RANSVESTIA

overawe you. Well, I sat down and at his invitation began to spill out the awful news, that I liked to dress up like a girl. With the exception of the other doctors mentioned above and Louise, I hadn't confessed my guilty secret to anybody and as I had started dressing about age 12 and I was now 30, that meant that I'd guarded it carefully for about 18 years. So I felt that I was telling him something pretty significant and when I got to the end he leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the pulled out drawer of his desk, clasped his hands behind his head, stretched and yawned and then quietly said, "So what else is new? What's so unusual about that? There are tens of thousands more just like you, you're not so special. What you need to do is just learn to accept yourself as you are and enjoy it." That was something of a traumatic shock in itself since he took so calmly what I thought was so desperately important. But the message sunk in and all of you who are readers of Transvestia have been the ultimate beneficiaries of his statement because I did learn to accept myself and when later I began to publish the magazine I did my best to help its readers to accept themselves refer to the inside front cover of Transvestia.

At the end of my year on the faculty as a research fellow the grant ran out and so did I. I returned to Southern California and got a job as a research chemist with a pharmaceutical manufacturer. My wife and I re-established our relationship with the young adult section of the church in which we had met and soon I was president of the Sun- day School class and a member of the Church of Youth Board of Dea- cons. Prior to our marriage there had been some Halloween and New Year's Eve events to which I went dressed in some sort of feminine costume which my wife to be hadn't been too happy about, but it was a party and so it was accepted grudgingly in that spirit. However, I knew that she wouldn't take kindly to finding out that I liked to do it. Then Halloween came around again and I resolved to go as a half man-half woman. My sister had left a long red evening gown at my parents' home and I recovered that, went to the Salvation Army and bought a pair of high heeled black patent pumps and another pair of gold evening shoes. Then on the Thursday night before the party I decided to assemble the costume. I took my tux and tucked the right pant leg and right sleeve into the left ones. I put on the dress and then got into the half pants and half skirt and coat of the tux, this pulled the skirt up my left leg but it was a full enough skirt that it draped down over the right leg. I wore a black pump on the tux side and a gold one on the dress side and ascertained that with makeup on

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