Part II of the continuing saga ...
When I reached sixth grade, we moved to the Seattle area to accommodate my father's job at Boeing Aircraft; he was an industrial engineer, and commuted to work. We lived in an area called Kenmore, at the North end of Lake Washington. I went first to Kenmore Elementary, for 6th Grade, and then on to Kenmore Junior High, then Inglemoor High School. It was while I was still in junior high that another "incident" happened. I'd been dressing partially, sometimes in my mother's stuff, but increasingly in my sister's, who was a year and a half younger than me (I am the oldest of five). I would take them out of the dirty clothes hamper and wear them, and then carefully put them back, hoping not to get caught. I had a friend named Artie, who like me was not one of the "popular" kids; unlike me, he used to get into trouble with the school authorities on a regular basis. Anyway, I'd confided in him that I liked to dress up, and one day we we went into the woods on my parents' small acreage, and I put on one of my sister's cast-off dresses, with a scarf over my short hair, and we went out the other side, wandering the neighborhoods in back of my parents place. While we were out, he took off, leaving me to make my way back through the woods, and stop to get dressed in my male clothes. Who should I find waiting there but one of my parents -- strange, I can't remember which one -- who told me Artie had told her or him that they'd see something very interesting in the woods.
Well, my father decided I need to see a shrink -- or maybe it was a psychologist -- and he found, somehow, a "good Christian" one, and I went to see him. I remember in our initial session, him telling me he didn't think my dressing was any big deal, and that "I would grow out of it." I answered "then why worry about it? Why see
you?" His reply was telling: he laid on the guilt. "Don't you want to stop," he asked. Don't you want to be normal?
Thus began my first foray into therapy, in junior high, with a therapist who (a) knew nothing about the subject of "T" and (b) pathologized it, thus contributing to my already deep store of shame. Of course, he assumed I wanted to
stop, what I did was perverse ... what red blooded American boy would want to dress like a
girl?
Well, I stopped for awhile, but of course didnt' for good. Soon I was back at it, dressing in my sister's and mother's stuff, and although I'm sure that there was always a sexual component (I believe most crossdressers are delusional about
that), it wasn't until I was in college that it became
overtly sexualized. By then, in the early 70s, I was scouring the university libraries and used book stores for any information about crossdressing, and of course, finding very little. What I did find helped reinforce the idea of
wrongness, and deepened that ever-growing, steaming pile of shame.
Next: Part III of the saga. Marriage, schooling, children, careers, and all that jazz.
