Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/198

 I. Debut as Adult Female-Impersonator.

Ralph, I was ushered into this mundane sphere in the year of our Lord 1854. I was a lucky dog to be brought up on the upper West Side a few blocks from Central Park [New York City]. As a diminutive urchin, I dolled myself up in feminine habiliments at every opportunity. Eunice was my favorite playmate. I opined her appellation the most melodious that ever impinged upon my eardrums and regretted it was not mine personally. Whenever I flaunted myself in skirts, I adopted it.

In my early teens, father escorted me to a physician that the latter might query me concerning my feminine predilections and ridicule me out of same. Simultaneously father, through severe castigation, imposed a finis to female-impersonation in my own clique. I therefore commenced, during periods of special obsession to be a puella, the practice of perambulating the slums, first by daylight, and later after the shades of night had fallen. During these insensate peregrinations, there would swarm through my mind visions of flirtations with the ruffians around my age that I encountered. These "huskies" riveted my gaze. They fascinated me. But not until the fifth or sixth [ 170 ]