RANSVESTIA

the same wave length because we did cooperate on one thing. Late in 1964 one of our members had been arrested in New York for being in feminine clothing on the street, under an ancient 19th century law prohibiting "disguise." It had been passed to prohibit the farmers of the area from dressing as Indians and attacking the landlords' agents. But like many of our laws it was never taken from the books and thus lay there for years as a handy weapon when some enterprising police- man or D.A. wanted to use it. Our friend, John M., was sentenced to seven days in the workhouse and the sentence suspended. That wasn't too bad in itself, but it was on his record and, as a result of the publicity, he was forced into early retirement from a company he had worked for for years and had had one of the best performance records of all employees in his category.

He was willing to appeal the case if he could be helped financially, so Siobhan issued an appeal to her mailing list and informed me of that fact and I did likewise. We raised over $1400 from 200 con- tributors to pay the costs of an appeal first to the N.Y. Court of Appeals and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately the latter did not accept the case for adjudication and so no judgment was rendered. It was unfortunate since, if it had, the conviction would have undoubtedly been overturned, but more importantly, a prece- dent would have been set in the highest court in the land about the rights of an individual to wear what he or she pleased as long as it didn't affront public decency. It may well have been that the court perceived that to render that decision would have opened a can of worms the likes of which had never been opened before and thus refused to take the case. Better to sacrifice one lamb than to expose the whole flock to the disease of individual rights and freedom. Gracious me! Think what could result from that!!

During the years of 1963-64 I had conducted a questionnaire survey of TVs with questions covering all aspects of their early history, dressing practices, psychological and sociological back- ground, etc. I had received back perhaps 375 questionnaires when I was approached by a graduate student in sociology named Buckner, who wanted to get some information for his master's thesis about the TV subculture. I made a deal with him to allow him to use the results of my survey as part of his Masters thesis in exchange for codifying the responses and reducing them to computer cards with a print out of the results. This he did and he also published a paper on the results without indicating clearly where the results came from. Subsequently

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