I’ve been on this board for about a month now, and have read many of the threads and picked up on what a lot of you get up to clothes-wise and otherwise…
I’ve been “interested” in female clothing for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories are of being fascinated by my elder sister’s clothes from the age of about 5, and wanting to be around her and her friends when they were wearing clothes of a particular style – which style was extremely popular for women as well as for girls, in the mid-60s here in the UK. On a few occasions when I was quite young I had the opportunity to secretly put on some of her dresses, but as the years went by, I outgrew her size, and duly “moved on” to my mother’s wardrobe. It was at this stage that I discovered fur, and my mother’s quite large selection of fur coats – beaver lambs (“moutons” to you US/Canadian folk), musquash (“muskrat”), racoon.
For me, there has always been a fetish aspect to wearing these clothes (although at the age that I started, I didn’t understand what was happening). But fetish isn’t the whole story – I also love the styles from an aesthetic point of view.
In the last few years, and thanks to the Internet, eBay, and the larger sizes of clothing in the styles I love that are produced by the likes of Coldwater Creek, I have built up a considerable stash of clothing, typified in style by the dress in my avatar.
My point is, I never go “the whole way” – no panties or other female underwear, no tights, no bra, no wig, no make-up (apart from clear protective nail polish, which I wear all the time on my long natural nails). I’m not particularly into jewellery, apart from wearing earrings (again, alll the time) in my pierced ears. I never try and make myself actually look like a woman. For me, it’s just a dress, or skirt and blouse, under a fur coat if it’s cold, and that’s it. Underneath is my own (men’s) underwear. And always indoors, alone. Nobody else knows. I’m totally in the closet. Just before we got married my wife saw some fantasy jottings in an old notebook, which alluded to cross-dressing, but at that stage I wasn’t active, and told her (truthfully, at that stage) that I had no intention of making it a reality.
I’ve heard of places in London where a guy can go and be dressed up – clothes, make-up, wig and all – helped by sympathetic G-females. While, admittedly, that remains a dim and distant fantasy, I have no intention of putting it into reality, at least at this stage of my life (I’m 47). From looking at your avatars, you girls look fantastic when you’re dressed, but I know that I’d look utterly ridiculous.
So, am I a cross-dresser? It’s not that I’m trying to deny it – it’s just that I’m not sure that what I do is what you would call cross-dressing.