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.