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!