Christine Jorgensen
By Michele Ingrassia
Throughout the years of living under a magnifying glass, Jorgensen retained her sense of humor. But in her 1967 book, "Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Biography," it was obvious that she had considered life before the operation anything but joyous. As a child growing up in the Bronx, Jorgensen said she was a "frail, tow-headed, introverted" little boy who "ran from fistfights and rough-and-tumble games." When she was 5, she wrote, her Christmas dream was for "a pretty doll with long gold hair." Under the tree, there was a red railroad train.
A graduate of Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx-Class of '45-Jorgensen was drafted into the Army a few months after the end of World War II, as a 19-year-old who admitted years later that he felt like a woman trapped in a mans body.
The road to Jorgensen's transsexual surgery in Copenhagen began in New York, with years of independent research. At the Manhattan Medical and Dental Assistants School, Jorgensen devoured information on the subject of sexual hormones and glandular imbalances. Then, through a friend who was a physician, the young man discovered it was possible to obtain sex change treatments and operations in Scandinavia. In 1950, George Jorgensen Jr. left for Denmark, staying with friends and keeping his plans a secret from everyone, including his family. It was not until two years later-on the eve of the second operation-that Christine Jorgensen finally wrote to her parents in New York: "Nature made a mistake, which I have corrected, and I am now your daughter." Although Jorgensen's parents were shocked by the news, they welcomed their child home.
Jorgensen herself never married, but there were countless reports of liassons: In 1952, a Texas GI told the world that he had dated her in Copenhagen "and she had the best body of any girl I ever met." In 1959, she became engaged; her first fiance later broke the engagement. "I've never been married," she said in the Newsday interview, "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 I was engaged to."
When the noteriety died down, Jorgensen settled into a fairly private existence. After she left Long Island in 1967, she lived quietly in California, first at the Chateau Marmont, the historic apartment-hotel on Hollywood's Sunset Strip, then in a four bedroomed house in Laguna Niguel, 60 miles south of L.A., and for the last two years in San Clemente.
Although she had dropped out of the lecture circuit for 15 years, she returned on-and-off during the 1980s. She had also been lpanning a sequel to her autobiography and had been trying to find a U.S. distributer for a Dutch-made documentary on transsexuals, lesbians and female impersonators. After she was diagnosed as having cancer in 1987, she confessed that one of her remaining dreams was to appear on the hit T.V. show, "Murder She Wrote."
Jorgensen never found even fleeting fame on T.V. But she didn't need it. To many, she had won more enduring recognition, as a pioneer, as a man-turned-woman who broke down at least one of society's sexual barriers. For her own part, though, she saw it as nothing more that a case of self-preservation. "Does it take bravery and courage for a person with polio to want to walk?" she once said. "It's very hard to speculate on, but if I hadn't done what I did, I may not have survived. I may not have wanted to live. Life simply wasn't worth much. Some people may find it easy to live a lie, I can't. And that's what it would have been-telling the world I'm something I'm not."
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