Times Do Change: The 1980s

Back in the 1970s and into the 1980s the revelation that a husband liked to crossdress was often a ticket to divorce court and financial ruin. If he is crossdressing, he must be gay and must be sleeping with other men was the common opinion of the time.

Linda A.’s story started out quite differently. For many couples the discovery that one of the partners has virtually no sexual boundaries or that one, like Linda, has what the other might call a fetish is enough to kill a relationship. Not so with Linda and Joanie.

After discussion with their children the families moved in together. Linda told me it was not exactly a ‘Brady Bunch’ arrangement. Linda’s boy and the Joanie’s slightly older daughters did not get along too well and apparently each parent tended to side with their own kids in family disputes. But that is another story.

The important story here is the parent’s sex lives. Joanie was the one with the experience in this department and she took the lead. Having established that her boyfriend who was to become Linda was open to bisexual group play opened doors for them. It seems Joanie had known all along about small gatherings happening across most cities and larger gatherings in places like Las Vegas and Miami.

Linda had a rule that they would not play in groups in their hometown. She did not want to risk running into parents of her students or even to former students. It happened but that is another story.

As the kids grew and could be reasonably trusted when left alone, or better yet with their other parents, Joanie and Linda would travel and play.

What has this got to do with the history of Linda’s crossdressing? Not much until they happened to attend an adult lifestyle party in upstate New York. It must have been about 1980, Linda figures as the lifestyle was in full swing and nobody was yet concerned about AIDS.

This one event was significant in their relationship, Linda told me. It was going to be a Hallowe’en themed party. Joanie wanted them to dress up like college cheerleaders. She secured matching outfits, right down to the short skirts and panties. Their sweaters were V-neck and Joanie took care to make sure Linda’s cleavage was attractively taped and her own boobs were jutting out thanks to a push-up bra. Joanie also brought along two pairs of volleyball knee pads. At first Linda was not sure why the pads were needed.

I bet you can guess why they were needed. I guessed right away.

The evening was also going to have a casino night as an icebreaker. Part of the price of admission was to be given some play money to gamble or use as you saw fit.

It seems that Linda and Joanie were not ordinary cheerleaders. They were to play the role of girls on a fundraising mission. Instead of a car wash the scenario was that they were ‘orally servicing’ any passers-by that wanted it. The passersby were other guests at the lifestyle party and the pay was play money, part of the Hallowe’en party contest to see who could ‘score’ the most from the other guests. Joanie was determined to win.

Linda said that Joanie gave her the knee pads and positioned her by the entrance to the play area while she went deeper into the grotto. The evening progressed. Linda apparently greeted everyone enthusiastically. She was doing okay and at one point Joanie came back to ask how much Linda had collected.

“$121,” she proudly reported.

“$121?” Joanie asked, “who gave you the $1?”

“They all did,” Linda replied with a laugh.

One important outcome of the evening was that Linda made some decisions about herself. She knew she could function as a heterosexual male but she enjoyed appearing as a woman and really enjoyed that her female image could be arousing to a lot of men.

“Me too!” I blurted out when she told me that.

A second important outcome was that Linda decided she was not going to wait for Joanie or anyone else to initiate her crossdressing experiences.

She started dressing and practicing makeup when she was alone and had the house to herself.

She found and collected TG magazines and tabloid newspapers.

She got a mailbox in her chosen femme name — Linda Alexander, perhaps you know her.

She found excuses to go out of town where she would arrange some time to dress and go out as Linda. New York was a favorite destination where she could find any number of clubs like Edelweiss and shop to her heart’s content whether it was at Lee Brewster’s or Macy’s.

I told her about my experience in the ’80s at Macy’s on 34^th when a guy who turned out to be a store detective followed me down several flights of escalator and asked to see i.d. I thought he was going to arrest me but turned out he just wanted to hit on me.

“I should be so lucky,” quipped Linda.

“I think for the both of us the 1980s started out to be a pretty wild decade,” I added. However, it seemed for both of us as soon as the wildness started it ended. The acronyms HIV and AIDS came to our attention. At first we assumed it was just something affecting gay men but it did not take long to see it was much more.

“Joanie very early recognized the dangers of unprotected sex and recognized that I was directly in the firing line of the virus.,” exclaimed Linda. We stopped going to adult parties and she made me promise to give up unprotected sex.”

“Even oral,” I asked.

“Even oral. Remember back in the day there was still a lot to learn about AIDS. She did not want us to learn the hard way,” Linda replied.

It seems that once they did not have the common bond of the ‘lifestyle’ Joanie and Linda started to drift apart. That plus the fact that the kids were growing and leaving home.

“We had little to keep us together,” added Linda, “once Joanie and I split up I was in one sense at loose ends but in another I was free to travel during my vacations and free to explore being Linda. Besides New York, I visited Boston, Montreal, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, London, Paris everywhere.”

“How did you find it meeting people? Were you able to play safe?”

“Playing safely was a must but it was hit and miss on meeting people,” Linda replied, “I had these magazines with directories of places to go in various cities but often when I got there the place was gone. So, when I found a good place, I would go back and back and back. For me that place was the Queen Mary in Los Angeles” Linda reported. “Another was Ziegfeld’s in DC.”

“Me too!” I again agreed. “But not in the 1980s. I went to the Queen Mary once in about 1987 but I was scared out of my wits. There was a lot of really tough ‘girls’ there, working girls who didn’t want us amateurs taking away their customers. There was a lot of open drug use, too. I was afraid to drink anything for fear my drink would be spiked.”

“Yes, there was all that. But there were some very nice characters hanging around the ‘Queen’, too.” Linda jumped to the Queen’s defense.

“Single and a crossdresser,” I sighed as I changed the subject, “what is a girl to do?”

“I spent a lot of time and effort perfecting my craft,” reported Linda. “At Lee Brewster’s I had purchased a VHS tape on how crossdressers can do makeup. It was by a drag model named Kim Christy. I devoured and memorized the contents. Of course, I could never look as good as Kim Christy but it was exciting trying.

“Then came the encounter that would truly change my life or at least my wardrobe. For years I had been shaving my body hair or using epilation cream to remove the hair. That was only good for a day or two. Then one evening at Cleopatra’s up in Montreal I met up with a pre-op TS who told me of the experience she had had that day with a lady doing body waxing. She told how the lady said she had lots of male customers coming in for wax jobs.

“The very next day I went to the business and she was able to take me on right then and there. It was about the most painful experience of my life. Each of those body hairs and leg hairs had a good-sized bulb at the root and that bulb had to be pulled through a tiny skin follicle. Each pull of pain quickly subsided as it was replaced by another pull of pain. But oh, what a feeling to touch and look at my smooth skin! Sure’ there was some redness for the next day or so but that quickly subsided.”

“And I bet the next time it was far less painful?” I guessed.

“Right you are,” Linda replied, “how did you know?”

“I probably went to the same place. Remember, I live not far from Montreal. The salon I went to was called Salon Bleu Vert. The second and subsequent times you get your body hair pulled there is less and less of a bulb. The hairs are finer and fewer. I used to go to the salon but now I do the job myself and my wife helps me with the few hairs I cannot reach on my back.”

“Isn’t it great that we can wear low cut and sleeveless fashions without exposing any body hair?” proclaimed Linda. I remember sometime in the late ‘80s being in Manhattan walking near Times Square in the middle of the day wearing a halter dress, makeup just right, wearing two-inch slings with a purse on my shoulder. I was passing a grate as I heard the roar of a subway train below.”

“You should have stepped on the grate and pulled a Marilyn Monroe,” I teased.

“That is exactly what I was thinking of doing,” squealed Linda, “but I chickened out. I remember how her hair flies in that scene. I imagined my wig being set sailing into the street.”

“Good thinking,” I had to agree.

“My other big milestone of the 1980s was turning a few tricks,” Linda mentioned calmly. I didn’t know whether I really wanted to hear or write about this but she continued, “We school teachers get long Christmas breaks. I was single. My son had told me he would be spending Christmas with his girlfriend’s family so I booked a two week holiday in Hawaii. I had read there were good TG bars and shows in Waikiki and Honolulu. My freshly waxed skin would enjoy the exposure. I spent my days at the beach or around the hotel pool and my nights at clubs along Hotel Street. I noticed a lot of the girls would come and go from the clubs. I looked to see what they were doing when they left. Well, I knew what they were doing and I wanted to see how it was going.

“There was a steady stream of guys driving by to check out and pick up the girls. It wasn’t long before one of the guys wanted to talk with me, wanted me to go with him and asked me the price. I guessed at something like $40 for oral which turned out to be in his range. As I was getting in his car another of the girls came over to let him know that there should be no funny stuff as they had his license number. That was great: the girls looking after each other,” Linda commented.

She didn’t tell me anything about the paid sex but it must have gone alright because she spent several more nights ‘tricking’ in Honolulu.

“Weren’t you worried about getting arrested and what that would do to your career?” I asked.

” Yes, I was but I think that was part of the thrill of being a crossdresser was the thrill of the risk of getting caught.”

I heartily agreed with her there.

Funny how my friend had started the decade on her knees servicing men for play money and ended it back on her knees doing the same thing for real money.

I was looking forward to her telling me about the 1990s. Stay tuned and feel welcome to share your best memories from the 1980s or any other time.

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Tags: crossdressing, featured, History

Category: crossdressing, Transgender History