RANSVESTIA

sixties. Thus I was comfortable with the abbreviation TV. But little by little, newspaper reporters, to begin with, and other authors later, began to use the word not as a medical term for a type of people, but in its English translation, namely as cross dressers. Thus, someone reporting on a police raid on a homosexual party would say that "police found and arrested 12 transvestites-" Well, you know and I certainly knew, that in the period of say 1955 to 1960, you couldn't have found 12 of our kind of people in one room at one time anywhere in the world. We were lucky if three or four of us got acquainted and met together. We never got that many at one time even at Johnny's place in Long Beach. Although he knew that many in this area, they never congregated at one time.

Obviously, therefore, the police had picked up 12 gay males who were "camping" it up in "drag." But little by little the word was used more and more simply to refer to cross dressing regardless of who was doing it and why they were doing it. Now it certainly isn't up to me-nor up to you to put down a member of some other minority for doing his "thing" for his own reasons even if what he does is the same thing you and I do for our own reasons. Yet, as long as society con- tinues to persecute and condemn homosexuality, in whatever form, I am not happy and I don't think those reading this piece are either, in being tarred with the same brush. Moreover, as I came across some of the blossoming pornography in the early sixties and found the abbreviation TV being used in ads, in captions to sexual action pictures and as self designations by drag queens I found myself very upset at finding "my" abbreviation being used by others of entirely different persuasions. When I say "my," I'm not referring to it in the sense of my initiating the term but that it was a term that had pre- viously described me and, by extension, you. Thus, I felt impelled to find some term that would exclusively refer to our kind of people and not everyone who put on a dress for whatever reason.

I coined the term "FemmePersonator" just like that with a capital "P" in the middle of the word to mean an individual who "person- ates," that is, gives life to his feminine self. Later I developed the term "Femmiphile" meaning "lover of the feminine," a word which de- scribes our motivation, not just what we do, i.e., cross dress-trans- vest. The abbreviation of both of these words is "FP" and this I shall use from here on. Unfortunately, it has not been publicized as much as it needs to be though I have used it in a number of professional papers and at professional meetings but it takes a lot to break down

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