Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/77

Rh But while all those who indulged in "nastiness" before reaching their teens grew up, so far as I was able to observe, into men and women above reproach, two of "my set"—those who were "kids" at the same time within a radius of five hundred feet of my own paternal roof, the several homosexualist schoolmates elsewhere described having lived outside that radius–the two that had been most carefully brought up and shielded by their mother from corruption by other children, almost the only two that were sexually unblemished as children, "went to the bad" immediately on arrival at puberty. They were brother and sister—the only children of a wealthy, pious couple. The brother became a chronic dypsomaniac and roué. The sister, a beautiful and brilliant girl who had enjoyed a college education, died before thirty as a result of excesses in her chosen profession of fille de joie in New York City. The mother died of a broken heart in her early forties. The father, previously active in church work, became despondent on seeing both his children "go to the bad," took to drink, and died a sot.

Debauchery was born in these two children, for they had never missed Bible school up to their middle teens. They were unusually innocent prior to puberty. But religious teaching failed to convince them. They thought the "goody-goodies" were trying to rob them of the pleasures of life through false representations. I believe both could have been saved from shipwreck of life if, at puberty, a book, scientific, not goody-goody, could have been put into their hands, demonstrating that alcoholic and venereal excesses bring on ruin and often early death. Children inclined to dissipation on arrival at puberty are far more likely to heed the pro-