Backstory

Perhaps the most interesting element of my story is just how ordinary it is.

I was born in 1962, the first of two sons born to a mixed-race (black/white) couple living in a small town in West Virginia. Our parents split up shortly after I entered first grade and my mother, my brother, and I lived with her parents until I graduated high school.

My mother and grandmother were awesome role models; my grandfather, not so much. It's not that he was a bad person, he just wasn't that involved. Perhaps the most significant male in my life was my slightly effeminate gay uncle. He's the one who taught me how to ride a bike, shave, and drive a car. Everything else about being a man I learned on my own.

Despite the lack of a true father figure I grew up feeling very much male. I played sports, wrestled, burned green army men with a magnifying glass, and had loads of friend. My earliest memories of feeling the slightest bit different came around 10 years of age when I developed a fascination for my mom's bras and playing private dressup. It wasn't until puberty that the sexual aspect of crossdressing reared its head That's when the familiar signs of shame and guilt appeared. Thus began the lifetime struggle with alternately trying to understand and trying to rid myself of this strange, unwanted compulsion.

I've spent more hours than I care to remember trying to understand why I have a compulsion to CD. Is it the lack of a significant male presence in my childhood years, the strong female presence, or something else? Maybe it's genetics. Maybe it's a complex combination of factors. Eventually I simply stopped worrying about the reason and began to embrace the truth: I am a crossdresser.