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.
Ever since driven from the Bowery six years ago, I have, one evening out of fourteen, clad in my beloved feminine finery, tried to get on the string strange young fellows in the Rialto ladies' parlors. My nerves need such a lark now and again. Otherwise years ago I would have gone crazy or killed myself.[1] In my later teens, while living in my home town, where I had to crucify my cross-dressing and female-impersonating instincts, I was its most melancholy being. Because I, a female soul, was imprisoned in a male body. How dark life looked from inside my male prison! How I pined to be free! To have my soul wholly clothed in woman's bone and flesh instead of man's for the most part—the latter so hated in my own body, but slavishly worshipped when breathing out
- ↑ Just the day I retyped the above (Jan. 24, 1921) I read how a girl-boy of eighteen committed suicide in New York City by jumping from a thirty-five foot bridge upon railroad tracks. Adolescent androgynes are continually putting an end to their lives because bitterly persecuted merely on account of their bisexuality and most unfeelingly told by their closest associates that they are deeply depraved, and because prohibited by the leaders of thought from acquiring scientific knowledge of their idiosyncrasy.
