Dressing, Meeting Friends (Part 1)

Returning after a longer than intended hiatus, let us take up with how I actually began dressing in women's clothes and made my first TG friends.

As previously noted, I discovered Lee's Mardi Gras Boutique in my early 20s and originally patronized it simply for the TV/TG literature available there. But I was intrigued by the array of lingerie, hose, shoes and dresses on sale as well...all in sizes that would fit males. I finally succumbed and bought a bra, panties, waist-cinching garter belt, stockings, high-heeled pumps (not real high), and a baby-doll pajama set. I actually began sleeping in all of it (yes, including the heels!).

I learned that Lee offered a "make-over" service, to dress and make-up a client as a girl, complete with pictures. I used it twice. I have no pics from the first time left, but the second time included the images you see here. Once I saw myself transformed, I was hooked--the desire to dress in feminine clothing went from an off-and-on thing to an obsession. All that was left was to find a way to safely do it with others around.


Then, one evening at Lee's, I met Steve and Bobby. Steve was older than I was, probably in his mid-30s. Bobby seemed younger, maybe 19 or 20. We shared some thoughts on what we liked in clothes and about cross-dressing in general. We left the shop and had a late snack together. I learned that Steve (who rarely dressed but went by "Sue" when he did) was an accomplished amateur photographer, who enjoyed taking photos of other TVs. Bobby ("Bobbi") was a more-than-passable TV who wore everything from very girlish stuff to punk rock gear to androgynous things like sailor suits. We agreed to meet at Bobbi's apartment in Brooklyn the next weekend.

Getting into Writing

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that if noone was writing the kind of fantasies of hypnotic feminization that turned me on, I'd have to start writing them myself.

In the early '80s, there was a men's magazine called Nugget that tried to make a niche for itself by running reader letters on all kinds of kinks and fetishes, including cross-dressing and female domination. I wrote them a letter--allegedly a "real-life" incident, but actually just my ultimate fantasy--and they ran it. This became the first chapter of my very first story, the self-titled "Pretty Sissy Dani".

Sometime later, I discovered some of the TV/TG message boards then operating and began posting my work in those places. I seemed to gain something of a following. Many other stories followed. By 1990, I began my first self-named website, featuring all the stories I had written to that point, with early attempts at illustration, as well as some photo essays. The website jumped around quite a bit over the next 15 years as free webhosts came and went. Finally, in 2006, I abandoned it, when the latest host disappeared. By that time, I felt somewhat "written out," anyway.

Along the way, I submitted three of my stories to Reluctant Press, which published them (heavily edited) as Male Lesbians of Club Lesbos. The three stories that made up that booklet--"Pretty Sissy Dani", "On the Couch" and "Magic Transformation"--can be found here, in the files section of my Yahoo Group.

Earlier, I promised you more info about one of my early fave stories, "Evelyn Manor". Early in my website career, I found the text of that tale on the internet, and I reworked it--adding hypnotic touches--into a story called "Sissy Forever."
Unfortunately, that's not one of the stories I kept on the Yahoo page. Nor is "Male Junior Miss", also rewritten from an Empathy Press story. But "The Mysterious Mrs. Livanos", which was also adapted from one of those stories is, as is my reworking of another afore-mentioned classic into "Miss High Heels 2001".

One of the most popular of my stories turned out to be one called "The Stepton Slaves", the tale of a town where all the men are converted to feminized playthings (a variation on The Stepford Wives, of course). Eventually there were three or four sequels, and an entire website devoted to that town.

So I was writing, I was illustrating. Was I ever actually dressing as a girl? Yes...and I'll tell that part of the story next time.

[Update: The links to my stories at my Yahoo group no longer work, since I have decided to delete the group.]

Pardon the Interruption

Before I continue with my history of my life as a wannabe male lesbian, let me announce that I've found one of the hypnosis clips I mentioned in this post.

It's the sequence of Dale Arden hypnotized by Ming the Merciless from Universal's Flash Gordon serial. Click the image to the right and you'll see a series of 11 screen shots from it--beginning with Dale's initial "induction" through her aborted wedding ceremony and her rescue by Flash. Jean Rogers did a terrific job in playing this--note how stiff and unhelpful she is in the shot where Flash is carrying her off.

I found this by buying a DVD of the entire serial. Now, a request--can anybody tell me how I can pull a clip (or clips) of this sequence off the DVD and upload it here or to youtube? I looked over Windows Media Player's instructions and I can't find anything that will let me do it.

Update: Those screen shots are no longer available, but I have instead managed to edit a sequence of Dale's "induction" and aborted wedding. Find it here.

Discovering the "Literature"

I was probably about 14 or 15 when I found out there was a word for what I was feeling. I was a transvestite. Most likely, I came across the word in some magazine article--I would scour the stands for anything that hinted at my secret. The earliest sources I recall were the "romance" magazines of the period; once in a while, one of them would feature an article with a title like "My Husband Wears My Clothes"...and I would buy it (secretly, of course) and devour any mention of someone else with my interest in looking like a girl.

I still had no idea there was an entire genre of fiction devoted to this idea. The first hint I had of that came a few years later. I was probably 16 or 17 when I stumbled across the Grove Press printing of Miss High Heels, the early 20th-Century classic about a rich young man forced into a life as a girl by his step-sister. I remember going back to the store where I found it and scanning the pages several times before I finally bought it and sneaked it home.

A short time later, I began commuting to college and had the opportunity to explore the many shops selling pornographic material that then dominated New York's Times Square district. I soon found a tiny, cubby-hole of a place called Keystone Books, that seemed to specialize in material for the transvestite. It was there I first found the stories written by "Nan Gilbert" and illustrated, I later learned, by Gene Bilbrew--either under the "Gilbert" name or as "Eneg."

Gilbert specialized in "petticoat punishment"--stories of adolescent boys made to dress as girls as retribution for overly masculine behavior...boys who eventually found themselves sexually obsessed with their new femininity. One of Eneg's drawings for such stories graces this blog on the left; here are some others:



And then a new publisher appeared--Empathy Press. Their little pamphlets--then always with bright yellow covers with elegant line drawings--featured a range of different stories. One of the first that struck me was "Evelyn Manor". It had a particular emphasis on shoes--especially platform sandals with very high heels--and it intrigued me. Another story from that publisher, whose title is lost to memory, had a high-school boy who visits relatives and finds out his cousin has been feminized...a fate that awaits him as well. There will be more about those specific tales in my next post. The quality of Empathy's interior art varied widely, but there were some gems--like this one.

Of course, there were other publishers doing stories of transvestism, too--usually cruder, with more emphasis on sex and often elements of sadism. Many of these were illustrated by Bill Ward, who had been one of the great "girly" artists of the '40s and '50s. At right is a sample.

Eventually--I think in an ad in one of the books--I found out about Lee's Mardi Gras Boutique. Located on the far western end of the Times Square area, in a loft, it was primarily devoted to selling female clothes to TVs. (More on that later, as well.) But it's biggest appeal to me was a huge inventory of TV publications, including some that Lee published herself, like this one.

It was in one of Lee's publications that my two fetishes--cross-dressing and hypnosis--came back together at last. A "back-up" story in one of her pamphlets told of a young man hypnotized by his girlfriend into becoming her girlfriend...forced to apply his own makeup, learn embroidery; in short, to become a stereotypical girly girl. It triggered all the old links...now, I knew precisely what I wanted--I wanted a woman to hypnotize me and make me into her lesbian lover!

Hypnosis in Media

Unlike cross-dressing, hypnosis turns up in film and TV all the time...mostly played for laughs.

Even more unfortunately, it's usually a male hypnotist and a female subject, as opposed to the other way around. I can get turned on by seeing a girl go under, but usually I have to plausibly imagine myself feminized and in her place.

One of the few female-domme hypnosis sequences around is a famous one from the Sherlock Holmes film, The Woman in Green. Here it is, thanks to youtube:



Unfortunately, the whole thing is sort of spoiled later in the movie, when we learn that Holmes is faking it all along.

But even hypnosis done for comic effect can be arousing. Take a look at this entranced Tina Louise from the Gilligan's Island episode, "Ring Around Gilligan" (her part comes about half-way through this 9-minute clip):

[Youtube deleted the original link, but I found another version, and this one starts right off with Ginger's entrancement.]

Ring Around Gilligan
Uploaded by lordsomno

An even better Gilligan trance sequence is in the episode, "The Second Ginger Grant":



A bonus here was that Gilligan--now convinced that he is Mary Ann, dresses in her clothes and acts like her...in other words, Gilligan is feminized by hypnosis! I couldn't find a clip of this part of the episode on youtube...if anyone knows of one, I'd love to see it!

One final memorable hypnosis sequence, one I can't find anywhere right now--in the original Flash Gordon serial starring Buster Crabbe, love interest Dale Arden, played by a platinum blonde Jean Rogers, is captured by Ming the Merciless. Dale is placed before a sinister machine full of ominous humming and flashing fluorescent lights and entranced.

I first saw this when I was ten or eleven...and got an instant hard-on, imagining I was the beautiful, sexy Dale, being not only mesmerized but feminized by Ming's science!

Coming next: Discovering TV/TG literature!

Cross-Dressing in Media

So that was the "trigger," as it were. I soon began to notice that there were other cartoons and TV shows that featured men or boys being dressed as women.

Bugs Bunny, for one, seemed to get done up in female attire with great regularity...but, for some reason, that never turned me on. Maybe it was too obviously done for comic effect--he never really looked sexy to my eyes. But then, one day, I saw The Big Snooze.



In this one, after Elmer Fudd quits his job with the studio, he falls asleep...and Bugs invades his dreams to bring him back to the fold. In one memorable sequence, he rapidly gets the half-naked hunter into devastatingly beautiful female form.

Update: I've replaced the full-length version of The Big Snooze embedded above with a clip of just the relevant section, in the interests of saving bandwidth.

I soon learned there was a word for this phenomenon--transvestite or cross-dresser. I learned there were others who shared my desires...but it would be several more years before I discovered the rich "literature" built around this passion.

In the meantime, I watched carefully for any "live-action" portrayals, particularly those not done for comedy--a style I learned was called "drag". One of the few TV episodes I can recall with a serious use of female impersonation was "Gitano", a 1970 episode of Mission: Impossible, in which a young Eastern European royal is forced to disguise himself as a girl to escape assassins, with the help of the IMF crew. The boy-girl was played by Barry Williams, then having just begun his most famous role as Greg Brady. (As I recall, he wasn't particularly attractive as a girl--but if anybody has screen grabs or video of this, I still want to see them.)

But what about hypnosis? Where could I find that on screen? More in the next posting.

...A Very Good Place to Start..."

"Let's start at the very beginning...."

I do not recall the exact day...or even my exact age...when I first realized I was intrigued by the idea of dressing and acting like a girl. And when I first realized I was turned on by the idea of being hypnotized. Or when I realized the biggest turn-on was the two combined.

But I do know what started it: A Mighty Mouse cartoon entitled "Svengali's Cat". For years I searched the web looking for someplace to buy it or see a snippet of it...and last year, I lucked out. Here's the relevant section:



I still get a hard-on during that make-up sequence, especially when he uses the paint brush to make her lips so red and kissable.

Anybody else have any links to hypnotic or cross-dressing sequences (or both) in films or TV--animated or live action, doesn't matter.