Welcome to Crossdresser Heaven, a safe and welcoming place for everyone in the crossdresser community.
Join Crossdresser Heaven today to participate in the forums.
For those of us ladies who were around in the days before the internet,how did we manage to find out any information regarding crossdressing or to be precise transvestism as it was widely known then.In my experience,information was very limited.First information I ever come across was in a couple of psychology books that I saw on the shelves in my local college when I was seventeen back in1977/78.I was a former student of the college who had returned to participate in a six month Office Assistant Work Experience scheme.Once a week,I helped out the librarian in the college library.When he was not looking ,I would sneakily peruse two psychology books and search through the index for transvestism.I am sure that he caught me a few times.The books were a few years out of date and were not too much help to me.I was shocked by stories of aversion therapy which was meant to cure the act of crossdressing.Another resource was the problem pages in the daily or weekly tabloid newspapers.At least this was a little bit more enlightening as the agony Aunts or Uncles as they were known in the UK at that time were quite sympathetic about crossdressing giving some reassurance that there was nothing harmful about the pursuit.
Some twenty years or so later I still found information hard to find.I had seen crossdressing magazines on the shelves of adult book shops when I tagged along there with friends.Just before the internet ,I did find useful O8OO recorded telephone information lines giving tips.However,at that time,I was not yet out to my wife and had limited dressing time and could not put any of the advice into practice.
Ladies of a certain age,what crossdressing resources were available to you in those dark days?
Very little in the U.K in the sixties and seventies. These were the dark ages where almost anything reported was sensationalist and reflected the negative attitude towards Transvestism. Drag queens were seen in a different light as entertainment and was quite acceptable, Danny La Rue, Hinge and Brackett to name a couple of revered acts.
The first change was in the seventies when Julie Grant had her sex change journey chronicled in a documentary ' A change of sex. It was very sympathetically done showing the negativity of the medical world but the acceptance of her employer and co workers. It was still hard to find anything but there seemed to be a gradual change in the press.
Then came the internet which I didn't embrace until the late 1990's and the world opened up.
Hi Roberta, well, beginning in the 1970's when I had the wherewithal (time, etc) to actually start searching out the various words I was hearing, there wasn't much. I do remember back then a club in downtown Chicago which advertised something like 30 'girls' on stage and only 1 is a female. An occasional book on children/adolescents by some MD briefly might have listed briefly something like transvestites. There were occasional articles one might find in regular publications (I think Playboy did an article or two), about some person going through transition. And of course TV had Milton Berle .Flip Wilson and others, doing regular cross-dressing skits which of course were outlandish . I also remember seeing parts of the Movie Glen or Glenda - which I thought was rather silly. And Jim Bailey doing more serious impressions of Judy Garland and others.
1st real book I bought and read was Canary by Canary Conn (formerly Danny Connor) around 1977. Two more books came out that I read, Mirror Images and Conundrum about M-F transitioning. Talk shows were starting to have a M-F or F-M come on. A book by Nancy Friday in the 80's titled 'Men In Love' covered a lot more ground than any previous book I read, having several chapters on cross-dressing, transitioning, and a few other what she called fetishes.
Around 1979 I found the book by Harry Benjamin on the surgical procedures. By then I was perusing various bookstores casually (read: surreptitiously) looking for any publications, few and far between. I had been aware of Christine Jorgenson from probably the 60's on, but seldom found any serious discussion.
Most talk shows that had m-f crossdressers, or more likely m-f post op, more often than not had showgirl looking people on, which from a wondering standpoint suggested that most of us were out of luck if we were ever to transition. Then around 1990 Lou Gordon did a show that I accidently caught that had on three or four m-f post op and they all...LOOKED LIKE NORMAL WOMEN!!!
But by then I realized I had made certain commitments and transitioning was not in my future, tho I continue to crossdress to this day.
Hugs, ChloëC
Hi Chloe.I remember seeing Flip Wilson in drag on Rowan And Martin's Laugh In.We got that show over here in the UK in the late sixties and early seventies.I saw Jim Bailey on a US variety show that was made with an eye for the British market.Would have been about 1973.Befofe the show aired there was an interview with Jim Bailey in our TV guide the TV Times.There were pictures of him dressed as Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand.I was very envious of seeing his shapely legs in tights in Judy mode.About the same time he was a guest on Lucille Ball's Here's Lucy.I don't think that particular episodes was shown on our local station.I saw it on Youtube a few years back.
You can see a lot of what was available at
https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/
Small press and stencil/mimeograph publications were often a mix of stories and help articles.
Female impersonation as entertainment and psychological studies were the acceptable public face of CD/TG. Christine Jorgensen’s transition was a big mainstream news story.
In my view the Internet and social understanding of CD/TG grew up together. Alt.com and IRC were well used before user friendly HTML creation came to be. At that same time the postwar ideas that CD/TG was a) not automatically a sexual fetish and 2) not a psychological pathology in and of themselves gained attention and acceptance —- including via info shared using those early online tools.
Of course, I’m just a simple country hyper-chicken, what do I know?
Two main stream publications that I found were Penthouse Forums and their other spin-off, Variations. Tons of 'kinky' things to read about. Crossdressing was one of my favorites. Until then, I really didn't have a clue that others were into it.
Sometimes back in the '80 and '90s, it could have been a radio show, or some late-night talk show on the local UHF channel.
If you went to an adult <ahem> toy store, you might be able to something in a magazine.
Overall, there wasn't much back then. No information, no easy connections, and no community like there is now. I can't imagine what it would have been like back in those days if you wanted to meet and talk about what's going on.
Rachelle
I began researching and reading about transvestism (crossdressing) in the 1960s at university libraries. I think sometime in the mid 1970s I recall seeing ads in Penthouse magazine from Tri-ESS, in addition to articles and letters from crossdressers. During the 1970s, I was stationed overseas, serving in the US Navy, and did not respond to the Tri-ESS ads, but in 1980, I was assigned to shore duty in Norfolk, Virginia and wrote to Tri-ESS for information. Tri-ESS referred me to a local chapter in Norfolk, Virginia.
By the late 80s, the information highway was upon us, and we soon learned we were not alone in our desire to crossdress.
When I lived with my parents, we had no internet whatsoever. Dial up services back then were expensive, and there was no way I could ever convince my parents to lay out cash for a new computer, modem, and isp.
So I never had any resources on CDing growing up. I wanted to explore why I liked being femme, see if I was the only one doing this, and clothing/sizing info but none of this existed for me even though there was internet available.
This sort of changed when I began attending university. There were sparc sun workstations, and this was my first ever foray into browser type of internet (remember netscape ??).
Searching for CDing in a open lab wasn't easy as it was high traffic. About the only time it was kinda quiet was 5 am. I remember doing a few odd searches for CDing when I was alone in the lab but it was very quick and I only glanced at info on a few websites as I didn't want to get caught.
It wasn't until we finally got internet service for home that I began searching in depth on CDing resources.
I remember watching Benny Hill and Monty Python back in the late 70's they always had guy's dressed up. Like others Penthouse and Playboy forums about cross dressing were my favorite's to read. I had to be careful that none of my cousins or brother ever caught me reading anything of that type as they would have been ruthless on me, they kinda bullied me a lot even when I was younger. Today I'm so glad I found CDH!!!!!!!!!!!
I came of age in the late 60’s and the early to mid 70’s clearly before the internet.
it was difficult. I knew I enjoyed wearing women’s lingerie, clothing and feeling feminine but who or what was I?
I found some info at our local library. I can remember reading the word crossdresser for the first time and that didn’t sound to bad, but the word Transvestite sounded scary.
my parents received 3 newspapers every day and I loved reading them even at a young age. News and current events always interested me. Occasionally there would be and article about crossdressing or even about drag queens. Slowly after reading these articles and stuff from the library I pieced together who and what I am, even though I didn’t completely understand it. of course the. The shame of it all kicked in. Later and I don’t remember how but I stumbled upon some crossdressing magazines that had stories similar to mine and I realized I was not alone in this. I’m happy that todays generations have the internet and better resources available that us older girls didn’t have
Natalie 💋💋💋
I remember the dial up internet access when I was at University and it was just starting to become more widely available. However, we used something called Mosaic. Anyone remember that?
Roberta,
As someone who also grew up in the UK, I don't recall ever seeing any literature on crossdressing or "transvestism" as it then tended to be called (sounds like a disease doesn't it?). My main experience was either seeing the occasional individual dressed up, much to the amusement and ridicule of my parents, or from "drag" experiences on TV such as Danny La Rue, Dame Edna Everage, Hinge and Bracket etc.
At the time, there was a direct assertion (from society) this was linked to homosexuality - this, of course, was never explicitly said, but was what people either knew or said in private. In addition, there were many other comedy programmes that used cross dressing in their acts: Monty Python, The Two Ronnies etc.
For me it was a world that I didn't even knew properly existed until the internet came out, even though I can now see there were plenty of people engaging in it secretly.
Katie
I also had very little info on crossdressing, growing up in the 60's and 70's. There would be the occasional "Female Impersonators" (now called drag queens) on the Ed Sullivan show (a variety show hosted for many years on Sunday nights). Flip Wilson in his Geraldine persona. Occasionally Johnathan Winters as Maude Frickert. I probably heard ads for the movie about Christine Jorgenson although I have never seen the movie. Even To Wong Foo ... I had only seen a few years ago. I never saw it in the movies, and somehow missed it on HBO. I did see Tootsie in the theaters, and occasionally watched Busom Buddies on TV.
Wendy Swift asked about Netscape. Netscape is what later became Firefox. When Netscape 4 came out (they skipped 3), I discovered that it didn't overwrite Netscape 2. By using the older browser, I was able to do searches without the queries being cached in history. Nothing I did showed up in the current (version 4) browser.
Down here in Oz, my first exposure was an article in a weekly mag, called Australian Post. There was a photo of a young Danny LA Rue and it blew my mind. We also had most of the English shows where as mentioned The Two Ronnies who did drag sketches.
By the early 70's in our "Adult book stores" we had the English "World of Transvestism" magazines coming from Swish Publications in Soho London. I built up a fair collection of these mags and also bought some from the London shop when travelling on business.
Then came a couple of local CD groups. One of which Seahorse Society of NSW up in Sydney, survived and flourishes to this day.
Early internet days we had one computer at my workplace on the old dial ups and that's how I found the old Geocities sites about CD'ing. I used to have to wait until everyone had left for the day to go and sneak a peek.
Ah memories, memories,
Caty.
