RANSVESTIA

material made up an issue of Clipsheet. It went through 39 issues before I just gave up because there weren't enough subscribers. What had happened, I realize now, though I didn't at the time, was that the whole TV scene is so much more open and up front today that the need to collect articles and stories about what was going on else- where, which, in those days, provided about all the contact anyone had with others of equal interest, just wasn't necessary anymore. Fewer and fewer people collected scrapbooks and my idea of making everybody's material available to everyone else no longer had enough appeal.

Now at the same time, and I suppose a symptom of the same isolation and locked room condition that so many of us were in, people were very interested in pics of other males in dresses and the rest of the "fixins." So seeing such pics was very interesting. It served the same basic function as the scrapbook, namely to reassure the individual that there were really and truly other males "out there" who shared the same interest. This helped in a small way to vicarious- ly relieve the isolation and aloneness so many of us felt. We might not know anyone else in person, but we were assured that we weren't the only ones in the world with this silly interest in feminine clothing because every now and then a story about some unfortunate caught or exposed in his finery would turn up and that proved that we were not alone.

One corner of my scrapbook was devoted to stories of FPs who had committed suicide by one means or another while dressed. Such news reports were always accompanied by statements of bewilderment by the surviving parents, relatives, wives or friends. They couldn't under- stand such a bizarre way of ending it all. Police constructed some rather fantastic "explanations" of how it happened. I remember one case of a relatively prominent Hollywood writer who was found dressed from head to toe and hanging from the ceiling on his yacht. The explanation offered was that he was writing a story involving a despondent woman who was going to commit suicide by hanging herself and in order to try to understand how such a woman would feel the writer dressed himself in feminine attire, put a rope around his neck, tied it to a hook in the ceiling and then "accidently" kicked the chair out from under himself. It was all very logical and uninten- tional. It didn't seem to occur to either the police nor the man's family that he just couldn't take it anymore--the conflict between the desire to dress and the difficulties, secrecy and guilt that accompanied the

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