by Amy Bloom
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 l
ike 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 th
at 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.
