ransvestia

Of course, this simply supports your own contention that it's better for a male who has a feminine "self" to tell his wife-to-be all about it, before- hand. If a man and a woman don't know at least something of each other's deepest and most haunting needs, they have no business rushing into matrimony. If the bride has some strong need of her own to believe her husband is completely "masculine" (as a way of bolstering her own fem- ininity), she's bound to be furious when she discovers what must appear to her as a gross deception. A truly feminine woman, well treated in bed, would take it in her stride. And the cruel irony here is that for most of us, if I'm any example, TV implies a certain amount of fear of truly feminine women. In other words, we marry-in ignorance and timidity-exactly the kind of women who can't possibly forgive us for what we are. The exceptions are to be envied.

I discovered all this only by accident after my own divorce, meeting and falling hopelessly in love with a woman who makes me feel like a man, even when I'm wearing lingerie. The fact that she's 19 years younger than I am, married, with three children, and living 300 miles away, doesn't matter. We are completely happy together during the few hours we can see each other, a few times each year. She knows about my TV-ism and doesn't care. If we could have married each other, we would have been happy anyway. And yet I know that 20 years ago I would have been afraid of her total femininity.

What does all this seem to "prove"? Only, I think, that very few TVs are able to believe what you preach: that transvestism is not homosex- uality. We live for years in the shadow of that fear, and unconsciously or subconsciously choose as mates women who are equally unsure of their own femininity. If sex is not very important to either mate, the mar- riage can survive as "friendship." But if either or both mates have strong sexual desires, the ambivalence will eventually produce hatred. And then comes all the dirty recrimination, the tragedy for the children, if any, and the inevitable divorce.

If I am right about this, then obviously the only answer is education and broad public recognition that a man's need to "be a woman" at times doesn't necessarily disqualify him as a mate and father. It does place squarely on his shoulders the responsibility to find a woman whom he can love and who can love him for the person he is, aside from his "od- dities." And it suggests that adolescents of both sexes need to know what transvestism is, so that neither young men nor young women associate it "inevitably" with homosexuality, as so many do today. If this could be accomplished, there would be fewer foolish marriages and far less un- happiness all around. So keep up your good work!