TRANSVESTIA's GENDER COMMUNITY It Was Good to Have Known Sheldon. His Life Reached Far Beyond T

INTRODUCTION HAVING IT ALL: TRANSVESTIA ’S GENDER COMMUNITY It was good to have known Sheldon. His life reached far beyond the circle of his loved ones to touch others like me. Though he lived out his life in the body of a man there was also the spirit of a gentle kindly woman living there in the home on the hill—and this is the person I really knew. On February 9, 1971, Sheldon, a successful businessman and engineer, died of a sudden heart attack at the age of thirty-nine. In a number of respects, Sheldon’s life embodied the American Dream. He was a happily married husband and a devoted father to a son and daughter. He and his family lived in a nice house on a beautiful hilltop in northern Idaho. And as a civic leader, Sheldon was admired and respected by other citizens in his town. Sheldon’s passing came as a devastating shock to his family and community. His death also deeply touched a unique underground society of friends that stretched across the United States. A few of Sheldon’s friends from this underground community wrote poignant tributes, like the one in the above epigraph, in honor of his memory. These tributes were published in Transvestia , a bi-monthly magazine that Sheldon subscribed to [See Appendix A]. Many readers of this magazine recognized Sheldon as a ‘first.’ Ten years earlier, he had appeared on its cover in the guise of a woman named Annette. His feminine appearance was not a joke or a Halloween costume. Transvestia catered to male-to-female crossdressers, or transvestites, to use the label common at the time. 1 “Annette ” was Sheldon’s alter ego—his feminine persona—and Transvestia ’s very first ‘cover girl.’ Transvestia was first published in 1960 by Virginia Prince, a white, heterosexual, male-to-female crossdresser from Los Angeles. With this magazine, Prince sought to educate, entertain, and instruct heterosexually-oriented crossdressers like Sheldon. Transvestia went from twenty-five initial subscribers to several hundred around the United States over the twenty years of Prince’s editorship. While Prince contributed regular columns to the magazine, readers submitted most of the content of each issue, including their life histories, fictional stories, letters to the editor, and self-photographs. In 1962, Prince formed a national membership organization for transvestites called Phi Pi Epsilon (FPE), which Sheldon also joined. It lasted for almost fifteen years before merging with another crossdressing club to form Tri-Sigma, a group that later became Tri-Ess, which still exists today as the largest membership organization for crossdressers in the United States. 1 Marilyn and Maureen were also crossdressers, Transvestia subscribers, and members of the same national “sorority” as Sheldon. In their tributes to their dear friend Sheldon / Annette, they each recalled a flattering comment made by one of Sheldon’s business associates who was unaware of his feminine persona and his association with this underground network of crossdressers. To this associate, Sheldon was the quintessential “All American Boy.” Marilyn and Maureen agreed with this assessment, but they not 1 Born in 1912, Prince’s birth name was Arnold Lowman. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Prince first adopted “Muriel” and later “Virginia Prince” as a pseudonymous feminine name. When delivering public lectures and co-authoring articles, Prince sometimes went by “Virginia Bruce.” She chose the name “Charles Prince” as a pseudonymous masculine name. Prince was a chemist and part owner of a pharmaceutical plant. For a personal account of Prince’s life, see “The Life and Times of Virginia,” Transvestia #100 (1979). 2 only admired the man, they also remembered Sheldon as the beautiful and gracious Annette—the “fairest of them all”—their own “Miss America.” The gendered dichotomies featured in their tributes are striking. Marilyn described Sheldon the man as “hard working, skilled, strong, [and] highly regarded in a line of work which was ‘strictly masculine’; [he was] a wonderful husband; a fine father.” With these remarks, Marilyn portrayed Sheldon as the prototypical middle-class breadwinner. “But, transformed into Annette, she was feminine perfection: lovely, graceful, soft spoken, [and] delightful in every way. Never one to swish, to exaggerate or to otherwise artificially draw attention to herself, all eyes nonetheless followed her every step because she carried herself gracefully and because she was strikingly beautiful.” Sheldon / Annette’s other friend, Maureen, concurred and added: ...her life was the best balance between the two roles of man and woman. As a man he lived with confidence, moving in a masculine world with enthusiasm and satisfaction…. As a woman, Annette was quiet and charming….Everything about her was correct for a woman her age and lifestyle. No pretense, nothing artificial that had to be labored over. She was at ease as a woman, a warm and friendly person, free of the tendency to overdo the feminine aspects that characterize some…. I could detect no difference in the family attitude as he moved from one role to the other. Self restraint and consideration marked the activities of Annette so that her fun and satisfaction were not bought at the expense of family happiness. 2 Amazingly, what Maureen said of Sheldon’s family life was true. Sheldon did not hide “Annette” from his wife or his two children. In fact, his crossdressing was known and accepted by many members of his community. Virginia Prince also wrote fondly of Sheldon / Annette. Prince marveled at Annette’s growth, service, and transformation over the ten years she had known ‘her.’ Prince had 2 Quotes from “Annette—The Fairest of Them All” by Marilyn and “My Friend Annette” by Maureen in Transvestia #68 (1971). Maureen put Sheldon’s age at thirty-five but this is wrong. A death record I found listed his date of birth in the year 1931. 3 helped Annette and hundreds of other male-to-female crossdressers who read her magazine and joined the membership organization to develop a sense of self-awareness. Prince wanted to socialize individual ‘deviance,’ in short, to place transvestism within a group context, domesticate it, and normalize it by promoting the radical idea that transvestites were not immoral, sexual deviants but rather normal, respectable citizens with only a harmless gender variation. By creating a semi-public space for its expression, Prince transformed crossdressing from a private, secretive and sometimes shameful practice into a social phenomenon for her readers. The specific goals of Transvestia and Phi Pi Epsilon, in these regards, were to foster self-acceptance on the part of subscribers and members, to help crossdressers cultivate a respectable and aesthetically pleasing feminine persona, to instill within them a desire to help other crossdressers develop their feminine gender personalities, and to promote a socially affirming script to counter public discourses that configured transvestism as a configuration of sin, sickness, and criminality. Annette had followed the script perfectly, having moved from a closeted, fetishistic transvestite who had a particular fixation for women’s shoes to a person who had learned to accept his feminine personality, to dress tastefully and behave respectably, and to responsibly integrate his crossdressing practices into his regular, masculine life with little or no harm to his family or his status as good husband and strong father. Adhering to certain prescriptive advice within the grand script, Annette had also worked hard to find acceptance from others within his family and community. Furthermore, he had been a dedicated member of Phi Pi Epsilon, having hosted yearly retreats for fellow crossdressers at his home in Idaho. 4 Although distance separated Annette (Idaho), Marilyn (Washington), Maureen (Colorado), and Virginia Prince (California), they forged “brotherly” and “sisterly” bonds through their subscription to Transvestia and their membership in the transvestite sorority. They, along with several hundreds of other crossdressers, risked ruining their often privileged lives and destroying their reputations in order to build and belong to a world where male-bodied individuals who had a certain “feeling” for femininity could find acceptance and comradeship and experience a sense of normalcy. There were probably numerous (sub)cultures of transvestism in postwar America. This project is narrowly concerned with the forms of social identity constructed by the hundreds of crossdressers who read Transvestia and officially joined Phi Pi Epsilon, as well as those who affiliated with the organizational network in less formal ways. I refer to this social formation and cultural imaginary as “ Transvestia ’s gender community.” It comprised several hundred mostly white, heterosexual-oriented, middle to professional class, periodic male-to-female transvestites. A large subset of this group, perhaps half, also possessed a sense of crossgender identification. A few within this subset, including Prince, changed their social gender permanently and lived full-time as women. Some of these folks would later identify as transsexual and obtain sex reassignment surgery. How did this underground society emerge? How did it develop from a readership to a membership organization? What were the risks and benefits of membership? Why did Annette, Marilyn, Maureen, and others who joined its ranks invest in rigid notions of gender, cultivate distinct feminine personas, and live out dichotomized gender roles as “All-American men” and

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