by Amy Bloom
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 dre
ss 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.