RANSVESTIA

Barbara and then had returned a couple of years later after the New York convention where he had gotten to know a lot of TVs across the country and had been here just at the height of the big schism, so he had a lot of juicy, though one sided, scandal to peddle in New York. As a result, starting with No. 3 of Turnabout, there were all kinds of insults, direct criticisms, a number of untruths, and snide remarks about me, and everything I did or stood for. A couple of years later Sioban admitted to a mutual friend that she had started Turnabout to "get at" Virginia but that it had been successful enough that it looked as though it could stand on its own. It did... for seven or eight issues and then died out. It had a reincarnation a couple of years later for two or more issues and then vanished completely.

It was too bad that a magazine had to spend so much of its energy and space deriding another magazine and its editor. Siobhan was a professional writer and put together a very intellectual magazine. Perhaps that was one reason for its lack of success-it was really rather snobbishly intellectual and didn't give the FP reader what she was looking for most of the time. Siobhan has apparently learned that lesson well as she has for the last decade more or less poured out quite a volume of TV-type stories most of which are not the type I would have printed in TVia. Not that they were pornographic or vulgar but just that they dealt too strongly in domination, bondage, punishment and involuntary TVing.

Competition is, they say, the life of trade. Had we had two maga- zines all these years that were friendly competitors, both dedicated not only to entertaining the FP, but to helping her understand herself, it could only have been beneficial. Too bad she had to descend to shooting barbed arrows at me in every issue after No. 2. I still have a letter in my files from the same Siobhan Fredricks, though signed in his masculine name, thanking me for "saving his life" by bringing some understanding and sanity to the whole phenomenon of cross dressing. There is an old saying that the best way to lose a friend is to save him from drowning. Seems that's the case here. Turnabout including incarnations lasted for, I think it was, 10 issues, and this is TVias Centenary issue. So much for catching flies with sugar rather than vinegar.

But something occured in 1964 and that illustrates what could have been accomplished if Turnabout and Transvestia had been on

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