"We Share a Sacred Secret": Gender, Domesticity, and Containment in Transvestia's Histories and Letters from Crossdressers and their Wives

Abstract

After WWII in the United States, gender and sexual minorities began to construct social identities in a cold war climate hostile to gender and sexual transgression. The coming of the sexual revolution in the mid-1960s and 1970s unleashed forces that provided opportunities for these groups to demarcate their differences from one another, achieve visibility, and court public favor in a more permissive and tolerant society. In this article, I examine how a cohort of white, heterosexual crossdressers and their wives forged a redeeming social script in ways that seem counterintuitive to the "spirit of the times." The presence of transvestism within the sacred, idealized space of the American home produced tremendous anxiety on the part of these transvestite husbands and especially their wives. To deflect the stigma of sexual deviancy and sooth feelings of insecurity, these couples utilized strategies of containment and embraced the domestic ideal, even well into the sexualized and swinging seventies. Their strategic yet curious retreat into domesticity compels a second look at the consensus, conformity, and containment narratives that once dominated our scholarly imagination of intimate matters during the postwar years. Might current revisionist histories have gone too far in discrediting these potent forces? How do gender and sexual populations beholden to whiteness and notions of respectability fit within the sexual revolutions of postwar America?