RANSVESTIA

I was surprised by the wealth of the Pohlman family and by the inheritance that Romy had received on "his" eighteenth birthday. It was that money that had sent the young Gustav Adolf Pohlman to the best plastic surgeon in Paris to re-emerge with the tiny, feminine nose. At first, he had looked absurd, but as later photos showed, he must have had quite a series of adjustments until "Romy" had finally appeared. He hadn't hidden his true sex at all while all of this was going on and he had even been an "actor" and a "dancer" at several nightclubs while he was being worked on. There were several photos of Romy in blonde and black wigs posing in sexy black underwear for shows in Hamburg, Amsterdam or Paris. But that seemed to have come to an end at least a year ago.

Besides that, Romy Pohlman had attended, in female dress natural- ly, just about every important public relations happening in Europe in the last three years. If there was a place for the transvestite male in the "jet set" of the world, then Romy had found it. He had the money, of course, to keep up with the trendsetting in-crowd, and was such a constant companion of the famous that he seemed to be treated as a beautiful girl by everyone, and there were several pictures, similar to the Bellamy one I'd seen first, either bussing or cuddling up to well known people. It almost was a sign of "having arrived" for a star to have their picture taken with "her."

"Sickening, isn't it?" Gerhard said in disgust, throwing a new folder that he'd dug up out of the Paris office news library onto the already crowded desk. "And this is just part of the Carrousel files," he added.

There wasn't much I could say to that. It might have been unfair to put Romy in the same group as the emasculated males of the Carrousel-such beings never turned me on, no matter how gorgeous they looked-but, with most people, there'd be no attempt to draw fine lines between degrees of deviation. Men who dressed like women and men who became women surgically were lumped together even by people like Gerhard, who should have been better informed.

"Is there really a drag show boom across Europe?" I asked Ray, "or is it just that the media is paying more attention to what's always been there?"

Ray shrugged. "There's more work for impersonators," he said, looking at his watch. He always had a lunch date, and he appeared

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