Who We Serve-Diane Frank

Two weeks ago I attended a Grey Pride meeting. My friend Carol from the Akron area was going to be reading from her remembrances. She wanted at least one familiar face in the audience. Earlier, she had shared some information about her partner’s late son, J. J was severely crippled from a congenital spinal disease and also it turned out he was a crossdresser. I had hoped that more information about the son would turn up in an oral presentation and I could get a fuller sense of who he was, more material to make a story out of. I was left with a simple picture of a loving non-traditional family, the son accepting his mother as a lesbian, she accepting him as a CD and the two of them having a contest to locate information about crossdressing on the internet.

For a while I was frustrated at not having a better story to share. But something more came out of this as I’ve thought about it. J. was closeted. He didn’t dress outside the house. He never shaved his beard, and by our rules of presenting as either one sex or the other, he would not have been welcomed at an Alpha Omega meeting, or just about any other organization I know of. I don’t know if his crossdressing was simply a sexual expression, as it is for many, or whether it represented something about his sense of alignment with the notions of man and woman, or was simply a form of relaxation.

J. represents the vast majority of crossdressers. For every person like me, who struggles with living a double life, there are many, many people who in ways have no life at all. Because they haven’t or can’t come to terms with their experience and feelings about crossdressing, they also don’t resolve what they feel about their ordinary life as a man. They are the ones whose sense of themselves as a man is diminished. There is one life they can’t have, and one they aren’t happy with. Not much of a life. Where is the hope?

The clue was in J’s search of the internet. Our website, our newsletter is a lifeline for people like J. These functions of Alpha Omega give people who aren’t members and indeed will never likely be members some idea of what it might be like to find what they seek. Ever time one of us writes about our experiences, whether it be coming out to one’s family, how one started, getting help with the basics, our connections with other people, we provide hope and the chance for growth to people who can’t or won’t come to our meetings. Not just people in North East Ohio, but anywhere in the world. When you write for our newsletter to share your experience and ideas, you are doing a good deed. I want to express my gratitude to Abigail and Sheila especially, who as new members have contributed material so soon after joining, and to Gloria for being unstinting in sharing of her life with us, and Kathleen for so often taking the time to give us a spouses perspective. And I want to thank Carol, whose simple story of acceptance and love in a non-traditional family helped remind me again of why what we do here is valuable.