variant people, but also those women growing more capable, independent, and self-reliant in the war years went underground rather than face the price of being “different” in an era that rigidly enforced sex-role conformity.
Jorgensen describes one particularly painful incident in the autobiography—the time a teacher called Mrs. Jorgensen to school after she had discovered a piece of needlepoint in Brud’s desk. In front of Mrs. Jorgensen and the other students, the teacher asked Brud if it was his, and when he replied yes, she responded, “Mrs. Jorgensen, do you think that this is anything for a red-blooded boy to have in his desk as a keepsake? The next thing we know, George will be bringing his knitting to school.” Both George and his mother were humiliated by this incident, though to Mrs. Jorgensen’s credit, she didn’t utter a word of reproach to her unhappy son.
Incidents like these increased Brud’s feelings of loneliness and isolation, which became even more acute in adolescence. “Instead of assimilating into a group as most teenagers did, I felt like an outsider. I didn’t like sports and I wasn’t interested in dating girls, which had become the chief topic of conversation among the boys of my acquaintance,” Jorgensen writes. “I tried to find some solace in books, and they became my closest companions.” Jorgensen also developed an interest in photography and began to dream of a “time when I would have an important place behind the cameras of Hollywood, the gilded Wonderland of make-believe.”
This new hobby led to a job as a stock librarian with the Pathe News Service in New York City, after George’s high school graduation. “I wondered if my new associates would notice what I had long since known: that I was one who deviated, emotionally, from what had been termed ‘normal,’” Jorgensen writes. “But I was determined to behave like a man, even if I didn’t feel like one, and try to hide the pretense behind a brave exterior.” It became even easier to “act like a man” the next year, when the nineteen-year-old George Jorgensen was drafted. Though he had already been rejected by the army twice during the war, owing to his thin build, this time he was accepted. “I wanted to be accepted by the army for two reasons. Foremost, was my great desire to belong, to be needed, and to join the stream of activities around me,” Jorgensen writes. “Second, I wanted my parents to be proud of me and to be able to say, ‘My son is in the service.’ Although they never mentioned it, I was poignantly aware that Mom and Dad must have felt their child was ‘different,’ and hence unwanted.”
Despite the triumph of passing the army physical, living with hundreds of other young men in close quarters during and after basic training provided yet more proof of George’s “difference.” As a clerical worker living in barracks and helping to manage the discharge of thousands of soldiers after VE day, Georgecouldn’t help comparing myself with the boys in my group and I was aware that the differences were very great indeed, both mental and physical. My body was not only slight but it lacked other development as a male. I had no hair on my chest, arms or legs. My walk could scarcely be called a masculine stride, the gestures of my hands were quite effeminate and my voice had a feminine quality. The sex organs that determined my classification as male were underdeveloped. It was, of course, quite possible that some men having the same build would feel completely masculine, but my mental and emotional chemistry matched all the physical characteristics which in me seemed so feminine. “What is masculine and what is feminine?” I thought. The questions plagued me because I couldn’t find a clearly established dividing line.
If George Jorgensen, Jr., wasn’t able to find a dividing line between masculine and feminine, he was quite clear about another line, one that he was determined never to cross. “During the months in the service, I had seen a few practicing homosexuals, those whom the other men called ‘queer.’ I couldn’t condemn them, but I also knew that I certainly couldn’t become like them. It was a thing deeply alien to my religious attitudes and the highly magnified and moralistic views that I entertained at the time. Furthermore, I had seen enough to know that homosexuality brought with it a social segregation and ostracism that I couldn’t add to my own deep-seated feeling of not belonging.” This was true despite the strong emotions that were aroused in the young soldier by a childhood friend, Tom Chaney; and by Jim Frankfort, another man he met while attending the Progressive School of Photography in New Haven, Connecticut, after his discharge in 1948. Jorgensen describes the strong attraction that drew George to these two unambiguously heterosexual men, and his equally strong feelings of confusion and terror of the implications of that attraction. “I awaited a miracle to release me from the growing horror of myself.”
In July of 2001, I posted a message on an Internet genealogy list, seeking family members of Jorgensen to confirm the information in the autobiography. I didn’t hear from any Jorgensens but I was contacted by a few people who had known or encountered George or Christine Jorgensen at some point. One of the most poignant notes I received was from a woman named Peggy Stockton McClelland, whose parents, she said, had shared a house with Jorgensen in Connecticut.Christine Jorgensen lived with my mother and father in Milford, Conn. My father, Richard Stockton, was attending Yale Photography School at the time and they shared the rent. Christine was known as George at that time. My mother loved him, as a friend, and he confided in her many feelings at that time in his life. My mother said he would babysit me for them and was the closest friend she had at that time. He loved to do more female type things, loved to be in the kitchen and take care of me. They lived in a beautiful stone home on the water in Woodmont, Conn., which is still there. Perhaps Christine was also attending school with my father? I never knew. I really do not know how my parents knew George, but eventually my parents returned to Muncie, Indiana, and they lost contact. My mother said they knew he was different, and she was not surprised by his decision.
While living with the Stocktons and other friends in the suburbs of New Haven, George Jorgensen continued to puzzle over his “difference” and to seek possible solutions. “The recurring questions of what to do about my effeminate appearance continued to plague me. Even if it were possible to adjust my mind and attitudes to a more male outlook, I wondered what could be done about a ‘masculine’ mind in a feminine body.” In December 1948, while still living in New Haven, Jorgensen encountered a book that was to provide him with the answers he sought. The book, Paul de Kruif’s
Reading Paul de Kruif’s ode to the power of the male hormone, testosterone, today it is easy to understand the comfort that the tormented George Jorgensen, Jr., found within its pages—but more difficult to trace the intuitive leap that enabled him to conceive a novel solution to his problem. The book describes the “rescue of broken men,” genital males who, like Jorgensen, seemed to lack key physical and psychological attributes of masculinity, or older men experiencing “the slow chemical castration” of aging. Early in the book, de Kruif describes a twenty-seven-year-old medical student, physically underdeveloped when he was first examined by physicians at Albany Medical College in 1937. “His hips were wide like a woman’s; he had protruding breasts like a girl’s; he had almost no Adam’s apple; and his voice was high-pitched like a woman’s. He had only a hint of hair under his arms and none on his chest or belly, and pitifully to kid himself that he was a man, he shaved about once in ten weeks,” de Kruif writes. “There were large circles under his eyes, and his private parts were somewhat smaller in size than those of a four-year old boy. His penis, which the doctors measured, was one inch long and less than half an inch in diameter.” The young man had also suffered throughout his life from severe migraines and the kinds of hot flashes that trouble menopausal women. As a result of these difficulties, he was socially withdrawn and often depressed. Curiously, he was engaged to be married—though he admitted to his doctors that he was unable to maintain an erection and had very limited sexual feelings. In medical terms, the young man was suffering from “hypogonadism,” or testosterone deficiency.
James B. Hamilton, an anatomy professor at the college, was able to persuade the pharmaceutical company Ciba to send him “for purely scientific purposes—a supply of testosterone that was still worth more than its weight in gold,” writes de Kruif. “For the first time into any American man, as far as published records go, anatomist Hamilton and the doctors sent shots of testosterone into the flabby muscles of this twenty-seven-year-old boy’s arm and into those of his buttocks three times a week.” The results impressed the scientists. Previously, the young man had “experienced only the feeblest and most fleeting sexual sensations,” but within sixty hours of the first injection, he began to have erections. After a mere six days of injections, his erections “became more frequent and stronger; the size of his penis at rest became greater; and before the month of testosterone injections was completed, this man, impotent for life, was able to carry on sexual intercourse.”
But the effects of the hormone did not end there. The doctors witnessed what appeared to be a complete physical and psychological transformation. “The boy’s thyroid gland began to grow; his larynx became congested, and the doctors thought they could detect a lower pitch to his voice. The hot flashes that had bothered him for years disappeared completely. During that month he had only one attack of the migraine headache that had tortured him so long and so often. A curious new sap of self-confidence flowed through him, and energy, and he
