Conservative men in conservative dresses

The world of cross-dressers is for the most part a world of traditional men, traditional marriages, and truths turned inside out.

Heterosexual cross-dressers bother almost everyone. Gay people regard them with disdain or affectionate incomprehension, something warmer than tolerance but not much. Transsexuals regard them as men "settling" for cross-dressing because they don't have the courage to act on their transsexual longing, or else as closeted and so homophobic that they prefer wearing a dress to facing their desire for another man. Other straight men tend to find them funny or sad, and some find them enraging. The only people on whose kindness and sympathy cross dressers can rely, are women: their wives and, even more dependably, their hairdressers, their salespeople, their photographers and makeup artists, their electrolysists, their therapists, and their friends.

Drag queens make sense to most of us. They represent congruence of sexual orientation, appearance, and temperament-feminine gay men dressing as women for a career, like RuPaul, or, less lucratively, for prostitution, or to express their sense of theater and femininity. (Barney Frank as a drag queen makes no more sense, intuitively, than Dick Cheney as one.) Actors whose most famous performance is as a female-from Barry Humphries, with his brilliant and textured Dame Edna, to Flip Wilson, with his one-note gag of Geraldine-don't puzzle us. Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire and the boys in Some Like It Hot don't puzzle us; they're just men doing what they have to do to survive, learning a nice lesson about the travails of womanhood, and giving one on the benign uses of masculine self-esteem. Even the cross-dressing women of history, women from many countries and every century since the ancient Greeks-from Joan of Arc to Pope Joan to America's jazz-playing Billy Tipton, to Disney's adorable Mulan-don't puzzle us, they chose to live as men because they couldn't otherwise have the lives they wanted.

Heterosexual cross-dressers-straight men who have not only a wish but a need to wear women's clothes and accessories-manage to be marginal among heterosexual men, marginal among other men who wear women's clothes, marginal in the community of sexual minorities, and completely acceptable only to fetishists, who take anyone who claims to belong. Gay men do not say, "Oh, you're a straight man who likes to wear a dress? Welcome aboard" Straight men do not say, "Well, except for the dress thing, you're just like me. Howdy, partner" Even in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where cross-dressers hold their annual fall Fantasia Fair, few of the residents, gay or straight, seem to recognize these men as people with whom they have a lot in common.

Many heterosexual cross-dressers never come out of the closet, not even to their wives. Others tell their wives after ten or twenty or thirty years of marriage, sometimes because they've been caught wearing their wives' clothes, sometimes because the clothes have been discovered. the revelation that a man himself is the "other woman" is a staple of cross dresser histories.) Heterosexual cross-dressers often spend their whole adult lives ordering size 20 cocktail dresses from catalogues and dressing in secret, with only the mirror for company. But lots of these men, driven by loneliness, by unmet narcissistic needs (all dressed up and nowhere to go), by risk-taking impulses (it's not hard to grasp that a forty-five-year-old 240-pound former Marine strolling through the Mall of America in full drag is consciously courting risk), want to cross-dress outside their bedrooms. Engineers, accountants, truck drivers and computer programmers, disproportionately represented among the retired military, predominately Christian and conservative (far more moderate Republicans than liberal Democrats), these men go to get-togethers in Kansas City, in Pittsburgh, in Seattle, all over America. They make forays into malls in pairs, and they go to tolerant gay bars in small groups. They browse in the Belladonna Plus Size Shop of Beverly, Massachusetts, and they hang out at Cross/Cross Consultants, of Houston, which offers special package rates for shopping, a makeover, and dinner at a restaurant; To weekly or monthly meetings, of six or ten or twenty guys, in Nashua, New Hampshire, and Trenton, New Jersey, in Springfield, Missouri, and Water Mill, New York, and throughout the Bible Belt. Arizona has enough cross-dressers to support chapters in both Phoenix and Tucson. A man who cross dresses and needs to be seen can go to conferences like Fantasia Fair and Fall Harvest, or take trips on any number of cruise lines that happily host groups of cross-dressers and their spouses amid a thousand other guests sailing to Catalina and other destinations.

Sometimes the wives wish to come, to support their husbands and to enjoy the trip, or to hang out with other wives, like golf widows or wives in Al-Anon. Some come because their husbands need them to. "I don't mind, but really, if he could learn to do his makeup properly and fasten his own bra, I'd rather stay home" one woman told me who later called to say that she had bought her husband a video guide to makeup for men and a magnifying mirror, and said she was resigning as his dresser. "He can ask one of the other guys to hook his bra,' Happy wives are everyone's favorites, enthusiastic or grimly accepting, at these functions they are simultaneously objects of much public appreciation and utterly secondary to the men's business.

Reliable statistics about the number of heterosexual cross-dressers don't seem

to exist In the fall of 2000 I spent several weeks trying to pin down that number. I checked with Jane Ellen and Frances Fairfax, of Tri-Eess, the Society for the Second Self, "an international support and social organization for Heterosexual Cross dressers, their spouses, partners, children and friends" "Maybe three or four million" Jane Ellen hazarded. "Maybe somewhere between three and five percent of the adult [male] population. People who claim it's more- I think that's just, you know, a minority wanting to be bigger than it is. And people who say more like one or two percent-I think those are the ones who are ashamed." When I asked Ray Blanchard (head of clinical sexology services at Canada's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) for an estimate, he agreed that three to five percent sounded about right. There are really only two points of agreement between Blanchard and the Fairfaxes: that no one knows how many heterosexual cross-dressers there are, and that all these men in dresses who assert that they are straight, sometimes to the point of annoyance, are straight.

Tri-Ess was founded in 1976, as a melding of several cross-dressing groups, including the historic Hose and Heels Club, which began meeting in Califonia, in 1961, and which is to many cross-dressers what Stonewall is to gay men: the beginning of the end of shame (although not, for the cross-dressers, the end of fiercely preserved anonymity).

Jane Ellen is a man with a mission: to save cross dressers from their worst selves and to preserve their marriages. A central tenet of TriEss is that cross-dressing is a gift-that wearing women's clothes is both relaxing and expressive of a feminine self that is nurturing and gentle-and that it can enhance any marriage if the wife is wise enough to appreciate it and strong enough to corral what can be, as Jane Ellen admits, a narcissistic, self-indulgent habit. In the words of "Do You Know Someone Who Is a Cross dresser?"

Most [cross-dressers] are ordinary men who have discovered a feminine aspect to their personalities, and desire to transcend the narrow stereotypes mandated by conventional society. Happy in their masculinity, they have simply discovered a feminine gender " gift" and decided to explore it ... There is within each man a set of personality potentials that are part of his birthright, but that society labels as "feminine" and says he should suppress. Cross dressers have made contact with these potentials and found their _expression fulfilling. Integrating these into their whole personalities, cross dressers are able to smooth off some of the macho rough edges programmed by their upbringing. The result is a healthier whole person.

Once a wife or partner realizes her mate isn't leaving her for another man or for a new life as a woman, or taking risks that could destroy their financial and family life, the two of them can seek a balanced solution ... Many of the traits that attracted her in the first place-sensitivity, kindness, appreciation of beauty, etc.-can now be seen as belonging to that "woman within"

Cross-dressing is an attempt to resolve an internal conflict, and it's not about fabric. If we had clothing for men and women that was identical in every way except men wore shirts with four buttons and women had shirts with five, cross-dressers would want more than anything to have the shirt with five. We don't know why". Our categories and descriptions are so narrow and self-protective that we don't have words for the drive to cross dress, we don't have any language to describe the mixture of attraction and envy that often leads these men to have sex with women while thinking of themselves as male lesbians.

An individual, usually heterosexual, who desires and needs to dress in the clothing of the opposite sex at different times throughout his or her life. This compulsive behavior generally starts young and the individual struggles alone for many years with this closeted need. Cross dressing is not a sickness, but represents a person who enjoys expressing another aspect of his personality and gains both emotional and physical pleasure from this transition. It is not a hobby, but a necessity and Cross dressing is for life. Cross-dressing is a compulsion, but we must not see it as a sickness. A good wife should tolerate it because the man has no choice, but it isn't too hard to tolerate because it's a gift. It is about fun and pleasure-and it's a necessity. The necessity of cross-dressing is frightening to the men and to their wives, and their wish to tame it, to characterize it as a preference and a gift, is understandable. I come to see why so many women find themselves sympathetic to cross-dressers: women are raised to be sympathetic, and protective toward the vulnerable, and there is something sweet, unexpected, and powerful about being a woman and sympathize with a man not because he demands it but because you genuinely feel sorry for him, for his debilitating envy and his fear of discovery and his sense of powerlessness to live as he wants. One evening Peggy Rudd, writer of “My Husband Wears My Clothes" says, with a slightly pursed expression, "My next book is on joy: the difference between the level of joy that cross-dressers experience"-she holds her hand up over her head-"and the level of joy that their wives experience" Her hand drops to her waist. The cross dressers around us say nothing. They nod, sympathizing with the poor wives left behind and trying not to show how much better a time they are having. I think of the twinkle in Mel's eyes and the fact that nothing like a twinkle ever appears in Peggy's. It must be psychologically exhausting for her to turn this pain into a shared hobby, his compulsion into entertainment, his need into an occasion for celebration, and I still prefer his company.