Transvestia

culous persons. Seeing these people, I could not asso- ciate my own feelings with them, for they seemed to me like rather grotesque caricatures. And yet I dreaded that might have some terrible complusion to be like them, and the thought almost sickened me.

I began to hound the psychology shelves of the lib- raries for more information, but here too there was little accurate information. In the only books on abnormal be- haviour I saw then, if the subject of men in female cloth- ing was mentioned at all, it was generally given only a few lines within a chapter on homosexuality. In a few such books where there were sections discussing the cause of perversions, it was mentioned that dressing a boy as a girl was often a cause. This, of course, made me more worried than ever. In no book that I found was TV men- tioned as a separate subject, so I thought that because I had this inner desire to wear dresses and especially to have long hair, therefore by definition I must also be developing into a homosexual. Although terribly worried about this, I was extremely preplexed, for on trying to analyse my feelings I realized that I was not even slight- ly attracted sexually to men. In fact even the thought of it repelled me. But on the other hand I had a very definite attraction for girls. And so I was able to con- vince myself that I was still relatively normal.

About this time I had my first sexual experience, having now finished grammer school and taking graphic arts at polytechnic. There was (and is) considerable promiscuity among London college students, so that it was not long before I was intimate with several girls. I won't go into details, but fortunately my initiation was delightfully enjoyable. I am still glad of this, for if things had gone wrong because of my nervouseness and inexperience, perhaps my developement could have been altered to a different course.

In my anxiety to convince myself that I was normal I persued girls avidly. After several affairs I was finally reasonably assured that I could not be homosexual, which eased my anxiety a great deal. However, I still could not displace these strange inner longings to wear feminine attire.

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