The words above appeared in the November 1965 issue of Femme Forum, a newsletter for heterosexual crossdressers, or transvestites, to use the term common at the time. The writer expressed the radical idea that a crossdresser could derive social meaning from the secretive and oftentimes shameful practice of crossdressing. He came to this understanding through his membership in a newly formed “sorority” for heterosexual transvestites called Phi Pi Epsilon. In the 1960s and 1970s, the three hundred members created an underground print culture and a network of chapters across the United States. By joining the sorority, these mostly white and middle-class crossdressers risked destroying their public reputations in order to build and belong to a community where male-bodied individuals who had a certain feeling for femininity could find acceptance and feel normal.
For a couple of decades now, historians have been writing about the identity formation and community building that occurred among gender variant individuals, such as transvestites, transsexuals, and transgenders, during the latter half of the twentieth century. My work contributes to this literature by historicizing the experiences of male crossdressers. I look particularly at a community of self-identified transvestites (“TVs,” to use their lingo) who came of age during the early Cold War era when gender norms felt like a straitjacket. Forming a kind of sisterhood of brothers, these men then rode the wave of the sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s in very fascinating ways that attest to their subjectivity as both privileged white males with a foot in the mainstream and as "sexual deviants" with the other foot in the gender and sexual margins.
My poster will display photographs they took of themselves in private and group settings. These photos will show the vision of white domestic femininity they emulated and idealized. My poster will also feature written testimonials (life histories) that they sent for publication in Transvestia, an underground magazine that catered to heterosexual transvestites. I will also have an audio feature that will enable attendees to listen to oral interviews of those who participated in Phi Pi Epsilon. The photographs and testimonials highlight their identity formation and their experiences creating a social world in the 1960s and 1970s via print culture and a national organization. I will argue that as they worked to normalize transvestism, a rigid and vicious “politics of respectability” came to characterize this particular community’s activism and organizing efforts—one that saw the group relentlessly police the boundaries of their identity and distance themselves from the (other) sexual deviants that loomed large on the social and cultural imaginary of Cold War America.