executive

and and his wife

runs

a modeling school. The couple's combined income is well over $100,000.

"After my father caught me I became more discreet," says Tim. "Because the BB gun was hidden with the dresses my father found, I don't think he ever suspected that I was any- thing other than "normal."

But as he grew older Tim began to have self-doubts.

"I tried to do everything to take my mind off myself and my desire to dress," he says. "Even in high school I held three jobs. I competed in athletics. I left myself as little spare time as possible so that I wouldn't feel the urge and experience the guilt that came with it.”

At nineteen, Tim began liv- ing with a woman who knew nothing of his crossdressing. It was about that time he read first the magazine article "177 Men In Dresses," and became acquainted with the term trans- vestism."

"I realized that I was not a freak; that men had dressed in female attire as long as there had been theater and back as far as the first religious ritual. I became courageous and told my girlfriend," says Tim.

"She packed her bags and never came back.”

Destroyed by the rejection, he decided to seek psychological counseling. The counselors he spoke to were unable to offer any help. In fact, a psychologist told Tim's girlfriend that cross- dressers were degenerates whose "sickness" becomes an obsession.

His next relationship with a woman lasted three years before she, too, decided to "pack her bags and run off with a truck driver."

It would have been easy for Tim to have given up.

"I amazes me how ignorant people are about transvestism,” says Carol, seated closer to her husband now. "Women leave their boyfriends and marriages of many years break up. People including many of the transves- tites themselves don't seem to know what it's all about."

And it's no wonder. Many members of the counseling and psychiatric community are also in the dark about transvestism, according to Leveen.

Transvestism is referred to as a "paraphilia" a fetish by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostice Sta- tistical Manual, a compendium of standard nomenclature com- piled by the APA and the World Health Organization.

In Leveen's opinion, the public's ignorance about cross- dressing is shared by the counsel- ing and psychiatric community. He has been in practice for 22 years before he counseled ano- ther male transvestite last December.

In spite of the

APA's

official posture that crossdressing is not a pathology, says Leveen, "the real opinion of most psy- chistrists and counselors is that transvestites are sick."

So much of what is treated as pathological depends upon the therapist's own standards," he says.

"I had always thought that transvestites were the same as drag queens that you see along Hollywood Blvd.," says Leveen. "It was startling to me to learn that they were heterosexual most of whom were married with children."

While teaching a human sexuality course at Cal State University, Los Angeles, Leveen was introduced to a transvestite. Later at a meeting of CHIC, Crossdressers Heterosexual Inter- social Club, he met Tim and Carol.

Members of Chic are hetero- sexual men. Very few have told their wives about their trans- vestism and in even fewer cases do their children know.

But Tim and Carol, Leveen

chon Day

"I did not put a run in your pantyhose! I only wear my own !"