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I Touch Bottom.
143

placed me, there was in me a practically irresistible impulse to adopt the manner of life I did. I would never have made the profession of the fairie the main business of life if it had not been for the peculiar concurrence of circumstances, expulsion from college, inability to find respectable employment, etc. That I now led the life I did was perhaps more the fault of Christian society than my own. While the world condemned, I have always believed that the Omniscient Judge pardoned because I was the victim of circumstances and of innate psychical forces.

The fact that I could now satisfy every day my instinctive yearnings to pass for a female and spend six evenings a week in the company of adolescent ruffians went far towards counterbalancing the many tears I had to shed when there was nothing to divert my thoughts from my condition of an outcast and an outlaw. I never coquetted on Sunday evenings, which I devoted to worship of my Creator at some mission. I no longer experienced any shame at displaying my feminine mentality everywhere outside of the missions, as no one knew who I was. In many neighborhoods I was hailed as " Jennie June."

Besides the Bowery, the streets most frequented by me during these nine weeks—as well as during the not immediately following two years when I was compelled to go on a female-impersonation spree once in two weeks—were the following: (1) In the foreign Hebrew quarter: Grand, from Bowery eastward to Allen, and Allen and Christie, for several blocks on both sides of Grand. (2) In the foreign Italian quarter, containing also a large sprinkling of Irish immigrants: Grand, from Bowery