The Art of Cross Dressing. Part II

Ed. If you did not read Part One, please set aside a few minutes to do so. Link here. This post should then provide better value.

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Yes, I relish the risk of Cross Dressing. I love the effect that it has on me, and on people around me. I am enthralled by the Art of it all. This drives me. These impulses and motivators, and the way that my pleasure receptors are touched when I act on them seem to me to be artistic, or at least creative, at their core.

Perhaps now is a good time to introduce a little more of me to help contextualize this theme.

I did a good amount of theatre in my 20’s. The high I took from working a stage is similar to the high I take from being Petra. The nerves prior to curtain, the attenuation to surroundings when on stage, the conscious blocking of movement, the ownership of personality, and presence while interacting with other players, the odd flower tossed by an admirer in the audience, it is all there, all of it. The satisfaction of knowing that to some degree you pulled off the performance, and that the immediate world briefly suspended disbelief is immense. If I had not worked in theatre I would have less, or perhaps nothing to compare Cross Dressing to. I did though, and damn it, but the likenesses of experience are profound.

It surprises me that I had not twigged to this earlier on.

For a variety of reasons, in my 30’s, I lost theatre and settled into technical lines of work. Lots of process, heaps of data, chains of command and the like. A couple of IPO’s that did nothing to fatten my purse too, but I am not bitter. It was a busy time building a career, and a busy time learning how to be a husband too. There was much to take me off the scent of creative pursuits. Great stuff, but different stuff.

I hit my 40’s with reasonable achievement on both the career and marital fronts. There was room in my life, and a creative, artistic activity snuck into the gap in the form of a big, beautiful piano. I had not played a note of music in my life. I started up pretty much the same way a 5 year old does and managed to become a pretty accomplished 7 year old before hitting a talent wall. I do play though, for minutes at a time, most days these days. The piano is a great source of joy for me. Certainly, the making of music is Art, even if in this field, I am no Artist.

Art has become much more central to my happiness over the last couple of years. I taught a course this past summer on the topic of Art History from Paleolithic times to the present day, viewed through the lens of technological advances. I cannot draw for beans, but I lit a room full of avid minds up expounding a theory of Art not as luxury, but as a necessity in the lives of our odd species. I gobbled up the research effort. It was delicious. I loved it and will refine the material for another go around the next time there is room for me.

Some, perhaps much of the confidence or the carelessness required to create this curricula from scratch, and then to stand up and teach it came from my recent experience of building this blog into a home for another type of Art. The Art of Writing. A fair amount of effort goes into rendering feeling, thought and experience into words here on these bright pages. Arguably the effort falls short of art, but it is creative. A blank Word doc is “medium” as surely as a freshly shaved face, and the keyboard is brush, shadow and blush. Doing this labor has thoroughly awakened within me just how central works of creativity are to my happiness.

All of this, if I am on the scent, truly brings me closer to apprehending the big catch, the whole "why". Not quite though.

I am left with why Cross Dressing, as opposed to, well, something else.

There remains the possibility of an odd chromosomal arrangement somewhere inside. There remains the possibility that some suppressed childhood experience guides my life and interests. There remains the possibility that the second hit of purple microdot I took at the David Bowie Station to Station gig clear cut an odd neural path and got me behind the velvet rope that keeps tourists from getting a good bar stool in Club Gender. And who is (ever) to know?

Not knowing these things with any certainty, I can at least contextualize my Cross Dressing as satisfying Artistic urges.

Art, at core, is work in pursuit of truth. Truth has a close relationship with beauty. Much of what I see in the world that is beautiful is displayed by women. This beauty inspires. I feel envy for it in moments of weakness. I admire it in moments of clarity. I realize that I cannot have it all or always. I can, however, aspire to beauty.

The beauty that I see in women provides very stark relief from what is ungainly, unmusical, and unbeautiful about men.

In admiring womanly beauty, in acting on the admiration, in adopting womanly surfaces, and surfacing the better feminine self from within, I believe that I am able to stand further away from my ungainly, unmusical and unbeautiful masculine potentials.

Having done this, the sculpting, the painting, the performing, and having written about it all has been completely transformational for me. Transformational in the way that Art is supposed to be. Lasting in the way that Art is supposed to be. Beautiful in the way that Art is supposed to be. For me.

I do feel further away from ungainly, unmusical, unbeautiful potentials that were always ready to stumble into view in earlier years. Perhaps that comes to us all with time, with maturity, but I am quite certain that it came to me earlier than it would have otherwise as a direct result of the pursuit of this Art.

I am happy that this Art found its way to me.

And I am curious to know from you, my Artistic friend, if these thoughts ring true for you, if you feel these things too. Comments most sincerely welcomed.

Photo Credit for Female Magritte to Colin Carver

Laundry, and the Art of Cross Dressing. Part 1

Just a little more than a month ago I was finishing up the weeks worth of laundry I created for myself at the Southern Comfort Conference.

The mental laundry has tumbling between my ears a little while longer. Today, dear friends, I will do a little fluff and fold of these pretty and static charged thoughts with you. It is a big pile, two loads at least. Let’s just take on one of them in this post.

You see, a week long skirt-a-palooza was big stuff for me, and for a number of reasons. On a visceral level, I had not been out en Femme through the too long, too hot Atlanta summer months. I therefore felt a great deal of anticipation for the first Frolic en Femme of the Autumn season.

Beyond that though, on a cerebral level, I truly wanted to see precisely what a more pronounced, prolonged immersion within my feminine surfaces might surface from within me. Complex stuff, yes, and while comprehension of the motivations that drive this splendid behavior is likely not to be completely seized, we must try. What would we be if we did not try?

Getting to “why” is important to me. My own personal delight in having a “why” for things runs counter to a deeply embedded hedonistic streak that I am possessed of, and which has largely served me well in life. This attitude can be succinctly summed up by saying “if it feels good, do it, provided it does not frighten the cows and sour the milk”.

The hedonist is kept partly in check by a ravenous analytical appetite. Like Mr. Spock from Star Trek, I am half Vulcan. Unlike Mr. Spock, my other half is Lt. Uhuru.

Back now, to the laundry of the mind, spinning on the question: “what is my motivation?”

I have, since giving Cross Dressing a wide berth in my life a couple of years ago, changed greatly. I will confess that there was an element of fetish, of forbidden thrill, of tactile excitement in my earlier experiments with wardrobe. This element is gone, long gone. Much else is gone with it. I no longer furtively under-dress, or sneak therapeutic moments of partial dressing in to my days. When I do dress, I go top-to-toe, and take it out on the road. Doing less does not seem to address any needs or desires. Moreover, I harbor no lesbian fantasies, have little interest in the company of men, and have absolutely no interest in congress with them. In some ways my conventionality borders on kinky. Perhaps then, we can reasonably eliminate sex as a motivator for my habit.

I have, since giving Cross Dressing a wide berth in my life (and since sharing that truth with my wife of 15+ years), listened closely for signals, kept my ears open for the Syren song sounding off the rocky shoals of Gender Re-assignment. I simply do not hear the call. At some level, I may be shutting off some sensors, daunting and disruptive as that trip would surely be. Perhaps, but I believe that I have been open minded and honest with myself on this matter.

Again. Just. Not. Feeling. It.

Perhaps then we can eliminate gender identity disorder from the mix. My birthly, earthly inheritances are sources of happiness and accomplishment for me. My advantages are considerable. I can not imagine not being the me that I am. Male. Shaken or stirred, with a twist perhaps, but yeah, a guy.

What then, dear friends, am I left with?

A thought has been coalescing around my uncertainty as to motive. It goes like so:

There is an element of Theatre, of Performance in this dressing. There is an audience, unwitting as they are, who get to see the show. I am capable of a good performance, of inhabiting a character convincingly, and staying on stage without being broomed off from the wings or shut down by a caustic review.

There is an element of Art, of Creativity in this dressing. There is bodily clay that is molded into new and attractive shapes. There is a frame draped in startling fabrics, a kinetic sculpture whose movements are changed, freed, constrained, and governed by dimensions of garments. There is my skin, a coarse canvas, smoothed, painted and beautified, an improvement on nature that I can see in a mirror and still feel surprised by.

There is something more. There is an element of exhibition, of sedition, of challenge to status quo in Cross Dressing. It may stem from some insecurity, a mad juvenile desire to be seen, noticed, to be paid mind to. In truth much of the friction of my younger years was borne of uncertainty about my value, insecurity about my place and progress in the world. There is abundant evidence in my more mature years though that this impulse has been largely stamped out, or corralled to a healthy degree. My present challenges to status quo seem better considered, more organic, and pretty well calculated for risk and effect.

I relish the risk of the Performance. I love the process of the Art. I am drawn to the challenge of the Status Quo. All of these things may be very important to me, and all very real contributors to my “why”.

It all requires a few more turns in the dryer before getting line dried here in Part Two tomorrow. I do hope to see you back here after a brief intermission.

Cross Dressing Canvas - Part 2

Dear friends, I had no intention of writing a whole 2-part big deal here, but I seemed to have accidentally struck a bit of a thought gusher, and it seems to have splashed onto your monitor. Bear with me. I should be able to tidy things up today. Part 1 of this rambling epistle is nestled directly beneath this post. Scroll down and take a read if you like. Of course, the epically lazy amongst you may simply prefer to click here.

To net out the prior post, I will say that I have come to a grudging and late belief that the people who imagine, design, build and market the clothes that we wear are involved in an artistic, or at least creative endeavour. There. Everyone caught up? Good. Now, proceeding. What about all the rest of us who dress? And particularly those of us who cross dress.

This line of thinking started for me in earnest the other day when I received a nice couple of comments about my description of a recent dressing up experience. One of the notes came from a dedicated fashionista, a genetic female who said more or less “ …makes me wish I had an occasion to don my finery right now!...”

I pondered that a bit. All of us dress each day in something. There is a certain amount of routine about it, and routines lose their ability to capture your attention. Dressing becomes very functional, and not attached to any particular magic. But even at the most routine level, choices are being made that reflect something you want to show to the world. At some level, our ad hoc selections are acts of creative expression. We paint and present ourselves to the world each day, and some days with a little more consideration and pride than other days.

But for the periodic cross dresser, and for anyone, anywhere in between the opposite ends of the gender expression continuum, well, dressing is special. I believe, from my thinking and reading and corresponding with a handful of friends made here online that most M2F cross dressers are exploring that sense of gender. I sense as well that all of us to some degree are expressing a creative drive too. For me, I am beginning to see the creative side of this life as more central to my dressing than any sense of uncertainty or unresolved curiosity about my own gender identity. I enjoy being a guy. I do guy stuff pretty competently. Life is simple and I like simple.

O, but what a platform for creative expression cross dressing is. And what an array of media we get to work in.

Our bodies are clay. The under-layers that obscure some shapes, and build curves where there normally are none. The smoothing and cinching that happens here and there that molds the body into new shapes. This careful process, this first stage of my dressing ritual is surprising each time, and breathtaking too. From noticeably male to attractively female in shape, and there in the mirror. We are sculptors and models all at once.

Our clay is a form. And forms want adornment. The array of finishes from hosiery, to skirts, blouses, shoes, dresses, a much more endless array of drapery meant to display our form attractively, functionally, and perhaps even comfortably. The realms of choice multiply massively from the simple sets we work from in our more typical day-to-day lives. Some tragic choices are made, but as we get more skilled, and as our adornment better fits us and our images, the better the feelings. The clay beneath the drapery takes on a new life, our movement changes, postures smarten, and with each step, stretch and touch we are aware of our choices.

Our forms want finishing. The painting that changes and smoothes complexions, that adds definition to cheek lines, that amplifies the colors of our eyes, that makes our lips look and taste sweet and desirable. This transformation is perhaps the most heightened, and most demanding work of art we can labor at. Again, fraught with failure, but with practice or with help, done well, you become to yourself a familiar stranger, a newly possible self. Again, it can take a moment to get back to breathing again. But still, the next mirror will be sure to see you.

Our nearly finished selves are tapestries too. Final adornments, the hair, the belts, the bracelets, the nails, the scarves, the bags, these new things, taboo to guy-mode life, are a completely new and endlessly variable matrix of options that express us, and finally conceals the clay within. These elements compel new and changed ranges of motion, keeping your mouth clear of hair, handling keys and car doors, being sure to not derange everything that we have worked to create takes constant consideration.

Our finished, and feminized selves are now dancers, expressing with a new physicality. We must now perform, and to move like a man, to sit like one, to hold a glass as we normally do would spoil the illusion. So many of these reflexes require thought and response, and always moment to moment. Movement becomes with time more natural, but there is always a frontier of physical presence, for me at least, that requires attention, craft and consideration. These are complex and satisfying moments of learning and of performance.

And performance in public, is definitionally a creative art. I spent a good amount of my earlier years on stages. The nerves before the curtain went up never got slack. And the satisfaction, right in the moment, of realizing that the performance was being bought into, and perhaps appreciated was for me the primary reason to be there. The nerves and the curtain calls could not be separated. So it is when the door opens and we take on the world en femme. There are critics of course, and performances that fall flat, but the moments when our characters effectively occupy the space we are in, believably, plausibly, these moments are the curtain calls of this cross dressers life. We are sometimes extras lost on a huge set, and sometimes get speaking parts in smaller and more intimate theaters of sociability, but always performing. We are actors, and this too is an ancient and demanding art.

All of this together is a pretty deep immersion in a highly creative, expressive, artistic life. Few people get to be so deeply involved in such a life.

It surprises me to put all of these thoughts together and to realize that I am, and many of you are, unconsciously to some degree, really quite accomplished artists. You might see in your day to day life, like me, less of an outlet for these capabilities than cross dressing provides. I suppose that without really being aware of it myself, that much of the satisfaction, and elation I derive from being Petra comes from the truth that this taps into a pretty deep pool of creativity. Petra brings out a bit an artist. And that art satisfies a special part of my humanity, a humanity we all have at some level or other.

Regardless of what compels us to explore this part of ourselves, forces we cannot often fully understand, confronting those forces, exploring them, personalizing them, is a form of art. Each day is an opportunity for donning our finery after all. Lots of clay and canvas and performance spaces all around us.

Thanks for reading through this. I wish you artful lives. I hope you enjoy your art. Whatever medium you work in, for whatever audience you work and play for.