Woman and no regrets Baffled by bisexuality

bigita

Continued from Page 1-B

She is suing United Artists for $5 million, claiming she is due money for the 1971 film version of ber life, which, she said, was badly botched and poorly marketed. She is coming back to the nightclub circuit after an absence of 15 years. "Well, you know, it's the turn of the wheel," she said, lighting up a cigarette and exhaling toward the skThe '50s are big right now. was my era." .

June she had a four-day Dak-in engagement in Portland, Ore.,at a club called Darcelle's and got a rave from the critic. "Better," said Miss Jorgensen, "than I deserved for the first night. Naturally it takes time to get back into the swing. By the eighth show I did feel I'd hit my stride."

جية

She is mulling other engagements, including a couple of offers from cruise ships, for the fall. "I'm not the greatest talent in the world" she said, "but I'm comfortable on a stage, and the audience has fun.”

The act is not so very different from the one she once took into the Latin Quarter in New York, the Interlude in Los Angeles, and to clubs in Havana and Caracas

preference. It doesn't have to do with bed partners, it has to do with identity."

Miss Jorgensen said she knows of some male-to-female trans-genders who have settled into lesbian relationships. She herself is heterosexual. "I've never been married," she said, "but I have been engaged twice, and I've been deeply in love twice. I was never engaged to the men I was in love with, and I was never in love with the men ! was engaged to. When I lecture at colleges, students always get a charge out of that.".

Miss Jorgensen embarked on her mission to Denmark after several years of independent research. As a student at the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistants' School she read all that she could find on the subjects of sexual hormones and glandular imbalances.

Through a physician, she learned of sex change treatments and operations that had been done in Scandinavia, procedures not being done in the United States at the time. She left for Copenhagen, to stay with family friends and explore the possibilities, in 1950. Her parents, her older sister and brother-in-law knew nothing of the medical mission until it was nearly

Dear Abby:

After reading your column on gay spouses, I just had to write.

It is a shock and a heartache when a wife finds out that her husband has had an affair with another woman, but I cannot comprehend how any woman could accept a man as her competition. She would have to be crazy and with children in the house yet.

How can any normal woman let a man who has been with another man touch her? To me, it is unthinkable.

Dear Mama:

A Yiddishe Mama in El Toro

To you it is unthinkable. But to those who have studied bisexuality and realize that one's sexual preference is rarely a matter of choice, it is understandable.

This is not an endorsement of infidelity of any kind, but rather an attempt to shed some light on one of the most misunderstood of all sexual behaviors.

Rel

Dear Abby

Miss Jorgensen writes of growing up a 'frail, tow-headed, introverted" little boy who "ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games.'

and throughout England and Australia. Though quite innocent, the aft was once banned in Boston, and she likes to tell of the time that she returned to Boston to promote her autobiography.

"You are going to ban the book, aren't you?" she asked a city official. "We don't do that kind of thing anymore," she was told. "Where are you when I needed you?" she replied.

In her autobiography Miss Jorgensen writes of growing up a Trail, tow-headed, introverted" little boy who "ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games,' whose Christmas prayer, at the age of 5, was for "a pretty doll with. long gold hair" and who was disappointed to get a bright-red model train instead.

KSA

She described the 19-year-old George Jorgensen, who was drafted into the Army a few months after the end of World War II, as a 98pounder with underdeveloped male genitalia and virtually no beard or

completed two years later. She sent them a letter:

"I have changed, changed very much, as my photos will show, but I want you to know that I am an extremely happy person and that the real me, not the physical me, has not changed But nature made a mistake, which I have had corrected, and I am now your daughter." Her parents anguished over the news for a time, but her father told the press: "She is ours, and we love her."

It embarresses her, even now, to be called a pioneer. "I see myself riding a covered wagon across the prairie when someone says that," she said.

The truth is she was not the first, nor did she ever say she was. Sexchange procedures occurred in Europe as early as 1930.

Hers was the first sex change to go public, although she insists there was nothing voluntary about that either. A friend of the family, Miss Jorgensen learned several years

Miss Jorgensen said she knows of some male-to-female trans-genders who have settled into lesbian relationships. She herself is heterosexual.

body hair. As a young man, Jorgeneen experienced strong emotional attachments to two male friends, but she said those feelings were never expressed. She has also written of the revulsion she felt on several occasions when men made hornosexual advances.

She said she wasn't entirely candid in the book.

Ten years ago, you didn't discuss some of the things you do today,' she said. She did have “a couple of homosexual experiences before she went off to Europe to seek a medical solution to her problem, but her limited experience only reinforced the feeling that she

anted to relate to men as a woman, not another man. "If you understand trans-genders,” she said, choosing the word she prefers to transsexuals, "Then you understand that gender is different than sexual

later, sold the story to the Daily News for $200, and a reporter told her the paper had played it so big because the Mickey Jelke story a circulation builder about an oleomargarine heir involved in a call-girl ring was on the wane.

Of course, it was news, news that left most Americans flabbergasted and, in the judgment of the newspapers, endlessly fascinated with the life of the new Miss Jorgensen. She had no intention of embark-

ing on a career as a performer, but offers to appear in nightclubs and theaters rained in while she was still hospitalized in Denmark. She succumbed to the argument that the notoriety would not go away and that she might as well make some money to go along with the inconvenience.

Continued on Page 3-B