RANSVESTIA

in Transvestia. In the middle west in Madison, Wisconsin, Fran held together the strings of the whole organization and of its chapters and published a newsletter for members. In Los Angeles was myself with Transvestia, other books of fact and fiction, and also giving lectures and making radio and TV appearances over the years to help bring some awareness to the greater public about the nature of our behavior pattern. How that came about is the next part of this saga. It is difficult to handle things entirely chronologically because a lot of developments went on side by side and so there is some overlap. So I will leave the story of FPE to ride for several years while I take up other matters.

What I am now about to tell has been known to a limited number of friends and readers but not to the general readership of TVia nor to the members of FPE. The reason it was not related in detail at the time was that I was afraid that it would frighten people away from me, from Chevalier, FPE and their own escape from the closet. It is al- ways difficult to explain all the details of an incident like what I am about to deal with, because you can't take that much space and in any case it sounds too much like protesting too much when you try to explain. But, by this time it does not much matter and as it is an im- portant part of the era both for me and for what it brought about and indirectly for many of you, I will set it forth here as briefly as possible yet as completely, as I can.

I can't rightly remember the year this occurred but I think it was sometime in 1962. In any case a friend of mine had become acquaint- ed with a certain person back east in some way that I don't remember. He was a TV and she was an apparently very understand- ing woman and they wrote long letters back and forth and got very intimate with each other. He had to move away and gave me her name saying that I might like to write and continue the correspondence. Since she had urged him to be very open and intimate and not beat around the bush, I presumed that that went for me too. So I wrote her a letter explaining how I came to "inherit” the correspondence and that I too was a TV etc. Well, I got a little carried away I guess, but I let my was a TV etc. Well, I got a little carried away I guess, but I let my fantasy run and related how she and I might behave if we were together. I am sure most all of you have had similar fantasies-two "women" making love together. So I went through this fantasy in the letter. It really wasn't much-certainly not for these days—it would have been a Sunday School picnic compared to what you can read

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