The Autobiographies of Earl Lind - Ralph Werther - Jennie June

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we're going to talk about a collection of autobiographies that were written more than a hundred years ago. The two that were published had three names on the title pages. Those were Earl Lynde, Ralph Werther, and Jenny June, and there were slightly different ordering and punctuation between the two books. To quote from the first book, which was titled Autobiography of an Andrew Gine, quote, I have been doomed to be a girl who must pass her earthly existence in a male body. So sometimes these books are described as the first autobiographies of a transgender person ever published in the West. They were printed in nineteen eighteen and nineteen twenty two. That was more than ten years before the publication of Man into Woman, An Authentic Record of a Change of sex. That book had been created from Lily Elbe's diaries and letters after her death. This was also decades before the term transgender was coined and the way people understood and talked about their own lives and the way doctors and psychologists described them. That was all very, very different from today. So we're going to do some level setting about the language that this person used and how that language compares to what is in use today. Before we talk about the books themselves and their significance and the life of the person who wrote them, we also need to note that this person was living at a time when the amount of stigma and shame surrounding any kind of divergence from established social engender norms was much greater than it is today. I'm not saying we're in a great place right now, but it was worse. There will be some discussions of her asthment, sexual assault, self harm, and suicide. And also we're not going to get into graphic detail about the author's sex life, but that was a big part of these books, so we will be discussing that a little bit as well. So we are not actually sure who this person was, although there is research into that and we will talk about it. Earland, Ralph Werther, and Jenny June are all pseudonyms. None of them are the writer's birth name, and this was of course to protect the author because so much of what was in these books was illegal in the addition to being deeply stigmatized or both, particularly in terms of the author's gender presentation and sexual experiences. This meant that the autobiographies themselves were also illegal in the United States under the Federal Comstock Law and other anti obscenity laws. It took about eighteen years for the author to find a publisher that was willing to take on the risk involved with publishing Autobiography of an Andrew John That was ultimately the Medico Legal Journal based in New York. Alfred W. Herzog, who was both a doctor and a lawyer, served as editor for the first two books, and they were sold by mail order only to people like doctors, lawyers, legislators, psychologists, and sociologists. In other words, people who could be interpreted is having some kind of professional reason for needing to read them. This author wrote a lot about gender and sexuality. As Tracy noted earlier, these subjects were understood very differently in the US at the time, and we're talked about with a totally different vocabulary than would generally be used today. These autobiographies are definitely part of LGBTQ history and specifically transgender history, but as Tracy noted, earlier, the term transgender didn't exist then. It didn't exist until about fifty years after these were published. A lot of the words that were used in these autobiographies and in other writing at the time really are not used today. Like people who cross dressed or who had same sex relationships were all described as sexual inverts. Other words like bisexual were used with different meanings, so in these books, bisexual generally describes a person who has elements of two sexes, rather than describing a person who is attracted to people of more than one gender. The author uses andragine essentially to mean a feminine man and fairy spelled fairiie to mean quote, a youthful andragine or other passive invert, for they are perhaps not all members of the extreme class of andragines, whom natural, predestination or other circumstances led to adopt the profession of the fie dejois, in other words, to be a sex worker, a counterpart to andragine is, or a masculine woman. Beyond that, today we think of sex and gender as two different things, but at the time there often wasn't really a separation between them. The idea of inversion didn't distinguish between people that we might describe as gay, men, lesbians, or bisexuals today and people we might describe as transgender. This was all one thing, along with pretty much any other divergence from what was considered the norm. During this period. Many, but not all, psychologists and sexologists also took an approach that was very binary in terms of male and female, with anything that didn't fit within that binary considered to be part of a third sex. Many psychologists also described a man who was attracted to men as being inwardly female, or a woman attracted to women as inwardly male. It was sort of conflating what we think of as gender and sexual orientation today. In the introduction to the first of these autobiographies, Herzog wrote, quote, it must be understood that the congenital homosexualist is really a human being born with the body of a male, with perhaps some female characteristics, but with the soul of a female. The congenital homosexualist always feels himself as a female, and therefore is always attracted towards men, and would rather be in their society than the society of females who are sexually repulsive to him. Because of these and other huge differences in language and how people have understood gender and sexuality. Historians who have studied these autobiographies over the decades since they were written have interpreted them in a range of ways. Some have described Jenny June as a gay man, others as non binary or as a transgender woman. The autobiographies describe Jenny June as having a small stature of feminine frame and breasts as an adult, so others conclude that the writer was intersects, and some have avoided making any specific interpretation. Because of all these differences in language and cultural context, historians who have written about these books and their author in recent years have also taken a number of approaches in terms of the author's name and pronouns. For example, Susan Stryker's Transgender History briefly mentions these books and names their author as Earl Lynde, who also used the names Ralph Werther and Jenny June, but doesn't otherwise use identifying names or pronouns. In Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules gil Peterson describes Jenny June using she her pronouns, but when describing research into who this person might have been, Gerard Channing Joseph uses the name Jenny June and he him pronouns because those are the pronouns that the author generally used, and in Joseph's words, quote, I honor his usage here. Language round, gender, and sexuality have evolved so much in the last hundred years and will continue to evolve that I don't think there's a perfect approach here that everyone will agree on, and I am in no way passing judgment on the choices of any of the historians that we just mentioned on the show. We've generally tried to take our cues from the people that we're talking about as much as we can, and part of me really strongly resist the idea of reassigning someone's pronouns to something other than what they used for themselves. We can imagine what a person might do or how they might identify if they were living today, but it's important to recognize the context that they were actually living in. As Joseph notes, the author of these books did usually describe their own life using he him pronouns and place the names Ralph Werther and Earl Lynde first in these autobiographies and in other writing at the same time. Though in these autobiographies, the author write. It's over and over about feeling like a woman and wanting to be a woman, and praying to be made into a woman, and saying things like quote, please don't call me boy, call me girl. We'll be reading some passages about how terrible it felt to the author to be made to wear boy's clothes and to use the boy's bathroom at school. So, especially while we're living in this moment when so many states in the United States are trying to pass or have past anti trans laws, including laws that are banning evidence based, necessary and life saving medical care for children. Using key him pronouns for this person seemed really wrong. I'm sure the United States is not the only place where this is happening, but the US is where we live. It's what I can speak to. So with all that in mind, when we quote from historical texts in this episode, we're quoting them as they are written, but when we're using our own words, we'll use she her pronouns to tie about Jenny June. So with all of that level setting, we will take a little break, and then when we come back, we will talk more about the books Jenny June wrote three autobiographies. The first autobiography of an Androgyne originally covered her life from birth until about the age of thirty two, but as we mentioned at the top of the show, it took her eighteen years to find a publisher, so she filled in a little detail about those eighteen years before the book went to print. Although she said she was writing this book for a professional audience, it doesn't read like an academic text. There's a lot of writing about her sex life, and it's in a tone and a level of detail that seemed kind of incongruous with the idea of professional writing. Aside from that, it's cleared that she thought doctors and psychiatrists didn't understand people like her, and she wanted to fill in the gaps in their knowledge and also try to dispel stigma. As she concluded, quote, I trust that the publication of my life story will contribute to a correct estimate of androginism on the part of scientists, the molders of public opinion, and the lawmakers, and to a more kindly treatment by society of those born with this curse. It is only expressing half the truth to say that they are more to be pitied than scorned, they are wholly to be pitied. Not long after Autobiography of an Androgyne went to print, Jenny June started working on The Female Impersonators, which came out in nineteen twenty two. This is a counterpart to her first book, this time written for a general audience, with the same overall goals. In her words, quote, my aim was to save thousands of innocent step children of nature from an aggregate of tens of thousands of years in prison, and bring about a repeal of the laws under which they are incarcerated and which are still in the codes, because civilized man has not yet entirely emerged from the prejudice and superstition of the dark ages. My second aim was to put a stop to the continuous string of murders of these step children, the assassins laboring under the delusion that homosexuality is due to deepest moral depravity, and feeling that they are mandatories of society. In ridding the world of these quote monsters, my third aim was to save hundreds of these superlatively melancholy sexual intermediates from suicide as the result of bitter persecution by those who pride themselves on the fact that in their own case, sex has been thoroughly differentiated. In addition to the descriptions of her life and her feelings and experiences, the Female Impersonators included a lot of Jenny June's general thoughts on sexuality, masculinity, and femininity, including the idea that androgynes have both male and male elements. She included examples of mythical and historical figures that she interpreted as andrew giants, including Apollo, Hermaphroditis, and ganny Meade from Greek mythology, and the historical figures of Alexander the Great, Walt Whitman, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Shakespeare. She thought Shakespeare was a pen name for Francis Bacon, which was a pretty popular idea in the mid late nineteenth century. There were still people debating it in my college when I was an undergrad. Will probably never do an episode on the who wrote William Shakespeare's works because people feel too passionately about it. Yep. This book also includes the stories of two other to use her term female impersonators, who she names as Frank Unice and Angelo Phyllis. To be clear, she did not mean female impersonators as in vaudeville performers. Although the people she was talking about could take the stage, these were instinctive female impersonators, so she meant other people like herself, and she reprinted the text of three newspaper articles reporting on the murders of other androgynes, edited to preserve those people's anonymity. She offered her commentary on the reporting and on the crimes that were being reported. For example, one of these articles was about someone who had been found strangled on a yacht dressed in women's clothes. According to the news report, there was no reason for suicide and no motive for murder. But in Jenny June's commentary quote, the strongest of reasons for suicide and the strongest of motives for murder, andregines, because so terribly misjudged by their associates, are the most melancholy and prone to suicide of any class of mankind. Moreover, they are often murdered on the strong motive of intense loathing felt by prudes ignorant of abnormal psychology, in whose eyes the andragine is a sodomite, with all the terrible though false connotation of that term. Such prudes believe themselves mandatories of society to rid the world of the monster. The Female Impersonators ends with two condensed psychiatric articles about Andrewginism, again with Jenny June's commentary, including pushing back in areas where she thought the psychiatric community was just wrong. There was also a selection of poems that she had written, what she called Andregine Verse. There are also poems included in Autobiography of An Androgine as well. Alfred W. Herzag wrote introductions to both of these books. Regarding Autobiography of an Andragine, he wrote, quote, this book is published in an endeavor to obtain justice and humane treatment for the Androgines, that class of homosexualists, into whom homosexuality is not an acquired vice, but in whom it is congenital. He later noted that he had agreed to publish it because he had been quote persuaded that Andraginism is not sufficiently understood, and that therefore androgynes were unjustly made to suffer. Herzog also explained why, even though he was listed as editor, he had not made changes to the author's words beyond ones that were necessary to protect people's anonymity. Essentially, he thought that the author had created quote a psychoanalysis of himself without attempting to do so. Herzog thought that inadvertently created psychoanalysis was worthy of careful professional study. We don't want to leave the impression that Herzog was entirely supportive of Jenny June or her efforts, though in introductions to both of the books he treats her and people like her with both empathy and revulsion. He drew a clear distinction between people who are born andregines, or maybe develop these kinds of affinities during childhood, and people who chose to pursue same sex relationships later on in life. He described that as a vice. Also described Autobiography of An Androgine as having quote neither literary nor scientific value, and he called it subject matter nauseating. He also described The Female Impersonators as a failure as a book meant to quote set forth the facts of androginism for the general public. He said that he thought the general public would find it immoral or revolting. At the same time, though this was all happening when cross dressing and same sex relationships were illegal, especially same sex relationships between men and Herzog stress that people like Jenny June should not be punished for who they were or for quote harmless sexual lapses. Both Herzog and Jenny June also differentiated between pederasts and others who were abusing or otherwise harming people, and people who were simply trying to live their lives according to their own innate natures and who were being unjustly imprisoned, blackmailed, driven to suicide, or murdered. Jenny June wrote her third book, Riddle of the Underground, in tandem with the second, and it's not clear why the Medico Legal Journal didn't publish it as it did the others. At this point, all we have of this text are fragments that were discovered by doctor Randall Sell in twenty ten. These fragments were in the archives of the United States National Laboratory of Medicine in the papers of doctor Victor Robinson. Robinson had worked out a contract with the author to publish Riddle of the Underground serially in the journal Medical Life. While we don't have all the text of Riddle of the Underground, we do have Jenny June's description of it, which was published as an advertisement at the end of the Female Impersonators. Like the first two books, it covered her life and her experiences with her gender and sexuality. It also focused on the histories of the white light and red light districts of New York since the start of the nineteenth century, as well as vice and crime, slums, lodging houses, nightlife, and her time as a female impersonator in these parts of the city. It does not seem as though Victor Robinson wound up printing a Riddle of the Underground in Medical Life. It seems like if he had, someone would have found it by now. I was only able to find a scan of that publication from nineteen twenty, which was before Riddle of the Underground was written. But if it were ever unearthed, this could turn out to be just a really important resource into the underground nightlife and the social life of LGBTQ people in New York during this period. We're going to take a quick break, and after that we'll talk about what we know about Jenny June's life as gleaned from these anonymized autobiographies. As we said at the top of the show, we don't know for sure who Jenny June was, and identifying details were changed in these books to try to protect people was anonymity. But according to Jenny June's autobiographies, she was born in Connecticut in eighteen seventy four and was the fourth of her parents eleven children, although at another point in the same book she describes herself as the shortest out of their eight children. Not sure what's going on with that discrepancy. This was an affluent Protestant family. They were living in the nicest area of their town, which was about fifty miles north of New York City. Jenny June described having sexual experiences starting at a very young age, and these were with other children, not with adults, although in one case this was with the boy who was five years older. That is very disturbing to read. Yeah, the age difference, even among children that young. It just it felt like a lot. Yeah. At this point, all children usually wore dresses or gowns for their first few years of life, and in Autobiography of an Androgyne, Jenny June described the expectation that she start wearing trousers this way quote. My first impression of the stern realities of life came at the age of six, when my parents insisted on putting me in breeches. I wanted to wear skirts all my life. I shrunk from going out in distinctively male garb and dodged behind the trees when I discovered an acquaintance approaching. The sensation was almost as painful as if I had been compelled to walk the streets naked. Until I reached my early thirties, I did not cease to regret being compelled to taboo feminine apparel, and was constantly being criticized by members of my family for choosing bright colors and as fancy apparel as a male can possibly wear. From the age of seven to twelve, I occasionally masqueraded in a sister's dress coquetting with my boy acquaintances, the same as if I were physically a girl. Jenny June started going to a day school for boys at the age of nine and was mocked and bullied by classmates for being a feminine. She described being so horrified at the idea of using the boy's bathroom that she wound up losing control of her bladder during class and being sent home to change. This, of course, led to more bullying, including classmates beating her to quote make a man out of you. Jenny June described an increasing fixation on sex during her early teens, especially on oral sex. At around age fifteen, she turned to devout religious belief with the hope of changing herself. Quote. I definitely chose the Christian ministry and a heathen land as my field of labor when I had finished my education. This greatly increased interest in religion fortunately put a stop to my morbid reveries. I now looked upon my yearning for fallacio as my besetting sin, and until the age of nineteen, fought against it as few others have struggled to be freed from lustful desires. While pursuing this religious devotion, Jenny June became really isolated and started to believe that she might not live to adulthood. She had started contemplating suicide much earlier in her childhood, and in her mid teens, these suicidal thoughts became a lot more frequent and pronounced. She went through periods of intense shame and distress. In September of eighteen ninety one, Jenny June started college in New York City in a weird irony. Her classmates soon gave her the nickname Anthony Comstock, namesake of the Comstock laws that would later make her books illegal. Because people thought that she acted like a prude, she started going out at night into different neighborhoods of New York looking for sex and doing sex work, using aliases with the hope that no one would trace her back to the college. Over the course of her life, her aliases were Rafael, Wather, Ralph Wather, Earl Lynde, Jenny, June, and Pussy. Raphael was after the painter Raphael quote because he was the greatest ultra androgyne who ever lived. He was my idol, my ideal. I wished him to pass through the earthly life all over again. In my body were there was after Gerta's novel Sorrows of Young were there in her own words quote As for the genesis of my first feminine name, I chose Jenny at four. I have always considered it the most feminine of names. When I began my double life, I appended June. I adopted that surname because of its beautiful associations, as well as the repetition of the J and N. I later substituted the feminine pussy because so nicknamed to my delight by the tremendously virile. I later adopted Earl, primarily because it rhymes with girl, the creature of enchantment that I longed to be, and secondarily because it arouses noble ideas. I adopted Lynde after Jenny Lynde, one of my models, kind of as an aside. Jenny June was also the pen name of journalist and author Jane Cunningham Crowley. This is something this Jenny June said she realized only after the fact, and she also struggled with her mental health. In her words, quote, paroxysms of melancholia occasionally came upon me at night when I felt their approach. I could not stand it to remain in my room, where I must be noiseless, but went out to a deserted spot in a large park near where I lived, where I would shriek repeatedly. All my muscles seemed to be rigid, and my fists were clenched. I would dig my fingernails into my palms and wave my arms wildly. Within a few minutes, my strength would be completely gone. I looked upon these paroxysms as fits of insanity, and I feared I would become permanently and violently insane. Jenny June started consulting doctors, hoping they would take away what she described as her abnormal passion. The treatments she received included drugs and electroshock therapy. One doctor advised her to get married word quote, I cultivated the society of a girlfriend, but after months of effort, feminine beauty proved powerless to attract me in the least, while male beauty was constantly increasing its way over me. Another doctor recommended castration, but when Jenny June looked for someone to do the procedure, she was told she might regret it later. At some point, Jenny June was expelled from her college, although she did eventually finish a bachelor's degree and went on to do at least some graduate study. Finally, in eighteen ninety three, she decided that this was how she was trying to change. It was fruitless, and she should stop struggling against it. She allowed herself to live in what she described as her French doll baby spirit for about one night a week. She wrote a lot about feeling both feminine and babyish. Sometimes this one night a week allowed the rest of her life to quote flow on peacefully and blissfully. But at other times she felt just a huge amount of abhorrence and shame, she wrote, quote as the classy, hypocritical, and bigoted overworld considers a bisexual as monster and outcast. I was driven to a career in the democratic, frank, liberal minded underworld. While my male soul was a leader in scholarship at the University Uptown. My female soul, one evening a week, flaunted itself as a French doll baby in the shadowy haunts of nightlife downtown. She frequented a hotel that she called Hotel Comfort to preserve its anonymity, as well as a club that she called Pugilists Haven because its regulars included a lot of prize fighters and gamblers. She was also a regular at Columbia Hall, also known by the disparaging nickname Press Hall, which was a gay bar in brothel in the Bowery neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. By the time the autobiographies were written, that had been closed down, so she didn't need to disguise its name. According to Jenny June, an organization called Circle Hermaphroditos had been formed. Quote for Defense against the world's bitter persecution of bisexuals, and they met in an upstairs room at Columbia Hall. The only primary sources we really have about this organization are Jenny June's autobiographies, so some historians have concluded that it may have been more like kind of an informal social circle that nicknamed itself, but it's possible that this was the oldest known transgender rights organization in the United States. She may have also been connected to Aliah Walker, daughter of Madame CJ. Walker. Aliliah Walker had become president of her late mother's cosmetics company, and she was known for hosting enormous parties at her townhouse in Manhattan, welcoming artists, writers, musicians, and other figures from the Harlem Renaissance, as well as people who might be described as gay or transgender today. Some of those were the same people. I got absolutely derailed when researching this when I was like, wait, Madam C. J. Walker's daughter, Wit. Yeah. Jenny June also attended and participated in drag Balls, which she described as the spectacle of a lifetime quote. Some of the costumes had been ordered from Paris and London. Many have already graced the Mardi grav New Orleans or Niece. Practically every romantic or grotesque character ever heard of is on the floor. Monkeys, parrots, geese, yellow kids, Foxy Grandpa, Happy Hooligan, Cupid, Mephistophels, and a thousand others. For about eighteen months, she spent a lot of time in nocturnal rambles in parts of Manhattan, including Hill's Kitchen, Fourteenth Street, and Mulberry Street. She was particularly attracted to Irish American and Italian American men, so she spent a lot of time in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. There were also class elements to all of this. Jenny June was from a well off family but was cruising in poorer neighborhoods. Sometimes these hookups seem to have been fulfilling to her, and there were times when she wrote about falling in love, but at multiple points she was also robbed, beaten, sometimes to the point of requiring hospitalization, or blackmailed, and more than once she was afraid that she was going to be murdered because of what she was doing. Eventually, Jenny June turned her attention to military bases located outside of New York City. She describes herself as popular and welcomed among some of the military men, but she was also arrested at one point, and her family, who lived nearby, found out about it. Although she never discussed it with them, Her father quote soon began to treat me regularly with extreme bitterness, as if he wished I had never been born. Some of the soldiers that one of the military bases also tried to blackmail her, and when she tried to run away from them, they caught up to her and beat her severely. In her account, she tried to bring these soldiers to justice, which led to a court martial in which she felt like she was the one on trial. Eventually, Jenny June, in her masculine persona, was hired as a private secretary to an elderly rich man. This allowed her to travel to Europe in his company, and she sought out the kinds of underground nightlife that she had already known in New York and visited military bases overseas. But after they returned from some travel, she was recognized by a delivery driver who came to her employer's house, and she had to resign. Throughout all of this, Jenny June had experienced a huge amount of emotional and psychological distress because of her desire to be a woman and her desire for sexual experiences with men. She described her desires as insatiable and accompanied by spermataria or excessive seamen. In the nineteenth century, this was a diagnosis that was often connected to social concerns about male sexuality and sexual practices, so it's not really clear whether Jenny June was having a physiological issue or whether this was more something connected to a lot of social stigma around sex. Regardless, at the age of twenty eight, she chose to be castrated with the hope of getting relief from all of this, and just for clarity, this was the removal of her testicles, not her penis. She had also been waxing her facial hair for years. As it grew back in. She would stay home for the last couple of days before it became long enough to wax again so that people would not see her with it. She had hoped that castration would address this as well. Quote minor motives were that I would prefer to possess one less mark of the male, and that I thought that facial hair cells would cease to function, and I thus be rid of my most detested and most troublesome badge of masculinity. About two years passed after her surgery, before Jenny June felt like her sexual or as were subsiding, although her facial hair never really changed. Even though that effect hadn't been as she hoped, she described this as giving her a new lease on life once she had recovered from an initial loss of physical strength that followed the procedure. At the age of thirty two, Jenny June moved out of the city to a smaller town where it was no longer possible to maintain a double life. While still remaining anonymous. She wrote her autobiographies and eventually got a job as an assistant at the Medico Legal Journal. When she first tried to get her book published there, she said it had been written by a friend. By the time the first of the books was published, she wrote a feeling as though her sex drive had nearly reached its end, something that she found to be a huge relief. Has this work as a private secretary and the work as an assistant at the Medical Legal Journal, these were like a couple of jobs that she had over the course of her life that she wrote about, and she had just a series of like professional level jobs doing a variety of things that we did not really get into a lot of detail. In addition to her autobiographies, Jenny June also published articles in at least one medical journal, the American Journal of Urology and Sexology. This was under the name Ralph Werther Jenny June. She did this over the course of nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen. Some of these articles cover the same basic territory as her autobiography. One piece, which was titled The Girl Boys Suicide, combines her own experiences as a child with that of another child that she knew of when she was growing up, who had died by suicide after being tormented by peers for being effeminate. Jenny June's autobiography does seem to have gotten some academic and medical attention. US Army doctor Robert W. Shufelt references it in a nineteen oh five paper in the Pacific Medical Journal. Shoefelt got a copy of the manuscript from someone, in his words, well known to the author. It might have been Jenny June herself. Shufelt seems to have believed that the author of the manuscript had died by suicide around the age of thirty. In an article about perversion and inversion, Shufelt described the autobiography as required reading for quote every sociologist, anthropologist, and professional person in this country. Numerous medical journals mentioned or reviewed at least one of these books in the years after they were published. Yeah, she clearly got a copy of it at some point during that eighteen year process of trying to find a publisher. Autobiography of an Androgyne found renewed interest after being reprinted in nineteen seventy five and then again in two thousand and eight, and then throughout that time, researchers have tried to figure out who Jenny June may have been, since that would add further context to our understanding of her life and of the world that she was describing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In October twenty twenty two, the website out History announced that Channing Gerard Joseph had concluded that Jenny June was journalist and essayist Maury Sabin. Joseph based this conclusion on extensive research through resources like census records and details from Jenny June's and Maury Saban's lives, as well as comparisons of their written work and known photos of them. Maury Sabin was born in Massachusetts rather than Connecticut, in eighteen seventy rather than eighteen seventy four. Both attended prep schools for boys. Both were expelled from college. Saban also had a sister named Jenny. May and Joseph found similarities between Jenny June's writing style and Maury Saban's published essays. Other potential authors have also been proposed over the years as well. This is really tricky to conclusively prove since, as we said earlier, details from Jenny June's books are intentionally obbuscated. Unfortunately, since we don't know who was writing under the name Jenny, we really don't know what happened to her after those autobiographies end. So much to talk about on Friday. There is so much to talk about on Friday. In the meantime, we have a listener mail that is a little lighter, although it is also about our Brown Dog Affair episode which was about vivisection. This is from Katie and Katie wrote, Hello Holly and Tracy. Never thought i'd have a reason to write you, but I'm glad to today. I heard your Brown Dog Affair episode, such a heartbreaking tale. While listening, I realized I used to live near the statue the newer iteration. I've passed it many a time when walking my own dog through Battersea Park, so yes, you may be happy to know it is indeed in Battersea Park. What's more, the statue is in a little patch of doggy heaven. It's more hidden away now. It's an enclosed walkway surrounded by trees, somewhere near the pagoda. It's probably the most squirrel populated part of the park, so you'll often hear dog running around having the time of their life near it. We also get a lot of birds and green parrots here. Yeah, the green parrots are kind of a thing in London. There's many a rumor as to why they're about. Beyond it is a huge open field where dogs and owners are often found playing together. If I remember correctly. The inscription is now kind of different, more subtle, but to me at least, I think it's the perfect resting place for any dog after a hard life. I do think if dogs have a heaven it must look at least a little like Battersea Park. I know you guys like your pet photos, so please enjoy some of our not so little Welsh Corgi named Badger. He's as cute as he is troublesome, and we work hard to give him the best life a dog and have goodness knows, he repays the love tenfold. I hope this helps you both smile. Thank you for making our dog walks so very educational. Best wishes, Katie. What unadorable Welsh corgy in one picture sitting next to a pumpkin and other looks like next to maybe a square shmellow with a cant of Doctor Pepper a big close up of doggy face. Thank you so much for this email, Katie. I'm glad to have a little more knowledge of what that part of the park is like, aunt to have these adorable dog pictures. We'll talk some more about our personal thoughts in this episode on Friday. If you'd like to send us a note, We're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and we're all over social media at missed in History, where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram and You can subscribe to our show at the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'll like be at your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.