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By Root 1936 0

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 The Male Hormone, a popular account of the science of endocrinology, was the catalyst that was to begin the process that transformed the anonymous George into the world-renowned Christine. “ ‘Manhood is chemical, manhood is testosterone. Over and beyond testosterone, manhood seems to be partly a state of mind’ … As I read on, my mind raced with this new knowledge, for throughout the narrative, there was woven a tiny thread of recognition pulled from my own private theories.”

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