Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/279

Rh ) too much to listen to his-her theories, were on a false scent. At the date this volume goes to press (December, 1921), the Z mystery—as well as the X, Y, and Q—has not been cleared up by the authorities, although none of the four is much of a problem to myself, knowing how the world treats androgynes.

[It is a strange coincidence that about a score of years before Z was strangled, within two miles of his yacht's point of anchorage, in a large patch of woods at night, I was, as an aftermath of a female-impersonation, being roughly teased by six "young fellows."

To cap the climax, they led me toward a tree and said they were "going to get a rope and hang" me. Horrified, I feigned an epileptic fit to save myself. See my, page 208.

[While I have never believed Z a suicide, it is a possibility. A new idol with whom he had had an appointment on the yacht that afternoon might have shown utter disgust at Z's revelations—as I have myself witnessed in a confidant—and pitilessly abandoned him. This misguided attitude might have brought on Z a sympathetic disgust with himself as female-impersonator and cross-dresser. According to this theory, Z wished to punish and heap indignities on his own body—just as I have myself, in my verdant middle teens, taken a whip and chastised my own body because lustful, homosexual thoughts had invaded my mind, while crying out: "'O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!'" Perhaps Z wished to punish his own body by depriving it of breath while in female garb and so publish to the world the despicableness of his own physical personality. In no other way could Z's spiritually minded