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Confessions of a Closet

Crossdresser

- Joyce

My background is either classical or hackneyed, depend-- ing on the age of the reader; if you are new to the TV scene it could strike you as fresh and in- teresting; if you are about my age, you could well dismiss me with a wave of the hand and say, "Old hat." My mother desper- ately wanted a girl and even wept with disappointment when told that a 'man-child' had arrived; this was way back in 1923. The era of dressing little boys in frocks had long since passed but in 1929 I was sent to school in girls' buttonover shoes and a sort of Christopher Robin smock that more or less concealed a diminutive pair of trousers. It was only when some other kid, looking critically at me, said with scorn and derision, "Just look; Doug wears a dress," that I shed my innocence more precipitately than Adam. I had, on several occasions during the pre-school years, asked, in all childlike innocence, why men did not wear frocks and stockings. Some- where in the universe, there may be a society that allows this without a blink!

Could the 'damage' done have had it's roots in pre-natal chemistry? Transvestic fantasies were already part of the furn- iture of the mind before I turned four and almost certainly before the birth of my sister at about that time; this nature and nur- ture thing I find quite impossible

was

to unravel. Johannesburg already a bustling city even in 1927. I spent a lot of time in the company of my aunt who lived with her father, my grand- the father, at corner of N father, at the corner of Noord and Wanderes Streets. In the 'dead' of night (more like 8:30 probably) when my aunt was out and the 'Old Man' dozing away in the room next door, I'd try on her stockings by the light of the street lamp outside and peer at myself in her wardrobe mirror For all the guileless questionings on the subject, my mind was still suffused with guilt and discovery would have been an unimagin- able agony.

It was one Sunday, after midday dinner for family and friends that my beloved aunt blundered into the sensitive Looking arch and mysteriously, she crooked her finger at me and summoned me to her bedroom. Leaning forward, her hands on her knees, she said with an ex- cited smile, "Let's put one of my dresses on you and some of my lipstick and take you out in to the sitting-room to surprise everyone." With dry mouth and beating heart, I shook my head so vigorously as to almost unseat it from my shoulders. She had the good sense not to press the matter and for her the incident blew over although for me her words have haunted me ever since. Looking at me looking at

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myself (please forgive this in- tense preoccupation with self) I do sense a sort of ambivalence; the innocent questionings and the guilt; this may be a highfal- utin observation if ever there was one but this seems a sort of microcosm of the development of man's mind.

It was at 13 or so when I found the urge to dress up as a woman quite overwhelming and I would do just this in my mother's and/or sister's clothing on deliciously lonely afternoons. This went on until I came within a hairs breadth of being caught one evening when my parents arrived back early from a film they were bored stiff with. was merely chastised for the infinitely lesser 'crime' of look- ing for volumn III of the Amer- ican health cultist's book, Benard Macfadden, which was kept in my mother's lingerie drawer; it contained pictures of men and women having sex in various positions! Saved by the book!

I

In the thirties and forties, the word 'transvestism' was hard- ly part of the vocabulary of the man in the street. It wouldn't surprise me now if even my gardener knew what it meant! The sexual revolution has come along way. I first came across it in a work by the sexologist Norman Haire in my matricul- ation year. I was completely bowled over by it and reread the passage about a dozen times.