RANSVESTIA

nights out I decided that I would try for Louise. But as I was on the faculty I couldn't very well use my own name in meeting her and had to have some name that I could remember easily. My father's first name was Charles and I lived on Prince Street in Berkeley so "Charles Prince" was born that night.

So shortly after my wife left I drove over to Louise's house and was met at the door by her wife. I rather awkwardly told her that I was on the medical school faculty and that I had been present at her presentation of the previous week and would like to meet her since I was of the same persuasion. She let me in and Louise came shyly out of the back room. We had an interesting discussion as she was the first other FP that I had ever met-most of you know that feeling. So it was through Louise that I made the acquaintance of a few others in the Bay Area and eventually of one named John Thornton in Long Beach. Incidentally I also learned that Mr. Morris was one of us too, which explained why he had so much information and pictures of a number of others when I talked to him in the car. Small world and all that.

Well, now having seen two FPs presented at the psychiatric confer- ence I figured maybe the people at Langley Porter (the psychiatric hospital attached to the University of California Medical School in San Francisco) knew something about transvestism; and maybe I could get some help from them. I had previously, over the last five years or so, gone to see four or five psychiatrists and analysts on my own and gotten a lot of unhelpful diagnoses-I had an unresolved oedipus complex because I liked to wear dresses, or my liking for high heels was a case of phallic symbolism or some other psychiatric mumbo jumbo which may have made the shrink feel better but didn't do any- thing for me. But maybe these people could.

As I was on the faculty, as I have said, I didn't feel safe in revealing my "secret" to any ordinary doctor and decided that I would go to the top and try to talk to Dr. Karl Bowman who was the director of Langley Porter. So I called his secretary and after much fencing around in which she tried to palm me off on some of the other shrinks, I got my appointment. Naturally I went to the session with some fear and trembling. Dr. Bowman was a power in the psychiatric world since he had twice been elected president of the American Psychiatric Association and he was director of the hospital. However, he was also a quiet, soft spoken, easy going little man and not one to

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