My wife and I were in New Orleans in 1984 for a speaking engagement at a ham radio convention. While in the Crescent City, we took in the World's Fair and visited the other sites that the city had to offer.
After walking around the French Quarter for an hour or so, we parked ourselves on a park bench in Jackson Square to rest and cool down. While seated there, I noticed a couple of crossdressers walking side-by-side through the Square. They were dressed as civilians not drag queens and tried to blend in with the other civilians.
Their height, flat posteriors and the fact that they were clearly wearing wigs gave them away to me. Not to mention that I was not the only person to notice them; there were a few gawkers, smirks and giggles as they passed by.
I was impressed with their courage to go out in public and to put up with the ridicule they encountered.
Doing the same myself a decade or so later, I realized it was not courage. Rather, it was the need to be authentic and damn the torpedoes of ridicule.
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Their height, flat posteriors and the fact that they were clearly wearing wigs gave them away to me. Not to mention that I was not the only person to notice them; there were a few gawkers, smirks and giggles as they passed by.
I was impressed with their courage to go out in public and to put up with the ridicule they encountered.
Doing the same myself a decade or so later, I realized it was not courage. Rather, it was the need to be authentic and damn the torpedoes of ridicule.
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| Wearing Gracia (Source: HauteLook) |
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| Christopher Hewett dresses pretty for the Choreographer's Ball in the 1967 film The Producers. (I watched the film in ultra-high-definition on a 55-inch LED TV last night and for the first time, I noticed the other pretty frocks in his closet.) |