The Art & Magic of Feminine Illusion, Part 3: Jay’s Makeover

A largely sub-rosa trend of the last two decades has been the rise and proliferation, ultimately in scores of cities of beauty salons and stores catering exclusively to CDs/TVs by providing male-to-female makeovers, and everything a T-Girl needs to transform himself into a passable and hopefully sexy and attractive psuedo-women. The first was Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to be Girls, an upscale New York salon and “academy” founded in 1992 by Veronica Vera: a deliciously zaftig dark-haired middle-aged goddess, a gracious and regal sophisticate and actress/model who, surprisingly, was formerly a trader and broker on Wall Street. She has given comfort and pleasure to myriads of crossdressers/transvestites, overwhelmingly affluent, with makeovers, instruction, and tutoring on how to walk in high-heels and such, and act and talk in a feminine/ladylike manner via seminars, speeches, media appearances, books, videos, etc.

The second, apparently, was Fairplay on Staten Island, founded in 1995 by Fred Gorski, a homosexual transvestite and ex-female impersonator, with the clever and unique femme name, Rain Storm. This “God-mother” and “matriarch” of Fairplay, a Victorian mansion with 22 rooms, has been featured in many articles and, nationally, in a segment on ET (“Entertainment Tonight”) that one can view on YouTube.com along with other videos of Rain and the men she’s transformed. In one video, over 13 minutes long, she is interviewed by Jay Miller, genial host of Mid-Evenings, a local New York TV talk show, who also shows a 6 minute-plus video of his visit to Fairplay and femme transformation by Rain. (The show aired on 3-5-2010.) The video can also be viewed, separately without the interview, on YouTube.com as Jay’s Makeover.

Introduced, Rain strolls on stage with the short quick agile steps of a TV who’s mastered the skill of walking in high-heels, gracefully and flawlessly, her posture ram-rod straight yet loose and relaxed with her back arched perfectly. She’s elegantly and stylishly attired in a pink ankle length dress and matching jacket, dark nylons, pink high-heeled sandals with ankle straps and black/red horizontal stripes, silver earrings, a silver necklace and bracelet. She’s passable, sexy, classy, feminine, one could even say attractive — but not pretty. One could describe her as jolie laide, a “good-looking ugly woman,” a woman or TV who is sexy and attractive but not “conventionally pretty.”

She does not wear a wig and her hair is dark, coarse, bushy, mildly unruly, shoulder-length, and combed back on a high forehead. Her salon has dozens of wigs in all lengths, styles, colors, a plethora of wigs to turn men into “sluts,” matrons, careerists, sexpots, glamour girls,” etc. I wonder why she doesn’t cut her long and thick hair and create a variety of looks and personas. In her position, I surely would. How could I resist? I could spend an entire day en femme just trying on all those wigs and taking pictures.

Seated and clearly at ease, not at all nervous or self-conscious, her voice, deep and brassy, for a women but not overtly mannish and thus passably feminine, she tells Miller that the men she’s turned into women have included Navy Seals, Marines, cops, firemen, ex-NFL players, Russians, a brain surgeon from Japan, an actor from the TV prison show Oz, several famous men whose names she can’t divulge. Nearly all heterosexuals, most want to look like “sluts,” “young sluts,” “old sluts,” “thin sluts,” “fat sluts,” including a 70-year-old man. Many covet a wild, sultry, and “over the top drag queen look.” Others want to look “plain,” demure, matronly.

Then Miller tells his audience and viewers that he visited Rain’s salon for a makeover and that he has a short video of his experience. Miller is a lean and small-boned man of medium height with short and thinning brown hair, a stubble-like uneven and scraggly beard, a forehead and face that is long and narrow, and a big, sharp, crooked nose. Nobody would call him handsome, and many would say he’s homely. He appears to be in his early-mid 40s.

We first see him using a small trimmer to shave the cheeks and sideburns of his beard. Then Rain enters to remove the goatee and mustache. Then we see him standing, in black bikini briefs, not women’s panties. She playfully mocks and teases him as she helps him pull a pair of beige pantyhose up his thighs and then over his waist and buttocks. Then her assistants, two middle-aged matronlyTVs, put on a one-piece bra-corset; then the insertion of breast forms by Rain and less than a minute of footage of her putting on a nylon skull cap with Scotch tape to lift and “open his eyes” and trimming and lining his eyebrows and skillfully and meticulously applying eye make-up: the eyes are beautiful, masterfully done, brightened and darkened by liner and false eye-lashes and grayish-green eye shadow, the lips feminine and fuller in light pinkish lipstick or gloss; his cheeks and chin soft and smooth with concealer, foundation, and powder. She teases him as she touches, and tries to straighten, his large crooked nose. (“Let’s get a staple gun,” she jokes.)

Then she consummates the feminization of his face with a classy medium-length auburn wig — the eye-makeup and wig distract from and minimize the size and ugliness of his nose — and tells him to look at himself in the mirror and marvel at his stunning metamorphosis. He stares in wonder at the she-male she’s created: “look at you, you look fabulous.” “I look like my sister.” “Do you look fantastic or what”? “My God.” The illusion is more than passable. He’s attractive, sexy, “foxy,” one could even say pretty. “It’s my first time,” she purrs in a campy falsetto voice, vaguely “Southern-bell” slutty. (Dressed in feminine attire, soft and silky, a melange of slutty and elegant, his face painted and powdered, and covered and framed by a wig, compells a man who now passes for a woman to act feminine and womanly, whether for humor or arousal, to act and talk, convincingly or not, like the women he sees in the mirror and others see as a woman.}

The feminization is completed as she helps him put on a mid-thigh, skin-tight, leopard-pattern dress with a high-neck and full-length sleeves –no need to shave his arms and chest — and finally a close-up of his nylon feet, passable and feminine, slipping into leopard-pattern spike-heels. The video doesn’t show this, but at some point she put on a pair of dark suntan thigh-highs over the pantyhose, the dark elastic tops of which were visible later in the video as he danced at a nightclub. Apparently, his hair was fine enough that it wasn’t necessary to shave his legs to create a hairless and feminine appearance. A double layer and veil of nylon was sufficient. Fully en femme, his figure is proportional, almost perfect, his legs shapely, as feminine as his visage. Nowhere in the video do we hear Rain giving him an en femme name or addressing him as such.

“Let’s go out and par-tee,” she says, again in a campy falsetto, and they’re off to a TV-friendly “gay” bar for an evening of dancing and drinking. Then we see him walking — somewhat awkwardly, stiffly, and perilously (“like Frankenstein,” in his words) in his spike-heels, and wearing a matching leopard-pattern fur jacket. He’s accompanied by Rain, effortlessly gliding in high-heels, and the two CDs who assisted her in and witnessed his transformation. Inside the club, we see him dancing, somewhat cautiously and clumsily in his spike-heels and moving his arms and legs in a comically stiff-robotic fashion, with the two assistants, both mature and matronly and dressed in demure attire and “sensible shoes,” (relatively) and moving gracefully in contrast to their novice partner.

Then he begins to turn in circles and, wincing in pain, peels off his right pump, and then the left, and dances the rest of the night, painlessly, in his nylon feet. Freed of his heels and thus unencumbered, he dances more naturally, agilely, even wildly as we see him on a tiny stage, uninhibited by the milieu, and I’m sure a few drinks, gyrating and prancing seductively, entertaining and teasing an audience of gays and CDs, a few of whom tip him for the show by putting bills down the front of his dress, which Rain, running to the edge of the stage, steals from him. The video ends with him making silly and playful cat-claw gestures. And back to the interview.

“I had a great time,” he says. He had such a “great time” that he keeps saying that he repeats the phrase 4 to 5 times.

Not only is Jay Miller not “a woman in a man’s body” or even a TV who wants to live as a women. It’s probable that that he never dressed as a woman before or even had the desire, much less compulsion, to do so even once. And he had a “great time.” Obviously, given his words and actions and expressions, both in the video and during the interview, the night was fun and exciting; the experience was exhilarating, gratifying, titillating. Not only was he amazed and thrilled by the makeover — his metamorphosis into a sexy and “foxy” redhead — it’s also likely that he was aroused by seeing himself as a she-male with creamy skin and painted lips and gorgeous eyes, crowned with a classy wig, and wearing a slinky dress, nylons and spike-heels, just as he’d be aroused by seeing a woman who looked exactly like himself en femme. It’s also possible that he was aroused by the feel of makeup and feminine attire.

Jay Miller had such a “great time” that I wonder if he hasn’t visited Rain and Fairplay again or other femme transformation salons. And how many men in the audience or watching on TV or later viewing the YouTube video, certainly amazed and perhaps aroused by Jay’s metamorphosis, were inspired to visit Fairplay or another salon or dominatrix for a makeover. Surely a few or several -possibly many.

How many males who were not transvestites, who had no desire to X-dress because of fetishism and/or an intense need to cultivate and express their “femininity” and “womanliness,” have visited a salon “on a lark” or dare from a wife or lover or friend, or simply out of curiosity to see what they’d look like fully en femme in wigs and makeup and feminine clothing, to see if they could “pass” as sexy and attractive T-girls, or for a segment on a talk-show* or a project or experiment. And of these how many are amazed, like Jay Miller, by the metamorphosis, exhilarated and aroused as they look in the mirror and see themselves as attractive and possibly desirable, even lovely and beautiful, apparent women? And perhaps also by the feel of nylons and panties and silky-satiny dresses and lingerie.

How many find the experience so thrilling and gratifying that they become addicted to a “guilty pleasure” that they then indulge in habitually and compulsively, or at least enjoy occasionally, if only a few times a year, as a “kinky” secret pastime?

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* Also search for the video of Mark, a Chicago TV reporter with 190 North, visiting Transformations by Rori, a suburban boutique and salon that serves the Chicagoland TG community and is replete with classy wigs in all colors and styles and feminine attire/accessories. They also do CD makeovers. The video ends with Mark being turned into “Marisa” by Rori, a woman in her 50s or 60s who is cute, petite and zaftig. Marisa is not only passable but pretty in a dark-brown medium-length wig with bangs, off-black pantyhose, black pumps and, like Jay, a leopard-pattern dress.

Tags: FairPlay, featured, makeovers, Rain Storm, Transformation by Rori, transformations

Category: Transgender How To, Transgender Opinion