I tried for 40 years to be a man while longing to be a woman. With my wife’s support, I now live as male and female, without surgery or hormones. I work through the GLBT subcommittee of our church Social Justice Committee to help the public understand heterosexual femulators like myself. My blog contains no ads, nudity or links to porn sites. Just a sweet story of dreams coming true. - Kathryn Diane Cleve
I hope you can see the happiness in my eyes. Although it took me most of my life to arrive at this wonderful place, I am glad it finally happened. I know this is nearly impossible for "normal" people to understand but I have adored women since I was eleven and I have wanted to be a woman for at least that long. Much as I would like to pretend I am a woman trapped in a man's body, I know better. I am simply a guy who was was no damned good at being male because he wanted to be female. Real women cannot imagine the joy I feel, wearing the clothing they take for granted. Real men cannot wait to get a shotgun and put me out of my misery. A special thank you to the thousands of folks who have visited my blog, some more than once, and to those select few kind enough to leave comments. Frankly, I put up this blog as a way to figure out who I was and who I was going to be; sort of a form of therapy. I am amazed and delighted at how popular it has become. Since 2000, it has been a very strange journey. Before I began the "two years living as a woman" stunt in Los Angeles, I wondered if I might, in fact, be a transsexual, but I realized that it was not that I thought I WAS a woman. It was that I wanted to be a woman. However, and here is my fatal flaw, I wanted to be MY VISION of a woman which is terribly skewed by my adoration for women. Passing day after day in LA and working at the drywall company as the "office girl" was, frankly, a pain in the butt. I much prefer the way it is now. I dress Monday thru Friday all day every day but do only basic make up and brush my hair so it doesn't look totally stupid. (For the UPS/USPS/FedEX folks) Weekends, I look like a man and Joy and I have a great time because she really knows me so we love being together. The major change for me this year is that I joined our church's GLBT committee and ultimately want to become a spokesperson (spokesman? spokeswoman? spokesmodel?) for femulators in the Tampa Bay Area. On speaking engagements and such, of course, I will present as femme as I can. What is so freeing about my "coming out," so to speak, at church is that I don't have to keep secrets. (One of the things that bound Joy and I together from the start was that we agreed to be totally honest with one another.) For example, on a recent sunny Saturday afternoon, Joy and I worked the church booth at a large Womyn's Festival put on every year for area lesbians. As I was lugging stuff from the car with the assistance of our GLBT subcommittee chair (a proud lesbian), I said, "Just your luck. You ask a man to help and he turns out to be a transvestite." We both had a good laugh about that. Admitting who and what I am has made my life happier and less stressful. I didn't ask to be different. I didn't "learn" to look at women in movies, on television and even on the street and wish I were them. It's ingrained in my mind as deeply as the belief that I exist. I don't know how to be any different. I cannot stop adoring women, my sweet Joy in particular. And, I have proved through four decades of pain that I cannot "get over it" or change the person I am. I am a man and a woman. And the woman is the part of me I like.
I wish I could explain to the genetic women who read my blog what ecstasy I feel wearing the clothing that they most likely take for granted. Since I am a teleworker and work from my home office, I dress in women's clothing every day. A few moments ago, as I stood in the kitchen, washing dishes, I looked down at my denim skirt and tasteful high heels and thought about how deliciously feminine I feel.
Now that I am 61, I no longer attempt to pass in public as I so successfully did in Los Angeles those two wonderful years at the beginning of the decade. However, I do wear a bra, panties, thigh high stockings, nice conservative three-inch high heels and - depending on my mood - either a dress or a skirt and blouse. While I do continue to shave my arms, legs and chest, I no longer have to devote time to make-up and hair since I am trying to convince no one but our three cats. (The shaving is just for me. I like feeling soft.)
As mentioned elsewhere, Joy and I have continued to attend Weight Watchers and I have lost more than 55 pounds already. My goal is to lose 45 more by summer and wear a size 12 dress to the Halloween party at our church next fall. Interestingly, the weight loss has engendered a number of changes in my life. I am no longer tired all the time. My blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure are getting better to the utter joy of my doctor. But, and this surprised me, I am finally feeling proud of my body. My entire life, I remained varying degrees of fat because, frankly, I didn't care. I was nothing but a man so why should I attempt to look good? That's really how I felt. I weighed 275 in 1964 (high school graduation), got down to 175 in 1968 when I fell in love for the first time, spent about 20 years at about 235, ballooned up to 313 pounds after a stay in the hospital from a hit and run and have been right around 275 ever since. Now, things are different. I was 229 this morning on my way to 185. Had I weighed fifty pounds less back in L.A., I would have been a much prettier woman. But at least I was a woman for two years. I am grateful for that. Feeling good about myself is a new experience and it happened because I was able to achieve my dream for two wonderful years in Burbank. Having been a woman, I can accept being 91% female and 9% male for the balance of my life. Yeah. I'm cool with that.
I won! Earlier this year, we attended a church costume party and I won the prize for best costume! When we arrived, Joy went in first. She was Elizabeth Taylor. About five minutes later, I came in. Margie, the lady who ran the party, did not recognize me the first three times she saw me. Our music director, Nadya, spotted me and came rushing up and gave me "air kisses" and said, "Darling! How are you?" Soon, word started spreading, "That's Frank Cleve." I got lots of compliments, mostly from women. With the church vice-president, I discussed high heels and she raved at my eBay-won shoes. The church secretary told me I was beautiful. The minister said I looked lovely. We had a nice dinner and then the prizes were announced. By the time they got to best costume, I figured I was out of the running. But it was me! I went up to accept the award and said, "I am so proud!" So, my church friends just thought "Gee. Frank and Joy worked hard on his costume." Little did they know. One of the great pleasures of not trying to "pass" as a woman is that I could stand around like the woman I am, walk like the woman I am and simply relax and be the woman I am and no one was the wiser. It was a great night. It was the first time since Los Angeles that I had been out in public as a woman and I loved my red nails and my pretty dress. Even though my friends knew I was just a man in a dress, I was a very HAPPY man in a dress.
Here, I look like who I am inside. I have always been a sweet, soft, gentle, sensitive, emotional person on the inside. While some consider those stereotypical assets of a female, I consider them real assets of a female and have always been proud that I was like that. Sadly, in the Sixties and Seventies, society was not ready to see a boy, and later, a man behave like a woman unless he was a homosexual. I sometimes wished I was gay just so I could be myself. Instead, I spent my life learning how to behave like a man and remembering to hide my natural instincts, thoughts and - of course - movement. I was playing a part. Every day. For 43 years.Joy was surprised at how quickly I adapted to high heels, skirts, dresses, and moving like a woman. When she remarked about how feminine I seemed in public and in private, I explained that - for the first time in my life - I was permitted to be myself; the female I had always been, deep inside. The female I had to hide so that I would not get beaten up or laughed at.But it was difficult. In fact, I was discharged from the navy when I was discovered by the Kingsville (TX) Police wearing women's clothing late one night coming out of the post office. Naturally, in a small Texas town like Kingsville, it took three squad cars to arrest me. And then, they refused to allow me to change clothes. So I sat for hours with a couple of drunks in a cell, until the Navy sent the Shore Patrol so they could laugh at me, too. I had several meetings with a shrink, who wanted to know if I was gay. I was not. Then, he wanted to know if it was merely a prank. I said no. Finally, they gave me an "Honorable under general conditions" discharge which basically meant, "We don't care how brave you were in Vietnam, we think you're a fag so don't come back." Of course, they ignored the fact that I did not like, let alone love, men. To this day, if unobserved, I walk like a woman, move like a woman and think like a woman. For me, maleness was an act that I had to maintain all my life, at great cost to my emotions. I'd love to hear from you! Email me!
(This is something I have wanted to share for quite some time, so bear with me, friends.) I seriously considered suicide one evening in the summer of 1968 on Knox Avenue in Mt. Pocono, PA. I had been living with my mother and step-father for about a year after nearly 20 years of being bounced around like a basketball among various family members. I was trying to fit in. The Poconos were an exciting, cool place to be back then and my stepfather got me a job as a bartender at Pocono Manor, where I worked very hard and hung out with a bunch of other college kids working their way through school. However, I had some secrets that were eating away at me. I was a virgin. I had been (and would be again, as it turned out) a fat man and was trying to cope with suddenly weighing 195 pounds for the first time since I was 15. (A year later, Uncle Sam congratulated me on the weight loss and invited me to visit Vietnam.) Worst of all, I wanted to be a woman, which I was sure would send me straight to hell. And, of course, I could not possibly share that with anyone. So, I removed the .45 automatic from my stepfather's bedside table and walked out into the wooded area next to our house and tried to decide whether it was best to put it IN my mouth or to my temple.
Obviously, I failed. For a remarkably wussy reason: I had "stolen" the gun from my stepfather and that was a sin. (Back then, I still bought into the God thing.) My next suicide attempt wasn't until 1992 when I stood on the median of a busy highway in Sarasota, Florida and seriously considered stepping out in front of a semi. Although sin was no longer an issue with me, I thought of the tragedy the truck driver would have to live with and decided suicide, while painless, according to the M*A*S*H theme song, was extremely selfish.
I ran through all this crap today for the frightened, lonely men out there who steal away an hour here and there to wear the clothes they love while listening for car doors, voices and keys turning in locks with the feverish fear of a cat burglar. Wearing a dress is not a sin. Trying to look like a woman is not going to bring the planet screeching to a halt. Even losing a wife because of your compulsion is not necessarily an ending. Often, it is a wonderful beginning. Remember, that - when all is said and done and we return to whence we came - we are all alone. If we're lucky, we get to share some of our life with someone we love, or like or have learned to live with. But, bottom line, it is OUR life. I wasted 40 years trying to conform to what society expects, trying to overcome my "sinful" behavior in the eyes of an invisible man in the sky who, I finally discovered, wasn't even there. For 40 years, I could not even tell a priest or a minister about what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. Now, I am married to the completely supportive, completely beautiful Joy Cleve and we belong to a church that cares not if I am a femulator because it is a TRULY accepting church. (For more on that, click on Femulator Church on the link bar up top.) Sorry I went on and on, folks, but I wrote from the heart. One draft. No fixes. Just my heart full of love for my fellow femulators. I want them to know we are not just okay, we are often the best men can be. And wives of femulator, don't be afraid. Your men are expressing the best of what they see in you and maybe, just maybe, that'll make them better humans.
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