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| Jan Morris, travel writer and transsexual |
Hay and Apples |
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I fear my [Lancing College] suitors thought me frigid, even the ones I liked best, but I did not mean to be ungrateful. I wasn't in the least shocked by their intentions, but I simply could not respond in kind. We indulged our illicit pleasures generally in the haylofts of farms, or the loose field-ricks they still built in those days, and I think it is a telling fact that of those first sexual experiences I remember most vividly, and most voluptuously, not the clumsy embraces of Bolsover Major, not the heavy breathing of his passion or his sinuous techniques of trouser-removal, but the warm slightly rotted sensation of hay beneath my body, and the smell of fermenting apples from the barns below . . . It all seemed plain enough to me. I was born with the wrong body, being feminine by gender but male by sex. (Shropshire, England, early 1940s)
from Conundrum by Jan Morris (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, © 1974)
© 2001 Nerve.com, Inc.
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