Beneath the Masquerade : Forum: Cross-dressers --both heterosexual and gay--are finding some acceptance. A conference will explore issues in the trans-gender world.

Dressed in a fire-engine red miniskirt and matching pumps, 30-year-old film editor Bart Cox walks fearlessly--albeit a bit unsteadily--into his not-so-secret other life.

In the bat of a false eyelash, he has transformed himself from a 6-foot-5 gun-shooting outdoorsman type into the towering Empira, out for the night at a wild barroom bash in Silver Lake.

A cross-dresser since age 5, Cox is an unrepentant example of gender-bending 1990s-style. He has shed the taboos of role reversal, coming clean with friends, family, even his boss. Venturing out to bars, parties and on shopping trips dressed as a woman, Cox exercises a mostly latent realm of his personality. He likes to feel handsome and pretty at the same time.

The causes and implications of cross-dressing and transsexuality have long transfixed psychologists, sociologists and sexologists. Now, for the first time, more than 90 such experts will gather to share what they know at the “International Congress on Gender, Cross Dressing and Sex Issues,” hosted by Cal State Northridge’s Center for Sex Research.

In research to be presented at the four-day event, which begins Thursday, USC nursing professor Bonnie Bullough concludes that the psychological makeup of cross-dressers--heterosexual and gay--and transsexuals varies widely.

“The whole trans-gender picture is far more complex than we previously thought,” said Bullough, who with husband Vern has co-authored more than 20 books on human sexuality. “Not all these people are emotionally or mentally disturbed. They don’t all want to kill themselves or appear on the ‘Geraldo’ show. They live happy, normal lives.”

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Virginia Prince is the grand old dame of the trans-gendered.

In 1960, the Los Angeles resident began publishing the quarterly Transvestia, the first magazine for straight cross-dressers, and later founded the Society for the Second Self, the first support group for the same community.

Now 82, Prince has followed a long and painful road to self-discovery. “There was a time when, had there been a pill to cure me, I would have taken two of them,” he said. “But 70 years in the gender trenches have brought a sense of inner peace with who I am.”

Who Prince is, experts say, is a sexual pioneer who has lived full-time as a woman, without trans-gender surgery, for more than 30 years. He has helped define the gray area of gender dysphoria, the dissonance between body and brain.

“People confuse sex and gender,” Prince said. “And both are matters of self-expression that have been opened up for discussion. And change.”

Such issues will be among those examined at the Northridge conference, which will also include transsexuals and cross-dressers as speakers so the experts can hear directly from the people they’re trying to understand.

“We’re trying to pool our knowledge about a topic that’s only been studied in our lifetime,” said conference co-sponsor and Cal State Northridge sociology professor Vern Bullough.

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Specifics on such private matters are hard to come by, but recent studies suggest that 1% to 10% of adult males worldwide enjoy wearing women’s clothing. Gay drag queens compose a mere 10% of that group.

Researchers say the public tends to lump together three subcultures that could not be more disparate in their motivations and lifestyles: straight cross-dressers, gay drag queens, and male and female transsexuals.

Studies show that most drag queens come from working-class backgrounds, while the more-closeted heterosexual cross-dressers hail from the middle and upper classes. They’re engineers, doctors, priests, bankers--most of them middle-aged and politically conservative.

While most heterosexual cross-dressers derived sexual excitement from the practice as children, the fetish aspect fades. “As adults, these men don’t get excited anymore,” Bonnie Bullough said. “The cross-dressing becomes part of who they are.”

The behavior evolves into a rebellion against gender roles imposed by society. Many male cross-dressers see themselves as the vanguard of true men’s liberation.

“People dress for effect--to influence other people’s impressions of them,” said Dale McPherson, a University of Utah graduate student who will also present research at the Northridge conference. “In that way, it’s all drag: Whatever you took out of the closet this morning, whether it’s a suit and tie or a miniskirt and pumps. Rather than feeling sick, cross-dressers celebrate their ability to ignore narrow rules of dress they had no role in creating.”

While the number of male cross-dressers has risen significantly in recent years, fewer women are cross-dressing or opting for transsexual surgery, new research shows. “These days, women are feeling more secure in their roles in society, more so than men,” Bonnie Bullough said. “Historically, women exclusively chose to change their gender identities. Today, while their role in society improves, it’s men who are feeling trapped.”

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To avoid the comments and cold stares of a still largely unaccepting public, Bart Cox regularly seeks safe haven in the once-a-month Silver Lake masquerades, known as Dragstrip 66, that many call “recreational transvestism.” In the standing-room-only crush of linebacker-sized men with crooked lipstick, reckless makeup jobs and big hair, he feels right at home. “Nobody judges you here,” Cox said.

In Cox’s photo album, the lines between the masculine and feminine blur. In one picture, a college-age Cox looks dapper in his hand-pressed ROTC uniform. On the facing page is the other Cox--sassy and campy for his role in the Seattle-area production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Cox’s drag life began with secretly wearing his mother’s undergarments. By the time college and film school passed, the sexual thrill he felt as a boy was gone. But the taboo-breaking excitement remained.

“I love the risk of being caught,” said Cox, who hangs necklaces from big-game antlers in his Hollywood apartment. “It’s not something I’m ashamed of. It’s the thrill of slipping out at night so my (building) manager won’t see me, my heart beating, my wig touching the ceiling as I walk quickly to my Vista cruiser station wagon. Not only is it a delicious sensory overload, it’s subversive to the order of things.”

For closeted cross-dressers, Halloween is nirvana--the Christmas, Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day of holidays, a time when they can dress without reproach.

But not Cox. His cross-dressing has evolved into year-round exhibitionism, as crucial in shaping his identity as scuba-diving and fixing cars. A bisexual, he tells his dates about his habit, not exactly expecting sympathy from the women who hear his complaints about pumps that pierce the feet like flaming daggers.

Cox recently quashed water-cooler gossip by crashing an office Halloween party as his alter-ego Empira, dressed in a leather miniskirt and heels, a blond wig clashing with his thick black mustache. Now his boss often lends him her lipstick.

Knowing that Los Angeles, and especially West Hollywood, is an island of eccentricity has helped, he said. “In this city, a man dressing as a woman is not a shameful thing.”

It also helps to have an understanding family. From their tiny home in El Monte, Lee and Marta Mendoza watched as Michael, the most secretive of their three sons, became a pre-op transsexual and voluptuous blond performer on the local female-impersonator circuit.

Even if they slip up sometimes, calling her Mike, the Mendozas say they want Lynda to be happy. So when the time comes for Lynda’s sex-change operation, they will help foot the bill.

“Whatever happens,” Lee Mendoza said, “she’ll always be our son.”

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But for many of the trans-gendered, acceptance is elusive. Just ask Michele Kammerer.

After spending nearly 46 years as Michael Kammerer, the Los Angeles City Fire captain underwent a sex-change operation in 1993, a decision that rocked her personal and professional worlds.

“I did a very disloyal thing,” she said. “I rejected my manhood while remaining a part of the fire department--perhaps the most manly profession there is.”

Even with the sensitivity sessions held throughout the department, many fellow firefighters could not accept their new female captain. Some left the room when she entered. Others confronted her, asking how she could embarrass the department and urging her to retire.

“I don’t really think that society is ready for this type of thing,” Kammerer said. “People say they are. But when faced with someone they know, many just cannot deal with it.”

Former colleagues still criticize Kammerer, who eventually transferred to a Westchester outpost to supervise fire inspectors.

“Kammerer embarrassed the department and we’ll never forgive him for that,” said one firefighter who asked not to be named. “People are quietly resentful. They feel as if they’ve been ordered to tolerate it. Frankly, I don’t understand it. I mean, this guy obviously doesn’t have a clue as to who he really is, so how can he expect others to understand?”

Kammerer’s children have also struggled with her new role. “This is still a shock for both of them,” she said. “(But) I’m their father and I always will be.”

While Kammerer said she has no regrets, a sadness pervades her life.

“A sex change is not a panacea for someone who thinks everything is going to be roses as a woman,” she said. “I’m living a normal woman’s life. And that’s filled with joy and pain. It’s real.

“But I’m out of the closet and that’s liberating. It’s very empowering.”

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While the trans-gendered and cross-dressing worlds remain minefields of unacceptance, change is coming. Cross-dressers have appeared in sitcoms and commercials, and have been the main attraction in such films as 1994’s “The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert” and the upcoming “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar,” the tale of three big-city drag queens marooned in a small Midwestern town.

“Movies and television are opening people’s eyes,” Bonnie Bullough says. “ ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ became as pop culture as you could find. Before that, it was ‘Tootsie’ and ‘The Crying Game.’ It’s still not the subject of Disney, but it’s getting there.”

For Bart Cox, the rising popularity of cross-dressing is bittersweet.

“My fear is that cross-dressing is going to become mainstream and then passe,” he said. “For me, it’s a critical way to express myself. I don’t want people one day saying, ‘Oh, Bart, that was so early ‘90s! Find another trip.’ ”