Normal

by Amy Bloom

  “I grew up in a nice, materially comfortable middle-class life. But. I carried a deep, dark secret around with me. I was pretty strange anyway. I was not an easy child to raise—my mother had her times with me. I believed that my feelings mattered, even though I was a child. I was an offensive child. I would not be taken advantage of, I would not be ordered about. I was just a short person, but a person. I know a kid just like that now. Completely obnoxious. I love him.

  “I hate to sound like Mario Thomas, but I just wanted to be free to be me, whatever that was. And I didn’t know, although I kept going to the library, trying to find out. Until I was six, I was a happy child. Boy games, boy clothes, even a little girlfriend up the street. And after going off to school, horrified that I had to go in what felt like drag, sure that everyone would laugh at me, I knew that I’d better get used to it, because this body was not becoming male and it clearly made a difference to the world. I tried to do what I was supposed to in adolescence, tried to be the Last Lady, like my mother and my sisters, which I did pretty well. I didn’t even bother trying to be a tomboy, it would have been absurd by then. My breasts were huge—they were ridiculous, size 46 double Z. But Joan of Arc did it for me, explained me to me, when I encountered her in school at the age of nine. I thought, Well, here we go, and when I was twelve, finally, I found a book on transsexuals.

  “After graduate school,” Michael continues, shaking his head over another five wasted years, “I thought, Well, maybe I’m a lesbian. Could be—I know I’m attracted to women. I went to consciousness-raising meetings, and I’d listen and feel like a fraud. One girl said, ‘What makes each of us feel like a real woman?’ and while they went around the room answering, I thought, Nothing. Absolutely nothing on earth makes me feel like a woman.

  “I’m just a plain old heterosexual man, and I didn’t want to spend my life having relationships with women who had never, ever been with a woman before and didn’t know why they were attracted to me. I wanted a life. I’m not a professional transsexual. I don’t think of myself as transsexual anymore. I was one, I made that transition, now I’m just a man.”

  Michael says, “Let me tell you about my terminally polite family.” And although he himself borders on the terminally polite, he tells me funny, sad, outrageous family stories, the kind we all use to entertain company, deflect sympathy, and connect without too much feeling. His father, born early enough in this century to have heard stories of slavery from his father, always told Michael that he was entitled to be happy, and that God would not have put such an unusual child on this earth without purpose.

  “He said to me, ‘You’re not the first freak in the family, and you’re not likely to be the last.’ My poor mother. I’m dead to her. We see each other, we love each other, but the loss of her daughter was terrible. And I feel her pain. But I couldn’t do otherwise. I know she would have preferred the husband, the kids, the house, and the Valium, but I couldn’t. The first time someone suggested I might want to kiss a man, I thought, Don’t be ridiculous.”

  At funerals and weddings, the old folks who had known Michael before puberty as a tough little girl nicknamed Butch were comfortable with him. And the young kids would call him over to their table at the party and brag to their friends, “Go on, Uncle Mike. Tell them how you used to be a girl. Tell them.” One elderly uncle approached him at a funeral. “So, you’re a man now. Well, well. How you doin’? How’s your health?” And when Michael said that his health was fine, thank you, the old man sat him down for twenty minutes so they could talk about his rheumatism.

  “They figured I had my health, I had a job, God bless me. My aunt figured my mother needed a strong man to lean on, so God sent me. Indirectly, of course. I keep my blinders on, they serve me. I kept not receiving family wedding invitations, and I was so dense I’d call and say, ‘Where’s my invitation?’ And since in my terminally polite family there’s no way you could tell someone they weren’t invited, I kept showing up. After I found myself seated with the unemployed third cousin and his trashy girlfriend, I knew I wasn’t wanted and I kept thinking, Why didn’t they say so? But they couldn’t say so, and I finally figured it out.”

  “And did you keep going anyway?”

  “Hell, no.” He sits back and opens his tight hands. He makes himself smile, and his dimples show. “I was born black. I don’t expect people to like me, to accept me. Some transsexuals, especially the white MTFs, they’re in shock after the transition. Loss of privilege, loss of status—they think people should be thrilled to work side by side with them. Well, people do not go to work in mainstream America hoping for an educational experience. I didn’t expect anyone to be happy to see me—I just expected, I demanded, a little tolerance. Hell, I transitioned on the job. I didn’t even tell people what was going on. You remember I said I was an offensive child? A friend of mine said, ‘Uh, don’t you think you ought to say something? People want to know.’ And I said, ‘Let ’em ask.’ The transition was hard, but once I was completely male, people relaxed.

  “I’m the same personality—a little more visually responsive erotically, maybe a little more aggressive, but I was always aggressive. You know what’s different? I have a toolbox. My whole life, I never thought about one, I’m not a big fixer. But now, every once in a while, I find myself buying another wrench, or one of those very small screwdrivers. That’s different.

  “I’m prepared to make my own way. And I am. I’ve been fortunate—I’ve been loved, I’ve been married, I’m not an addict, not unemployed, not dysfunctional. I’m a decent person, I’m not ashamed. I don’t know why this condition chose me. We, people who have been through this transition—we are among the few people in the world who have overcome obstacles and fulfilled their lifelong dreams. All these obstacles, and I am who I dreamed I’d be, who I wanted to be. I’ll marry again, I’m going ahead with an adoption as a single man, my work’s going well. I’m damned fortunate.”

  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, beca
use 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.