Female impersonation

“ Since I had expected to take him under my own roof and acquaint him with my every-day professional personality, I had not gone to the extremes of frivolous female-impersonation customary before young bloods who would never meet me in every-day life. I had feared I would forfeit his respect. Thus I had bidden him call me "Ralph"—not "Jennie."
"Ralph, what a ya think when I say I've served time in Elmira Reformatory? I kin prove what kinder man I am! Reach your hand here and feel this terrible scar. And then reach it here and feel this other. ”

“ Q loved to roam the slums of large cities. [An earmark of cultured androgynism. They thus roam because realizing that in their Overworld, they are prohibited outlet for the feminine side of their duality. They roam with day dreams of how they would like to impersonate a female in the Underworld, where alone female-impersonators are welcome; and finally, in many cases, they are carried away by their mania for an actual female-impersonation spree.] ”

“ To achieve my best success at female-impersonation, the stimulus of an appreciative and responsive audience of youthful Lotharios was necessary. Our hilarity was more and more attracting the eyes and ears of all other guests. Some recognized me as a female-impersonator. Calls began to reach me: "O you Jennie June, give us an impersonation of a prima donna!" The old-timers were remarking to new patrons of the "hostelry": "The little fellow with the red bow is a fairie!" ”

“ I had heard that the Rialto is New York's stamping-ground for amateur female-impersonators. Accordingly I commenced devoting one or two evenings a week to its resorts. As. soon as I learned that "the Hall" is the home of cultured female-impersonation, I made it my own headquarters.
IV. The Masked Ball.
You inquire, Ralph-Jennie, if I have been blackmailed during my business career. I confess I have been more negligent than most cultured women-men, and as a punishment, have suffered more blackmail. ”

“ The only taint in my family is that father is somewhat womanish: falsetto voice, sissie mannerisms, and never any mind for things thoroughly masculine. He ought never to have married to perpetuate, and probably strengthen, his own mild sexual intermediacy.
As I walked the Bowery on that first spree, I was puzzling my mind as to which of the brightly lighted dance-halls or the dark and fearsome dives—through whose doors I saw pass only sailors, gutter-snipes, and slovenly gangsters—would be the best stage for my virgin effort at female-impersonation. ”

“ Perhaps Z had the habit, to satisfy his mania for female-impersonation, of taking on his yacht as an audience young bachelors who owned launches usually anchored near his own. Perhaps a launch, on that Sunday afternoon ideal for yachting, was kept at anchor near Z's because its owner had plotted to teach Z a lesson, with the "good" intention of curing him of his habit of female-impersonation, believing—as nearly every one does at present because prohibited by public opinion from learning the truth—that it is a wilful bad habit. ”

“ The Overworld has enjoined complete silence about female-impersonators because of their thoroughly false view that any adolescent adopting the role must do so from moral depravity. They argue: “If I myself adopted the role, it could only be through unspeakable depravity. Ergo, the same is true for every male.” They overlook the fact that Nature did not 99|Female-Impersonation Instinctive.| make all anatomical males of like passions. What would be moral depravity for one is not for another.
Instinctive female-impersonators are sexual cripples from their mother’s womb. ”

“ It was two miles from Z's residence to the boat; twenty minutes, by motor-cycle, to get on board. The reason given impresses me as a mere pretext to hide his appointment on the launch and prospective female-impersonation—because the pretext sounds just like me. I am one who has been compelled to falsify much because if my associates had been granted the truth, they would have impiously crushed me. In my university course in ethics, I was taught that it is proper to tell a lie if the persons deceived have no right to the truth. ”

“ How I Came to Be a Female-Impersonator.
82 IV. I Grow into The Fairie Boy. At sixteen, I entered a college in New York City. I alone was responsible for the scene of my university training. I had frequently visited New York and wished to reside there. But I had then no intention of ever yielding to my detested instincts for female-impersonation. I had not realized that residence in a great city would make temptation far stronger than in a village. ”

“ The androgyne who had adopted the name of a romantic woman had, during his twenties, before becoming thick-set, been a female-impersonator on the vaudeville stage.
"Mith Nighty!" one of the youngest hermaphroditoi shouted in a falsetto. "Queenie and I want you to coach us in female-impersonation. Next Friday at the Masked Ball we make our debut as public femaleimpersonators."
A senior: "The world would call our hobby insanity. ”

“ By means of an introduction of the reader to several androgyne patrons of Paresis Hall, I aim to demonstrate that instinctive female-impersonation has no relation to brain lesions, dementia praecox, or other psychic disease. The prevalent diagnosis, by physicians, of androgynism as insanity is as rational as for a male alienist to pronounce all women insane because their psyche differs radically from his own. ”

“ For they appeared demigods.
They would run a hand up my arm. “Your skin is softer than velvet. And your pencils look as if you had chewed them off with your teeth. And what makes you scream when a fellow merely touches you? Ralph, you certainly ought to have been born a girl! You will never make a man!”
On holidays I would run off to the house of a girl friend. With several of the gentle sex, I would play hide-and-seek in remote nooks, as hay-mows. Later I would exchange clothing with one, and we would seek boy acquaintances that I might display my skill in female-impersonation. ”

“ X (at the time my regular stamping-ground) who hated androgynism so fiercely as to be capable of murdering an individual in whom the phenomenon cropped up. I therefore explained matters to a brother: that if ever I was found murdered, to look for my assassin among the common soldiers of Ft. X. He replied: "Ralph, if you are ever murdered on one of your female-impersonation sprees, the family would be too much ashamed ever to take the first step to bring your murderer to justice!" ”

“ But there existed little justification for the police's "jumping on" the "Hall" as a sop to puritan sentiment. Culturally and ethically, its distinctive clientele ranked high. Their only offence—but such a grave one as to cause sexually full-fledged Pharisees to lift up their own rotten hands in holy horror—was, as indicated, female-impersonation during their evenings at the resort. A psychological and not an ethical phenomenon! For ethically the "Hall's" distinctive clientele were congenital goody-goodies, incapable (by disposition) of ever inflicting the least detriment on a single soul. ”

“ You sneak, why didn’t yez have more bills onter your carcass?”
On female-impersonation sprees in Stuyvesant Square, I carried less than ten dollars. But judging from my rich attire and not knowing I had set out from home just for such a spree, Harvey must doubtless have thought I had on me a big roll. The present is only one of the most remarkable of about two hundred adventures I have had with robbers, the thievishly inclined regularly preying on androgynes because knowing the latter are themselves outlaws and thus unable to complain to the police. ”

“ For almost twenty years of my “youngmanhood,” I was an habitué of barracks, etc., and a worshipper of swords and rifles, although I would have been horrified if required to take them into my own hands. I have known other androgynes whose female-impersonation sprees were staged before professional common soldiers. A young androgyne acquaintance actually enlisted in the hospital corps in the war with Germany because he wished to be surrounded continually with warriors—the type of manhood which androgynes in general most servilely worship. ”

“ And fortunately, for I thus met Roland and the other hermaphroditoi who had likewise turned to the Rialto to blow off now and again their ordinarily pent up, but at last overwhelming, craze for female-impersonation.
II. Jailed for Wearing Petticoats.
A scrape that I like to tell about, mon cheri, although very bitter in the happening, is my only arrest for flaunting myself in feminine finery. Don't you think a jail a queer home for a wishy-washy gentleman and art connoisseur? A softy whose swatting a fly was the worst act he was ever guilty of, and he almost had to weep when he did that. ”

“ In ultra-androgynes alone, the physique is noticeably feminesque, and the psyche predominantly feminine. As a rule, they alone have a craze to decorate themselves in feminine finery and spread paint and powder on their faces. They tend to avoid the society of full-fledged males except to display to a tremendously virile coterie—to whom they are generally incognito—their skill in female-impersonation. ”

“ We care to admit only extreme types—such as like to doll themselves up in feminine finery. We sympathize with, but do not care to be intimate with, the mild types, some of whom you 152|The Cercle Hermaphroditos.| see here to-night even wearing a disgusting beard! Of course they do not wear it out of liking. They merely consider it a lesser evil than the horrible razor or excruciating wax mask.
“We ourselves are in the detested trousers because having only just arrived. We keep our feminine wardrobe in lockers upstairs so that our every-day circles can not suspect us of female-impersonation. ”

“ For the next few hours, I was in hitherto undreamed-of bliss because of being wooed by all four in 206|Phyllis Finds “Herself.”| their delightfully wild and rough way. Ever since my later teens, I have always yearned to be treated by young fellows as a girl, and on my female-impersonation sprees now and again, I have had such yearnings fully met. ”

“ For while the career of a female-impersonator is a purely physiological and psychological phenomenon, it is incorrectly regarded as deep-dyed immorality.
All impersonators belonging to the middle and upper classes also choose a masculine alias, represented in the Underworld to be their legal name. They do not wish to risk disgrace to their family name. ”

“ Only one adolescent "male" out of three thousand in New York City adopts the role of quasi-public female-impersonator. A Rialto habitue therefore does not often run up against one. Judging by my own experience, a female-impersonator proves an attraction of the first order for young bloods having time hanging heavy on their hands. ”

“ The Eternal foresaw that it was to the best interests both of the human race and of myself that I should leave to others the coveted work of preaching the Gospel to the heathen and spend my physical prime in New York’s Underworld as an avocational female-impersonator. That was the cross that God willed that I should bear. The role of female-impersonator is the niche in the universe that its Architect had created me to fill. ”

“ They entreated me to bring around other female-impersonators. They were merely anxious for the money it would bring them. When I apologized for my queer penchant, they said: "It is nothing. It is Nature."
Ralph, those adolescent Pug Heaven sluggers knew more about the psychology of instinctive female-impersonators than all the M. D.'s in America combined! ”

“ But I here confine myself to what I experienced and learned while impersonating a French doll-baby because it constitutes something novel to most readers.
Indeed Parts Three, Four, and Five portray the social life and diversions of the most cultured New York coterie of the third sex during the last decade of the nineteenth century. For, while little has yet been published about instinctive female-impersonators because of the prudery of the sexually full-fledged, they form (necessarily sub rosa) quite a large class of society—about one out of every three hundred physical males. ”

“ But during the eighteen months that my sprees were staged in the Fourteenth Street Rialto and the six years on or near military reservations in New York's suburbs, my attire was as fancy and flashy as a youth dare adopt. Fairies are extreme dressers and excessively vain. To strange adolescents whom I passed on the street I proclaimed myself as a female-impersonator through always wearing white kids and large red neck-bow with fringed ends hanging down over my lapels. ”

“ If it be objected that the human race is perpetuated by the latter, I answer that this consideration would only permit to married couples a sex-union when offspring was the object—that is, for a cultured couple, from one to three times throughout their married life.
In the description of my own physique and psyche, I have indicated the general characteristics of the extreme type of androgynes foreordained to become quasi-public female-impersonators. ”

“ III. College Student's Death is Unexplained.
(The following are excerpts from a New York paper. Every few months the press brings to light a similar death of an androgyne. All because the world misunderstands and grossly misjudges them, as well as because public opinion has always deprived them of the means of coming to an understanding of themselves. Bracketed words and italics are those of the author of The Female-Impersonators.) ”