Amy Bloom - Normal

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.