I’m not sure which came first, my viewing of the first television broadcast of Some Like It Hot or the revelation that the glamorous women appearing in nightclub advertisements in the Daily News were no ladies.
The Daily News was one of the newspapers that showed up in our house on a routine basis. In the mid-60’s, a New York City nightclub called Club 82 began advertising in the News with thumbnail-sized ads displaying glamorous showgirls with an intriguing caption that revealed that the showgirl “Is No Lady!” Rather, the showgirl was “a femme impersonator.”
My previous crossdressing sightings were all of the men-in-dresses variety. They were not trying to convince anyone that they were real women.
On the other hand, viewing the Club 82 ads and the Some Like It Hot femulations of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon showed me that some of the men in dresses were in fact trying to be convincing women!
If they could do it, maybe I could do it, too!
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| Wearing Venus |
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| Professional femulators performing at Club 82 circa 1965. |
Back in the stone age we would search high and low for any form of encouragement or confirmation that we were not the only boys interested in wearing girls clothes. Today young people can find out more on line in a hour than we could uncover in a year and the material that is available today goes a long way to confirm that our desires are not unique and that these is a community for almost everything..
ReplyDelete"Today young people can find out more on line in a hour than we could uncover in a year" Isn't that the truth!
ReplyDeleteStana
My brother came back from New Orleans (1974) with a tourist guide that had an ad in the back for "The Gunna Den" a club for female impersonators. I stared at that ad for hours!