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.
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.
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.”
Veronica Vera, known as Miss Vera, is a prominent mentor on the cross-dressing scene and the only biological female in the room.Part of her mission is to help wives understand and embrace their husbands’ cross-dressing desires. Raised as a Roman Catholic in New Jersey, she pursued a career on Wall Street, then one in pornography and sex journalism, before founding Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls in the early 1990s. It bills itself as “the world’s first cross-dressing academy,” and still operates out of her Chelsea apartment.
Before the term transgender gained traction in the ’90s, all trans people were regarded as transvestites, or cross-dressers. Now, though most cross-dressers put themselves under the trans umbrella, the mainstream trans movement is not always eager to claim them as its own. The term retains connotations of perversion and fetishism.
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