Part 8

Even before castration, rarely expertus sum ejaculationem. During my fairie apprenticeship, however, it occurred about once in ten fellationes. But it was accompanied by such horrible feelings and thoughts that I used my will power to prevent it. This probably made it become less and less common during coitus, although from the age of sixteen until I was castrated at the age of twenty-eight, it averaged twice a week during sleep. When it occurred during coitus, I wanted everything to stop immediately, and felt like never again indulging therein. From the age of nineteen on, however, it was not quite so terrible as in my early teens. Pædicatio nunquam induxit ejaculationem in me, and under force, not even an orgasm.

Fellatio appears to be deeply rooted in the constitution of man and of the mammals in general, although usually coming to the surface only in exceptional individuals or under exceptional circumstances. It has been witnessed between dogs on the street and between monkeys in zoos. Guinea sows, when the boar is disinclined to coitus, repeatedly resort to a sort of fellatio, which appears to give the boar pleasure. Fellatio is common in the underworld between the two sexes. In a 1915 issue of the _Alienist and Neurologist_, a writer maintained that fellatio is common among ordinary respectable married pairs.

My peculiar instinct was the occasion recipiendi in stomachum in tantum novem portiones liquoris vitæ in one evening. There was never any tonic or other beneficial effect. The apparent effect is an immediate disagreeable stimulation, followed the next day by a serious mental and physical collapse. This depression was, however, not specially serious during my first two or three years of promiscuity. Possibly later my constitution had become somewhat undermined and coitus therefore became more fatiguing. The collapse was particularly severe after I was castrated at the age of twenty-eight. Cultured inverts of strong passions realize the detriment to their health from coitus, yet they feel that it is the _summum bonum_ for which everything else should be sacrificed. My own fascination for the rough and wild-natured was so great that for a decade I could not let slip a single opportunity.

[Sidenote: _Liquor Vitæ as Medicament._]

Sometimes for several days following fellatio, I would suffer from a slight fever and all my organs and muscles would seem to be used up, as if I was just about to expire from exhaustion. I would be very irritable, and nothing seemed to go as it should. My brain was particularly affected, and during the latter half of my open career as a fairie, I would be incapable of doing good mental work for two or three days following an indulgence. My judgment and critical faculties were clouded, and I could do only such work as was mechanical in its nature. Providence endowed me with powers of mind such as are met with in approximately one alone out of two score university graduates. In life I have achieved about the average success of a university graduate. I have every reason to believe that if it had not been for my suffering for twelve years from acute spermatorrhea, and if I had been able to abstain wholly from coitus, I would have reached the front rank among university men. I therefore exhort young intellectual inverts to be continent as far as possible. For every indulgence, a heavy penalty must be paid in diminished efficiency. For each minute of bodily contact with a counterpart that I have enjoyed, I have had to pay one hour of resultant serious suffering, physical or mental.

[Sidenote: Author’s Chronic Hyperæsthesia.]

My mind and body have, however, always been hypersensitive to all stimuli and impressions. A few swallows of tea or coffee after one P. M. would make me lie awake half the night. A slightly tainted article of food which would have no effect on most people would prostrate me mentally and physically for hours afterward. A business worry would cause me to lie awake for hours. When spending the night in bed with one to whom I was attracted, I generally lay awake the whole night, and for this reason, I usually sought a separate place to sleep in.

But all these bad effects following fellatio I have sometimes fancied might be due rather to the mere presence of membri virilis in ore and in juxtaposition to the brain. The debilitating effects of coitus inter femora or of pædicatio were not one-quarter as marked as those of fellatio. Moreover, perhaps the ill effects of departures from the entirely normal form of coitus are roughly proportional to the extent of departure. Fellatio is further removed from normal coitus than inter femora or pædicatio. On a few occasions, as an experiment, exspui semen, but it seemed to make no difference in the aftereffects. Quite probably the bad effects were due to a relapse after intense nervous excitement, which in my case always accompanied fellatio, but not pædicatio, which latter I never sought. Or it might have been largely due to my habitual inhibition of the ejaculatory center. I now believe that I made a mistake in respect to this inhibition, and that it is more healthful to experience the ejaculation than to check it by force of will.

[Sidenote: _Alleviating Ill Effects—Inter Femora._]

Not until I reached the age of thirty-nine did I, by chance, discover a means to alleviate decidedly the exhausting effects of fellatio. I had used potassium iodide extensively in tablet form dissolved in water for syphilis. I discovered it to be for me an excellent sedative and soporific, and occasionally used it to secure this effect alone. I further discovered that fifteen to twenty grains taken at night after fellatio almost entirely forestalled the exhaustion otherwise supervening on the following days. Experience further taught me at about the age of thirty-nine that the supervening exhaustion was in large measure forestalled by eating a light lunch several minutes before fellatio, and a hearty meal as soon afterwards as possible. Fellatio occurring just before rising in the morning was found to induce far less fatigue than when occurring in the evening, or at night just before going to sleep.

On rare occasions—about one hundred out of sixteen hundred—we adopted the normal position, cum peni ejus inter femora mea. I was entirely passive. It was necessary for me ponere femur unum transversum altero in order to form a foramen strictum. Sometimes I requested this pose, and sometimes my companion. This was the nearest to normal coitus. I was curious to see how my companion would conduct himself with a genuine fille.

[Sidenote: _Pædicatio._]

Only when I could not avoid it, either because of force or because of insistent entreaty on the part of a kind companion, pædicatio took place. I would sometimes be beaten into submission, and knives would be drawn on me by the most desperate ruffians of the slums. Anus evidenter attrahit a very small percentage of men, just as the pudenda does the normal individual. Tangebant atque dicebant, “Anus pulcher.” My intense moral horror of pædicatio experienced at the beginning of my fairie days gradually declined. I later enjoyed it somewhat only because I enjoyed witnessing all kinds of amorous conduct on the part of ultra-virile young men. I had a craze to see them sexually excited, and to see the means they instinctively took to appease their ardor. The pain to me was generally excruciating—ad magnitudinem priapi—and has sometimes rendered walking painful for months together. It also occasionally brought on hemorrhoids of brief duration, but so painful as to render walking almost impossible. It is attended with much risk to the pathic. I know of two who were compelled to undergo serious operations as a result of repeatedly permitting it, one of whom in his early forties was invalided for the rest of his life. In my own case, pædicatio occurred only about fifty times out of sixteen hundred instances of coitus.

Up to the age of thirty, two years after castration, I was seemingly never satisfied. I have expressed to a group of companions the wish to die through them as did the Levite’s concubine at Gibeah, as related in the Book of Judges. In the subsequent physical and mental collapse, I received comfort from the consciousness that it was the result of devotion to adored beings.

[Sidenote: _Manustupration—Nature of Satisfaction._]

When spasmus in my companion was impossible otherwise, I would resort to manustupration. My companions preferred me to do this rather than do it themselves. Only twice in all my career did my companion do it to me, much against my wishes. I have always had a horror of this experience, including solitary onanism.

Except for these two instances, and one instance when a companion to my disgust attempted fellatio, my pudenda never had any part in coitus, and I always wished I was rid of them. No method ever brought me any kind of local physical pleasure. That is, I am entirely devoid of any erogenous center. Companions have remarked that sensus gratissimus suffunderet corpus totum. I never experienced anything of the kind in the least degree. With me the satisfaction was practically all mental. I found it exclusively in the body of my associate, not at all in my own. I was satisfied with the realization that I was instrumental in efficiendo ei voluptatem acutam. I had my pleasure in seeing his vita sexualis strongly aroused and in witnessing the manifestations of the procreative instinct in him, e.g., his me cogendum, detrahendum mihi vestem, ejus appetitionem propellendi, anhelandum, etc. I was happy in the thought that I was being received tanquam uxorem by a handsome high-spirited adolescent. He called me uxorem, and I called him maritum. There was also a life-long satisfaction in the remembrance that I had possessed him in amplexu sexuali. To mimic the baby and the woman in his presence was a rare pleasure. Up to my early thirties, in all my conduct with him, I was more feminine than any woman and as babyish as a three-year old. Sexually I have never grown out of babyhood.

[Sidenote: _Sadism._]

I liked to be regarded as the slave. In the “Enslaving Ceremony,” I lay prostrate on the floor, my companion towered above, placed his foot on my head, and pronounced me his slave. I have always felt that a woman should adore her husband so much as to delight in being treated as a slave, and to suffer gladly any abuse by her lord.

In the “Ceremony of Adoration,” my companion stood upright, I prostrated myself, clasped his legs, pressed my lips against his feet, recited all the heroic qualities which enslaved me to him, and cried out over and over again my love and adoration for him. Associates have said they only hoped they would ultimately secure a wife who would adore them as I.

I sometimes found pleasure in my companion being vexed with me and striking me. I would playfully slap him until he was provoked to give me a blow meant seriously. With heartless associates who were bent merely on the pleasure spasmi and would choke and otherwise maltreat me into submission to pædicatio, I often enjoyed being thus forced. Occasionally I even insisted that friendly ones rapere for the pleasure of struggling to get away and feeling their conquering strength.

There was a great difference in respect to the extent to which they responded. Some would not allow osculation above the waist and only desired spasmum. From this coldness there were all grades up to the associates who would kiss and hug me, and even let me protrudere linguam in os ejus, atque vice versa.

[Sidenote: _Farewell to Mulberry Street._]

Although a girl only in mind, though to some extent in body, this deficiency seemed not to detract from my success in the vocation of a fille de joie. Few filles have had a clientele the equal of mine in youthfulness, beauty, and virility. Providence compensated me for my years of grief over being an invert by throwing in my way this exceptional clientele. My enterprise in seeking conquests was that usually found in the male, and rarely in the female.

Practically all my companions have remained permanently a part of me. Now and then through life when the memory of a particular one arises, it has been accompanied by regret at the thought of our eternal separation, and by the consciousness that I was offering him an eternal worship of which he could never know. From my late twenties on, I impressed it upon my ever changing companions that I offered them an eternal worship, and that down through life, when we must be forever separated, they should think of me as still offering them my adoration.

* * * * *

I am now going to recount how I happened to abandon Mulberry Street as my “stamping ground” when I had so many accommodating friends there. On account of a nervous breakdown, due partly to overstudy, partly to debauchery, but chiefly to emissions during sleep which had afflicted me twice a week since the age of sixteen, I was unable to stay out my junior year in college and left the city the middle of May. I was to spend my last evening with my “husband” _par excellence_ at a theatre. I was to meet him at seven o’clock on a Broadway corner several blocks from his usual haunts. Since I did not expect to be with him where he could help himself to my belongings, and also since I had to leave my residence before dark, instead of putting on cast-off clothing as usual on my visits to the foreign-born quarters, I clad myself in my best and wore a gold ring and watch and chain.

[Sidenote: _Close of Junior Year._]

But he did not come, though I waited a half hour in anguish. It was only five minutes’ walk from his usual haunts, but clad as I was, I was afraid to seek him there. Finally two Italian bootblacks happened to pass. Even the boys of that part of Mulberry Street knew me. I however never had anything to do with them, not being attracted toward those immature sexually. Even my companions would always drive away boys who sought to stand around our group. The bootblacks now called out: “Hello Jennie! Where yer goin’ all dressed up?”

I sent a message by them, and waited still another half hour. Of all things in the world, I wanted at that moment a sight of my idol. Though realizing the risk I was running, I decided that I must go nearer to his usual haunts. I walked to the corner of Mulberry. I said to myself that I would not venture any farther. I would wait on this corner until he happened to pass, since it was on his route home. I considered myself safe since the street was well lighted and there were numerous pedestrians.

[Sidenote: _In the Slums in My Best._]

After waiting here also a half hour in vain, I became hysterical, wept, wrung my hands, and gave utterance to suppressed shrieks. I finally decided the only thing to do was to walk up Mulberry Street. About the middle of the block, I happened to find him seated, as usual, in a group of my beaux. They all made exclamations of surprise and pleasure when they caught sight of me. It was my first and only appearance there dressed up. My mate called out: “Hello pretty little girl!”

“Hello big, brave, bouncing boy!”

They immediately pulled me down to a seat among them and several hands were stuck into my pockets. I had tucked my bills away in the waistband of my trousers. The street was alive with recent Italian immigrants, and I might have saved my coin by raising an alarm, but of course did not choose to. On every visit here I had my pockets rifled, and did not mind the loss of the coin.

My mate sought to be as captivating as possible, and put me in a state of perfect happiness. Before long he asked me to sleep with him and a pal that night. All this time, among this group of young bloods, there was but one female, only sixteen years of age, whose home was on this block. It was decided that we should spend the night in her rooms. Accompanied by the two ruffians and the young woman, I thus finally sauntered down a pitch-dark alley and descended some steps to the basement of a ramshackle rear tenement, occupied entirely by illiterate Italians recently immigrated. I revolted at what I saw and smelt, but on this and other occasions was drawn by sexual attraction into pestilential places where nothing else would have induced me to remain a minute.

[Sidenote: _In the Lair of a Strumpet._]

When the lamp was lighted, I found myself in a suite of two dilapidated rooms, scantily and poorly furnished. On a century-old bedstead rested a dirty mattress filled with straw, and no pillows or bed-linen. Benefiting by my money, my associates drank to excess as the evening wore away, while I found my pleasure in the usual manner. Toward midnight, after the two ruffians had become half-intoxicated, my mate placed the muzzle of a revolver, which the young woman kept for self-defence, against my head, saying he would blow my brains out if I got him into any trouble. Because of the maudlin condition of the two young men, and because I had something on me that they might consider worth committing a grave crime for, I now half expected never to leave the place alive, and repeatedly breathed a prayer that no serious harm might be permitted to befall me. I now let them dispossess me of the balance of my bills and my other valuables in dismay and without the slightest protest, for fear of angering them.

Finally, in order to frighten me further from making complaint to the police, one of the ruffians asked the other whether they should put a bullet through my head or turn me over to the police because of my peculiar addiction. Thoroughly frightened, I implored them to let me go home. After some deliberation, designed to show how they had me in their power, including the assurance that I had that night rendered myself liable to a long term of imprisonment—ignorant men always thinking only the androgyne is amenable to the law—they finally decided to let me go if I ran away from the neighborhood as fast as my legs would carry me. The three of them escorted me to the mouth of the alley, and the last words I caught were: “Run faster! Run faster!”

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Yearning for Feminine Apparel._]

While in college I shrunk from the required gymnasium exercises. I felt that they were proper for young men, but my feminine nature made me exceedingly shy while in line in the drill. In the gymnasium dressing-room I would enjoy seeing the naked forms, but concealed my own. If military drill had been required, as is the case in some universities in 1918, it would have caused me to omit a university education.

Beginning about this time, my twenty-first year, and continuing down to the date when this book goes to press, I have commonly worn in my home an ornamental bathrobe, just like a woman’s dress. Clad in it, I have gazed at my reflection in the mirror, imagining I was a woman. Walking in it to and fro and up and down the stairs, I have taken pleasure in hearing it rustle like a woman’s dress, in feeling it strike against my legs, and in holding it up when ascending the stairs, as a woman her skirts. In my college days, while home for week-ends, I would occasionally, when alone, put on a sister’s hat and gaze at myself in the mirror with rare pleasure, wishing that I might wear that style of hat.

In this summer of 1894, when away from New York, where temptation was less strong, I became for several weeks weaned away from my peculiar habits. In my present rather puritanical circle, I felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Under the unusual religious influences, I even thought I might never again seek the gratification of my peculiar cravings.

[Sidenote: _Sexual Starvation._]

Nevertheless, before many weeks, I began to suffer intensely from sexual starvation and melancholia. Being then a nervous wreck, I saw before me only insanity or suicide. I would walk deserted streets at night beating my breast and waving my arms in anguish. Even in broad daylight and on the main street, I several times wept openly while walking along, so that people who knew me probably thought I was insane. In the privacy of my room I would writhe on my bed in an agony of tears.

My sexual cravings began to render me sleepless after retiring, and throw me into paroxysms. Driven by my importunate craving for fellatio, I would occasionally rise from bed around midnight, and roam through the poor quarters, looking for a thoroughly intoxicated man who would not be able to recognize me, but I never found one. I now believe I was irresponsible.

The only ray of hope I had was the possibility of securing a steady mate. When in my imagination I could see the feasibility and certainty of this, I was happy and hopeful. I felt that then a successful life would be a certainty. Without a mate I feared for my virtue and my reputation. With one I felt that I could live a virtuous life outside of occasional fellatio with him. At the present time (1918), I am convinced that I had a right view of the matter back there in 1894. Possession of a mate would have been the panacea for all my ills.

[Sidenote: _Appeal to a Highminded Adolescent._]

My New York physician, to whom I confided my woes, wrote that the only remedy to make me well and happy was the possession of a mate, and urged me to apply immediately to some stalwart acquaintance. I decided to appeal to a cousin, an adolescent fair to look upon, and possessed of all the qualities of mind attractive to the female sex. Moreover, in my early childhood, he had been one of my intimates. Too much ashamed to speak, I handed him the following argument:

“... I am driven to make these disclosures to you, or else go insane or commit suicide. I am madly in love with you. I say it before God—this impulse of my being is entirely opposed to my will. I bewail the fact that this animality is a part of my nature. I abhor sensual love and sensual enjoyment, and if I had my choice, would never stoop to them. Nevertheless, sometimes a person cannot do what he would but what he must. My physician says my health demands that I do not resist this overpowering impulse. Last night I went to bed drowsy and tired. But the impossibility of my possessing the masculine counterpart which nature ordained I should have, threw me for an hour into paroxysms which threatened to take away all my strength. I had finally to leave my bed, and spend two hours reading in order to save myself from insane raving. The statement of the few specialists who have studied into the nature of sexual inversion is that the craving of a person like myself for his sexual counterpart is abnormally intense, and that it is, for the ends of health, more necessary for his peculiar craving to be met than it is necessary for the normal man or woman’s.

[Sidenote: _Abstinence Would Wreck Life._]

“Judging from the past, my life is likely to be a wreck if I deny this instinctive craving. In leading a life of chastity, I have endured a melancholy existence, and have often deliberated suicide. Recently I have meditated it daily. All my privileges, which one would think must make my life a happy one, have failed to make life to me worth living. You may say it is my own fault, and that I just make my own life miserable. But truly, it is a matter to me not dependent on my will power, but on physiological and psychological laws, over which the will has no more control than over the diphtheria.