Inside Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, where anything goes except for your real name.
Out
BY CHADWICK MOORE
Behind Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal lies a grimy, litter-strewn block of brownstones where a half dozen bums have camped outside an abandoned storefront. The tableau is like a mote of Old New York dust suspended in the neon beams reaching west from nearby Times Square. Since the late 1990s, the New York–based group Crossdressers International, or CDI, has maintained an apartment here.
For its roughly 30 key-holding members, the CDI headquarters serves as a support group and a locker room. There are two rules: no photography and never reveal your male name.
In the entry hall of this low-ceiling garden apartment, there’s a stack of pigeonholes for passing along communications and sometimes love notes to other members. There are two sofas and a television in the living room, a shelf for unwanted clothing, and a bulletin board with announcements and resources. The periphery is lined with lockers and stacks of luggage; members pay a fee to keep their wardrobes here and can come and go as they please.
I’m first introduced to Karen — nervous, small, balding, with a close-cropped horseshoe of hair and a deep, husky voice. She’s standing wigless in a skimpy dress, shuffling through her locker, and won’t look me in the eye. Pointing at my voice recorder, she whispers, “I can’t be on tape. I can’t have people recognizing my voice.” She slips by me, shoulders bowed, to the bedroom, where she stands on a paper towel to put glitter polish on her toenails.
Karen is single, without children, and works as an accountant. “I wish people in my office could see me look like this,” she says. “I’m so boring and dumpy at the office.” She carries two cell phones and uses a back entrance to her apartment building that allows her to ferry her female clothing in and out without the doorman or neighbors seeing. She says she goes out in a dress four or five nights a week, far more than anyone else here tonight — save for Jen, the current president of CDI, and her girlfriend, Michelle, who live full-time as women.
They met through CDI and have been dating a few months. Jen’s story sounds a little apocryphal: She says she became transgender under “very rare” circumstances. “Mine was an accident because of prostate cancer,” she tells me, adding that things became “quite bizarre,” amid the hormone therapy she was receiving during treatment. “I got saturated with estrogen, and that’s when I discovered it. I have not known my whole life like most of the girls in here. Before I was diagnosed, I was pretty much asexual.”
Dues also help pay for things like CDI’s weekly dinner parties, including the one hosted on this recent Wednesday evening. The other eight diners gathered around the card table live outwardly as men except for the handful of times a month when they change how they dress. They’re all sexually attracted to women or to other cross-dressers. They have wives and children. Many have grandchildren. Everyone is around retirement age. They have a taste for skimpy dresses, short skirts, high heels, heavy makeup, and the kind of glittery accessories that usually appeal to teenagers.
“For as long as I remember, I’ve had gender identity issues. About 11 years ago, I was very suicidal,” says one member, who has grandchildren and who asked not to be identified by name. “I started living a double life. I’ve invested 40 years in my marriage. I’m successful at work. I don’t want to walk away from that. My wife has a really hard time. It really turns her off.”
Nancy is a longtime member. She’s not dressed tonight and looks a bit like Jerry Van Dyke with a manicure. “You dress, you go to Macy’s, you go to a Broadway show,” she says. “I’ve been married 34 years. I love my wife. I can’t [fully transition]. It’s not going to happen.”
“The gays aren’t too pleased with us because they think we are like Punxsutawney Phil — you come out on Groundhog Day, and then you go back down the hole,” Nancy adds. Many cross-dressers rely on gay bars as places to feel safe in public, yet that’s usually where the association ends. Nancy claims CDI’s application to take part in New York’s annual LGBT Pride March has been continually rejected in recent years, with organizers telling her each time it was filed too late. …