crisis. For the past two years, while looking to be in good health, I had suffered intensely from mental and physical prostration, due almost entirely to ejaculations during sleep but in small part to nervous shock following fellatio.
Neurasthenia now confined me for six.months to the village home of my parents. The "procreative" instinct gave me no rest, just as a drug fiend has none when denied his anodyne. Night after night I roamed the streets in the factory section. On two occasions I was successful. On a third I was crazed by enforced abstinence for over a month. I encountered a youth just under puberty. I clandestinely ascertained that he did not know me, did not attend the same church, and was employed in a part of the village where he was not likely to run across me. I was a shoemaker, just arrived in the village looking for work. I was lonely and languishing for company. A burden was oppressing me and I needed a confidant. Would he be my confidant? Would he promise to keep strictly to himself what I was about to tell? Had he heard of hermaphrodites?[1] I was one.
I found that to permit fellatio was decidedly against his tastes, and plead earnestly that he would show me compassion, at the same time offering money. His final answer was: "I was not brought up that way. I would never permit it. I am a Christian."
Fearing he would raise an alarm, and I would be ar-
- ↑ As this term is commonly a part of the vocabulary of laboring men, I sometimes used it in reference to myself, as they would not have understood the proper term. I am of course not an hermaphrodite in the present signification of that term.
