RANSVESTIA

suddenly occurred to me that with all that exciting display of beautiful feminine things which ought to have brought on an erotic explosion, no such thing had happened. That was something of a surprise to me for a bit, but on reflection I realized that I had simply been window shopping like any other woman and that it wasn't any more erotic for me than it would have been for them. It was in that moment that I first realized that there was something more to the dressing thing than just a sexual outlet, something from deep inside. I didn't have any clear understanding of what it was at that point, but it was the beginning point of the awareness of the "girl-within" philosophy. Over succeeding years this point of view came to be the cornerstone of my philosophy.

Well, like most others in this paraculture I finally got married. Again like many of the rest of you I decided that now that I was going to have a girl all my own that I wouldn't have to create one by using myself as a manikin so I wasn't going to need all those feminine clothes. Right? Familiar? Yes, it is pretty standard-I burned all my clothes the day before the wedding. The marriage went off as planned-we were married on Saturday, drove to Oakland over Sunday, found an apartment, moved in and I started a new job in a new town with a new wife in a new home. Everything went fine for about three months until Thanksgiving came and she went back to L.A. to visit with her sisters. And what happened to me-after three months of having dresses hanging behind my suits and lingerie in the drawers just below mine and cosmetics and other feminine things all around the place all the time? You guessed it, it all came surging back. I went out to a second hand store and bought or rented all the essentials because my wife was much smaller than I and I spent the weekend as my femmeself.

When she returned she commented about "who has been into my dresser drawers." Well, as you can imagine, I was scared green and mumbled something about she must have disturbed the things herself in packing for her trip. After all, I had had years of experience putting my mother's lingerie back just as I found it and was panicked by the idea that my wife could tell. This began a very intense guilt trip for me which culminated one night when some friends were over and the conversation turned in some way to homosexuality. I flushed, stammered and became very ill at ease. That really got to me because I had never had a homosexual experience yet here I was reacting exactly as though I had. It was one of the things that made

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