“The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture” by Daniel Harris – A very bitchy (and I use that word intentionally) book that simultaneously acidly critiques aspects of gay culture and sentimentalizes the “outsider” aspects of gay culture. It would’ve been nicer if the author has copped to this ambivalence in the introduction rather than the final page, since the swings initially come off as if the author just hates everything. But it’s got some great insights, and also offers some interesting looks at gay life outside the major metropolitan areas. For example, Harris discusses the “hobbyist” magazines that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s whose ostensible purpose was to connect people who shared common hobbies, but which quickly became thinly-veiled gay personal ads. Ads from the hinterlands by gay men seeking to meet someone, anyone, who lived locally are all too reminiscent of the posts I still see today on mailing list by deeply closeted crossdressers hoping to meet in person someone like themselves. (NY Times review here.)

“Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America” by Lillian Faderman – Very well written and comprehensive history (up through 1991).

But a couple things left a bad taste my mouth: Faderman repeated insistence that some people seen as butches might in fact be trans men. To be fair, she was obviously reacting against the “invert” theory of the late 1800s that proposed [I]all[/I] lesbians “men trapped in women’s bodies,” and against the way masculinity was used to discredit lesbians and feminists. But she seems to want to ignore away evidence that some women living as men seemed to be doing so because they saw themselves as men. Plus both of her two actual references to “transsexuals” come complete with scare quotes — while Faderman is a little oblique, it seems like she was of the mindset that if trans people just freed themselves from gender stereotypes they wouldn’t need to transition. Finally, she misrepresents the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Stone""]Sandy Stone[/URL] incident. Correctly stating that it caused a huge controversy when the women’s recording collective refused to fire Stone in the face of transphobic attacks by lesbian-feminists — Stone was specifically targeted in Janice Raymond’s “Transsexual Empire” — but neglecting to mention that the company later caved in to the demands and fired Stone.

“Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco” to 1965 by Nan Alamilla Boyd – A bit on the academic side, but worth wading through the formal prose. Interestingly Boyd begins her book with a chapter on trans and gay male culture — and in fact argues that drag show nightclubs — featuring both drag queens and drag kings, and tolerated because of the tourist dollars they helped bring to the city — provided the city’s first publicly visible queer cultures and communities. Unlike New York, San Francisco was a “wide open town” in a variety of ways — from local politicians ignoring or downplaying morality issues, to the lack of entrenched political machines, to the lack of the Mafia; all of which caused San Francisco’s queer to differ greatly from New York’s. (Here’s a review by the San Francisco Chronicle.)

“Gay L.A.” by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons. L.A. finally gets its due as the overlooked birthplace of many mainstays of today’s gay and lesbian institutions. This time around the scare quotes are gone and trans people do crop up now and then. But disappointingly, only three or four pages out of the 464 pages specifically looked at trans history. It came out in 2006, so Virgina Prince’s biography (as one was Vern and Bonnie Burroughs’ “Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender,” both of which included a fair bit of trans history in L.A.) was available had the author’s cared to read it. (An example of how not only is history written by the victors, but how it’s written by those with the best meeting minutes.) It’s disappointing because early in the book the authors explicitly say they intend to do a comprehensive LGBT history — and that they used “gay” in their title because historically it had been used as an encompassing term that included LGB and T people. Like San Francisco, was also a “wide open town” in its own way compared to New York — with the film industry being a being a haven for all sorts of alternative behavior (as long as done discretely), fewer social hierarchies (since almost everyone was a relative newcomer) and an extremely diverse population.

“Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940″ by George Chauncey – Revelatory on how — at least within selected subcultures in New York City, concepts of sexual orientation and gender were far [I]more[/I] flexible than they are today. Aside from oral histories, Chauncey relies heavily on the reports filed by investigators of various “morals committee,” which gives an unusually detailed look at the lives of gay men in public places. (The book doesn’t look at lesbians and lesbian culture at all.)

“The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America” by Charles Kaiser – Good for a general overview of gay and lesbian life in NYC from World War II through the early 1990s, mixing historical analysis with oral histories. But while Kaiser tries to include a spectrum of voices, it feel like it focused heavily on the lives of the gay/lesbian rich and famous.

As Diana said, yet another clear indicator that the real and perceived ”trans” communities are light years apart.

Fortunately Helen Boyd has posted her own list of essential trans reading with capsule reviews on her site. Modestly, Helen omits her books — “My Husband Betty” and “She’s Not The Man I Married” — which are definitely on my must-read list. (Sadly, both SNTMIM and Julia Serano’s excellent “Whipping Girl” were both overlooked for this year’s Lambda Literary Foundation’s list of finalists in the transgender category. One wonders whether the Lammies had any trans people on the review committee.)

For those of you who are squeamish, there’s actually more nudity in the hetro sex scenes than the gay sex scenes (although there’s a couple gay make-out scenes). If you’re really squeamish, just remember to go for pop-corn whenever Ennis goes into Jack’s tent.

But seriously, it’s really more of a gay “Romeo and Juliet” than a “gay cowboy” movie. It’s really about lovers separated by society’s prejudices — I could easily imagine the basic plot being translated into an interracial hetro affair in the Jim Crow South, or a German/Jewish hetro affair in Nazi Germany.

And while the subject matter is obviously different, I think it’s a movie that one can use to communicate some of the pain that comes from being in the closet about crossdressing. Jack and Ennis are in the throes of urges they don’t really understand and can barely articulate. But they do feel that it’s something they absolutely can’t let anyone know about. And hiding that part of themselves eats away at all involved.

Like many crossdressers, Vincent seems to have a discomfort with her native gender. “Practically from birth, I was the kind of hard-core tomboy that makes you think there must be a gay gene.” That sentence points out one problem with the book and with Vincent’s conclusions: she fails to distinguish between sex identity (whether you feel biologically male or female), gender self-identity (whether you feel you’ve got a “masculine” or “feminine” personality) and gender role expectations (how others think men and women are “supposed” to behave). Vincent claims not to have transgendered feelings and I believe her. But Vincent herself makes clear her discomfort with gender role expectations for women and her belief that she’s got a “masculine” personality.

Ironically, Vincent assumes she’s butch enough that her personality won’t be a problem. Instead she frets about her physical appearance even though she’s got a physique (5′10″ wearing size 11 men’s shoes) that female-to-male transsexuals would gladly kill for. Vincent spends several pages describing her physical transformation in the sort of loving detail one finds in postings on online crossdressing forums. But to Vincent’s shock, it’s her feminine personality that keeps comes bursting through the physical disguise. Vincent may successfully pose as a man, but she’s almost universally seen as a gay man—an example of society’s equivalence of “unmanly” = “effeminate” = “gay” in action.

Part of it that Vincent constantly stumbled over the subtle do’s and don’ts that men have incorporated into their behavior an unconscious level. (For example, one of the monks actually reprimands Vincent when she refers to another monk as “cute.”) As a crossdresser trying to blend in, I also find the hard part is less the physical transformation as much as trying to understand all the unwritten rules of behavior that women have also learned consciously or unconsciously growing up.

Crossdressers are often (and rightly) taken to task by wives and girlfriends for the assertion that feeling that one has a “feminine side” and putting on a dress somehow inherently understand those who are born and raised as women. And I confess I had the same reservations about Vincent’s experiment. The experiences she sought seem drawn from a rogue’s gallery of middle/upper-class feminist bête noires. The men’s hangout for working class stiffs. The strip club. Men-without-women (Vincent joins a monastery mainly because going undercover in the army or prison presented obvious difficulties). The Glengarry Glen Ross sales job. The Robert Bly-ish men’s movement weekend, beating drums in the wilderness. It’s only the chapter on dating where Vincent talks about something remotely like everyday male-female interaction.

Admittedly, choosing these sorts of extreme archetypes does highlight behavior seen elsewhere, and initially Vincent does caution that her experiences are a really a travelogue of carefully chosen outings, “certainly inapplicable to anything so grand as a pronouncement on gender in American society.” Which—for better of worse—doesn’t stop her from making exactly those sorts of pronouncements later on in the book. Many of those insights are dead on—if not exactly news—for this guy.

This is where Vincent’s lesbianism is advantage. She herself points out having dated men before she came out as a lesbian, she learned that romantic hurt gets inflicted by both genders in equal measure—whereas exclusively heterosexual woman often unfairly assign the blame for such hurt on the gender, rather than the morals of the person inflicting the pain. But more significantly, while a number of feminist writers have written sensitively and insightfully about the masculine psyche, as heterosexual women they’ve assumed that men’s relationships with women are the pivotal foundation of masculine experience. Whereas Michael Kimmel points out in his excellent “Manhood in America,” that American men define their masculinity, not as much in relation to women, but in relation to each other men. Not to say women are incidental to men’s conception of (and efforts to prove their) manhood—men do often take elaborate and extraordinary risks to prove themselves in the eyes of women. But it’s the fear that we won’t measure up in the eyes of other men that’s far more haunting.

In fact the central lesson Vincent learns is how constrained and powerless men often feel. As Kimmel notes, the paradox of male privilege is that while men as a whole have benefited from it, individual men rarely feel the power that feminist critiques tell them they have. As Vincent puts it: “Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy, as if it’s some kind of plague they’re terrified of catching, or, more importantly, of other men catching.” In a meat-grinder job of door-to-door sales, the sale manager taunts the sales team with the fear of failure. On dates she’s shocked by the power women have and the icy precision with which they wield it. She hates how emotionally constrained she has to make herself to be a believable man.

One gets the sense that her breakdown may not have simply been the strain of the impersonation and the inevitable lies required, but instead may have been just as much do, as another reviewer put it, that “it was just as difficult—particularly for a lesbian, feminist, former Village Voice writer—to handle the disconcerting realization that being a guy is, as she plainly (and plaintively) puts it, “really hard.’”

Men—particularly those in the men’s liberation movement—have been saying that for years. So one of the main values of Vincent’s book is that hopefully women will be more receptive to hearing about some of the downsides of masculinity—and differences in communications styles—from one of their own. Vincent notes that women have taken the attitude that their style of communication is the “correct” one and men are just incommunicative clods who need to be trained how to do so properly. And it’s true that many men are unable to analyze their feelings, let alone articulate them, not only lacking the years of training that women have in both skills, but also having been actively discouraged (by fathers and mothers) from developing them. But Vincent discovers there’s a masculine style of intimacy that women haven’t bothered to see is there, let alone understand. It’s more physical than verbal, it’s often more about letting someone know you’re there rather than overtly offering sympathy—but it’s no less caring. As Vincent says, she learned “about the respectful space a man often needs around him when he is vulnerable or in tears. It may be possible now to interpret the silences of men around me as something more than voids or standoffs, and to feel more comfortable about being present and available to them without always needs our exchange to be explicit or neatly resolvable in my language.”

But being a man isn’t all bad. In her sales-jobs-from-beyond-hell, nerdy Ned becomes a Big Swinging Dick. “Nobody ever thought this Ned was gay,” she notes. Vincent doesn’t comment on why the change occurred, nor is it really clear to me either. But in part it was the clothes. Ned finally gets to wear the blazers and dress slacks Nora had stocked up on. And in the hardscrabble door-to-door sales industry, Vincent in her sharp suits stood-out (as potential management material) from the other salesmen with little cash and less fashion sense, who looked like exactly what they were: hucksters in cheap suits. The other part is it seems Vincent learned the same lesson men learn: fake it until you make it. The interviewers for these high testosterone sales jobs expected Ned “to brag about himself, to be smugly charming and steadfast, and so I did and I was.” (So much did Ned end up getting into Nora’s head that she ended up being mistaken for a man even out of disguise.)

That air of confidence—even if it’s sometimes actually whistling in graveyard bluster—is one of the few aspects of Ned that Vincent carried through her post-Ned “detox” and she’s appreciative that it allows her to expand her repertoire of behavior. In a similar vein, crossdressing at its best can allow men to flex the parts of their personalities that they feel they can’t express as men. Admittedly, as Helen Boyd, author of the excellent “My Husband Betty,” points out, crossdressers are expressing a man’s idea of what it’s like to be a woman, but again it can—especially for crossdressers who get out in public and interact with people—be an opportunity to step out of the “normal” constraints of masculinity.

Speaking of constraints, I enjoyed Vincent’s chapter where she joins a men’s lib group of the Iron John-Robert Bly mythopoetic variety where the men eventually get together for a weekend retreat out in the woods beating drums and getting in touch with their long-buried Wild Men. While Vincent sympathizes with the mostly broken men there—she says of one man: “you could see that his sense of self was in pieces all over the floor”—she’s a bit bemused by the “toothless mantra and aphorisms, or airy poetry that’s supposed to sound deep but usually isn’t.” As someone who flirted with the men’s movement years ago, but who was turned off for similar reasons, it was interesting to see Vincent also wishing the group would “offer a genuine obstacle, a real trial that would test the limits of a person’s character and sense of self” rather than their faux-Native American/pagan rituals.

The book does have some definite downsides. The chapter on sex is by far the weakest. For starters using a strip club to investigate men’s attitudes toward sex is both spurious and offensive. (I can only imagine the reaction I would get if I posed as a woman and hung out with strippers to gauge women’s attitude toward sex.) Moreover, the two clubs Vincent hangs out at sound like something out of the lower levels of Dante’s Inferno, but Vincent seems naively shocked to see the amount of sleaziness. Vincent’s attitude toward the male libido itself seems oddly Victorian—men are just horny beasts who can’t really help themselves. Now I’ve seen enough male-to-female and female-to-male transsexuals to have a healthy respect for the impact testosterone has on the libido, but the story isn’t quite that simple. There’s definitely truth in Vincent’s assertion that men on the whole think more from the groin and a better at separating lust from love, but on the other hand she wasn’t likely to meet the guys who take a more “womanly” approach to intimacy (i.e. attraction on more of an emotional basis) at a strip club.

The chapter on dating omits Ned’s dates with gay men, which Vincent has mentioned in interviews, which would’ve have provided an interesting contrast. Vincent did mention that they had far more sexual overtones than her dates with women and that the gay men immediately lost interest in her once they found out who she really was. But Vincent didn’t mention whether she also told them she was a lesbian—which obviously might have been a factor. A fair number of female-to-male transsexuals end up as gay men and manage to find partners even without genital reassignment surgery, so I’m not sure the picture is as clear-cut as Vincent might think it is.

In her chapter on her stay at a monastery, I think Vincent actually captures some of the problems of intimacy men have among each other and the sort of hazing that occurs as a new man seeks to proved himself to other men. But Vincent fails to look at how much of the hazing and emotional constriction is due to the environment rather than the gender. From what I recall of a ex-nun’s account of her time in the convent, a similar process of weeding out potential candidates went on, as well a tamping down on intimacy (also to prevent potential homosexual encounters as well as ensure each nun’s attachment remained on God), etc.

But it’s the conclusion of the book that for me is especially problematic. On the one hand, I’m glad she sums up the downsides to her experience. Vincent herself says that she became the “tired and prototypical angry young man” who she used to hate for droning on about his problems. “But after living as a guy for even just a small slice of a lifetime, I can really related to that screed and give you one of my own.” But Vincent is unable to move past the pain. Perhaps it’s too new to her. As men we’ve grown up with these constraints and as “Brokeback Mountain’s” Ennis Del Mar says, “If you can’t change it, then you gotta stand it…” So we may chafe it our constraints but they’re not as raw as they are for Vincent. I imagine it’s a bit like women and the beauty myth—it’s something that’s always there in the background, like a stone you can’t quite ever get out of your shoe, but it’s not something that constantly preoccupies your thoughts. And Vincent’s atypical forays into the world of men might have something to do the pain she feels about being a man—ironically the final bits written after temporarily checking herself into a locked psychiatric ward are written in a clipped tone that reveals almost nothing about what’s going on in her head (maybe Vincent hasn’t shed Ned as thoroughly as she thought).

For transgendered people (in the broadest sense of the word, including not only transsexuals, but crossdressers, drag queens, etc.), it’s heartening to hear that Vincent—who wrote some notoriously transphobic things a few years ago—has developed a deep sympathy for us. (This isn’t explicitly mentioned in the book, but Vincent has mentioned on the talk show circuit.) However, Vincent does talk about the ever-increasing difficulty she had trying to sustain simultaneously maintain male and female personas—“this cognitive dissonance essentially shut down my brain.” Ironically, for someone who’s an advocate of androgyny, Vincent decides she needs to banish Ned entirely to maintain her sanity. “I could not live in both worlds at once, so I chose the side to which habit and upbringing have accustomed me….” Unfortunately, Vincent generalizes from her personal experience that “I can’t help almost believing, after having been Ned, that we live in parallel worlds, that there is at bottom really no such thing as that mystical unifying creature we call a human being, but only male human being and female human beings, as separate as sects.” I’m remind of Mark Twain’s adage that a cat having sat on a hot stove will never again—nor a cold stove either. Vincent has burned herself (perhaps deeper than she realizes) with her gender bending, and in talk shows she’s shown an unfortunate tendency to warn others against “messing with gender.”

Which is probably one reason Vincent doesn’t seem like she’s a found integrated sense of manhood. On the one hand, she sees men as the sorrier sex. On the other, she still seems to harbor “gender fantasy” ideas about masculinity—such as her rhapsody to the “authenticity” of the male handshake. Girlfriend, lemme tell ya, men’s handshakes may not involve the fake smiles that women-to-women greetings can have, but there’s also a lot of subtext going on there too. Believe me, I’ve endured more bone-crushing let’s-see-who’s-top-dog handshakes than I care to remember. That said, if Vincent has contradictory attitudes toward masculinity, it’s undoubtedly in part because society also does.

Had Vincent participated in more “regular Joe” male pursuits, she might have discovered that there many times when being a man isn’t “a series of unrealistic, limiting, infuriating and depressing expectations constantly coming over the wire”—in fact it can be a joy (and not just from the privilege of being the cock of the walk). Or why, although I enjoy putting on a dress and taking a gender vacation from time to time, I’m happy to remain a man.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh. O’Briens photos are excellent and often intriguing, and Brubach does make a number interesting insights about crossdressing in general and the drag variety in particular—plus more interesting thoughts on gender. So it’s worth reading. But it’s a “reportial” book in the bad sense of the word. It might be better subtitled: Brubach parachutes into eight drag/transgender cultures around the globe and talks about the people she meets. Unfortunately, the travel guide approach ends up being about surfaces—Brubach never delves deeply into the motivations of those she meets, although she does discuss the varying attitudes different cultures have toward crossdressing and gender impersonation.

Part of it is that “drag as (performance) art” is what Burbach is most comfortable with—and who she’s most impressed with. This seems to be beyond Brubach’s idiosyncratic definitions of people on the transgender spectrum. Brubach first distinguishes drag from female impersonators (who crossdress strictly as part of a staged performance) and transsexuals. So far so good. But her definition of crossdressers—“men (the majority of them straight) who dress in women’s clothes, usually underwear and usually in private, often as a sexual turn-on” clearly refers only to the more fetishistic type of crossdresser. Brubach doesn’t cite the source of her definition, but it seems to be heavily influenced by the DSM-IV TR’s definition of “transvestic fetishism.” In her book anyone “who dress(es) in public as women, on social occasions” is a drag queen. Brubach herself seems to recognize that she’s imposing her own definitions, since she then goes on to argue that: “The cross-dressers who claim that their impulse to dress in women’s clothes (and not only lingerie) is not erotic would theoretically qualify as drag queen.”

While this might sound like splitting hairs over semantics, it’s reflective of a problem throughout the book. Having defined other types of transgender behavior as irrelevant to her inquiry, Brubach can’t seem to see them when she encounters them, leading to strange comments, such that Brazilian travesti who get breast implants are merely “drag queens looking for a little more verisimilitude.” (Admittedly, I don’t know much about the travesti, so Brubach may be right, but it’s an observation tossed off without discussion how the travesti are actually different than the North American transsexuals they would seem to resemble. Assuming this is the case.) Likewise, Brubach seems nonplussed when she meets some rather drably dressed drag queens in a London club who turn out to be self-described transvestites, who pointedly contrast themselves with their more flamboyant sisters.

Nonetheless, in her descriptions of various drag queens interesting bits of transgenderism (rather than drag) seep in around Brubach’s preconceptions. There’s Jay, an American drag queen in Paris, who mostly models as a man, but serves as a consultant on femininity to female models—including numerous supermodels. (It’s actually not as sexist as it might sound, since much of the instruction is also teaching them the particular style of movement preferred by specific designers, as well as how to move in one type of fabric vs. another, and Jay also coaches male models on the same things.) Jay himself says he only drags for an actual modeling assignments or, on rare occasions, for some fancy social event. Says Jay: “I think it’s more of a challenge to sit at a table and actually talk to people than to go to any old restaurant and make a scene by overdoing it and being loud and outrageous.” Jay claims no desire to be a woman, but says: “I want to be able to change back and forth, from one extreme to the other, and just be comfortable.” Brubach observes: “Jay believes that the difference between being credible as a woman and being a caricature of a women is for the most part a psychological one, and when he is dressed in drag, he tries to be one hundred percent feminine in his head.” While Brubach fails to ask Jay about his motivations, the language Jay uses seems to be much more reminiscent of that used by crossdressers and transgenderists than of drag queens.

The difference turns on the intended portrayal of “femininity.” Both crossdressers and drag queens claim to be portraying idealized women. For crossdressers who go out in public, the focus is often being “the average woman”—a focus admittedly often driven by a desire to avoid the sort of attention that the drag queens intentionally seek. For its drag queens the focus is, as Brubach puts it, “womanhood at its finest…the perfection that beauty contestants and Hollywood starlets, have, to [their] mind[s], abdicated.” Interestingly, in Japan, “a society that prizes artifice in all things” according to Brubach, famed drag diva Miwa Akihiro has often been named as a personification of ideal beauty in public surveys over the course of 15-20 years and Elle Japan held up a handful of drag queens as examples to its readers, citing their “assiduous self-refinement.”

That desire to be a “glamoursexual” while overtly expressed by drag queens—who usually give a wink and a nod to the artificiality of it all—is also amply on display among many crossdressers, especially the more closeted ones. Brubach notes that drag has an “uncanny knack for depersonalizing women, for reducing them time and time again to a semaphore: hair, lips, breasts, hips, high heels.” Which are precisely the frequent obsessions of many crossdressers. Crossdressers may opt for a “realistic” big-hair wig, rather than a platinum blonde, pink or blue wig, but often there’s less difference in the cartoon portrayal of “femininity” between drag queens and crossdressers than either might acknowledge. But as Brubach notes, women parody themselves when it suits them. “It is said that Marilyn Monroe could go unrecognized on the streets in New York because she wasn’t doing what she herself called ‘the walk.’ Drag highlights the ironic distance between and the person, male or female underneath—a distance with which women are already familiar. When, in 1973, the Hasty Putting Club changed its ‘Woman of the Year’ aware to the (one time only ‘Person of the Year and bestowed it on Gloria Steinem, she remarked, ‘I don’t mind drag—women have been female impersonators for years.’ It was John Waters who coined the term ‘female female impersonators’ to describe women overly simulating femininity.”

In the final chapter of the book, Brubach herself goes in drag, attending a class for drag kings, but both the experience for Brubach and her observations are oddly flat. Part of it is that from the account, it sounds like none of the dozen women in the class ever left the apartment where the class was held, so they never interacted with the outside world. Part of it is that Brubach concludes a drag king simply isn’t as transgressive as a drag queen (or other crossdressed male). “Today, men in drag are every bit as threatening as women in drag used to be, and for the same reasons: they represent a bid for power that has been denied to them—in this case, the power of beauty. While women have made significant inroads into the realm of ideas, they have also retained control of the realm of appearances, and all the audacity, the simmering envy, the frustration and resentment that once was implicitly in women’s dressing as men are now echoed in men’s dressing as women.”

However, like Norah Vincent’s “Self-Made Man,” it was interesting to see the difficulty the would-be drag kings had in “being a man.” As Brubach says: “Even the twelve women in Diane Torr’s Drag Kings Workshop had a hard time coming up with a new version of a man that didn’t seem like a hollow replica of the old kind. A woman who goes out on a blind date asks herself at the end of the evening if she liked the guy enough to see him a second time; the women who, under Torr’s direction, became drag kings for a night asked themselves whether they liked the men they had become to be them a second time, and the answer in the majority of cases was no more auspicious than it usually is after a stilted meeting with an uncongenial stranger.”

She continues: “[T]he living area took on the forlorn aspects of a club populated by the kind of guys whom the women taking part in Torr’s workshop would have pegged as losers. In friendship and in love, these women aspired to a new breed of man, and, every so often they could imagine him: in their minds, they’d pieced together a sort of collective portrait. Mostly, what he would be had been arrived at by way of what he wouldn’t be—that much at least was clear. Still, when the time came to dress in drag, they didn’t dare become him. Cozy, affectionate, communicative, he inspired in them feelings of solidarity that real men—the men they knew—rarely, if ever, inspired. [But] [h]is fears were theirs for the moment: What if, in the harsh light of day, he didn’t pass muster? What if he weren’t man enough? It would just be a matter of time before the world was on to the fact that this was not a man but an imposter and unsuccessful one, at that. And then despite the stubble on his chin and the gruff gestures and the suit that emphasized the breadth of his shoulders, the jig would be up. Masculinity, not less than femininity, is an undertaking, and those who are unsuccessful in their efforts—all the failed men—are branded women.”

As said at the beginning, Brubach’s book won’t offer much if you’re looking to understand what makes drag queens tick. But it does offer an interestingly look at the widely different ways drag is interpreted around the world—from the ever-so-chic Parisian queens, to the aggressively ugly (and political) Berlin queens, to the can’t-be-over-top-enough party queens in London’s club scene. Likewise, it offers interesting—if familiar, at least to those students of gender—observations about how drag reveals society’s concepts of femininity (and of masculinity):

“As for drag’s capacity to unsettle the viewer, it could be argued that the more complete the transformation in a man’s case, the less threatening it is.… By demonstrating that a man can ‘become’ a woman, he confirms the message that our culture sends via advertisements, magazines, movies: that femininity is predicated on artifice and therefore can be acquired…. When it comes to women in drag, however, the situation is reversed: it’s the partial transformation—the ‘butch’ women—that it’s easier to take in stride, while women who completely plausible as a man calls into our standards of masculinity. Unlike femininity, which relies on makeup, on clothes that contort and exaggerate the shape of the body, masculinity has been construed as ‘natural,’ inimitable, indomitable—strictly the providence of men. If a woman can convincing simulate a man, then there must be something wrong with masculinity: it has failed to hold its ground; it has been proven impotent in the face of a woman’s raid on its demeanor and appearance. While a man in drag may in fact uphold the ideology of femininity, a women in drag is liable to undermine the ideology of masculinity.”

Hollander acknowledges her views run contrary to popular opinion: “Actual women take “Fashion” seriously or not, depending on their lives, means and views; but they may all believe that it is something legitimately possible for them, something any woman may ignore if she likes but always has an absolute right to take part in.… Most men, in accordance with modern rules, are still quite comfortable ignoring “Men’s Fashion” in its show-businesslike aspects, and feeling that it is not actually available to them nor really even aimed at them.” But Hollander, an art historian, is focused on the formal qualities of clothing, particularly their structure.

For centuries in Western culture (and commonly in non-Western culture to this day), both sexes wore roughly the equivalent clothing: bag-like garments that were variously wrapped, belted and fastened. The length might differ—men often wore shorter ones for activities, such as physical labor and war, that required greater movement—and Northern European men added loose-fitting leg covers to cope with the climate, but the similarities far greater than the differences. However, the first revolutionary advance in men’s clothing occurred in the late 1200s when plate armor required a close-fitting undergarment to protect the wearer from the metal casing—and men’s fashion quickly imitated the shapes created by the linen-armorers, who were effectively the first tailors of Europe. Subsequently, men’s fashion varied wildly over the centuries—compare the portraits of Henry VII, Rembrandt and George Washington—before settling down with the invention of the “modern” men’s suit around 1800.

In contrast, Hollander argues: “The female costume stayed essentially the same since the Middle Ages….[F]ashion might thicken or thin out the female formula, sometimes imitating the simplicity of the poor, sometimes adding more display with extreme extensions or extra details, sometimes imitating men’s accessories; but the scheme was not radically challenged until this century….” In other words, as Hollander sees it, women’s clothing was inventive but not innovative. She argues the only two major formal innovations in women’s fashion were the skirt (as opposed to a the dress) and décolletage (not only of the neckline and back, but also exposure of the wrists, arms or shoulders—and finally the legs in the 20th century). Interestingly, this sort of exposure seems to be fascinating to many crossdressers, in part no doubt because décolletage (and skirts) has always been a “women’s-only” style of dress.

But aside from the obvious feminine connotations of décolletage and skirts, their appeal to crossdressers may stem from two other more common desires in fashion. First, is simply the unbearable desire for something new and different—something that Hollander argues sets “modern fashion” apart from traditional modes of dress. “Fashion abhors fixity, or form or meaning, of knowledge or telling, or the past itself. Fashionable dress thus has a built-in contingent character quite lacking to all ethnic and folk dress, and to most clothes of the ancient world.” In contrast, traditional dress illustrates “the confirmation of established custom, and to embody the desire for stable meaning even if custom changes…. [E]ven with considerable change in the look of traditional clothing over time, the formal relation of new to old is direct, a straightforward adaptation….”

While women’s clothing underwent this “modern” shift in meaning, Hollander argues that it was strictly within the realm of “surface” aspects. In part, this may have been due to another historical event. In 1675, Louis XIV granted a group of French seamstresses royal permission for the first guild of female tailors to make women’s clothes—the first professional dressmakers. However, men remained the corset-makers (a skill set which traced it roots to the linen-armorers). Consequently, the seamstresses didn’t control the fundamental shaping of the body in the same way that tailors could sculpt men’s clothing. However, women were acknowledged experts in fine needlework and when they became dressmakers they focused on the “exquisite finish of surface details.” Consequently, while the elegance of men’s clothing depended on the subtleties of cut, women’s clothes focused on surface decoration and “the making and arranging of ephemeral trim and small accessories that gave feminine fashion an increasingly bad reputation for frivolity and extravagant costliness.”

The “modern” men’s suit, invented around 1800, coincided with both a sharpening of gender differences as well as the Industrial Revolution in which men were expected to take a more “serious” role in order to literally take care of business. While Hollander does touch on surrounding social trends, her focus tends to be on the clothing itself (probably due to her background as an art historian). Which is unfortunate because the rise of the suit has fascinating correlations with the rise of “The Self-Made Man” as the dominant image of manhood in the United States (as detailed by Michael Kimmel’s “Manhood in America”). But Hollander does note that: “Paintings of the later nineteenth century often contrast a somber-suited man with the riotous light, motion and color of the natural world…. His suit was not supposed to be beautiful, but reasonable by contrast….”

And so men’s fashion—at least on the surface—retreated into a pseudo-uniform to allow them to devote their energies to the “serious” business of becoming success objects. But while it’s taken 200 years, men seem to be finally tiring of the suit and men are starting to borrow from women’s fashion for the first time in centuries, although within carefully “acceptable” limits.

But ironically, Hollander argues: “To make clothing express a more radical form of equality for men and women, something more has lately been needed than simply dressing women in men’s suits—that finally smacks too much of giving in to male dominance, unless it is done for fun in the old coquettish form….The real solution has instead been found to in dressing everyone like children. A crowd of adults at a museum or a park now looks just like a school trip…. Everyone is in the same colorful zipper jackets, sweaters, pants and shirts worn by kids—which are the same as traditional work-clothes, only made in jolly colors.”

But if Hollander’s argument about the insatiable need of Fashion for novelty is correct, we’ll seen the pendulum swing back toward formality one of these days. In fact, I just ran across an article that men are starting to dress more formally for work—nominally to decrease the chance they’ll get outsourced, although Hollander notes the expressed reasons for changes in fashion rarely seem to match the actual, unconsciousness ones that are clearly visible in hindsight.

As far as the downsides to the book, Hollander does have a weakness for Proustian-length sentences, although they do remain fairly readable. And transgender readers may find it irritating that Hollander uses “sex” and “gender” interchangeably (instead of realizing the former is what’s between your legs and the latter is between your ears). Finally, the initial chapters, which take a philosophical look at “what is fashion” can be a little hard going at first. If so, I’d suggest skipping them and then circling back afterwards, since they’re easier to understand after seeing Hollander’s examples in action.

But on the whole, it’s fascinating read with many intriguing—if unintended—insights relevant to crossdressing.

Is the real you hiding beneath dreary clothes? In A Week of Dressing Dangerously, U.K. fashion journalist, Angela Buttolph, commandeers women’s closets for one week, challenging them to play dress-up in order to develop an aspect they feel is lacking in their personalities.

A housewife may be asked to dress like a punk rocker on one day and a glam movie star the next. Or, Angela might assign a 40-year-old divorcee to dress like an Amazonian cave woman for the day in order to learn how to stop caring so much about what people think.

In the end, the women are surprised to find how they behave when their regular clothes are off and people start taking notice. They also learn to have lots of fun with their new personas, and the confidence they inspire. A Week of Dressing Dangerously is a makeover show from the outside-in.

And they do mean dress-up. In the episode I saw an introverted singleton was told to wear a Spanish flamenco dress one day (to become more “passionate”) and another day to wear a fake fur coat over nothing but lingerie (to be more “sexy”).

What was interesting were the parallels to some of the more fantasy-style dressing/personas that some crossdressers—including myself—sometimes do. For myself, there is a sense how “playing dress-up” can help explore parts of my personality. I was also interesting watching the show’s participant interacting with people in the park in her flamenco dress, which almost felt like I was watching her doing drag as she loosened up and got into it.

More details (click on “programs”) about each episode, with photos and each participants’ thoughts about how they felt wearing the outfits).

At the start of the movie, Bree has let her fears marginalize herself. (Of course there’s no telling what she went through prior to the first act.) But Bree seemingly has constructed a protective bubble around herself. She works as dishwasher (where she doesn’t need to interact with anyone and the restaurants staff only speaks to her in Spanish, which she only marginly understands) and as a telemarketer, where she’s just a voice on the phone. One reviewer asutely commented that her heavy make-up, which she shouldn’t need any more after electrolysis, was a form of armor. (It’s notable that as Bree comes out of her shell, the make-up becomes lighter.) While she makes a reference to having friends, there’s no evidence that she has any—the only person she ever calls for advice during the trip is her therapist. In interviews Huffman has said Bree’s wardrobe is so bad in part because Bree does all her shopping via catalog, so she won’t have to interact with sales people. As one reviewer said: “this heroine would just as soon not be watched, for fear of being truly seen.” In short, by distancing herself from others, she’s minimized the chance she can be hurt—but also the chance that she can be loved.

By the end of the movie, she’s learned not how to be a woman, but to be a multi-dimensional person. I think Huffman summed it up nicely in this interview:

She’s a freak,” Huffman said of Bree fondly. “Not because she is transgender but because she’s trying to fit herself into this image of what she thinks a woman is. She can’t just let herself be who she is. Until the end. When she does, a little.

I also liked how the movie touched on how transitioning isn’t a magic bullet—afterwards you’re still “you.” While the therapist refusing to sign Bree’s letter to greenlight surgery is really just a McGuffin to get the plot rolling, there is a certain amount of plausibility to it. Not that Bree needs to bail out her son as a prequisite for GRS per se, rather her reaction of trying to sweep it under the rug indicates that she hadn’t yet accepted that she wouldn’t be able to leave her past behind.

For those of us within the transgender spectrum, there’s more than few details in the film to quibble over. For example, if Bree is as broke as she’s supposed to be, she’d be going to Thailand, not having her surgery done locally (although to me this was an acceptable bit of dramatic license, since it was necessary for a crucial scene). Likewise, it’s dubious that Bree wouldn’t know what a “GG” (“genetic girl”) is, but it’s just one of those things necessary to explain things to a lay audience.

The one unfortunate thing is that since so few movies have been made about TSs, Bree may be taken as emblematic of TSs rather than an individual who happens to be TS and that her personality isn’t reflective of TSs collectively. But even though she’s a flawed character (as are most of the characters in the movie) she’s a deeply sympathetic character.

A couple thoughts on the audience. The theater was half full (mostly couples from what I could see)—not bad for a Sunday night and at the end the audience gave a rousing round of applause. There were gasps when Huffman’s prosthetic (named Andy) was revealed—in a key scene in which another character learns Bree’s secret—but part of it may have just been that Andy was a bit big boy and audience aren’t used to full-frontal male nudity.

FYI there’s an interesting interview with the director among other tidbits, he said, he considered casting a TS actress but couldn’t find one with the acting chops, or who were willing to come out deep stealth, to play the part.

As far as the casting, I’ve heard some griping in various TG circles about not casting a TS, but I think it’s worth considering what Betty (the TG partner of Helen Boyd, author of “My Husband Betty” and actor herself) said on the issue:

What I really wanted to comment on was this notion of “acting” that’s been bandied about here. You see, you can’t play being a transexual. It’s not possible. Or being a hunchback. Or blind. Anymore than you can play being angry. Or sad. Or happy. Those are things that describe a character but they don’t define a character.

What you play is a person. Now, a person may be trans or blind or a hunchback. Or a happy blind transexual hunchback. But what you’re really playing is a person who happens to have those characteristics.

Truly, being blind or trans or a happy hunchback will have an effect on a person’s outlook on life. No question. But… it’s the person you play. Not the characteristics.

Which is why I never had a problem with FH being cast. She’s a really good actress. And, for me, talent should always win out. Because a talented actor will find the person and play that. Not the characteristics.

The good news–the author, Paula Begoun, generally likes MAC products, although she thinks many of the Full Coverage shades don’t match well (I’ve noticed mine seems a little peachy) and are a bit heavy. She really like the Illuminare foundation that some others have mentioned. No word on ColorTration unfortunately.

The even better news–many of the product reviews are available for free on her website, which also offers a line of skin and cosmetics that Begoun create herself out of frustration with existing products. (Yes, there is a bit of conflict of interest to her reviews, which Begoun is upfront about and in her book she doesn’t rate her own products for that reason.) Haven’t tried any of the Paula’s Choice stuff yet, but some of her skin care product look interesting.

You voyeurs will enjoy all the naked women. For me, and perhaps some others who may question the femininity of our bodies, it’s a great opportunity to see a wide variety of real bodies I could compare to and contrast with my own. I also thought it was interesting the image I get in my mind when I see the woman clothed corresponds so poorly to what she really looks like.