Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/130

104 risky. I merely kept some feminine finery locked up in my room for occasional decoration of my person while I gazed in the mirror. 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.

I would set out from my lodgings with the feelings of a soldier entering a terrific battle from which he realizes he may never return. As the car carried me farther and farther from where I staged the puritan student life and nearer and nearer to where I staged the "French doll-baby" life, my overwhelming melancholia would gradually give way to a sense of gladness that in a few minutes I would find myself again on "Jennie June's" stamping-ground. I had left at home all my masculinity (a very poor variety). The innate feminine, strangled for a week in order that I might climb, round by round, the ladder to an honored place in the learned world, now held complete sway.

During the last decade of the 19th century, the Fourteenth Street Rialto ranked second only to the "Tenderloin" as an amusement center in the entire metropolitan district. While it still holds the same rank in 1921, its present night life is only a shadow of what it was. A quarter of a century ago, New York was wide-open, whereas for more than a decade, the lid has been down tight. Promenading the Rialto on