RANSVESTIA

mercialism. I went by myself and had a very successful trip though it would have been better if I had known Spanish. It was another ad- venture under my belt (girdle). I shared a cabin with the young wife of one of the German teachers aboard and she and I hit it off well. There were only 13 passengers on the converted yacht and so we were quite a family for a week.

Thus we come eventually to this very year 1979. It will be an important year for me. As indicated above, I'm going to take the Rogue River raft trip in June. In September I'm going to take a tour of South Africa and the animal preserves of Kenya. On the way to Africa, there will be two days in Rio. When the tour is done, there will be about a week or 10 days before the 1979 Fantasia Fair gets under way in Provincetown so I am going to repeat my trip of last year and go to London from Africa but 'I may also take a couple of days from London and go up to Copenhagen to say hello to my Danish friends and probably goodbye, because I'm not likely to be going their way again for a long time. But it will be a goodbye of another sort too. This issue is by way of a goodbye to all the rest of you, too, as I am about to tell you.

I have been involved with cross dressing most of my life as the pre- vious story has told you, but I have been intensely involved with it not only in my own life but with the lives of literally thousands of others. In the last 20 years, during which the 100 issues of Transvestia have been published, I have written three books on this subject, lec- tured to medical schools, universities, service clubs and other groups, appeared on TV and radio shows, done research on the subject and presented it to professional societies, published in both professional and lay magazines and talked to numberless individuals who were not FPs themselves, about the subject. In all this time I have striven to learn about myself and about you, the other FPs. Being scientifically trained and an intelligent person and having the motivation to do so, I have, I feel, dealt with the whole subject of cross dressing more deeply, more thorougly and more usefully than anyone else in this country or elsewhere.

I have tried to share my insights into the subject with the readers of TVia through Virgin Views columns, and in all the public presenta- tions I have made I have always attempted to present our life style in a clear and positive way. I have developed a philosophy about it (set

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