bloom. There was one child by this marriage and it lasted 9 years before a divorce set in. I had eventually in desperation told her about myself and she had consulted a psychiatrist who told her I was a homosexual and that did it. Of course I wasn't and am not now but that event determined me to do what I could to educate the poor be- nighted psychiatrists. A year after the divorce, in a controversy over the child, I won the argument in court but lost it in the newspapers since she gave them the story and I was exposed.

I had already met the girl who was to be my second wife and she sat thru the whole trial with me. She was not very tolerant to begin with but eventually became not only understanding but cooperative and helpful. She did much to help me grow as a person since she af- forded me the opportunity to dress as I pleased when I came home from work. Gradually I came to develop a sense of being me, Virginia, with only a minimum amount of femme clothing on. I did not have to be all gussied up from heels to hair to feel that I was ME. I had de- signed a little secret room behind my wardrobe in the new home we built and made it my boudoir. When I emerged from there, regard- less of how much or how little of Virginia's things I had on, I WAS Virginia to myself and was accepted by her that way.

As a result of the newspaper exposure I felt that I had lost every- thing there was to lose. So, since there was nothing further to be lost, I could safely undertake to help others who still had much to lose. I therefore began to publish Transvestia, the first issue appearing with the date of January 1960. I had 25 subscriptions to that issue and thus began an eventful 10 years.

Those events have been chronicled as they occurred in the pages of this magazine. However, many of those issues have been out of print for years so that many readers know very little about some of them. I don't wish to take the time and space to recount them all in detail here, but I do think it may put the whole period into some perspective and may also give many of the readers a little further insight into me as a person to recount very briefly some of the things I have been through both good and bad during this time.

As indicated above I got married for the second time in 1954 so that I had been happily married for 6 years before I published the first issue of this magazine. My wife, of course, knew all about me and about the magazine and helped me in various ways in the publica- tion thereof.

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