Homens em lingerie: crossdressing

Em 1910, o médico alemão Magnus Hirschfeld – que desenvolveu a teoria do Terceiro Sexo – cunhou o termo travestismo para designar aqueles que, independente de suas inclinações sexuais, sentem prazer em vestir roupas consideradas do sexo oposto.

Ao longo do tempo, o termo começou a agregar significados pejorativos e muitos travestis, hoje em dia, preferem ser chamados de crossdressers. Há, ainda, por vezes, a diferenciação entre travestis,crossdressers, drag queens, e transexuais.



Embora o termo seja relativamente novo, o fenômeno não o é. Desde a antigüidade, algumas pessoas já demonstravam o desejo de se vestirem como o sexo oposto.



Não necessariamente o crossdressing está relacionado à homossexualidade, porém ambos os comportamentos são vistos, muitas vezes, com maus olhos e preconceitos.

Felizmente, nos dias de hoje, já é possível uma discussão um pouco mais aberta a respeito desses antigos tabus. Muitos homens e mulheres assumem o crossdressing, como, por exemplo, o cartunista Laerte que, desde de 2009, veste-se de mulher quando bem entende.

Já existem, inclusive, algumas marcas especializadas em crossdressing. Uma delas é a XDress que possui um catálogo variado de lingeries e fantasias para homens.



O crossdressing é um assunto interessante e que vale à pena ser discutido e pensado para que otabu que o envolve possa ser, cada vez mais, destruído.

Existe um filme feito por Ed Wood – considerado o pior diretor que Hollywood já viu – em que ele trata a questão do travestismo – ele próprio era adepto dessa prática.

Para quem quiser assisti-lo, aqui vai o link da primeira parte do filme, em inglês >> Glen or Glenda (1953) – parte 1.

Há! E, para quem se interessar pelo Ed Wood, vale a pena conferir o ótimo filme sobre ele feito pelo maravilhoso Tim Burton. >> Ed Wood – parte 1.

Girls of Casa Susanna

Girls of Casa Susanna


Casa Susanna was a house near Hunter, New York where men would congregate for the weekend while dressing up in women's clothing. The thirteen black and white photographs on view were made in 1966 during a single afternoon at Casa Susanna.


Photographs from "Casa Susanna": Book edited by Michel Hurst and Robert Swope (Powerhouse Books)




THERE was a pilot and a businessman, an accountant, a librarian and a pharmacologist. There was a newspaper publisher, and a court translator. By day, they were the men in the gray flannel suits, but on the weekends, they were Felicity, Cynthia, Gail, Sandy, Fiona, Virginia and Susanna. It was the dawn of the 1960’s, yet they wore their late 50’s fashions with awkward pride: the white gloves, the demure dresses and low heels, the stiff wigs. Many were married with children, or soon would be. In those pre-Judith Butler, pre-Phil Donahue days, when gender was more tightly tethered to biology, these men’s “gender migrations,” or “gender dysphoria,” as the sociologists began to call cross-dressing, might cost them their marriages, their jobs, their freedom.

And so they kept their feminine selves hidden, except for weekends at Casa Susanna, a slightly run-down bungalow camp in Hunter, N.Y., that was the only place where they could feel at home.

Decades later, when Robert Swope, a gentle punk rocker turned furniture dealer, came across their pictures — a hundred or so snapshots and three photo albums in a box at the 26th Street flea market in Manhattan — he knew nothing about their stories, or Casa Susanna, beyond the obvious: here was a group of men dressed as women, beautiful and homely, posing with gravity, happiness and in some cases outright joy. They were playing cards, eating dinner, having a laugh. They didn’t look campy, like drag queens vamping it up as Diana Ross or Cher; they looked like small-town parishioners, like the lady next door, or your aunt in Connecticut.

Mr. Swope was stunned by the pictures and moved by the mysterious world they revealed. He and his partner, Michel Hurst, gathered them into a book, “Casa Susanna,” which was published by Powerhouse Books in 2005 and reissued last spring, and which became an instant sensation, predictably, in the worlds of fashion and design. Paul Smith stores sold it, as did the SoHo design store and gallery Moss, which made a Christmas diorama of a hundred copies last year. Last month, you might have seen it in the hands of a child-size mannequin in the Marc Jacobs store on Bleecker Street.

But it was only after the book’s publication that Mr. Swope and Mr. Hurst began to learn the story of Casa Susanna, first called the Chevalier d’Eon resort, for an infamous 18th-century cross-dresser and spy, and only in recent months, as they have begun working on a screenplay about the place, that they have come to know some of its survivors.

“At first, I didn’t want to know more,” Mr. Swope said. “I didn’t want to find out that the stories turned out to be tragedies.”

But the publication of the book has drawn former Casa Susanna guests out, and it turns out that their stories, like most, have equal measures of tragic and comic endings. Some are still being told.

Robert Hill, a doctoral candidate in the American studies program at the University of Michigan who is completing his dissertation on heterosexual transvestism in post-World War II America, came across Mr. Swope and Mr. Hurst’s book by accident in a Borders last year, reached out to them through their publisher, and sketched in many of the details.

Casa Susanna was owned by Susanna herself — the court translator, otherwise known as Tito Valenti — and Valenti’s wife, Marie, who conveniently ran a wig store on Fifth Avenue and was happy to provide makeover lessons and to cook for the weekend guests. It was a place of cultivated normalcy, where Felicity, Cynthia, Gail, Fiona and the others were free to indulge their radical urges to play Scrabble in a dress, trade makeup tips or walk in heels in the light of day.

“These men had one foot in the mainstream and the other in the margins,” Mr. Hill said the other day. “I’m fascinated by that position and their paradox, which is that the strict gender roles of the time were both the source of their anxiety and pain, and also the key to escaping that pain.”

What still moves Murray Moss, the impresario behind Moss the store, about the images in the book is their ordinariness. “You think of man dressed as woman and you think extremes: it’s kabuki, Elizabethan theater, Lady Macbeth,” he said. “It’s also sexual. But these aren’t sexual photos. The idea that they formed a secret society just to be ... ordinary. It’s like a mirror held up to convention. It’s not what you would expect. It’s also not pathetic. Everybody looks so happy.”

At first, Casa Susanna was a thrilling place, said Sandy, a divorced businessman, “because whatever your secret fantasies were you were meeting other people who had similar ones and you realized, ‘I might be different but I’m not crazy.’ ” Now 67 and living in the Northeast, he hasn’t cross-dressed for decades, and asked that his identifying details be veiled. He was a graduate student in 1960, he said, living in New York and visiting Casa Susanna on the weekends.

“It was the most remarkable release of pressure, and it meant the world to me then,” he said. “I’d grown up in a very conventional family. I had the desire to marry, to have the house, the car, the dog. And I eventually did. But at that point there were all these conflicting desires that had no focal points. I didn’t know where I fit.”

Sandy remembers one weekend sharing a cabin with another man and his girlfriend. “She obviously accepted the situation with him for better or worse,” Sandy began. “Anyway, I didn’t get dressed until later in the day, and when I did, the girlfriend was just coming down the stairs. ‘Oh my,’ she said, ‘you certainly have made a change. I have to tell you, I much preferred the person who got out of the car.’ And with that she reached under my dress and groped me. She said, ‘It’s a shame to have all that locked up in there.’ In one sense, it was titillating, in another, depressing. And yet in another way, it put a finger on the issue.”

Casa Susanna was a testing ground for many. Katherine Cummings, who went by Fiona at Casa Susanna, was born John Cummings in Scotland 71 years ago. Now living in Sydney, she has been a transsexual for more than 20 years, as well as a librarian and an editor. When she was 28, she took a post-doctoral degree in Toronto, and spent her weekends at Casa Susanna, the first place, she said last week, where she could dress openly. In her 1992 memoir, “Katherine’s Diary,” she writes hilariously about a late October weekend, shivering in the cold bungalows, and accepting a ride from the main house down to the cabin she had been assigned with a burly man in slipshod makeup and a slapped-on wig. She turned to the back seat and froze: there lay a nightstick, handcuffs and other police paraphernalia. Turns out her chauffeur was the sheriff of a small New Jersey town.
The resort catered to hunters as well, Ms. Cummings said, and sometimes there was overlap. “Libby, who was very beautiful, was also Lee, who was a very macho person. And one day the hunters were there and so were we and they all had a great time discussing rifles.”

Mostly the guests talked and talked. “They talked about fashion, and passing, and how and if they’d told their wives or girlfriends,” said Ms. Cummings, who is divorced and has three daughters. “In those days we didn’t know where we were going.”

They had parties, and even a convention of sorts, one Halloween in 1962, that drew cross-dressers from all over the country, as well as a few psychologists from the Kinsey Institute. Led by the irascible pharmacologist Virginia Prince, who made them their own magazine, Transvestia, for which Susanna was a columnist dispensing exhortatory advice and tips on deportment and makeup, many of them formed a loose collective that decades later grew into a not-so-secret society called Tri-Ess (a k a the Society for the Second Self).

“I remember the first morning we all arrived,” Ms. Prince said last week, “and all these, let’s just call them people, descended on the bathrooms and you see all these folks in their nighties and kimonos and so forth standing around shaving. It was a very amusing sight. Beards tend to grow. I had mine removed years ago.”

Ms. Prince became known as the founder of the transgender movement, and wrote copiously on the subject for science and sex research journals and conferences, irritating more than a few Casa Susanna graduates, who weren’t comfortable with the politicizing of their issues, or the strict categories she created. Born male (and still biologically male), she has been living as a woman for the past 40 years. At 94, she’s no longer allowed to drive, but she leads the Lollies (“little old ladies like me,” she said the other day) at her California retirement home in a study group (they’re covering astronomy this month) and drives a red scooter.

“I invented gender,” she said proudly. “Though if the ladies here find out I’m a biological man I’m a dead duck.”

Of Susanna herself, the trail ends with her last column for Transvestia in 1970, when she, like Virginia, announced her plans to live henceforth as a woman.

“Scene: The porch in the main house at our resort in the Catskill Mountains,” Susanna writes in a snippet from one of her early columns, courtesy of Mr. Hill’s research, and trimmed a bit. “The time: About 4 o’clock in the morning as Labor Day is ready to awaken in the distant darkness. The cast: Four girls just making small talk. ... It’s dark in the porch; just a row of lights illuminate part of the property at intervals — perhaps a bit chilly at 2,400 feet. ... An occasional flame lighting a cigarette throws a glow on feminine faces — just a weekend at the resort, hours in which we know ourselves a little better by seeing our image reflected in new colors and a new perspective through the lives of new friends.”

60's T Girls Fashion


How those lovely ladies used to dress at those times.

coccinelle

Coccinelle (France) was the most famous T Girl in the sixties.

Ladies in jail


Ladies taken to jail for the only fault of crossdressing. It happened in New York, 1962.

Portrait mistaken for 18th-century lady is early painting of transvestite

National Portrait Gallery in London buys portrait of celebrated diplomat, soldier and cross-dresser Chevalier d'Eon

It was the five o'clock shadow that helped give her away – the portrait was not, as it seemed, a rather grand if slightly butch 18th-century lady with a fancy feathered hat but was in fact the Chevalier d'Eon: diplomat, soldier, spy, transvestite.

The National Portrait Gallery has announced the acquisition of its first painted portrait of a man in woman's clothing; a cross-dresser who enjoyed considerable fame in both high society and popular culture.

Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont, to give her full name, is one of the most important transvestites in history. She was "a fascinating and inspirational figure", said Lucy Peltz, the gallery's curator of 18th-century portraits.

"We are absolutely delighted to be able to acquire this portrait. D'Eon is a particularly fascinating and important figure from 18th-century British history."

The painting was discovered by the London dealer Philip Mould at a provincial sale outside New York last year. It was being mistakenly sold as a portrait of an unknown woman by Gilbert Stuart, most famous for painting George Washington on the dollar bill.

"Even in its dirty state it was quite clear that this woman had stubble," said Mould, who bought it, brought it to the UK and began further research and restoration.

"Cleaning is always a revelation and on this occasion it revealed that not only was it in lovely condition but, more pertinently, the Gilbert Stuart signature cleaned off revealing the name Thomas Stewart, a theatrical painter working in London in the 1780s and 1790s."

Everything then began to click into place. "What is so unusual about this portrait is that it is so brazenly demonstrative in a period when you don't normally get that type of alternative persona expressed in portraiture," said Mould. There is no attempt to soften his physiognomy – basically, he was a bloke in a dress with a hat."

The discovery was tremendously exciting, said Mould. "We are the main dealers in British portraiture, doing it for something like 30 years and I must have sold two or three thousand British portraits to museums and institutions – but never have I come across something quite so idiosyncratic. I've never had anything which is so off-beam."

Even without the cross dressing D'Eon is a seriously interesting person. Before living publicly as a woman he was a famous French soldier and diplomat who had a key role in negotiating the Peace of Paris in 1763, ending the seven years war between France and Britain.

After 13 years living in London he was not inclined to return to Paris, resorting to blackmailing the French crown with a threat to sell secrets after he was officially recalled.

"He had information about French plans to invade England, despite the peace that was being negotiated," said Peltz. That led the king, then Louis XVI, making the highly unusual edict that D'Eon could remain only if he lived his life as a woman which, at the time, would have been an enormous disempowerment.

"It was very much due to D'Eon's own encouragement, putting forward the idea over some period.

"As far as we can tell D'Eon was Britain's first openly transvestite male who was able to live out the life that his gender orientation demanded of him – and he was able to get away with it, feted as a particularly brave and courageous woman."

London society, not particularly known for its liberal tolerance, accepted D'Eon as a woman and she became well known for fencing demonstrations in theatres – dressed as a woman, of course.

D'Eon was not the most feminine of transvestites. Aside from the stubble, she hitched her skirt when she went up stairs and was rather course and boorish. None of that stopped pioneering feminist writers including Mary Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft hailing D'Eon as a shining example of female fortitude, someone women should look at and aspire to.

The painting is known to be a copy of one exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1791 by Jean Laurent Mosnier, which is in an aristocratic collection. The Stewart portrait was probably commissioned by the libertine Francis Rawdon Hastings, second Earl of Moira and first Marquess of Hastings.

Interest in D'Eon has seldom waned with biographies every 20 years or so between the 1830s and 1950s. The Beaumont Society, which gives advice to the transgendered community, was named after D'Eon.

We will never know, of course, if D'Eon was transgender or transvestite but Peltz said she was clearly extremely courageous.

"The painting sheds fascinating light on gender in history and one of the reasons the gallery was so keen to acquire the portrait is that D'Eon is such a fantastically inspirational figure and one of the very few historical figures that the gallery can represent that is a positive role model for modern LGBT audiences."

• The portrait is on display in room 15 of the National Portrait Gallery

fonte http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/06/national-portrait-gallery-found-patron-saint-transvestites/53223/