Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/123





I. Female-Impersonation.

In, I shall outline what kind of adult career is the natural sequel of the childhood and adolescence described in ; what kind of adult career is bound up with the physique and psyche with which I am endowed. I shall disclose what Providence had in store for the youthful religious prodigy of the Connecticut hills—the delicate, lilliputian, chickenhearted girl-boy—after he had been swallowed up in New York's millions.

Since ultra-androgynes are, in a sense, instances of dual personality—a male soul and a female soul inhabiting the same brain and body—it is natural for them to live a double-life.

Moreover, as the "classy," hypocritical, and bigoted Overworld considers a bisexual as monster and outcast, I was driven to a career in the democratic, frank, and liberal-minded Underworld. While my male soul was a leader in scholarship at the university uptown, my female soul, one evening a week, flaunted itself as a French doll-baby in the shadowy haunts of night life downtown.

Since my student and subsequent professional career were prosaic, I leave them almost unmentioned [97]