or should I say sisters who are much the same age and can and do share experiences.

We are both domestically engaged, she as a housekeeper to a respectable and personable man twice her age, and I in that most demanding of all household responsibilities - housekeeper to myself!! But she has a nine-to- five occupation whereas I am no better than an an indolent and self-indulgent writer.

However, knowing "Lana" and her employer-cum-husband, Lane, has given me a new and crystallised outlook on the rela- tionship between homosexuals. and crossdressers since here I have been able to study both phenomena in one outward-look- ing and articulate personality. May I sum up how I see the mat- ter?

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Homosexuals are not gene- rally transvestite and this is really only to be expected since the female image is unattractive, if not repugnant to them. Con- versely, crossdressers are not us- ually actively homosexual. As a rider to this, it is worth con- templating that, to the crossdres- ser, the act of dressing as a wo- man is usually not a means to an end but an end in itself and there is no urge to go fur- ther. But when crossdressers who are NOT primarily homo- sexual, do venture into homo- sexual activities, they do so without any feelings of love for their partners and such sex- acts are no more than a logical extension of their performance of dressing and behaving as a woman does.

In the several years that I have spent in Australia, dressed substantially always as a woman, by night and by day, I have final- ly learned that most folk are quite relaxed in their attitudes towards me. In shops, offices, beauty salons, theatre foyers, the

member's enclosure at cricket, or at the races as well as in my friendly neighborhood Wine Bar, I am taken at my own evalua- tion. Happy with that casual acceptance, I carefully avoid pressing my luck.

In the small quiet apart- ment that I have lived in for sev- eral years, I have no friends; nor do I seek any. On the other hand, I am on nodding or greet- ing terms with most of the other occupiers when our paths cross- in the hall, in the parking lot, at the clothes dryer or up on the sun-roof. New tenants often give the impression of wanting to be friendly and most find some cooked-up excuse to call during their early residence. I used, at first, to find this encouraging but I soon learned that it is no more than understandable curi- osity and that they will soon lose all interest. I am just some- one rather odd who lives in the place. But on official com- munity occasions, such as when drains are blocked or the state of the gardens demands a deter- mined assault on the managing agents, my support is always sought after as if I were the only person around who could do the job regardless of how I might dress at times.

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I have found that, as to a crossdresser's close friends who know him only on on a social level in his male role, that they will seldom cast him off when they find out that he will spend a great deal of his time in dresses and even likes to be called "Sandra."

One final thought!

Quite often I have been consulted by crossdressers in their emergent, guilt-ridden stage of development fearful, wor- ried and conscious stricken. when one has boiled down all the range of doubts and misgiv-

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ings it has become apparent that they really only want to talk about themselves to some- one they think cannot be censo- rious and, most significantly of all, they always ask to be told how best to forge on with the building of their female image. I have never been asked "Is there a road back? Would you advise me to take it if there were a way back? This suggests to me that crossdressers are hooked on it from earliest childhood maybe even earlier.

But had they asked me if, assuming that retreat to "normal- ity" was possible, they should stop and get out now while they still could I wonder what I would have advised. I think that I would have been ines- capably reminded of that very old crack - "Advice to those about to be married! Don't!" Meaning, "stay out of it if you can as a life style it's pretty hard to handle and, like witch- craft, you can get into very deep and dangerous waters!"

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How much use would that be? I guess just about as much as advising Evel Knievel to quit jumping motorcycles over twen- ty-four buses, just because he's made that way and likes it!!

"You haven't lost a husband, dear, but gained a girl friend."