Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (17 page)

I
N MANY WAYS,
G
EORGE
J
ORGENSEN
had a happy and unencumbered childhood. His parents, George Sr. and Florence, met at a social hall in the Danish-American community in New York City, and were married in 1922. George Sr. served in the Coast Guard and then formed a construction company with his father and brother. Florence stayed at home to take care of Dolly, the couple's first child, and George, who was born on May 30, 1926. His birth,
which landed on Memorial Day that year, was marked by street parades and the clattering of brass bands.

The tight-knit Jorgensen family lived in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx, where George grew up surrounded by dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Every year, Grandma Jorgensen, the matriarch of the family, who had silvery hair and a passion for African violets, hosted a joyous Scandinavian Christmas. Young George always looked forward to marching hand in hand around the tree, singing carols, eating turkey drumsticks, and searching for the sole almond hiding in the rice pudding.

Although he was secure in the warm embrace of his family, George Jorgensen never felt at home with himself. A delicate and shy child, he could not reconcile his own feelings and interests with the social rules for boys. “A little boy wore trousers and had his hair cut short,” Jorgensen later wrote in a best-selling autobiography. “He had to learn to use his fists aggressively, participate in athletics and, most important of all, little boys didn't cry.” But young George had no stomach for fighting and ran away instead. At times, he
did
feel like crying, and he liked “girly” toys, too. When he was five, he prayed for a beautiful doll with golden locks for Christmas. He got a red railway train instead.

The difference between George and his male peers was palpable from an early age. He preferred his sister's games of jump rope and hopscotch to rough-and-tumble sports. He liked Dolly's dresses and her long blonde hair. He felt more at home at her camp than at Camp Sharparoon, where a piercing whistle moved campers from one activity to the next, and George was compelled to join in with the other boys—a requirement he dreaded, because he knew he would stand out and be teased. At Dolly's camp, by contrast, “the girls didn't call me ‘sissy' or ask me if I was really a girl dressed in boys clothes, like the boys at Camp Sharparoon did,” Jorgensen recalled.

One of George's most painful childhood experiences occurred at school, where he kept a treasured piece of needlepoint in his desk drawer. He liked to reach in and touch it or, if no one was looking, take it out and admire it secretly. “I didn't display it openly, probably sensing the derision that might result,” Jorgensen recounted. After recess one day, George, then about eight, was heartbroken to discover that his needlepoint had disappeared from his desk. His teacher called the class to order, then summoned George and his mother, whom she had sent for without telling George, to her desk. As his classmates watched, the teacher held George's precious fabric up just out of his reach and asked if it belonged to him. “Yes,” George said, his face hot, his eyes stinging with tears. “Mrs. Jorgensen,” the teacher said, “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!” His classmates snickered.

Jorgensen remembered feeling “upset and puzzled” by the line drawn between “masculine” and “feminine.” What was wrong with enjoying needlepoint? Why
couldn't
a boy have long hair and wear dresses like his sister? One day, George posed his problem to his mother. “Mom, why didn't God make us alike?” he asked. “My mother gently explained that the world needed both men and women, and that there was no way of knowing before a baby was born whether it would be a boy or a girl. ‘You see, Brud,' she said,” referring to George by his nickname, “ ‘it's one of God's surprises.' ‘Well,' I replied, ‘I don't like the kind of surprise God made me!' ”

I
T IS NOT UNUSUAL FOR YOUNG CHILDREN
to be captivated by toys, colors, or clothing that are stereotypically considered masculine
or feminine. Plenty of boys enjoy playing with dolls and kitchen sets, and many girls prefer short haircuts and action figures. And why shouldn't they? Most parents accept this when their children are toddlers; many even encourage it and are relieved when their daughters stick up their noses at pink dresses and princesses or their sons shun trucks and superheroes. The majority of these children will move through childhood with the usual bumps and bruises, and then tussle with adulthood as we all do. Along the way, they'll face their share of personal and spiritual quandaries—Do I want to be a parent? Am I really cut out to be a lawyer? Do I believe in God?—but they will never question the most fundamental essence of their identity: Am I male or female?

This was a predicament that haunted George Jorgensen. It wasn't just that he preferred the company of girls or liked the way they looked; it was that he felt he was meant to
be
a girl. It was a conviction that was deeply rooted, knotted up in the core of his being, and it did not diminish as he aged. By puberty, it was clear that George did not fit the masculine mold, either physically or emotionally. He was, as Jorgensen later reflected, “extremely effeminate” and continued to identify with classically “feminine” interests. Although he had plenty of friends who were girls, he was not interested in dating any of them. As a teenager, “I recall that I was even more keenly aware that I was different from other boys,” Jorgensen wrote. “Once I overheard one of them say, ‘George is such a strange guy.' At other times, they didn't have to say it; I could read the thought in their attitudes.”

By all accounts, George Sr. and Florence Jorgensen were supportive during their son's growing-up years (Florence remembered both her kids as “model children,” according to Jorgensen's account). But Jorgensen knew it could not have been easy having a child who didn't fit in and acknowledged this as one of the
reasons Army service was appealing. Although George failed his first two draft physicals for being underweight, he passed in the fall of 1945, the year he graduated from high school. With the fighting phase of the war over, he was assigned to process paperwork for thousands of U.S. soldiers returning home. The Army gave George the opportunity to serve his country, and his parents the chance to boast about their son.

George viewed his military experience, which lasted 14 months, positively overall. But, once again, it reinforced the gulf between him and his peers. His fellow servicemen wanted to get married and have families; George didn't know what he wanted, other than to retreat further into his “protective shell.” One day after he was discharged, he aired his confusion with two female friends. “Maybe you'll think I'm insane,” he said, “but did either of you ever look at me and think that I might not be a man at all, but a … woman?” His friends were bewildered. “But George, you're made like a man, aren't you?” one of them asked. Yes, his body was male, although underdeveloped, he told them. But as far back as he could remember, he had felt “the emotions of a girl.” Although attracted to men, George admitted, “I notice them, not as a man, but as a woman might. I just don't know what category to put myself in.” According to later reports by Jorgensen's doctors, George felt that “nature had made a mistake,” and he attempted, early on, to right it himself as best he could. He secretly dressed in women's clothing to relieve “the psychic pressure” he felt in men's clothing; he shaved his pubic hair in a way that made him appear more feminine and gave him “inner satisfaction,” according to his physicians. On the outside, however, he had no choice but to do his best to appear and act like a man.

It is not surprising that George Jorgensen initially wondered if he was gay. At the time he was coming of age, in the 1930s and early
1940s, there was little popular understanding, let alone knowledge, of what we know now as transgender: “persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth,” as the American Psychological Association defines it. A small cadre of medical experts in the United States had consulted with patients who felt out of sync with their sex; as George would soon learn, several European doctors had initiated experimental treatments with hormone therapy and surgery. But there was not yet an appreciation of transgender as a distinct condition. The term “transvestism,” a catchall grouping at the time, included people like Jorgensen but was also used more broadly to describe cross-dressers—those who got pleasure out of dressing up in male or female clothing not their own. The notion that people could or would undergo a physical transformation from man to woman, or woman to man, would have been as unthinkable as landing on the moon.

Being gay, on the other hand, was a known quantity, lambasted from pulpits everywhere for centuries. At the time Jorgensen was growing up, the mainstream medical establishment was busy trying to convert patients from gay to straight by subjecting them to hysterectomies, castration, shock therapy, and even lobotomy. At the same time, sexual behavior had become a niche research subject with scientists attempting to understand what Americans were doing and who they were doing it with. This was the era of Alfred Kinsey, the famed sociologist who interviewed thousands of Americans about their sexual practices and preferences. His first major report, published in 1948, concluded that homosexuality among men was far more common than believed. No matter what the clergy said or the doctors did or the sex researchers published, it wasn't going away. Indeed, gay culture was beginning to flourish in nightclubs and cabarets, from San Francisco
to Chicago to the streets of lower Manhattan, not far from where Jorgensen grew up.

Despite his own sensibilities, George perceived being gay as religiously objectionable and immoral. But he could not deny his attraction to boys. When he was a teenager, George got to know a boy named Tom during annual summer visits to a farm in upstate New York. The two became fast friends, corresponding back and forth during the off-season. One day, Tom wrote a letter raving about a girl he'd met; George's immediate reaction was jealousy. In the library, he had read about “sexual deviation” in a book about human relationships. Now that he realized he had developed feelings for his friend, George could not help but ask himself: “Was this the same thing I felt? Was I one of those people?”

In his quest for answers, George scoured books and news articles about human behavior and sexuality. The more he read, the more he began to suspect that his condition might be related to hormones. One day in October 1948, he came across a newspaper story about a well-known endocrinologist in New Haven who was conducting hormone experiments on animals—“the masculinization of a female chicken and the return to vigor of a castrated rooster,” as Jorgensen later recalled. After mustering up the courage to make an appointment, George told the doctor about his history of feeling girlish and living a life as what he dubbed a “sexual mix-up.” He had tried to live and feel like a man, he said, but he had failed. Could it be that he was suffering from some kind of chemical imbalance?

George assumed the doctor would do a medical exam, but he wrote down the name of a psychiatrist instead. At the time, the prevailing view was that emotional and behavioral turmoil, however it manifested, was triggered by early childhood experiences—often parental neglect or abuse. Psychoanalysis was seen as the
answer, and there was little else the doctor could offer. Dejected, George went to see the psychiatrist, who prescribed a series of sessions to guide him away from his “feminine inclinations.” He declined.

If there was a moment that changed everything, it was when George stumbled across a book called
The Male Hormone
, published in 1945. Author Paul de Kruif, a well-known science writer of the day, described a series of experiments in which testosterone injections had cured sexual impotence, increased muscular endurance, and even eradicated depression. The overarching message was that sex hormones played a decisive role in differentiating men and women. Jorgensen later described the book as “salvation in my hands”; it reaffirmed George's belief that he was suffering from a hormonal, not a psychological, malfunction and provided hope that changing the chemical balance in his body might solve his problem. Soon after, George learned about the treatments being performed in Europe, where research into gender and sexuality was far more progressive, and made his pivotal decision to set sail for Copenhagen. “To my friends and family, then, I was merely planning a tourist jaunt,” Jorgensen wrote, “but the Old World was to be the point of no return as George Jorgensen.”