RANSVESTIA

is a person like yourself doing here?' I couldn't help asking. 'I might turn the question around, I think, but I have the feeling we're both out of place. Would you like to talk somewhere where we can hear ourselves, without competing with them.' Her tone of voice was so sympatehtic and she seemed so honest that I agreed and we left.

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She paused, as if to allow me the chance to ask the inevitable ques- tion, but the answer was so obvious that I didn't want to interrupt the story. "Later on," she resumed, “I was to wonder at my actions. Here was I, virtually the head of a state admittedly a very modest one but nonetheless leaving a homosexual party in the middle of the night in a city with a notoriety for such things, with a person I had never met be- fore, going to a destination equally unknown. Can you imagine the scandal that would have broken? It would have given the anti-monarch- ists all the ammunition they ever would have needed, especially when you consider that the only defense would have automatically conceded the issue.

―

"But in defense of myself, I want to add several points. First of all, you must know that my unusual circumstances had given me some prac- tical training in political, economic and even diplomatic affairs but as far as emotional or sexual matters I was utterly and completely naive. Secondly, I honestly thought my new companion was a woman perhaps looking for the same thing I was, whatever that was. You see, I wasn't even sure about that.

"It was a night of a thousand surprises.

The new companion had taken the Prince to a hotel room and after a short period of conversation which seemed to create an empathy be- tween them, the companion had done something astonishing: she had asked if the Prince would like to borrow some of her clothes.

"I was completely astounded. I simply did not understand what was happening and said so. It's hard to tell who was the more surprised by this time, myself or my new acquaintance. In the confusion that fol- lowed, somehow I let the whole issue slip out when I suddenly said, ‘I thought perhaps I might somehow find . . .' What? I didn't know for sure and in an effort to communicate, I told who I was - not everything, for I still had a semblance of caution left, but described myself as a young woman who had to live as a man, and wanted to find a young man who might fit into this plan in some way.