. The maternal uncle was known, while in his early twenties, to have indulged in solitary onanism before boys around the age of twelve, but all his adult life he appeared to be unusually attracted toward girls aged from ten to twelve, but I do not believe he ever corrupted any, as he was always popular in his community.

A female first cousin is a psychical hermaphrodite, and 29while married to a man, has always retained a woman sweetheart, who has evidently occupied a place in my cousin’s affections much above the husband. From my close observation of this case for over thirty years, I am convinced that normal women succumb more readily to the advances of a gynander than do normal men to those of an androgyne. The cousin is decidedly masculine both physically and psychically. No offspring resulted from her marriage.

Fellatio ex Instinctu Infantili.

The question has been much discussed as to whether sexual inversion is congenital or acquired. In my own case—as well as in that of my female cousin—it is indubitably congenital. The full evidence, in addition to my decidedly feminine anatomy and her decidedly masculine, may not be presented here out of regard for others.

My very earliest memories are those of following out my strong baby’s instinct for the nipple—immediately after I was weaned—by making use of the best substitute that came in my way. Pueri, atque puellae, several years older than myself, with whom I was intimately thrown every day, furnished me with what nature craved. The infant’s nursing instinct unfortunately did not die out in me as in the normal individual, but has continued powerful all my life, though with transferred object. Once after I had grown up—much to my shame—my mother remarked before a small family gathering that until I was quite a large boy (perhaps nine years of age) I would in my sleep go through imbibing motions, like an infant at the nipple.

Infantile Sexual Precocity.

30My earliest memory of all of this perversion of the nursing instinct and its transformation into a perverted sexual instinct is the following: A large carpet hung over a line. Several girls around eleven years of age sat down inside and exposuerunt pudenda. The conversation was about the boys, who they wished might come in. I was hardly more than a baby and was undoubtedly thought too young to understand or disclose their conduct. I crept from one to another, os cunnis earum. I was too young to know that it was the organ of micturition, or to distinguish between it and the breast. My instinct was sugere when the latter was presented to me, and I did the same to it. Possibly the girls told me to.

Only on one other occasion, at the age of six, did I have such relations with a female. The girl, of my own age, begged it of me, much to my disgust. But I had innumerable relations cum pueris. The earliest remembered occurred when I was three-and-a-half years old. A boy of nine had myself, a brother of five, and another of fifteen months sugere penem erectum. For several years he sought me occasionally for the same purpose. My two brothers complied only a few times, while I eagerly grasped every opportunity. They developed into strong, virile, six-foot men, husbands and fathers.

One other boy, a year older than myself, became an even greater favorite. From my fifth to seventh year, our relations were almost as intimate as those of a husband and wife. We used to play “husband and wife,” although the fact of conjugal relations was the farthest from our thoughts. When I reached the age of seven, 31our relations ceased, since we were sent to different schools and he began to play with normal boys, while I henceforth shared the pastimes of the little girls and had them almost exclusively for my companions. In subsequent years of our boyhood, he asked for fellatio several times, but I refused through shame.

Age Four to Seven.

My addiction was common knowledge among the boys, and others sought it. While engaged in games with boys, sometimes fellatio would occur every few minutes. Before reaching the age of seven, I had doubtless had more than one thousand such experiences. I of course always took the more humiliating part. Only once in my life, at the age of thirty-six, has another taken that part with me, much to my disgust. Out of nearly 800 intimates during my life-time, only one ever sought to take that part.

I told these boy playmates to call me “Jennie,” and encouraged them to use sexual argot to me. I instinctively hid all my sexual experiences from everybody except my boy intimates, though some of them proclaimed my addiction abroad in my hearing and much to my shame. Only once my mother questioned me suspiciously as to why I entered an outhouse every little while with my boy friend, but I counteracted her suspicion.

I was decidedly the greatest cry-baby of my mother’s eight children who survived infancy, as well as the most weakly. I was the only child of the neighborhood subject to convulsions, but these were not more than half a dozen in number and occurred before the age of six. As early as the age of three I suffered from occasional 32melancholia, and would bang my head on the floor and express the wish that “I was dead.” A girl-boy acquaintance committed suicide at the age of twelve by swallowing rat poison.

Girl-boy Playmates.

I was the only girl-boy of my immediate neighborhood, and from the seventh to the twelfth year of my life, was looked upon by all the other children as more girl than boy. When, after the age of seven, I made acquaintances farther off than in my own block, I became acquainted with three other girl-boys on three adjacent blocks, and a number of others in the village. It was common knowledge among the boys of the school. After they became adults, three became notorious among the sporting adolescents of the village, as I learned through a brother who belonged to that class.

The only one with whom I was intimate became, between the ages of fifteen and twenty, a regular fille de joie. A coterie of particularly virile adolescents who had no other means of satisfying their libido, and who were disinclined to visit an evil resort, had recourse to him regularly that he might take the humiliating role in fellatio. Young inverts who do not repress their instincts have relations ordinarily with their young male friends. I was an exception in this respect, as well as in respect to conscientious scruples against following instinct.

My other two girl-boy playmates became, respectively, an organist and an orchestra leader by profession when they became adult. During their late teens and early twenties, they had many liaisons (fellatio) with sport-loving 33young men—according to my brother—but having more money than the invert just described, they played the wooer, being the seeker, and choosing their intimates, instead of being sought out by the many. They spent a considerable part of their earnings on their beaux. I know nothing about the sexual conduct of any of these three inverts after they passed the age of twenty-five. But the first mentioned developed into a notorious dipsomaniac toward middle age, and the other two, when past the age of forty, are healthy, prosperous, and I believe well esteemed in their community. Most of their business associates have never heard anything against them. Of course none of the three ever married a woman.

Inversion Promotes Music.

Of this group of passive inverts who grew up together, I alone had the scholarly instinct and was unusually religious. Of the six who lived to be adults, three—including the organist and the orchestra leader—had extraordinary talent as musicians. No growth of beard ever showed itself on the face of one of the three, and he looked remarkably like a woman.

My knowledge of these inverts leads me to remark at this point that in general those who have relations with a passive invert are normal young men who later marry a woman, but in whom the fire of lust has been kindled by nature subsequent to puberty and for whom circumstances prevent marriage between eighteen and twenty-five years of age.

Every large city block and almost every small village 34of the world has its girl-boy, so far as my wide observation goes. After a life extending over nearly half a century and spent in many countries of the world, it is my own careful estimate that approximately one physical male in three hundred is born with this nature.

Frequency of Androgynism.

Physicians possibly have not discovered inverts in such numbers: First, because the majority of the medical profession have been in almost entire ignorance of the existence of this variety of the genus homo, and have therefore neglected to search around for them; and secondly, because of the fact that through humanity’s misunderstanding and persecution of them, these inverts hide their idiosyncrasies and secret practices as no other class of mankind. They can be discovered only by careful search, and recognized only by those having an intimate knowledge of the invert’s character and habits. They are often unsuspected even by their own families.

In a class of fifty boys in a school, there was one passive invert. In another class of forty, there were two. In a club of thirty young men, there were two. In an office staff of fourteen, there were two. In a community of twelve hundred inhabitants, six were known to your author. Havelock Ellis has stated that among the professional and most cultured classes of England, the number of “homosexualists”—which term includes active pederasts as well as passive inverts—may rise as high as one in twenty. Moll has stated that he knew of from 850 to 1,050 in Berlin alone, which would make the ratio one to every 1,666 inhabitants. Of course Moll could 35know of only a small proportion of the total number in Berlin.

Author’s Rather Diminutive Size.

All inverts do not give way to their instincts, since the strength of these instincts varies in different individuals, as does the degree of effeminacy, just as there are corresponding differences in normal individuals. Your author’s is an extreme case of passive inversion. His case is also unusual because of the strange combination of appetencies in one individual: the instincts of the fairie, the thirst for knowledge of the savant, the yearning after God and holiness of life of the zealot, and the impulse toward altruism of the missionary. My intention from the age of fifteen to nineteen to pass my life as a foreign missionary and preacher of the Gospel was relinquished because inconsistent with the much stronger appetency of the fairie, which finally carried all good resolutions before it.

I grew up slowly, and when adult was the shortest of my parents’ eight children. Six-foot men are common among my near relatives, especially my brothers, but I am five feet five inches. At six years of age I was smaller than a brother of four. In college I was noticeably small and of slight build, weighing only 110 pounds stripped when I graduated.

My first impression of the stern realities of life came at the age of six when my parents insisted on putting me in breeches. I wanted to wear skirts all my life. I shrunk from going out in distinctively male garb, and dodged behind the trees when I discovered an acquaintance 36approaching. The sensation was almost as painful as if I had been compelled to walk the streets naked. Until I reached my early thirties, I did not cease to regret being compelled to taboo feminine apparel, and was constantly being criticised by members of my family for choosing bright colors and as fancy apparel as a male can possibly wear. Androgynes have a predilection for such apparel, just as gynanders prefer the severely plain. Dress is one of the best signs by which to judge whether any suspected individual is or is not an invert. From the age of seven to twelve I occasionally masqueraded in a sister’s dress, coquetting with my boy acquaintances the same as if I were physically a girl.

Yearning for Feminine Apparel.

After reaching the age of seven, I abstained from fellatio on account of shame, as well as because I now habitually played with girls. Nevertheless, as just indicated, I was more crazy after the boys than any of my companions, and was a great flirt. When, promenading with a party of girls, we would encounter boys of our acquaintance, I would incite them to chase myself and the girls. With the girls I would discuss the merits of the various boys and name my favorites. The girls did not look upon me as a boy. Only one ever asked me to take the normal boy’s part in coitus, and I answered naïvely and without embarrassment that I did not know how. My family would ridicule me for playing with the girls, but that did not stop it.

Up to the age of twelve I continued to tell my most intimate schoolmates to call me “Jennie,” encouraged them to hug me, and right in the school-room reclined in 37their bosoms because of amorousness. Several would hug and kiss me right in school, and in private request fellatio, but I always turned from the latter proposition in shame. To yield would have been my highest earthly pleasure, but I could not bear the disgrace. Mean-spirited boys would call me a girl in derision, and twit me about my conduct of early childhood, thus awakening a violent desire to commit suicide.

Bent for Feminine Activities.

I was as fond of dolls as is a little girl. Two other characteristic pastimes were playing preacher and playing school, generally all by myself. I spent a large part of my time in the house singing, but have never been able to learn to whistle. Inability to whistle is a general characteristic of passive inverts. I learned to sew and crochet, and naturally took to most other feminine lines of activity, so that my mother has remarked that I was “the best daughter” she had. Indeed none of the family looked upon me as a boy, all unconsciously. Nevertheless there is little evidence that any of them ever suspected that I was attracted toward the male sex.

As a child and youth I was rather odd even apart from my androgynism. For example, from my eleventh to my thirteenth year, while sitting at my desk or walking the streets alone, I would, without raising the head, direct my eyes upward for about two seconds at intervals of from five to ten minutes in order to breathe a short prayer for acquaintances or for pitiable looking individuals whom I passed. It was probably a sort of St. Vitus dance of the muscles about the eye. Another peculiar action, and one which I have never seen in any other person, is the 38life-long craze that I have to press the flesh bordering the finger nails against some sharp hard corner, as that of a book-cover or a pillow-case, which repeated action renders the skin horny along the edge of the nail, so that I have often been able to peel it off.

School Life—1883 On.

From the age of nine to sixteen, my parents sent me to a large boys’ private school. At first the experience was painful to me. I felt out of place, and would have preferred attending a girl’s school, or at least a co-educational one. Through my school life up to the age of fourteen, a sense of shame kept me from going to the lavatory except when the need was most urgent, and until the age named, I never sat down there. I never lingered on the play-ground, and mingled with the boys only in the class-room. I particularly avoided them when they were tossing a ball, being very much afraid it might roll near me, and I would have to throw it. The few times that this did happen, the boys laughed, because, they said, I threw just like a girl.

Through all my school life, I hardly had a rival in respect to high standing in all my studies. Near the close of my school career, I was proclaimed before the whole school by the principal as the model student, and the average of all my marks for the last four years of the course was the highest ever attained by any student at that school up to that time.

Between my eighth and my thirteenth year, I several times saw boys in solitary onanism. It gave me a violent desire facere id iis, and also for fellatio. But shame conquered, and I would not betray my desire to my nearest 39boy friend. For years I slept with an intensely masculine brother. Several times he requested fellatio, but even when in bed, I turned away in shame. Because he was my brother, I had never felt drawn until finally, about my thirteenth year, he committed solitary onanism before my eyes. From this time on, no sleep would come to my relief until I had followed out my instincts. After he fell asleep, I would simply labra mea peni ejus for one second. I never disturbed him enough to awaken him, or even to cause him to have an orgasm, except once, when he asked me to proceed, but for shame I would not. On the other nights, the mere contact for a second would induce a paroxysm. I immediately had the most dreadful sensation imaginable, so that the thought held complete possession of my being: “I’ll never do it again! I’ll never do it again!” I closed and unclosed my hands convulsively. My memory is that there was an emission, but not until two years later did I know the nature of the discharge. Immediately after the paroxysm I always fell asleep as if from exhaustion.

Renewal of Fellatio at Twelve.

Thus my habit of early childhood was renewed after about five years continence. Up until past the age of forty, I believed that the early fellatio was without injurious effect on mind and body, but that that of my thirteenth year was decidedly baneful to both. After passing the age of forty, I am doubtful as to whether the indulgences at either period were injurious.

But happily the period of these thefts lasted probably less than six weeks. My parents possibly learned of it. 40Any way I was soon assigned a room and a bed all to myself, which I have continued to have down to the time when this autobiography goes to press. Subsequently, between my thirteenth and seventeenth years, emergency destined me to sleep only three times with a boy friend, when also instinct triumphed surreptitiously.

Youthful Reveries.

Beginning at the age of twelve and continuing two years, I could not sleep for approximately two hours after retiring. My thoughts were entirely of boys and of myself as a girl. I imagined all sorts of flirtations and amours with every decidedly good-looking boy with whom I went to school. I would sugere finger or plum or other similarly shaped object, and imagine it was the membrum virile first of one acquaintance, and then of another. I would imagine myself breaking into their houses after they had gone to bed, and attaining my desire. I would imagine a dozen of them standing behind a long screen, with erectis sticking through apertures, and myself going from one to another, according to instinct. I would imagine myself walking on a lonely road and meeting a handsome youth, a stranger, who would force me to fellatio. I would imagine boys keeping me a prisoner in a secluded place and compelling me every day to fellatio. I would imagine myself a beautiful girl skating in the rink, and having a bevy of boys frolicking with me—I falling down and having several of them pile on top of me. In many of these reveries, indeed, I imagined myself clad in feminine apparel. I also indulged in this kind of revery while taking long walks alone through the country. My present judgment on my entertaining such 41a current of thought is that I was for the most part irresponsible, and that these reveries were due to my being driven in a measure insane by the lack of any outlet for an innate excessive amorousness.

Prayers for Feminization.

These reveries in bed were accompanied by an orgasm, but I never had any inclination toward solitary onanism. Though knowing the difference between male and female pudenda, I did not until later, about my fourteenth year as I remember, know their function, reproduction. As I lay abed, I would wish and pray that my pudenda might be changed to those of a girl, largely with the thought that I might be enabled to receive boys. I knew what went on between some boys and girls, but I did not know that anything ever resulted from the act. The fact that I was a boy—or rather that my body was that of a boy, because in mind I was thoroughly a girl—occasioned me an immense amount of regret and chagrin, and continued to do so down to the age of forty, as I approached which age, my sexual life was retreating more and more into the background, so that I became rather indifferent as to my physical and psychical sex.

I have been doomed to be a girl who must pass her earthly existence in a male body. How dreadful it is to a young woman to have a slight growth of hair on lip or cheeks! Only one mark of the male! How much more dreadful for a young woman to possess almost all the male anatomy as I do! How I have bewailed my fate! During my early teens, being in a frenzy sometimes over it, I would meditate taking my father’s razor and castrating myself in order to bring my physical form more in accord 42with that of the female sex to which I instinctively yearned to belong.

Early Opinions of Fellatio.

Once during the wishes and prayers spoken of above, I reached my hand down and momentarily believed I had been miraculously provided with a cunnus. It is my present impression that my hand came in contact with the scrotum, and that it was my first perception that I had such an appendage. Possibly this indicates late descent of the testicles. As I remember it, up to about my thirteenth year, I never knew there was a scrotum on any male. All my intimates of early childhood had been fully dressed, and thus this organ was concealed.

Up to about my fourteenth year, I regarded fellatio as a wicked shameful habit which evil-minded children fell into, and the desire for which I would outgrow as I became older. From my fourteenth to my seventeenth year, I regarded it as the very worst kind of a habit, which must be overcome by a hard struggle. I had no idea the desire was to continue into and through my adult life.

Up to about my fourteenth year, I also thought normal coitus, which I knew some boys and girls of my acquaintance were guilty of, was equally heinous. When at about the age of thirteen I was told by boys that babies thus came into being, I at first refused to believe it. When I was finally convinced, it was with a realization that every member of the human race was as vile as myself. Subsequently, down to my middle twenties, I considered the subject of love between the sexes as one which should never be mentioned in polite society, a subject 43which ought to bring deep blushes to every cheek.

Fear of Pregnancy.

After the age of twelve, I no longer masqueraded in feminine apparel or openly flirted with boys because restrained by the sense of shame. Because all the lexicographers wrongly insist on the feigned character of flirtations, I am moved to explain here once for all that my flirtations, in every period of my life, were sincere, and prompted by adoration for those flirted with. The same explanation applies to my use of “coquet.”

But while no longer openly and energetically flirting with boys, I still adored them, enjoyed their occasional petting attentions, and even sometimes put myself in the way of receiving such consideration. For a brief period during my fourteenth year, I used powder to make my cheeks more rosy with a view to impressing my schoolmates, with several of whom I was in love.

About the time of my learning the secret of reproduction, circumstances brought me one night to sleep with a boy friend, and my instincts prevailed while he slept. On this occasion the terrible paroxysm accompanying fellatio two years earlier, as already described, and putting an end to it almost before it had begun, was not experienced, and the act continued for some minutes. I did not yet know of the existence of semen, but believed the simple presence membrum virile in membro femineo induced pregnancy. Even if I had had an emission myself two years before, I knew absolutely nothing about its nature. For several months after this night’s experience I was somewhat worried for fear of pregnancy, thinking it might result from buccal coitus.

Early Teens.

44During my early teens also, a few schoolmates hinted at fellatio. Because of shame I gave them no encouragement, although almost insane for love of them. Moreover, about this time, several old and middle-aged men would find occasion to clasp me, cum peni adversum fundamentum meum. They evidently entertained thoughts of pædicatio, but on account of our position in society, they did not go any farther. I abhorred their conduct.

As a consequence of my comparatively solitary life, my association with boys being confined to the school-room, I was very backward in acquiring normal sexual knowledge, never used slang, and was in general a “goody-goody.” Other boys called me an “innocent.” Adults regarded me as exceptionally guileless and pure-minded. The reader will discover in these pages what manner of person I was, but down to my middle thirties my “childlike and bland smile” and my “frank and open countenance” have been harped upon by my every-day associates. Down to the age named they have described me as “mild-eyed,” “inoffensive,” “childlike,” and “lamblike.”

I was probably more a prey to sensual imaginations than any other boy of the community, and yet, without any attempt to deceive on my part, I was judged to be the most pure-minded! Nevertheless, though naturally one of the most sensual, I probably practiced the most self-denial. Later, college associates remarked that they never met any one else with so little of the animal in him, when actually I was then perhaps the most given to venery of them all. I had in myself the germs of two as widely opposed careers as it would be possible to name. 45I was a born religious and philanthropic worker. On the other hand, no girl was ever more clearly cut out for the life of a fille de joie than was I.

1889—I Become a Religious Prodigy.

The genitals became pubescent as early as the completion of my fifteenth year. Is this not unusually early for a male, but the proper age for a female? Whether or no as a partial effect of this beginning of pseudo-puberty, I simultaneously developed into a religious prodigy, leading the congregation in church in extempore prayer at this early age, and spending a full two hours daily in private religious exercises for the next two years. At this time I definitely chose the Christian ministry in a heathen land as my field of labor when I had finished my education. This greatly increased interest in religion fortunately put a stop to my morbid reveries. I now looked upon my yearning for fellatio as my “besetting sin,” and until the age of nineteen fought against it as few others have struggled to be freed from lustful desires. A popular medical writer has described the girl-boy as “congenitally depraved,” and “secretly vicious.” I would refute this and other slanderers of the girl-boy, cursed by Nature and cursed by his fellow man. Lofty ethical ideals, including self-abnegation, are as common among youthful inverts as among those normally sexed.

From my fourteenth to my seventeenth year, I passed a rather sad and lonely life. I was ashamed longer to mingle with girls as one of them, and still shrunk from companionship with boys. My recreation consisted of long solitary walks through the country during which I brooded over the real and imagined ills of life. Being 46delicate, I hardly expected to live to reach manhood.

My Gethsemane.

Erotic dreams, with emissions, began at the age of fifteen, and in a few months reached a frequency of twice a week. The fraudulent advertisements in the newspapers held out to me the strong probability of my soon becoming an idiot as a result of these losses, and occasioned me much despondency. Only males have figured in these dreams. They related only to fellatio, never to pædicatio.

It was during my seventeenth year that I first became fully conscious that my unwilling craving for fellatio was deeply rooted, and not to be outgrown; that my feeling for my schoolmates was the procreative instinct, in me misdirected. The realization that I was differently constituted from nearly all other males, and such an individual as during the whole history of the human race—so far as I was then acquainted with the history of the phenomenon—has been abhorred, reviled, and regarded as the lowest of the low, a monster of wickedness, and an outcast, was accompanied by the bitterest sorrow, causing me about once a week to go forth at night to a lonely quasi-abandoned graveyard, throw myself on the grass-covered graves, writhe in an agony of tears and moans, and beseech my Creator by a miracle then and there to take away my perverted instinct and make a virile man of me. These seasons of anguish would exhaust me mentally and physically for twenty-four hours afterward. This was the beginning of three such melancholy years as few are called to pass through, and I meditated suicide repeatedly.

Family Physician Prescribes.

47For several months I bore my sorrow alone, shame preventing my making my spiritual adviser my confidant. I was at last driven to him for consolation, and on his advice, with the greatest shame and in broken language, made my secret known to my family physician. The latter advised me to enter into courtship with some girl acquaintance, and said that this would render me normal. Like most physicians in 1890, he did not understand the deepseated character of my perversion. Although it was counter to my inclinations, I cultivated the society of a girl friend. But after months of effort, feminine beauty proved powerless to attract me in the least, while male beauty was constantly increasing its sway over me.

In September of 1891 I entered a university in the City of New York, which was only an hour by train from my home. During the first two years I was regularly engaged in mission work in the slums as an avocation. I preached about twelve times from the pulpit, besides being the leader of about a hundred secondary church services.

Life in a great city soon made its impress on my constitutional femininity, which, for several years practically suppressed as a matter of conscience, was now calling louder and louder for expression. Moreover, in a great city, the temptation to a double life is exceptional. One can so easily hide a disgraceful act. It was especially unfortunate that I saw so much of the loose morals of the slums. The adolescents there attracted me powerfully, and suggestions came into my mind repeatedly to 48accost them with an indecent purpose.

Year 1891—Freshman in University.

I was also constantly in love with athletic classmates. In the lecture rooms I found it advisable to take a front seat since the sight of an athlete would hypnotize me, making me stare at his form and disregard the lecturer. If one seated himself beside me, shameful thoughts would come into my mind at once. While seated in the lecture room, some of them have put their arms around me and said “Child.” They have taken my hand in theirs and said it was just like a girl’s hand. When my sleeves were rolled up they have said that my arms were just like a girl’s arms. Their laying their hands on me was ineffably sweet, and always occasioned an orgasm, but modesty forbade betraying my feminine feelings. None ever even hinted at anything further than what I have just narrated.

On my visits home during this first year in college, I was supersensitive to my family’s criticism of me for lack of manliness. I sometimes felt like never visiting home again because of my shame at being an effeminate man. I shunned all social gatherings because I detested the idea of courting a female and putting myself forward as a man. I would nevertheless weep at seeing other young people enjoying the ordinary legitimate pleasures of love without my ever—as I then thought—being privileged to have a share in them, since love and courtship in my case must be with one of my own physical sex. I often wished I might get away from the world and live as a monk or, better in my own case, a hermit. Then I would be in a way unsexed, and would be so regarded by the 49world. As to be a monk one must be a Roman Catholic, I contemplated going over to that religious body.

Religion Unavailing.

One day I happened to be left alone in the room of an athletic classmate. I spent the whole time in passionately kissing his pillow and articles of clothing. Especially did corduroy braccas feel most exquisite labris as I osculated partem prope locum membri virilis. If he had not been fair to look upon and decidedly virile, it would have been nauseating even to think of doing what I did.

Afterward, repentant, I wrote in my journal: “Religion, reputation, life itself, ready to put all at stake for a few moments enjoyment! I never felt so much like a wretch as I do now! If only I had thought more of the love of Christ to me, I might not have so far yielded! For a month nearly all my reading has been of a religious character; I have for a month been in close communion with God; yet in a moment I can so fall away! O to understand more fully salvation from sin through Christ, and to experience more of it in my own life!... I feel this morning that I can never enter the ministry. I feel that I must give up all my plans, and that maybe I shall come to a miserable end.”

All my life corduroy trousers and rubber boots have attracted me sexually more than any other articles of civilian dress. I have always considered both articles too masculine for me to wear. It would have filled me with shame to be seen wearing boots. At the age of ten I would go secretly to the closet where a brother’s corduroy braccas hung and do as described above. On other occasions prior to my fifteenth year I have arisen at night 50and similarly osculated braccas puerorum who were our guests, creeping stealthily into their rooms in a highly excited state and trembling violently. On only two occasions I approached their bed and touched them, but did not dare go further for fear they would awake. I have no doubt now that I was irresponsible, and any girl-boys ever found guilty of similar conduct should be dealt with compassionately.

Fetishes.

Speaking of fetishes,—from boyhood the military uniform has been a magnet. During my twenties the sight of it would bring on a sort of babyish and effeminate dance of various members of the body and a sort of pouting. It would rivet my gaze, I would halt and turn around as the soldier passed, and mark his every movement until he disappeared. I would consider his gait and his every sway and swagger as marvellously manly and in every way wonderful.

Of those under thirty years of age, nineteen out of twenty soldiers or sailors in uniform have captivated me, but hardly one out of twenty civilians. But I generally had to get used to the uniform. When the olive drab was first adopted for American soldiers, I had only disgust for it and its wearer, while fascinated by the older blue uniform. But after the olive drab had been worn for two years, it appealed to me far more strongly than what I now regarded as the “old-fashioned” blue, though the latter was still often worn by soldiers.

The following was written in my diary about the middle of my freshman year:

Dawning Sense of Irresponsibility.

51“I sometimes think I am an irresponsible being. De Quincey is exonerated from censure for his opium habit. May God not also pardon my cherishing amorous thoughts of the kind peculiar to me—abnormal for others, yet for me normal? I am by nature very amorous, and have been all my life, even in infancy, when I could not distinguish between good and evil. Further, all my life I have been thrown in with what is to me the opposite sex—compelled to mingle and live with them. I had nothing to do with the bringing about of this peculiar nature and environment of mine. Has it been my fault that my amorous desires have run into the channel they have, the channel opened to them when I was in the state of innocence and ignorance of a three-year-old child? I am really a woman, and a very amorous one at that, although regarded as a man because the majority of my physical traits are those of the male sex. Did society ever compel any other woman, except those like me, to live, eat, sleep, frequent the same comfort-rooms and baths, lie sometimes in the same bed, with men, and sometimes to listen to the unclean talk of men? I am driven wild by instinctive cravings more than any other human being ever was....

“I wish I was not of an amorous nature. It makes my life miserable. If I had my choice, it would be a life entirely free from all sexual phenomena—complete sexual indifference. How gladly would I be free from all passion, so that I could make a name for myself in the world! My highest ideal is to be a Christian philosopher, and to preach the Gospel to those who are living in sin 52and sorrow. An amorous person can hardly be a philosopher, a scholar, and a preacher....”

Dawning Doubts as to Sinfulness.

Shortly afterward, in a letter to my family physician, I wrote as follows:

“I would like to know if you think there is any possibility of my ever following my instincts without sin? It is right for the normal individual to appease natural craving in wedlock. Is it not also right for me to do the same if the opportunity should offer? For instance, I will suppose an almost impossible case. If I should ever come across a young man whom I loved and who would marry me, would it be right for me to live with him as his wife? This supposition is probably highly repulsive to you, but absolutely, looking at it philosophically, it is no more unseemly and monstrous for me to be joined in wedlock with the man I would love above everything else in the world, than for a normal individual to enter into the state of matrimony.

“I long to be made the pet of my classmates. Would it be unbecoming to show my girlishness to them occasionally, and welcome and encourage their caresses which I sometimes receive? I still often pray God to deaden these desires to receive tokens of a reciprocated passion on the part of those whom I sexually worship, but I am beginning to add, ‘If it be Thy will;’ because maybe it is for my highest good and happiness to have these feelings toward my associates.

“I desire to know the mysteries of my peculiar life. It seems to me I have a right to know. I spent several days recently in ransacking the college library for the information 53I desire, but found almost nothing. If the science of medicine knows anything about my peculiarity, I demand of you to know it.

First Knowledge of Other Adult Inverts.

“Lately from a conversation of some students that I heard, I chanced to learn more about my peculiar affliction than I ever knew before. I heard brief accounts of four persons cursed as I am, ‘With their procreative instincts centered in their heads instead of in the usual organs,’ as one of the students expressed it. These four victims were all intellectual men; one, a young clergyman; one, an elderly judge; and two, principals of schools. They were found out by their communities. The clergyman committed suicide, and the others had to flee from the stern hand of the law....

“You thus see that I may some day have to flee from the wrath of men by suicide, or by self-imposed exile in a distant land, where I doubt if I could stand the misery I would suffer, forever removed from all my dear ones, and worse than dead to them. No one would have any mercy on me, and my name would be held up as that of a consummate hypocrite and the most degraded of men. But more than anything I would suffer, I would bring my parents in sorrow to the grave.”

About this time I read the eminent theologian Lange’s comments on St. Paul’s teaching about marriage, and through these, as well as through my own deep reflections, I was becoming more than ever persuaded that since it was God who had planted these instincts in me at birth, they could not be so horribly sinful as I had been led to 54believe. Nevertheless I was not finally convinced. A month later I stayed up all of one night in order to reconsider the question, desiring and purposing to convince myself of the sinfulness of an invert’s harboring the suggestions of instinct to the slightest degree. I weighed carefully all the passages of sacred scripture bearing on the case, and finally determined to fight harder than ever to annihilate in myself all the movings of the sexual nature. In the following weeks, I occasionally did not leave my room all day, fasting, praying, and studying the scriptures.

Paroxysms of Melancholia.

During this winter of ’91–’92, paroxysms of melancholia occasionally came upon me at night. When I felt their approach, I could not stand it to remain in my room, where I must be noiseless, but went out to a deserted spot in a large park near which I lived, where I would shriek repeatedly. All my muscles seemed to be rigid, and my fists were clinched. I would dig my finger nails into my palms, and wave my arms wildly. Within a few minutes, my strength would be completely gone. I looked upon these paroxysms as fits of insanity, and feared I would become permanently and violently insane. I now attribute these attacks largely to unsatisfied, involuntary yearnings for the mate which Nature had designed me to have. If society had permitted me one, and I had been taught that it was right for me to have one, I would have been saved an enormous amount of suffering, as well as perhaps my subsequent career as a fairie.

About the middle of April came a characteristic experience 55of an invert’s life. Shortly before my usual hour of retiring, an old schoolmate, a stalwart and handsome youth, who had spent the day in the city, called and asked to remain over night. I experienced a shock, knowing the temptation such an arrangement would be to me. For several weeks I had been living a life almost free from amorous thoughts, due to the lengthened seasons of religious exercises spoken of above.

Typical Temptation of Inverts.

Out of considerations of hospitality, I could not but grant my friend’s request. How could I bring myself to explain to him that I was essentially a girl, and so our spending a night in the same room was not to be thought of? I inquired if there was not a vacant room in the house, but that night there was none. Of course I could have given up my room and gone to a hotel, but I had to be saving, and such a course would humiliate my friend. So I arranged for him to occupy my bed, and for myself to sleep on the floor. Sleeping alone on the floor, I felt strong enough to resist, as I had done before when forced to sleep in the same room with a youth to whom I was attracted, and I would have probably resisted on the present occasion if it had not been for an unusual and unforeseen incident which inflamed me as never before.

My guest was moderately addicted to sensuality. As we were about to retire, he handed me, without evil intentions, a libidinous rhyme to read, the first I had ever seen. I became intoxicated, and my companion happening to absent himself from the room for a few moments, I passionately osculated the paper the rhyme was written 56upon. My fleshly nature immediately determined to have its desire that night, but my spiritual nature counselled otherwise. It was to be a struggle of hours. “Self-praise goes but little ways,” but I believe that there are comparatively few of the human race who, with a nature peculiarly susceptible to sensuality, as mine was, would have resisted as long as I did the force of so many evil suggestions.

The Spiritual versus the Carnal.

After retiring, the young man soon slept. But I was unable to sleep, no matter how hard I tried. My mind was unusually active. I continually prayed that sleep might come and save me from yielding, because I felt that my own poor will could not resist the long pent-up force of passion. Notwithstanding all my prayers, nothing was further from me that night than sleep.

It was a night following a Sabbath spent in communion with God, and with a strong determination to live a life of self-abnegation for the sake of others. But through the long hours of wakefulness, the influence of the sexual nature grew stronger and stronger. For hours I vacillated between cherishing the suggestions of the spiritual nature and those of the flesh. My chief defence against the latter was the thought that if I yielded this once, I must from now on give up all idea of ever becoming a preacher of the Gospel.

Moreover, the young man knew I was engaged in religious work, and expected to enter the ministry, and what would he henceforth think of the genuineness and utility of religion? If it had not been for my occupying an active position in religious work and my looking forward 57to entering the Christian ministry, I would have yielded much sooner on the present occasion, as well as indulged my instincts much earlier in my career.

First Full Knowledge.

As I grew more and more weary mentally and physically, I naturally grew weaker and weaker in will power. The seducer of souls finally conquered. I suddenly found myself lying on the foot of my guest’s bed. The transition seemed to have taken place in a moment of unconsciousness. Being exhausted, I had probably dozed off for a moment, walked there in my sleep, and again fully waked up as I laid myself on the bed. As the Ruth of the scriptures—but I wish to emphasize it, without premeditation and unconsciously—I had come softly, uncovered the young man’s feet, and lain down. Before long he awoke, and heartily acquiesced in my desires. For fellatio, I at the moment felt ready to forsake all plans for leading a useful and respected life—for I thought it meant that.

The next morning I was ashamed to look my guest in the face, and stammered forth an apology. I was really irresponsible for my conduct, but at the time believed I had wilfully sinned, and when the time of temptation was past, sincerely repented. In my diary I wrote:

“What harm may I not have brought on Christ’s cause by my recent action! I may have endangered the eternal welfare of my friend. I suppose he thinks I am a nice one to be thinking of becoming a minister of the Gospel. I feel ashamed to make any further profession of religion before him. O to be holy and pure! I think I am holy 58enough to be a clergyman if it were not for my sins arising from my abnormal passion....

Utmost Recourse to Religion.

“Miserable wretch, miserable wretch, miserable wretch, that’s all I am! I am ashamed to look any one in the face any more. I feel very much like putting an end to my life, or else going off to some place where none of my friends will know I am. I wish this morning to die speedily, to be killed in an accident on the street. I would like just now to lay down my life for others. I have nothing to live for. I am one of the unhappiest of mortals. I may be disgraced, disgrace my family, bring reproach upon the cause of Christ, be compelled to flee, be disowned by my parents, be cursed and be despised throughout the land. I will flog myself and starve myself, to see if I cannot conquer my body.

“Because of my many failures to follow Christ perfectly in the past, and because something out of the ordinary is necessary to root out my procreative instincts, I now vow before God to imitate the example of Christ, who spent much time alone in meditation and prayer, and to spend hereafter one hour every morning and one hour every evening in the study of God’s word, in meditation, and in prayer.”

For some weeks I fulfilled this vow. But my seasons of devotion gradually became less and less edifying, and at last I reached the point where the spirit of prayer—that is, of conversation and communion with the Great Omnipresent Spirit—left me entirely, and the words of sacred scripture, formerly falling upon my eyes and mind with a strange power and revealing to me, and enabling 59me to live, the larger, heavenly, eternal life, where sensuality has disappeared, were now read mechanically and failed to impress me except as being tedious.

Haunted by Sensual Images.

Sensual thoughts now began to creep into my mind more and more. Interest in my studies was declining. In the class-room I was absent-minded, and when called upon, would be confused, and hardly able to reply to the professor’s questions. Even here I would be thinking of the soft satin-smooth cutis in inguine of my late guest which I had found gratissima tactioni, praesertim labiali et linguali, and would regret that it was always to be denied to me to touch again on viro this marvellously fine integument. I pined for the repetition of other similar pleasures which I had for the first time tasted in their fulness only a few weeks before, such as pillowing caput super abdomene aut femure nudo adolescentis, the fascinating sight membri virilis ejus erecti, and the extremely smooth surface glandis, gratissima tactioni et digitorum et oris.

While walking the street, my gaze would be riveted on stalwart adolescents, and I would halt to look back at the handsomest that passed. If a street-car conductor happened to be youthful and good-looking, I became almost irrational. With a look of despair I would gaze insolently and imploringly into the face of the blue-clad youth as if I would compel him to read my thoughts, since I did not dare give them expression. When in a crowded car he brushed against me in passing, a tremor would pass over my body. Youthful policemen also at this time particularly fascinated me. Blue clothing and 60brass buttons have always made a young man appear to me as at his best.

Nymphomania.

After retiring at night, my unwilling desire to be in amplexu adolescentis did not permit me to sleep. Through long hours of wakefulness I writhed on my bed and repeatedly groaned in despair. “Am I being tried by fire?” I would ask myself. “‘For every one will be salted with fire,’ says the scripture. Are others so tried by fire as I have been through a large part of my life? Maybe this is what God is doing to me in implanting the strongest of desires and then forbidding my gratifying them.”

Even in the midst of almost continuous prayer, my delirious imagination brought before me obscene images, which I repeatedly tried in vain to expel from my mind. Several times during the struggle I would rise and walk up and down the room for a few moments. After retiring for perhaps the third or fourth time, I would rise once more, go raving about the room like an insane person, and if it had not been for the lateness of the hour, about midnight, I would have gone out in search of fellatio, which could alone pacify me. I was at last able to fall asleep only by making the resolution to undertake the search on the following evening. But on several evenings I postponed it because of the overwhelming dread of setting out, as well as because the desire was not so insistent until it became time to go to bed.

During these terrible days, I felt that a crisis in my life was at hand. I felt that I stood at the dividing of the ways, one leading to honor and self-approbation the other to ignominy and the blasting of all my legitimate ambitions. 61As each month of my first year in the university went by, the struggle against sensuality had been growing harder and harder.

First Nocturnal Ramble.

Finally, on an evening in early June, I arose from my studies and prepared for my first nocturnal ramble. I put on a cast-off suit which I kept for wear only in my room, placed some coin in a pocket and several bills in a shoe, stuffed a few matches in one pocket and in another a wet sponge, wrapped in paper so as not to dry out, and then carefully went through my clothing a second time to make sure that I had not by oversight left on me some clue to my identity.

On account of my shabby clothing, precaution was necessary to leave my place of residence—a high-class boarding-house—without being seen. I crept stealthily out of my room, closing the door softly so as not to attract attention. After listening to make sure that no one was about to ascend the outside steps leading to the street, I opened the outer door and glided out bare-headed, a cast-off soft cap crumpled up in my hand because I was ashamed to be seen wearing it by any one who knew me. Hurriedly crossing to the opposite side of the street, I put on the cap, pulling the tip down over my eyes. Walking a few blocks to a park, I took my house key from my pocket and hid it in the grass, so that it could not be stolen and I thereby rendered unable to let myself in on my return.

“Jennie June” Is Introduced.

The reader now beholds me for the first time transformed into a sort of secondary personality inhabiting the same corpus as my proper self, to which personality 62I soon gave the name of “Jennie June,” and which personality was to become far more widely known in the immediately following dozen years than the other side of my dual nature, the unremitting student and scholar, was ever to be known. The feminine side of my dual nature, for many years, as a matter of conscience, repressed, was now to find full expression in “Jennie June.” For it was not alone fellatio that I craved, but also to be looked upon and treated as a member of the gentler sex. Nothing would have pleased me more than to adopt feminine attire on this and my multitudinous subsequent female-impersonation sprees, as some other ordinarily respectable androgynes are in the habit of doing when going out on similar promenades, but my position in the social organism was much higher than theirs, and the adoption of female apparel would in my case have been attended with too great risk. The mere wearing of it on the street by an adult male would render him liable to imprisonment.