Normal

CONSERVATIVE MEN IN CONSERVATIVE DRESSES: HETEROSEXUAL CROSSDRESSERS

Heterosexual crossdressers bother almost everyone. Gay people regard them with disdain or affectionate incomprehension, something warmer than tolerance, but not much. Transsexuals regard them as men “settling” for crossdressing because they don’t have the courage to act on their transsexual longing, or else as closeted gay men so homophobic that they prefer wearing a dress to facing their desire for another man. Other straight men tend to find them funny or sad, and some find them enraging. The only people on whose kindness and sympathy crossdressers can rely are women: their wives, and even more dependably, their hairdressers, their salespeople, their photographers and makeup artists, their electrologists, their therapists, and their friends.

Drag queens (gay crossdressers) make sense to most of us. There is a congruence of sexual orientation, appearance, and temperament: feminine gay men dressing as women for a career, like RuPaul, or less lucratively, as prostitutes, or to express their own sense of theater and femininity. (Barney Frank as a drag queen makes no more sense, intuitively, than Dick Cheney.) Actors whose most famous performance is as a female, like Barry Humphries’s brilliant and textured Dame Edna or Flip Wilson’s one-note gag of Geraldine, don’t puzzle us. Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire and the boys in Some Like It Hot don’t puzzle us; they’re just men doing what they have to do to survive, learning a nice lesson about the travails of womanhood and giving one on he benign uses of masculine self-esteem. Even the crossdressing women of history, from Pope Joan to Joan of Arc to America’s jazz-playing Billy Tipton, from Little Jo Monaghan the cowpoke to Disney’s adorable Mulan, don’t puzzle us; they chose to live as men because they couldn’t otherwise have the lives they wanted.

Every fall, hundreds of heterosexual crossdressers come to Provincetown for Fantasia Fair, an annual event since 1975. They come to attend seminars on self-esteem and lectures on Your Feminine Self, to accompany their wives to support group meetings, and to pay for photo sessions of themselves “en femme.” They come to walk up and down Commercial Street, to eat in the Governor Bradford and Fat Jack’s, simply to be and be seen in public dressed as women. Provincetown seems like a pretty safe place for them, and it is, but even here there are looks and chuckles, and there is no sign that any of the residents, gay or straight, recognize these men as people with whom they have much in common. The gay people do not say, “Oh, you’re a straight man who likes to wear a dress? Welcome aboard!” And the straight men do not say, “Well, except for the dress thing, you’re just like me. Howdy, pardner!”

Heterosexual crossdressers — straight men who have not only a wish but a need to wear women’s clothes and accessories — manage to be marginal among heterosexual men, marginal among other men who wear women’s clothes, marginal in the community of sexual minorities, and completely acceptable only to fetishists, who accept anyone who says they belong.

Many heterosexual crossdressers never come out of the closet, not even to their wives; they spend their whole adult lives dressing in secret, ordering size 20 cocktail dresses from catalogues, with only the mirror for company. Others tell their wives after ten or twenty or thirty years of marriage, sometimes because they’ve been caught wearing her clothes, sometimes because the clothes have been discovered. (The revelation that he himself is the “other woman” is a staple of crossdresser histories, and although the husbands say that their wives were relieved, it’s not clear to me that they were, for more than a minute.) Second wives usually get told sooner, and as with other matters, third wives tend to know everything there is to know before the knot is tied.

But a lot of these men want to crossdress outside their bedrooms, driven by loneliness, by unmet narcissistic needs (all dressed up and nowhere to go), by risk-taking impulses (it’s not hard to grasp that a forty-five-year-old, two-hundred-forty-pound former Marine strolling through the Mall of America in full drag is consciously courting risk). They go to get-togethers in Kansas City, in Pittsburgh, in Seattle, all over America. They make forays into malls in pairs, and they go to tolerant gay bars in small groups. They browse in the Belladona Plus Size Shop of Beverly, Massachusetts, and they hang out at the Criss/Cross Condo in Houston, which offers the Empress, Princess, and Duchess packages for a twenty-four-hour getaway as a woman. They go to weekly or monthly meetings, of six or ten or twenty guys, at the Paradise Club in Parma, Ohio, at Long Island Femme Expression in Ozone Park, at gatherings of the Central Florida Sisters of Kissimmee. There are crossdresser groups in Nashua, New Hampshire, and Trenton, New Jersey, in Springfield, Missouri, and Allentown, Pennsylvania, and throughout the Bible Belt. There are enough crossdressers in Arizona to support chapters in Phoenix and Tucson. A man who crossdresses and needs to be seen crossdressed can go to conferences like Provincetown’s Fantasia Fair or Atlanta’s Southern Comfort or the Midwest’s Fall Harvest, or take a cruise aboard the Holiday, a Carnival ship offering a four-day trip to Catalina out of Los Angeles, happily hosting twenty-five crossdressers and their spouses amidst the other thousand guests.

Sometimes the wives wish to come, to support their husbands and enjoy the trip, or to hang out with other wives, like golf widows or wives in Al-Anon. Some come because their husbands need them to. “I don’t mind, but really, if he could learn to do his makeup properly and fasten his own bra, I’d rather stay home,” one woman told me at Fall Harvest 2000, in St. Louis. (Later she called to say that she had bought her husband a home video guide to makeup for men and a magnifying mirror, and that she was resigning as his dresser. “He can ask one of the other guys to hook his bra.”) Happy wives are everyone’s favorites, but happy or cowed, enthusiastic or grimly accepting, the wives at all of these functions are simultaneously important objects of much public appreciation and utterly secondary to the men’s business. The world of crossdressers is for the most part a world of traditional men, traditional marriages, and truths turned inside out.

I am on line to board the Holiday and my antennae are up. So far, I have seen three large families, one Filipino, one African American, one mixed Caucasian and African American. There are lots of couples in their twenties, some with six suitcases, some with small gym bags. There are several pairs of well-dressed women who are clearly travel agents. I keep scanning the crowd for the crossdressers, but no one stands out.

As I make my way to my small room on B Deck, I wonder what to wear to dinner and a preliminary cocktail party in the suite of my hosts, Mel and Peggy Rudd, both blond, heavyset Texans in their sixties. Peggy has written a number of books on crossdressing, the best known of which is My Husband Wears My Clothes (PM Publishers), and was formerly the director of SPICE (Spouses’ and Partners’ International Conference for Education), an annual workshop that “focuses on spouses’ and partners’ issues, communication skills and relationship-building” for wives of “ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension.” I’ve met the Rudds before. I’ve traveled to Texas to interview them, stayed at their home, woken up in their astonishingly sunny and beribboned guest room, and walked down to the breakfast nook past a phalanx of posed photos: the Rudds with Ronald Reagan, the Rudds with both Reagans, the Rudds with George and Barbara Bush. At breakfast, Peggy said to Mel, “Oh dear, we should have taken down all those pictures of us with famous Republicans before Amy got here.” Mel smiled. “Oh, I think she’s a true liberal, she won’t mind about the Republicans.”

I waffle about what to wear for nearly half an hour. Outside my door, the men are coming down the hall in twos and threes. Finally I decide that silk pants and a tank top and sandals is right — right for the level of dressiness of the dinner (which I have overestimated) and right for my own social and appearance anxiety (which I have underestimated). When I walk into the little party, the Rudds hug me and introduce me to everyone as “Amy the writer.” Some men flinch, although the Rudds have told everyone to expect me. Tory, a good-looking young man from Mexico, shakes my hand: “Hello, Miss Amy.” His aunt and his cousin and his girlfriend, Cory, are on this trip, his first time crossdressing in public. Tory and Cory, with their romantic banter, his devoted relatives, and his final painstaking and successful transformation from Antonio Banderas to Daisy Fuentes, become the darlings of our group; they make everyone feel better.

I meet the rest of the guys and their wives. The men — to whom I will refer in print as “he,” and to whom I refer in person when they are crossdressed as “she”—are not drag queens, hardworking perennials like Pearlene the Size Queen and Big-Boned Barbie, not actors, not Vegas female impersonators. They are most definitely not gender-benders of any kind, not Marilyn Manson, not Prince. They are more like Mrs. Attanas, my formidable fourth-grade teacher, a big, tall lady with a bolsterlike bosom, thick legs, sensible pumps, hennaed hair, and twin spots of rouge on her cheeks. I meet a happy, long-married couple, Steve and Sue, who look alike whether he’s crossdressed or not. I meet Harry, who is always somewhat crossdressed (women’s jeans, women’s sneakers) but never flamboyantly; his appearance is that of an effeminate man, and he doesn’t bother with a femme name or seem to have any of the common need for a more feminine presentation and feminine affectations. I would have thought that this might be easier for his wife than a husband who calls himself Lulu, spends hours in the bathroom on his face, and parades around the living room in a strapless lavender tulle dress and matching fuck-me pumps, but it’s not.

“I love him,” she tells me later. “I love him, but I don’t want a man who is excited by the idea of being a woman. We have two kids, he’s a great dad, a good provider, but I want a man who’s comfortable with masculinity. I don’t want to be sisters … or lesbians. If I wanted a woman, I would have found one by now. But … there’s all the other things that are good.” And he tells me later, with great sadness, “She is the most supportive person in the world, and this is a terrible thing for her. We work on it, we struggle.” He stops and gathers his defenses; throughout the cruise he will condescend to the men with femme names, the men who insist on hours of makeup, because he sees himself as “evolved,” free of the trappings and compulsions of crossdressing. “All couples struggle, they fight about money, about sex. You can’t tell me they don’t. This is no different.” He looks out at the ocean. “This is different, I know, but I refuse to let it ruin our lives.”

At dinner I am seated at a table anchored by Peggy and Melanie (as Mel calls himself when en femme), in nearly matching vibrant floral prints. To my right are Tory’s aunt and cousin, who speak almost no English, and next to them is a very attractive woman, Lori, a Lee Remick look-alike, husband nowhere in sight. To my left are Felicity and his wife. Felicity is a large, hunched man, made up in a conventional, slightly stiff manner. He looks like a librarian, or perhaps the strong-minded wife of a minister, and he is, in the rest of the world, a Southern Baptist minister from the very buckle of the Bible Belt.

“So, you’re the writer. Well, I’d say you pass pretty well,” Felicity tells me. I smile pleasantly, as if I am not offended, as if I didn’t think he intended to offend me. “Well,” he says heartily, and then he clears his throat twice and stares at my silk pants. “You gals just get to crossdress all the time and no one says boo.” He sounds furious that life is so easy for me and so hard for him, but because he is a minister, and even more because he is dressed as and representing someone named Felicity, he cannot be direct or angry; he has to try to convey a serene and gracious femininity regardless of his feelings and the oddness of the setting, which is as hard for him to do as it would be for me. And his wife is beside herself, tight-lipped, hands clasped; she is a Christian woman doing what she must, and as much as she might wish it otherwise, what she cannot be is pleased.

On the other side of me is a man in his late sixties, recently retired as a senior partner in a white-shoe law firm in the Deep South. He looks great. He looks like a Neiman Marcus matron, right down to his Chanel slingbacks, and although he seems a bit out of place, it is only because the cruise is so downscale and there are twenty-year-old guys clumping around the casino in their NASCAR jackets, baseball caps, and hiking boots, as if a nice shirt and a pair of slacks would be way too much trouble.

At first I thought that the matronly look so common to straight crossdressers reflected some weird attachment to the mother, that the image they wished to present was that of their own first woman — hence the heavy foundation, the blue eyeshadow, the big pearl button earrings. I no longer think so. That same look is common among their wives, and among lots of middle-aged women not much interested in changing fashions.

Most crossdressers, and almost all married crossdressers, live lives in which they are not crossdressed. They don’t take female hormones, they usually don’t have electrolysis even if they would like to (many express the wish to wake up and find themselves without facial, arm, or leg hair, but their wives are opposed), and they are not regular readers of Elle, Vogue, or even Ladies’ Home Journal. They cannot easily put together a natural, believable female appearance. First, you need beard camouflage to flatten and disguise the stubble, then powder over that and foundation over that, and sweating is a big problem. (Jim Bridges, a transformation guide and guru, creator of the Bridges to Beauty 2000 and Hollywood Makeup Secrets videos, which are offered at his boutique in California and through his booming Internet business—“Can’t tell you who in the House of Representatives, can’t tell you who in the NFL,” he says to me while putting false eyelashes on a John Deere salesman at Fall Harvest — counsels a quick swipe of antiperspirant on the upper lip and at the hairline. Crossdressing is not only anxiety-provoking and arousing, it is also warm under the wig, the corset, the padding, the pantyhose.) You need the foundation for smoothness and for color, and by the time you add lipstick and a wig, if you’re a man you get that overdone crossdresser look, and if you’re a woman you get Joan Collins. A pronounced face requires pronounced makeup for balance, and after the false eyelashes and even the most subtle contouring of the wider jaw, the thick brow, one can look beautiful or ridiculous, but one cannot look like most of the women around.

My tablemates look like more attractive versions of the photos I’ve seen in the personals sections at the back of crossdresser magazines. I flipped through thirty issues of Transgender Tapestry and saw a lot of men who looked bad, like every joke and caricature of a crossdresser: the big shoulders, the jagged makeup, the prom dresses or JCPenney crushed-velvet tube dresses. Some looked mentally ill and possibly dangerous. I saw a few beautiful women, very often transsexual, as it turned out, but occasionally just crossdressers blessed with the right shape and the conventional proportions, narrow shoulders, small hands. And then there were always a dozen crossdressers who looked like pleasant, average women: librarians, daycare providers, schoolteachers, not staggering, not intense, not lovely, but perfectly ordinary, pantsuited, sensibly shod middle-aged women. I have met crossdressers whose presentation is just this side of Christina Aguilera, and I have met a fifty-year-old Midwestern engineer and a sixty-year-old born-again Christian CEO and a forty-year-old police captain, all of whom dress exactly as they would if they had been born to the distaff side, in clothes both contemporary and appropriate, whether Gap or Escada or Dress Barn. Anatomy may not be destiny, but it certainly lays a hand on our options.

Age is a great help to crossdressers. It is, for us all, the great androgynizer; the skin softens and sags, the secondary sex characteristics shrink and fade, slacken and thin. I have seen far more convincing crossdressers over sixty than under. Except for the guys whose height and build make it impossible for the world to construe them as female (and this is a problem for very tall and muscular women, as well), by sixty, crossdressing men have undergone the inevitable softening of the face and chest, the diminution of testosterone, and have enough practice and enough confidence to make very passable grandmothers of themselves. Not surprisingly, the amount of time that many crossdressers spend en femme triples after they retire. They can crossdress when they want, and many of them want to a lot.

There are twenty-five crossdressers among the four hundred or so male passengers aboard the Holiday, and this may represent roughly their proportion of the general population, but it’s impossible to say for sure. No one seems to have any reliable statistics about how many heterosexual crossdressers there are. I check with the International Foundation for Gender Education in Waltham, Massachusetts, which acts as switchboard, referral service, news agency, and educational center for both crossdressers and transsexuals, and with GenderPAC (Gender Public Advocacy Coalition), and with Dallas Denny of AEGIS (American Educational Gender Information Service), a longtime activist in the transsexual community, but none of them can tell me. “Too many guys in the closet,” a voice at the IFGE says. “How could anyone presume to count?”

I call Ray Blanchard, a self-described “traditional clinician,” who is head of clinical sexology services at Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and has been studying sexuality for thirty years. “No one knows,” he says. “I consulted several colleagues, and the consensus is that there’s no useful epidemiological information. Period.”

I check with Jane Ellen and Mary Frances Fairfax of Tri-Ess, the Society for the Second Self, “a family-oriented support group for heterosexual crossdressers.” The Fairfaxes (this is the last name they use for their crossdressing life, their mutual invented femme name) live in Texas, where Jane Ellen is otherwise Chet, and a physician, and a fierce cribbage player and the father of three boys, two in college, one in prep school. They offer that at last count there were eleven hundred crossdressers and three hundred twenty wives in Tri-Ess’s thirty chapters nationwide, but they don’t know how many heterosexual crossdressers there are either.

“Maybe three or four million,” Jane Ellen hazards. “Maybe somewhere between three and five percent of the population. People who claim it’s more, I think that’s just, you know, a minority wanting to be bigger than it is. And people who say more like one or two percent, I think those are the ones who are ashamed.” When I ask Ray Blanchard for an estimate, he says he thinks three to five percent of the population is about right too.

These are just about the only two points of agreement between Blanchard and the Fairfaxes: no one knows how many heterosexual crossdressers there are, and all these men in dresses who assert that they are straight, sometimes to the point of annoying everyone else, are straight. They may not be straight in exactly the way that noncrossdressing men are — most heterosexual men don’t look at an attractive woman and think, I’d like to have sex with her, I’d like to wear her dress, I’d like men and women to look at me as they look at her — but they are straight.

It was precisely for these men that Tri-Ess was founded in 1976, as a melding of several crossdressing groups, including the historic Hose and Heels Club, which began meeting in California in 1961, and is to many crossdressers what Stonewall is to gay men: the beginning of the end of shame (although not, for the crossdressers, the end of fiercely preserved anonymity). Tri-Ess is now the largest organization for heterosexual crossdressers and their spouses, by which they mean wives, and although nobody would object if a female-to-male crossdresser and her husband wanted to join, it is true that they have not yet, and it is true that neither the folks at Tri-Ess nor I can quite imagine the dynamics of that couple, since the spousal, role requires an abundance of traditional wifely virtues: accommodation, compromise, and gracious acceptance of that which is unwelcome, and often truly painful. The “spouses and partners” who are mentioned so frequently in Tri-Ess literature and who attend the SPICE workshop, which Tri-Ess sponsors, are women.

The Fairfaxes, a little John Gray, a little country doctor in their beaming certainty and parental concern for the weaknesses of others, are the driving forces behind Tri-Ess. For some crossdressers, Tri-Ess is a beacon of hope in a society that judges them weirdos and queers when they know they are not. For critics within the crossdressing community, the Fairfaxes are good people, but misguided about the nature of crossdressing, even self-deceiving. Lots of crossdressers take issue with the Tri-Ess focus on “family values” and heterosexuality. The Tennessee Vals, for instance, will welcome you “if you consider yourself a crossdresser, transsexual or any other type of gender bender … whether gay or straight, bisexual or asexual.” There is a big-tent movement among crossdressers these days, and many groups don’t share Tri-Ess’s exclusionary philosophy.

Jane Ellen Fairfax is a man with a mission: to save crossdressers from their worst selves and to save their marriages. Mary Frances, firm but unassuming, competent, and mild except when offended, is his partner in this, and has been the secretary of Tri-Ess’s board of directors (of which Jane Ellen is the chair) since 1988.

Jane Ellen has a hearty, blunt demeanor that is sugared over in the Southern manner when he’s crossdressed, more emphatic when he’s “en drab,” as they say, but he is always smart, always tenacious and unshakable in his self-esteem and in his beliefs, which include churchgoing Christianity and the platform of the Republican Party. He sees crossdressing as more than a hobby and something quite different from a problem. He insists that the wearing of women’s clothes is both relaxing and expressive of a feminine self that is nurturing and gentle, and that can enhance any marriage if the wife is wise enough to appreciate it and strong enough to corral what can be, as Jane Ellen admits, a narcissistic, self-indulgent habit.

Once a wife or partner realizes her mate isn’t leaving her for another man or for a new life as a woman, or taking risks that could destroy their financial and family life, the two of them can seek a balanced solution.… Many of the traits that attracted her in the first place — sensitivity, kindness, appreciation of beauty, etc. — can now be seen as belonging to that “woman within.”

[Tri-Ess pamphlet, “Do You Know Someone Who Is a Cross Dresser?” February 2000]

A central tenet of Tri-Ess is that crossdressing is a gift.

Crossdressers are blessed with an additional facet to our personalities. As we accept our dual, masculine-and-feminine, “bi-gendered” gift, and seek to understand and explore it, the result is a very fulfilling broadening of our entire personality.… Our occasional adoption of a complete feminine persona and total gender role presentation is an outward personal expression of our inner feminine feelings. We dress appropriately in emulation, rather than in mockery, of femininity.… We cultivate our complete feminine image, with lingerie, makeup, wig, padding for breasts and hips, as well as feminine clothing, shoes and accessories and even a femme name.

[Tri-Ess pamphlet, “Tri-Ess Today,” 2000]

The Fairfaxes hope to persuade the world outside Tri-Ess that heterosexual crossdressers are just normal folks, not at all like those gender outlaws and gender-benders — bearded men in dresses, “chicks with dicks”—whom Jane Ellen calls “gender mockers.” The Fairfaxes want crossdressers out of the closet, not because Tri-Ess wishes to defy or upend society, but because they believe that if society understood how normal crossdressing is, there would be no resistance to it; it would be seen as no stranger a form of relaxation than golf. The words that Ray Blanchard uses when he talks about crossdressing—“fetish,” “continuum of gender dysphoria,” “erotic self-absorption”—are words the Fairfaxes don’t ever want to hear. It upsets them to have crossdressing viewed as being about sex, which they try to get as far away from as possible, or as odd, although they know it is, because they also know that they are exactly the kind of people — Christians, family people, Texans — that George W. Bush wants and needs. When you say “crossdresser,” Jane Ellen and Mary Frances want you to think only of a guy relaxing in a dress.

“Of course it’s not relaxing,” Blanchard says, with some heat. “Heels and makeup and a wig and a corset? It’s preposterous. Even women don’t find that relaxing. Relaxing is a pair of sweatpants, clothing that doesn’t even feel like clothing. Crossdressers want to normalize this, to have it seen as relaxation and self-expression. I’ve had people say to me, ‘You know, I bet if there wasn’t all this stereotyping, these people would not choose to wear a dress.’ I say that’s nonsense. The crossdressing is an attempt to resolve an internal conflict, and it’s not about fabric. If we had clothing that was identical in every way, including fabric and shape, except men wore shirts with four buttons and women had shirts with five, crossdressers would want more than anything to have the shirt with five. We don’t know why.”

Our categories and our descriptions are so narrow and self-protective that not only don’t we have words for the drive to crossdress, we don’t have any language to describe the mixture of attraction and envy that often leads these men to have sex with women while thinking of themselves as male lesbians, “men trapped in men’s bodies,” in Dr. Anne Lawrence’s words. For crossdressers, Ray Blanchard says, “it’s like they plug in the lamp and the toaster pops up. They emulate the women they want to have — some kind of confusion between attraction to a sexual object and being the object. Many see an attractive woman, get aroused and then envious. They cannot get their wires uncrossed.”

A brochure from the Fantasia Fair of 1986 encapsulates the crossdressers’ bind.

What is a Crossdresser?

An individual, usually heterosexual, who desires and needs to dress in the clothing of the opposite sex at different times throughout his or her life. This compulsive behavior generally starts at a young age and the individual struggles alone for many years with this closeted need. Cross-Dressing is not a sickness, but represents a person who enjoys expressing another aspect of his personality and gains both emotional and physical pleasure from this transition. It is not a hobby, but a necessity and Cross-dressing is for life.

This seems to me to be the heart of the crossdressers’ dilemma, and now the heart of mine in writing about them. Crossdressing is a compulsion, but somehow not a sickness. A good wife should tolerate it because the man has no choice, but it shouldn’t be too hard to tolerate because it is, after all, a gift. It is about enjoyment, it gives physical and emotional pleasure — and it’s a necessity. The necessity of crossdressing is frightening to the men and to their wives, and their wish to tame it, to dress it up as a preference and a superior personality, is understandable.

“We learn what everyone learns,” Jane Ellen Fairfax says. “Girls are now taught you can be anything you want to be. No one tells a little boy, ‘You can be a sweet, soft, and wonderful little boy and an astronaut.’ Men are still being trained — well, you know, as Virginia Prince [founder of Tri-Ess and one of the godmothers of crossdressing] says, ‘Men are always trying to become what women are content to be.’ ”

“What is it that women are content to be?” I ask.

“Oh, you know, they know when to give it a rest. They know when and how to quit. They can relax and be themselves.”

I do know. He means that in his vision, idealized and old-fashioned, women are like oceans, or like fields, or like horses, and men are sailors, farmers, and cowboys, and that is their curse and that is women’s blessing, although women may not realize it. It is exhausting to be a man, and delightful to kick off those demands and slip into something more comfortable. It no longer seems odd to me, when I am talking to the Fairfaxes, that they are middle-of-the-road Republicans; it seems odd only that this quirk, this habit of wearing women’s clothing, would make anyone think that they belonged at the same party as Queer Nation, Dykes on Bikes, and transsexual women who become lesbian feminists.

Jane Ellen says, “Crossdressers are not women, and they’re not trying to be women.” When he talks about crossdressers, he almost always says “they.” When he talks about his marriage, his practice, and his politics, he says “I.”

“A lot of men want to go there, to be our feminine selves, to slow down and stop striving.”

“It sounds like yoga,” I say.

Jane Ellen is silent. It sounds like yoga except for the two hours of preparation time. It sounds like yoga except that it begins in a man’s life as an erotic response and becomes an erotic fetish. Sometimes I put on lipstick when I’m tense. It makes me feel armored, less vulnerable to the world. That’s not the same thing. I don’t feel that the lipstick is essential to my being, that without it I must stay home, and even as I know that there is an erotic dimension to getting dressed up (it’s not just crossdressers who appreciate the rustle of a slip, the slide of a stocking), when the dressing and the garments are the fuel and the expression of one’s sexual wishes, it is about sex, and not gender. For all their talk of relaxation, the Fairfaxes are too smart to think, or to try to persuade me, that crossdressing is ordinary, or that it’s just a hobby. Fly-fishing is a hobby; spending two hours preparing yourself to walk through a mall or a hotel lobby, hoping — hoping to the point of anxiety and arousal — that you will be perceived as female, is not what anyone, not least the crossdressers themselves, thinks of as a hobby.

“Crossdressers’ desires do not map onto anything in our world,” Ray Blanchard says. “You will never know how they feel if you are not one of them. And they have to disconnect between reality and their fantasy. Otherwise, it’s too disruptive. It’s too disruptive to acknowledge that you wish your penis was part of your wife’s body and not yours. It’s too disruptive to acknowledge that this is a sexual compulsion — one that diminishes over time, to the point that you can begin to tame it and not be so driven by the sex part, but there are very few former crossdressers. Even when the sexual spark, the libido fades, the attachment and the need persist. Like in marriage.”

Heterosexual crossdressers are disproportionately represented among the retired military; they are often first-born sons, and often quite masculine-looking, which is why the rest of us struggle so with their appearance. Blanchard says, “All of these men will tell you, ‘I had to hide my femininity. I became a cop, a firefighter, a black belt in karate, a construction worker, in order to compensate, in order to put these fears to rest and to hide my true nature.’ ” Blanchard thinks that what the men fear is actually exposure and ridicule — exposure not of their own femininity but of their drive to crossdress. He thinks their insistence that their intensely masculine behavior is merely a screen for their deeply feminine natures helps them believe that their wearing of women’s clothes expresses this femininity rather than an erotic compulsion. “These are masculine guys, for the most part. There’s no contradiction between ‘I feel like a woman’ and ‘I drive a tank, fly combat, play tight end,’ but there is a contradiction between those activities and ‘I am a very feminine person and always have been.’ The past gets rewritten because of their enormous emotional need to believe in their own femininity as the source of the need to crossdress.”

This is the only world I know where heterosexual men argue that they are more feminine than they appear and their critics and judges argue that they are less.

It is Talent Night aboard the Holiday, and I am having dinner at the Rudds’ table before the show. Felicity and Merrie, a large, sweet engineering professor, take turns dominating the dinner conversation. There is a great deal that they both want me to understand, and they are also gratified, painfully gratified, by my attention, by the fact that I even think about them without horror. I come to see why so many women find themselves sympathetic to crossdressers: women are raised to be sympathetic, and protective toward the vulnerable, and there is something appealing, unexpected, and powerful about being a woman and sympathizing with a man not because he demands it and you must offer it but because you genuinely feel sorry for him, for his debilitating envy and his anxious and powerless state of mind. Heidi Klum and her supermodel crowd may feel sorry for helpless men, whipsawed by passion, every night of the week, but this is not a stance that society affords most women.

Peggy Rudd is the boss and the model for the wives, their spokesperson, the movement’s spokesperson, the cruise director, the school nurse. Mel, all hearty kindness, a genial grandfather even in a dress and bolero jacket, does not seem to have the same obligation. None of the men say to me, “I’ve learned so much from Mel.” Like many husbands of dynamic, take-charge women, he is one of Peggy’s biggest fans, supportive and teasing, emphatically appreciative, and just slightly digging in his heels. “She’s just go, go, go,” he says. He is a good old boy in drag, always looking for a laugh, a little good-natured fun, another party, another piece of bread and butter under Peggy’s watchful eye (the whole table knows of his cholesterol troubles and hers). Although he does not make a pretty woman, he makes a reasonably good overweight, coarse-featured sixty-year-old woman, I think, but my eyes have adjusted: none of these guys look as tall or as large to me as they are.

With a slightly pursed expression, Peggy says, “My next book is on joy. The difference between the level of joy that crossdressers experience”—she holds her hand up over her head—“and the level of joy that their wives experience.” Her hand drops to her waist. The crossdressers around us say nothing. They nod, joyous astronauts sympathizing with the poor wives left behind and trying not to show how much more fun they’re having. I think of the twinkle in Mel’s eyes and the fact that there is never anything like a twinkle in Peggy’s. It must be psychologically exhausting for her to turn this pain into a shared hobby, his compulsion into entertainment, his need into an occasion for celebration, and I feel ashamed that knowing all that, I still prefer his company.

Peggy turns to Lori. “You are so special,” she says, as she does every night. “You are just the most beautiful crossdresser I’ve ever seen. Everyone wants to sit next to you, you’re so beautiful.”

As I’ve learned in the past couple of days, Lori is a preoperative male-to-female transsexual; if she weren’t with our group, she would stand out only as an unusually elegant woman on a Carnival cruise. Transsexuals sometimes come to transgender events, for a number of reasons, personal and political, but many feel that having resolved their problems through surgery, they have no need for the transgender community, for people who are defined as “other,” and that they can now simply slip into the rest of America with legally changed ID and, like transgendered Anatole Broyards, enter into new lives and answer easier questions. Lori is here because she is accompanying one of her best friends, a crossdresser whose wife couldn’t make it at the last minute.

The implication of Peggy’s flattery is clear: Your performance as a woman is so good. I don’t think Peggy means to offend; she can’t help it. Transsexuals make crossdressers nervous: maybe there is a continuum, maybe crossdressers just feel more mildly what transsexuals feel so deeply, and maybe those feelings will become overpowering if not reined in by wives and children and Tri-Ess’s marital guidelines. Almost every crossdresser in the group compliments Lori. No wife has the nerve, or the wish, except Peggy. Other passengers send over requests for photographs with the beautiful crossdresser every night.

And Lori is deeply offended every night. If this were Tootsie 2, she would leap up, etiquette be damned, and say, “How dare you decide that I am the evening’s entertainment? I don’t ask the Don Rickles look-alike at Table Six to pose for us with his outrageous, hedgehoglike toupee. I don’t send the waiter over to ask that the entire clan, three generations of short, pointy-headed, potbellied men, waddle over so I can show my friends the perils — not that I’m making a judgment — of inbreeding.” And the entire dining room would cheer as Lori tossed her head prettily. If necessary, she would deck someone (although she doesn’t have the build for it), which would be hilarious, and if the screenwriter had seen In and Out, all the waiters would don wigs and sing “I’m Every Woman” in their Thai, Mexican, South African, and Jamaican accents, until the insensitive slunk away or — as Peggy Rudd told me had happened on a previous cruise — the other guests began donning wigs too, partying along with and expressing envy for the fun-loving crossdressers.

This is not what happens. Lori withdraws, fending off the curious and the compliments, until she is as cool and pleasant as a white-gloved lady on the subway.

After dinner we make our way to the ship’s theater for the talent show. It is an amazing evening, beginning with the small man who approaches us from behind potted plants, leering like Groucho, murmuring, “You ladies look lovely tonight” with the hopeful fatuity of John Cleese. The crossdressers in our group dimple and smile, as if behind fans. “Aren’t you nice?” one says. “Oh, thank you,” says another, and bats her eyelashes. Lori says, “Give me a break,” and walks into the theater. I follow, and bump into our group’s shy, skinny engineer from Texas, from whom I have not heard a murmur so far, and who is now wobbling across the room in a white stretch velvet dress and a platinum Tina Turner shag.

Lori and I settle down in a booth; it’s clear to me that she would rather not sit with the rest of the group, which has settled in a large, dim cluster on the other side of the stage. We are joined by a tiny elderly couple from South Africa, on their twenty-fifth cruise. The Tina Turner engineer approaches with another crossdresser, whom I haven’t met, and then, at the last minute, sensing the utter lack of welcome, they pull back and join the larger group. I feel bad. Lori sighs. The elderly couple peer at the strange person in the tight white dress, and then at us, curiously. They are reassured, I think, although later I hear that Lori and Merrie have taken up with them and that they are as pleased to meet crossdressers as they have been to enjoy the chocolate buffet at midnight, to fox-trot in the Tahiti Lounge, and to visit the uninspiring port of Catalina. They seem incapable of having a bad time.

The engineer’s companion, in a tiny bright red dress with matching red satin pumps and black fishnet hose, comes back across the floor to us with a camera. He takes four or five photos of Lori and me and our little South African friends. As usual, we are supposed to be flattered: either Lori is so beautiful, or we make such a charming group, that a crossdresser we don’t know wishes to commemorate the occasion. Lori and I think that the photographer wants to show his friends at home how “real” both of us and therefore all of them look (and neither of us is flattered by that) or to suggest that the cruise has been an easy blending of the crossdressers and everyone else. Finally, smiling broadly, he leaves, with photos of us from every angle.

The emcee is English and unhappy. He mocks us all relentlessly and indiscriminately. He is as disgusted by the round-the-clock feeders as he is by the well-behaved reunion families and the blameless honeymoon couples; strolling on the deck and in the lounges, he assails us with cries of “You’re having such fun!” much as an unhappy lover might scream, “You’re ruining my life!”

The talent show opens with two couples from Japan demonstrating the rumba. The alpha couple, firmly occupying center stage, are in their late sixties and have been studying dance for about five years, or so I guess; it appears they speak no English, and the emcee gives only their names, with the same honeyed enthusiasm he reserves for the smallest children, the disabled, and the old. The beta couple are in their seventies and have been studying the rumba for about five minutes. They sway and snap their fingers ceremoniously and essay a few simple steps upstage while the other couple go from the basic box step into a hand-to-hand double break and twin turns, all slowly, elegantly, and with enormous intensity. The dancers are stately and exotic in black tie and rustling taffeta dresses, and even though their performance seems to take hours, they are applauded wildly.

The rumba people are followed by an Israeli man who plays a homemade drum with his mouth, an accountant who sings “Heartbreak Hotel” badly but arouses the crowd’s snickering only when he attempts to mime the Presley moves, and a lady in her seventies who sings “I Believe” and clutches the emcee’s hand. He begins supportively, swinging her hand gently, smiling genially, but his true nature asserts itself, and by the end of her song, he is pumping her arm, grinning and flapping like Jerry Lewis.

The next guest is one of ours. I noticed Ted the first night, a small, dapper blond man in a tux, and wondered if the Holiday had Gentlemen Escorts like the fancy ships do. Unlike the other crossdressers, he comes to dinner every night in high, black-tie drag: exquisite bouffant wigs, perfect matte makeup, three-inch heels, and formfitting dresses that cling to his padded bust and bottom. His wife looks pleasant and sensibly dressed, except for the one night when he is in a tux and she is in one of his outfits. For one night, she too looks like a beautiful drag queen, and even so, our crowd is more interested in his artistry than in her.

Ted’s performance, not surprisingly, is Marilyn Monroe doing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Ted asks the emcee for his hand, and the emcee backs away, miming horror. The audience laughs, but they’re puzzled. It is not entirely clear to them that Ted is a man — maybe the emcee pulled his hand away because she’s such a femme fatale? — but it is obvious that this is someone who has violated the Talent Night rules of homespun and shyly showcased minor talents. Ted’s is a minor talent, but his production values, from wig to beauty mark, are high — too high for this crowd. Ted flirts with the emcee during the show, but the emcee is stone-faced. I cannot tell, from beginning to end, whether the hostility in the air is a response to Ted’s semiprofessionalism, his artifice, or his maleness, but there is something ugly, as there is in the lounge later that night when Merrie sings “My Way” in a pleasant tenor. It is not abusive and not challenging, but there is a coolness, an unwillingness to engage with him as he is.

The show is over. Lori and I talk, looking out at the ocean. She says, “Most crossdressers, they dress in safe places which are just big closets. I think most crossdressers are comfortable as long as it’s a safe environment, where they can be seen but not in danger. Although a lot of them need some danger, some milestones — my first time at the mall, my first time in a restaurant.”

The evening after the talent show, Felicity comes to dinner en drab, looking like what he is, a heavyset Baptist minister who worked construction in his youth. The headwaiter approaches the table bearing a bouquet of roses. Every night he has become more and more camp and foolishly flattering; the crossdressers are big tippers, moderate drinkers, considerate of the staff, and extremely polite. I don’t doubt that they are desirable customers. With a flourish, the headwaiter delivers the roses to Felicity’s wife, to applause from our four tables. Felicity puts his big hand on hers and squeezes it. He makes a toast to their thirty years and her goodness and support. He begins to choke up; her remote look never changes. It does not please her that he decided to dress like a man for her tonight. It does not please her that he is so grateful to her for trying to believe that he crossdresses only because he cannot express his warm and nurturing self while wearing trousers. It does not please her, God knows, to sit with a bunch of men in makeup and dresses, some modest, some outrageous, some passable, most not, and call it an anniversary party. It just about kills her that this should be their life, and although she absolutely believes that Jesus will guide them, Felicity’s crossdressing is a cross to bear.

Later they come to talk to me, and when Felicity says that his path may be to minister to the transgendered, his wife puts her hand over her mouth and says, quietly, “Jesus will show us the way.” And means, unmistakably, that the way will surely not be this one, that Jesus cannot want her to be the wife of a crossdresser who ministers to the transgendered. Felicity says, “It’s like there are three of me in this little boat: the husband, the crossdresser, and the minister. I can hear the falls approaching, and I know, I know with all my heart, one of us will not survive this ride.” He begins to cry, and I get tears in my eyes. As I hand him a Kleenex, his wife glares at me and says, “You sure do get involved with your interviews.” She must think that it takes some fancy footwork to feel so sorry for the crossdresser and not for his wife, and when I look at her sympathetically, she almost spits. Pity from people like me is not what she wants either. For the remainder of the trip, Felicity seeks me out and his wife avoids me.

I do better with the wives, overall, at Fall Harvest 2000 in St. Louis, Missouri. We all arrive in the last days — not the glory days, if there ever were any, but the last, sad days — of the Henry VIII Conference Center on the frayed edge of the St. Louis airport. In two weeks this place, with its tired decor and dangling fixtures, will be razed to make a new runway. The Henry VIII has bits and pieces of Merrie Old England and bigger bits of St. Louis Generic, circa 1973. It is like a Mel Brooks set with a Spike Lee twist: doorknobs sliding in and out of splintering doors, splotched carpeting, lopsided lamps, and a sparse, disheartened staff composed of black teenagers, some of whom look too young to work, and Bosnian women who look as weary and wary as the American kids. No one is inclined to do much, and when the crossdressers come in with three and four suitcases, the kids and the women all look over sympathetically but without stirring.

The first people I meet in the cavernous lobby are my host, Marcia Lynn, and his wife, Barb. Marcia Lynn is president of the St. Louis branch of MAGGIE (Mid America Gender Group Information Exchange). Throughout the weekend he and the other regulars among the crossdressers will tell me how bad they feel for the staff, whom they’ve gotten to know during the five years the St. Louis group has been meeting here. “They love us,” Marci says. “We’re friends, a lot of us are fun people. The staff is crazy about us.” Certainly, the other guests, a swingers’ convention, do not tip as well or express solicitude for the staff.

There’s an unexpected resemblance between some of the crossdressers and the swinger wives, who show up for their morning coffee in heavy makeup, sequined tube tops, fringed miniskirts, and the occasional pair of fluffy bedroom slippers — which do distinguish them from the crossdressers, who stick to their sneakers by day and killer heels at night. By the end of the weekend, some crossdressing couples and swinging couples are sharing Rob Roys in the lounge, but for the most part, the crossdressers express perfunctory tolerance and real disdain for the swingers, who reciprocate with jovial contempt.

At the registration table there are stacks of meal tickets, pamphlets, and information about MAGGIE, the Fall Harvest’s sponsor and the umbrella organization for chapters in Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Iowa, Kansas City, St. Louis, northern Indiana, Omaha, and Wichita. Tours of Grant’s Farm, a wildlife preserve, and of the Anheuser-Busch brewery are scheduled for Friday and Saturday. The professional service people for the crossdresser community are also here: Absolutely Picture Perfect, providing videos and formal portraits; Barb’s Large & Lovely lingerie, sizes 1X–8X; the IFGE Bookstore; Shoe Express, ladies’ shoes in sizes 11–15.

Marci runs all over the hotel, happily bustling, scolding, cajoling; he won’t have a real crisis on his hands — aside from the usual lost room keys, forgotten wigs, vendors who fail to show up — until the night of the beauty pageant, when the papered-over gap between the transsexuals and the crossdressers opens up. Barb works the registration table with her friend Carol, also the wife of a crossdresser. They look like lots of fortyish women in St. Louis: curly brown hair with a little gray at the temples, pastel-framed glasses, comfortable track suits, a little pink lipstick. They are enormously kind and helpful, and they roll their eyes affectionately at their husbands’ self-important busyness and excitement, as wives at husband-centered events often do. And in the great tradition of ladies’ auxiliaries, they have become important parts of the community, often providing not the point of the event but the web of it: they are the in-house mothers, and Marci publicly thanks Barb every day.

Two crossdressers lounge near the table, although their body language is so coiled and fraught that it is no more like lounging than tae kwon do. They are both thin to the point of disturbance — the emaciated look is almost as common as the matronly one. Other men solve the waistline problem with the severe corseting one sees only in fetish catalogues, Gaultier shows, and Victorian porn, and the rest of them wear large dresses. These two are in tight cocktail dresses, one black spandex, one electric-blue satin with three tiers of flounces from hip to mid-thigh. Awkward and odd in three-inch silk-strapped sandals at two in the afternoon, they pace next to these cheerful dumpling ladies. They don’t look so much like men in drag as like people of indeterminate gender with whom something has gone wrong. And they’re not happy to see me, either. Throughout the weekend, I get cold-shouldered by the men who find my presence as neither wife nor support staff burdensome, the ones who make it clear that they have to contend with real women (“g.g.’s” is the common, faintly hostile term: genetic gals) plenty the rest of the year. I’m welcomed by a few guys who are happy with their crossdressing, or happy to talk about it, and I’m asked out by two shy, determined men, an accountant and a firefighter, whose previous relationships foundered on the revelation of the crossdressing and who would like to find a nice woman who will accept it, even embrace it.

During cocktail hour I’m approached by Kris and her husband, Leroy, a middle-aged crossdresser. I learn that they are newly married. When he goes off to get a drink, she suggests in a soft Iowa voice that we talk more, later. Her pile of stiff blond curls is not unlike Leroy’s. She finishes her drink and looks at me with the sad, amused gaze of a woman who does not kid herself.

“Well,” she says, “I put an ad on the Internet for a man in touch with his feminine side, didn’t I? Of course, I had in mind a communicator, a romantic, a listener … and apparently Leroy read it a certain way. There are so many things you can’t say. Most of the wives are not as open as I am. They don’t want to say to themselves, ‘You’re nothing but a people-pleaser, you’ve been one all your life.’ You see yourself as a failure if you can’t accept this. The wives don’t tell their husbands, they can’t tell him because they don’t want to hurt him and they don’t want to lose him, so they walk a fine line of the truth or they hang on silently and hope his feelings change. Crossdressing is the ultimate form of worship, that’s what the men say, and they say they want to develop all those feminine aspects, but I don’t feel worshiped. My femaleness is not something Leroy adores — it’s his femaleness that this is all about. This gift is supposed to be the integration of the feminine side — more nurturing, more open — and the sharing of feminine things is very important to Leroy, but he’s said that if he can’t pass, he’ll quit. So I could make him quit, I guess, by telling him the truth, and yet I can’t tell him the truth. He’d feel terrible.”

I suggest to Kris that she feels pretty terrible already.

“I know. I’ve been thinking of not coming to these things anymore. When he crossdresses, I just don’t have a husband. It’s not like Dixie and Rebecca, who just seem themselves all the time. He always acts like her husband, not like a nervous girlfriend.”

Dixie and Rebecca are standing across the room, both of them in black lace cocktail dresses, Rebecca’s floor-length and very Scarlett O’Hara, his mid-calf and rather 1930s, with a dropped waist. Just in case you didn’t see him, at six feet, four inches and about two hundred and thirty pounds, he wears a large black polished straw hat with velvet band and dyed black feathers. Dixie and his very pretty wife seem to be having a hell of a time.

“Hey, little lady.” Dixie cocks his finger at me John Wayne-style and beckons me over. He is explaining to several crossdressers that if they’re stopped by a state trooper they should not try to impersonate a woman or lie. He should know: he’s been stopping cars in Alabama for twenty-five years. He plays both roles for us, the menacing trooper and the wetting-his-pants crossdresser hoping to get out of this without newspaper headlines, a beating, or a divorce. The other men laugh, seeming to appreciate his help, and the wives sneak looks at Rebecca, who is holding his hand and twisting around one of his big arms in the historic manner of Southern belles. They are as happy as any other deeply compatible couple, the kind of couple whose pleasure in each other makes them even more golden to the rest of us. Later on, she sits in his lap in the cocktail lounge, and when a stray businessman asks Dixie if he, Dixie, thinks he’s a woman, Dixie growls, “I’m a guy in a dress. Of course I don’t think I’m a woman. But how about this, pal, we’ll ask your wife and my wife who’s happier. The winner buys a round.” The man backs off and lifts his glass in Dixie’s direction. Dixie laughs and kisses Rebecca—“Well, there you go. I’ll buy anyway”—and orders drinks for the bartender, the businessman, and me.

Rebecca says, “You know, Dixie’s just a people person.” (She uses his femme name and his real name interchangeably, and he seems to care as little as she does.) “He goes to the bakery for a loaf of bread, and when he comes back he’s got five new friends and four of them are staying for dinner. That’s just the way he is, and I guess the dressing up goes with that. Of course I don’t mind. Why should I? It’s fun for both of us. It’s something different, and I’m glad about that. I don’t want to just play bridge — I already had a boring marriage.”

Rebecca understands that some wives do mind, and she thinks that’s too bad.

“I wouldn’t have married him if I minded. It’s fun, we buy some fun clothes, and he’s always himself. I mean, just look.” Dixie is winking at our smiling waitress and setting up a bridge game for later that night.

When the day of the Miss Fall Harvest Pageant arrives, Jim Bridges is busier than a one-armed paperhanger. He is doing makeover after makeover, on his feet from nine A.M. until eight P.M., when the pageant begins: Contemporary Dress, then Talent, then Evening Wear. As I’m sitting on the bed in Bridges’s suite turned beauty parlor, Mimi comes by, in undershirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, as Mike. I met Mimi the first night of the conference. He told me he was not going to be in the pageant because he didn’t need to be: Mimi’s talent was simply in being. That night Mimi was wearing a sort of Heidi the Vampire Slayer outfit — platinum shag, tight black latex corset, suit with arm cuffs, boots, choke collar — and having a fabulous time, flirting, strutting, glad-handing through the crowd, without the restraint or anxiety I see in lots of the men. But now Mike is wandering in and out of Bridges’s suite, his powerful shoulders slumped, a slight potbelly over his jeans, distressed that Jim can’t fit him in so that he will look “absolutely spectacular” tonight.

Jim cracks jokes and soothes the anxious, perspiring men. The suite has the whiff of a locker room without any sense of team. Each of these men is on his own journey, and although they are kind to one another most of the time, and encouraging (“You go, girl!” “That wig is really good!”), there is no feeling at all that they are in this together or that it is fun.

Jim says, “I want you all to look fabulous. Maybe someone’ll get lucky tonight.” There is a round of masculine chuckles, and one man says, “I’m all for that!” I ask, “Who would you all want to get lucky with?” and there is complete silence. Jim lifts one eyebrow but says nothing. These men are his bread and butter now, and if he thinks that some of them have a more ambivalent relationship to their sexuality than they acknowledge, he certainly isn’t going to offend them by saying so.

“So,” Jim says to the man in the chair, “can I tackle those eyebrows?” The man says, reluctantly, that his wife won’t let him pluck. Jim is undaunted. “Well, the wife must have her say. Let’s just give you exquisite eyebrows tonight.” He smooths the lower halves of the man’s thick, straight brows with foundation, sets it with colorless powder, and darkens and arches the upper halves with brown powder. When Jim puts a wig of chestnut waves on the man, he looks different, of course. He also looks radiant. He thanks Jim, tearfully—“I can’t tell you what it means to me to see myself like this, God bless you”—and the next man hops into the makeup chair. Mike sighs and kicks one pointed toe against the wall.

I volunteer to do Mike’s makeup, although I don’t think that I can really master the magic of the Scotch tape strips attached to the concealed headband to raise the eyebrows and lids and recontour everything from the jaw up. “Lucille Ball, Loretta Young,” Jim says airily. “They did this all the time before everyone had face-lifts.” He knows. He did makeup in Hollywood for thirty years, for Joan Collins, Mick Jagger, and a long list of other divas, and when he kept getting bumped from choice assignments “by little blonds with boob jobs who were shtupping the producer,” he turned to an unimaginably grateful, large, and uncomplaining clientele: crossdressers.

Jim quickly does the Scotch tape trick and applies Mike’s false eyelashes, which I am afraid to do. Nine men wait impatiently, trying on auburn and honey-blond wigs, restlessly looking through the jewelry and false eyelashes and corsets for sale. All the goods are sized for larger-than-average women, to minimize the “King Kong in heels” effect that Jim has been warning them all about.

Mike now looks like a denuded drag queen from the neck up, and like a man ready to mow the lawn from the neck down. As we walk down the hall to his room, he tells me about his very supportive wife, about his teenage boys, who don’t know, about his passion for wine making and vintage motorcycles. The worst thing in his life, he says, was Vietnam; his kids are the best thing, especially now that they’re old enough to really talk. For forty-five minutes I lean over him, applying foundation, following his instructions, making my own improvisations. So this is what you have to do to stubble, so this is how you diminish the shelf of bone over the eye. I have tried for a subtle, natural look, and when I step back I see what a mistake I’ve made. With his edges softened, he looks wan and vulnerable, feminized but now lifeless. I put on more eye shadow, more lip liner. I apply more blush and work it in carefully, then dust a little shimmering powder over it all. Mike looks in the mirror and laughs. Now he looks like Mimi.

“I’d kiss you if it wouldn’t mess my lipstick,” he says cheerfully, and disappears into the bathroom to get into his pantyhose, his padded bra, and the fierce corset. His wife, stout, handsome, and tired, comes into the room. We introduce ourselves, and she settles down on the edge of the bed with a self-preserving amusement, holding her purse in her lap. I explain that he’s dressing.

“Oh,” she says, “well, that’ll take a while. He really gets into it.” She unpacks her overnight case and looks at me closely.

“I helped with his makeup,” I say. “Jim was really busy.”

“Oh, yeah, I can imagine. I used to help him with it, but — it just took so much time. I said, ‘If this is what you want to do, you better get good at it.’ ”

Mike comes out as Mimi, his biceps and deltoids gleaming above and below black latex straps, the muscles contrasting with the now small waist. He grins and strikes a pose. He sees his wife and freezes in the doorway, no longer friendly, blunt Mike, not yet wild party-girl Heidi, but a Heidi-in-waiting, hoping that his wife will give him permission to become.

His wife purses her lips. “That’s new, huh?”

“Yeah, but if you don’t like it, I brought the other one.” He points to a more conservative black sheath hanging on the closet door, with cap sleeves and a modest hemline.

She shrugs, massively. “Wear what you want. You ready to go?”

We all walk out together, and I see his wife hail a couple of friends, other wives from the MAGGIE circuit.

The pageant begins with one of the emcees, an older crossdresser, performing Rusty Warren’s “Knockers Up,” a song from the era of “blue” records: Redd Foxx, Belle Barth, Pearl Williams. Hard-faced and lithe, the emcee lip-syncs Warren’s biggest hit, from fifty years ago, and although there is some applause, no one looks very pleased, and the other emcees, Lor and Mary Akers, cut the song off pretty quickly.

Lor and Mary are the new generation for MAGGIE. Lor is a female-to-male transsexual, and Mary, his wife, has been with him since they were a lesbian couple. They are both short and stocky and tirelessly kind, and they both make it a point to check in with me to see if I have met the people I wish to meet. All weekend I see them thanking people, comforting people, sorting out the usual conference problems. The only other “FTM” at Fall Harvest is self-identified — and self-identified only. A petite Cyndi Lauper look-alike, in an ivory pantsuit and rainbow-dyed hair, she claims to be a shaman, a healer, and formerly a man, in her previous life. After she hands me her business card, Mary Akers catches my eye and shakes her head good-naturedly. Mimi pulls the card out of my hand. “Nuts,” he says.

The talent portion of the pageant, like the evening wear, ranges from the excruciating (plump, sweet Lor lip-synching, two-stepping, and giddyapping to a loping, sexy cowboy tune) to the pleasant (a dark, strong-featured black crossdresser belts out a gospel tune, and the mere fact that it is actually sung, not lip-synched, and sung well, brings down the house) to the complicated. The complicated performance is Stella’s.

Stella, a transsexual, is a warm, giggling blond with a great figure and a flirtatious head toss. Someone tells me she was a successful professional athlete and had her surgery a year ago. On the good side of thirty, fit and energetic, Stella dances and lip-synchs to “Le Jazz Hot,” a dopey number from the movie Victor/Victoria, in which the point is, of course, that a beautiful woman is impersonating a man impersonating a woman. Stella cuts to the chase. Her adequate lip-synching is background to the real performance, which is simply her body. She strips down, a bit awkwardly, from a tux to a spangly Folies Bergère outfit that clings to her small perky breasts and her bare round ass. Stella shimmies and loosens her hair, which has been hidden under a fedora. Her sexy, very female body is revealed and shaken and shown to every crossdresser in the room. I think she’s not much of a dancer, really — there is a certain stiffness in the hips which is very un-jazz — but Jim Bridges and all the other judges (friends of the community, vendors, and therapists) go wild. Stella bows, looking deeply, deeply pleased with herself.

My pal Jeanette, another crossdresser I met the first evening, is next in the show, and I wish he weren’t. In his everyday androgynous wear (bandanna, jeans, clogs, and tight T-shirt) he looks like George Peppard in his late-forties prime. In drag he looks awkward, and I blame his girlfriend, Marianne. Jeanette tells me that Marianne sought him out; bisexual and dominating, she loves having a man to dress up in women’s clothing. If she’s so happy, I think, why doesn’t she dress him right? He’s in a strange seventies sort of wig, a rayon jersey Liz Claiborne dress, dark hose, and makeup that distorts his features, although I cannot imagine what kind of makeup would not be wrong. If he were a woman, someone would have said to him by now— he’s about fifty—“You have strong features, make the most of them.” He should have a Diana Vreeland or Gertrude Stein look, powerful and emphatic, with no attempt to take the edge off, because the edge is the glory of those strong masculine faces. What I think, and what impels me to shut up about makeup and clothing when we talk and he asks for suggestions, is that he makes a very handsome man and a plain, awkward woman. Jeanette, smart, appealing, and sensitive, seems to me to have no place in this show, between Stella and the elderly gentleman in tails and leotard, who shows great legs and does an old-fashioned magic act. Jeanette reads from Dorothy Parker’s short stories and poetry, and the audience is puzzled, very much as they would be at Miss USA or Miss World. When they say “talent,” they don’t mean reading.

It’s time for the vote. It seems that almost everyone in the small Mr. Fall Harvest division (featured “for the first time ever” at Fall Harvest 2000, “for our female to male guys”) wins for something, but the Miss Fall Harvest contestants occasion much shuffling and adding of points. The final three are selected, and Stella is not among them. There is some rumbling, Jim Bridges stalks over from the judges’ table, and after a little back-and-forth Mary Akers announces that there was a mixup and everything has been straightened out. Stella, in her low-cut evening gown, is back in the top three. There is generous applause for the gospel singer, for the old magician, even for Jeanette, and there is loud, fair-minded clapping for Stella, who reacts as if she’s won an Emmy after years of merely being nominated. Afterward a number of the men mutter that Stella won for showing that she had the equipment, not for doing anything talented with it.

Finally, music begins, and for a moment the judges and the crossdressers and their wives are standing on the dance floor snapping photos, hugging and kissing, sipping their drinks. Within five minutes, all of the crossdressers are off the floor and back to their tables or pouring out into the lobby for a little air. It’s too hot and hard to dance in corsets, padding, three-inch heels, heavy wigs, and beaded evening gowns. Even more than that, dancing would melt the makeup and ruin the illusion. Who would they dance with? In the moment of fantasy, even men who don’t desire a man as a sexual partner need a handsome man as a prop, as the necessary and missing accessory; a wife is not at all the perfect complement to a ball gown. Not to mention that most of the men — Presbyterian accountants from Cedar Rapids and Lutheran engineers from Omaha — can’t dance and never do, not in suits, and not in dresses. I am out on the dance floor doing the macarena with twelve tired, cheerful wives, all of whom have kicked off their shoes and are getting down, hands on rumps, laughing and drinking, until it is so late that we close the joint.

After the cruise, after follow-up e-mails with Melanie and Peggy and more phone calls with the Fairfaxes, I found that I had more to say than I had thought, and more concerns about saying it. I didn’t want to demonize or pathologize any sexual preference or behavior that doesn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t want to make fun of fetishists. Now that our culture has begun to shift toward the notion that reciprocal, mature love between two people, of the same or opposite sex, is not a disease, I didn’t want to consign everyone who isn’t just gay or straight to the DSM junkpile. I wanted to focus on people like Steve and Sue, happily married for thirty years and not caring that with waning hormones they are now often mistaken for a lesbian couple, or on Tory and Cory with their buoyant puppy love, swapping party dresses and playful kisses. I wanted to see crossdressers as so many of them saw themselves. And I did, as with Dixie and Rebecca, but I also saw many of them very differently.

The men I met were, by and large, decent, kind, intelligent, and willing to talk openly; their wives were the same, many under the additional pressure of having to make the best accommodation they can to a marriage they did not envision and do not prefer. But it does seem to me that a passion for a person, or a capacity to love people, is different from a sexual impulse that is directed toward an object or an act and that is greater than the desire for any person. And although one could argue that all desire focused on an object or even an act is a fetish, I don’t think so — any more than I think that gender reassignment surgery (even when it’s known as gender confirmation surgery) is no different from a tummy tuck. The greatest difficulty people have with crossdressers, I think, is that crossdressers wear their fetish, and the gleam in their eyes, however muted by time or habit; the unmistakable presence of a lust being satisfied or a desire being fulfilled in that moment, in your presence, even by your presence, is unnerving. The mix of the crossdressers’ own arousal and anxiety and our responsive anxiety and discomfort is more than most of us can bear. We may not mind foot fetishists, but we may not wish to watch either.

The crossdressers of Tri-Ess insist that crossdressing is not about sexuality, and therefore not about sex. They are right about the first, and we can all stop assuming that any man who wears a dress is gay. But they are not right about the second, and their assertion that crossdressing is their creative expression of both genders is unsettling because it is at such odds with their behavior, their natures, and their marriages. These men are as far from gender warriors and feminists as George W. himself. As one wife said to me, “For twenty years he couldn’t help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can’t help because he’s doing his nails. Is that different?” For these men, the woman within is entirely the Maybelline version, not the Mother Teresa version, not the Liv Ullmann version, and not even the Tracey Ullman version. There is no innate grasp of female friendship, of the female insistence on relatedness, of the female tradition of support and accommodation for one’s partner and of giving precedence to the relationship overall. If you believe that these characteristics are more common to women than to men, these men do not embody them; if you don’t believe it, they would argue with you. If there were that kind of understanding, that kind of empathy and female bonding, rather than accessories and tapes on how to walk in heels, these guys would be unable to ask their wives to go through this crossdressing life with them, and everyone, husbands and wives, knows it. They know that if the women insisted on wearing three-piece suits or baseball uniforms in public, and asked their husbands to accept hairy legs, hairy underarms, and jock-straps as part of their sex life, the husbands would not be rushing off to join spousal support groups while cheerfully spending the family’s money on bespoke suits and expensive glue-on facial hair. The marriages would be over.

As with the Ladies’ Home Journal of the 1950s, or Cosmopolitan in the 1970s (and 1980s and 1990s), when I read Tri-Ess’s advice to wives, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry: It’s probably your fault but you can fix it, he really needs you but he may not show it, your love will overcome his problem, and a good man is hard to find. If Dickens’s devoted, selfless Nancy were alive today — and Bill Sykes, his sadism aside, is exactly the kind of macho, over-compensating, risk-taking guy one might find crossdressing — she would be in a wives’ support group, happy to pick out a lipstick, apologizing if they ran out of Slim-Fast just a week before Fall Harvest.

Is it just delicious irony that makes so many people’s eyes sparkle when I tell them about my Christian Republican crossdressers? Is it something less sophisticated, like schadenfreude, or even less civilized, like homophobia? It is gratifying to yank the covers off hypocrites: the fundamentalist Christian congressman with his handsome young pages, the feminist and her abusive boyfriend, the priest and his porn.

The widespread assumption is that these crossdressers are hypocrites: publicly lambasting deviance of all kinds and dressing up in private like Little Bo-peep. There is still plenty of Little Bo-peep (and Courtney Love and Scarlett O’Hara), but the lambasting has died down considerably over the last thirty years. In the past, crossdressers were eager to dissociate themselves from gay men and about as interested in feminism as Ward Cleaver. But now, as with the end of the Soviet Union, the unimaginable has happened and the landscape has changed. All the crossdressers I spoke to expressed their admiration for the gay civil rights movement and their hope that whatever acceptance gay people have managed to engender would somehow envelop crossdressers as well. Gay men and women turn out to be their role models in terms of self-respect and civil rights, even if the crossdressers are well aware that the gay community offers them tolerance, not a warm welcome. And feminism, of the women-are-nicer-people variety, although not a part of the wives’ lives, adds an unexpected aspect to the men’s self-understanding; in their remarks about the burdens of masculinity and the innate nurturing and graciousness of women, in their attempts to connect with Nature and Spirit, they sound like the softest and most Goddess-worshiping of Second Wave feminists.

Almost everything Tri-Ess has said about its members is true: they are straight and traditional men who love their wives and wear dresses. Just as Tri-Ess says, its Christian, conservative, Republican men have a great deal more in common with other Christian, conservative, Republican men than with anyone else. Their wives are not professional women with their own substantial incomes and career paths, and they are not royalty or Hollywood types who expose their spouses’ peculiarities and let the muck cling to their kids. They try to make their marriages work, and if the price of a good provider and a decent man is not much sex and a certain amount of constant pain, it is not an unfamiliar bargain. The wives are not uniformly overweight, motherly, and devoid of self-esteem (as some mediocre research has suggested they are), or at least no more so than any other group of middle-class women married young to traditional and dominant men, devoted to home and family, and lacking in advanced education. Juggling the limited resources of time, money, and pleasure, balancing dominance and fear, self-deception and love, selfishness and generosity, crossdressers and their wives struggle with one big difference — his compulsion — and otherwise, just as they have told me all along, they are just like everyone else.