It surprises my when I look back now but as a child I was quite ignorent about sex. As I began to grow older, and the full impact of my desires hit home, I began to experience a great deal of guilt. When this guilt was coupled with a strong desire to gain an acceptance among my peers, it resulted in several years of frustration.

By my senior year in high school I had become captain of the football team and had been honored by "All League" despite my size. I was also vice president of my class and was adolesently in love with an attractive girl. I was to all appearances a successful young man. Yet I continued to "dress" and I was bewildered that such a thing could be so powerful in the face of all my masculine success.

When I entered college, one of my pre-requisite courses was psychology and I began to see a solution to my dilema. Along with my studies, I became involved with the social life of the university. I joined a fraternity and gained quite a reputation as a ladies' man. I felt sure that insight through learning and success with women would finally cure me of an ailment which I now knew had a name.

But in my final semester, while working on a term paper on transvestism for one of my courses, I began to realize the impossibility of my task. Journal after journal, report after report, spoke only negatively about a "cure". But I had only to look into my own life to see the truth I was now twenty-three years old and I had been dressing for most, if not all, of my life. I had fought with myself many times. I had gained many new insights into my problem and through my experiences I had become secure in my manhood, yet I was no closer to an end to my behavior than I had been on that first day so many years before.

I began to worry seriously about where my life would take me. Could it be that I was to be alone for all of my years? Would I ever be a success? How could I reconcile my behavior with my desire to marry and raise a happy family?

These problems, however, were quickly taken from me as I was drafted two days after my last final.

46