TRANSVESTIA

me if I had to depend on it for a living. Fortunately, the sale of my orig- inal manufacturing business plus savings and investments keeps me go- ing. So although Chevalier is a successful business in this sense, that was not the original purpose. I actually printed the first issue of TVia with 25 subscribers and $100 of initial capital.

No, my reason for starting TVia was exactly as indicated on the inside front cover to provide "Entertainment, Education and Expression." I have wanted more than anything else to teach, suggest, help and bring to FPs self-acceptance and peace of mind because I was and am very aware, from long and bitter experience, just how important it is to the FP to achieve these goals. This then brings us back to the matter of the mater- ial that does not appear in TVia.

Erich Fromm, the widely read psychiatrist and author, has pointed out that two of the indications of maturity are the ability of an individual to make the important decisions in his life him (or herself) rather than to take them from some real or imagined authority — whether that author- ity be parent, teacher, leader, an important personage or a book, philo- sophy, doctrine, social movement or just custom. The second is that hav- ing made his own decisions that he have the guts and the integrity to take the responsibility for the results of those decisions.

Now put my purposes in publishing TVia together with Fromm's conception of maturity and maybe you'll understand a bit more. FPs live in a fantasy world, we all know that. More than one wife has com- mented that FPs are much like immature schoolgirls and of course the wives are right, little as the FPs like to hear it. The reasons are obvious. FPs don't get enough elapsed time, not enough help and not enough ex- periences as girls to allow them to grow up and to mature. That's a fact that can't be helped under existing circumstance but that is no reason to take it lying down. There are other ways of maturing.

My past history is pretty much like any other FPs. I didn't have much opportunity, experience and certainly no counsel or help of any kind for a great many years. But I had a good mind, a better than average educa- tion, scientific training and above all a driving curiosity about every- thing. That was what made me a successful scientist but it also drove me inward to ask innumerable questions about myself and my FPia. I could not find much even in the Medical Library at the U.C. Medical School where I was an Instructor for a couple of years. I wanted to KNOW and as I gradually over the years began to figure it out I wanted to TELL it to others

- to you.

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