After an hour of bitter tears and heart-broken pleadings to the Architect of the universe, I would be in a state of mental and physical collapse for twentyfour hours. Can the reader wonder that, weighed down by such a burden, I repeatedly meditated suicide during these four terrible years? And I realize now — at middle age—that I had to suffer these four years of melancholia only because of cultured man's misunderstanding of androgynism, prohibition of any' one's inquiring into the facts, and bitter persecution of androgynes.[1]
Events have proved that it was the policy of the All-Wise and All-Good not to answer my prayers, notwithstanding their almost unexampled earnestness and repetition. The Eternal foresaw that it was to the best interests both of the human race and of myself that I should leave to others the coveted work of preaching the Gospel to the heathen and spend my physical prime in New York's Underworld as an avocational female-impersonator. That was the cross that God willed that I should bear. The role of female-impersonator is the niche in the universe that its Architect had created me to fill.
In middle life I have often thought that Providence mercifully spared me from suicide—the fate of so many youthful androgynes as a result of the world's persecution—and foreordained my career of female-
- ↑ Anglo-Saxon leaders of thought have hitherto been of the opinion that the domain of sex is "terra interdicta," just as those of Roger Bacon's time (priests and monks exclusively) would have believed it sacrilege to use a telescope or microscope—"to see what God meant man should never see." Roger, although having invented these instruments, did not dare tell his generation because the leaders of thought would have burnt him alive for invading terra interdicta.
