It is my belief that what you are dealing with is fear. It is one thing to anonymously correspond with someone over the Internet but something else entirely to meet them face-to-face. I have never seen figures concerning the percentage of CD’ers who are “out” but my guess based on reading this site is that it is a fairly small percentage and that the vast majority keep their CD’ing secret – in the closet so to speak. Read the number of posts from members completely in the closet, no one knows, not even their wives or gf’s. While meeting someone they can openly talk to, with similar feelings, certainly sounds inviting but when the moment comes to step out the front door and go to the meeting the years of hiding and the years of living in fear that someone will find out, that fear takes over.

Rogina asks “But what does the clothing have to do with it?” Well for someone not “out” and comfortable being out in public there is virtually no chance they will come to a meeting en femme and a very good chance they don’t want to be seen in public with someone else dressed en femme. Someone they know might see them and make the connection – birds of a feather . . . etc. So it makes sense to suggest a meeting in a public venue dressed in your normal male clothes. That may very well apply to both parties.

I’ve never been to New York so I know virtually very little about Long Island but seeing as New York is the nation’ largest city I can’t believe that there aren’t support groups. I found one in San Diego and started going to the meetings. As was suggested by the group I went drab for the first few meetings until I was more comfortable with the group. Also the meetings were held in a public restaurant (private meeting room) and I wasn’t yet comfortable out in public. I met and liked a couple of the other members (sort of knew already them from this forum) and we started going to the meetings early – we held our own strictly social meeting prior to the more regimented scheduled meeting.

Short of joining a group I think it may take quite a while corresponding via Emails and PM’s to gain someone’s confidence enough for them to get over the fear of being “outed” by meeting a total stranger in public. There may also be a certain amount of fear along the lines of, what is this person really up to? Does this person have some other agenda other than just meeting another CD’er? Do I really want to meet this person, after all I don’t really don’t know very much about them and there are all those warnings about actually meeting people you have only corresponded with over the Internet? NOTE: for the most part those warnings are intended for juveniles.