"Cloak and dagger," as an idiom, is a layer cake of interpretations. We hid ourselves, disguised, and it was indeed deadly serious business. Angharad, I think we might be near-contemporaries, and I remember the secrecy, the small, furtive groups, the fear that everything in our lives could be ruined by exposure. Nevertheless we did it, risked it, for a little human contact with our real human inside.

What's amazing, in retrospect (in even deeper retrospective?) is how it *wasn't* so deadly serious to me when I was younger still. As a little child and even as a newly-minted teen, I was happily, openly "queer." I cross-dressed and played dress-up and toted my dolls around. I played pick-up baseball, too, and even joined the Scouts for a summer, but I was the fairy of the group.

And then puberty, and then: no. No more of that.

After sex - or even the unexplained, mysterious urges towards sex (and a more defined, sexualized gender?) - it was NOT okay to be me anymore. Not openly. Cloak - and very real daggers. Those photos remind me of the informal gatherings I found during my early college years, of the atmosphere in the change-room of a drag club I found and frequented after high school hours. Very intimate, but with strict isolation from the outside world.

I had a friend who was assaulted after a show. Dressed, very passable, but still an "out" drag performer, she was terribly injured by a casual acquaintance who turned deadly nasty, and never left the hospital, never recovered. More terribly, most of her friends, her family, never visited her while she waited. Fear of being associated, connected, compared, attacked.

Sad, sad times. Cloak and dagger. But I remember the laughs and the glow of, of BEING. Of watching the stupid stage makeup come off and the normal, real girls emerge. They told me I had to be careful, be secretive, never tell. But they laughed and joked like nobody else in my adolescent life. I remember the men and women who met in secret to share their happy for the moment lives with family. They're good memories.

Thanks for the time. Your comments and those pictures brought me back...

My dad was a career cop, through WW II and into the early 70s. He told me about the first suicide he ever attended, a young person at a remote farm. She was fully dressed, sitting in front of a mirror. None of the magazines I managed to find here and there, or that my friends shared with me, (Transvestia, etc) talked about that dark side of life, and even hid it the same way the mainstream press did: "Died suddenly" can mean so many different things :-(

On a happier note, I was never turned away for being too young, though I was under the legal age by six years when I found my way into the back rooms of The Black Cat nightclub. I remember the club was attached to a huge tavern. It was a well-known gay bar/hangout, and smack dab in the middle of Montreal's gay village. My dad was horrified when he found out where I'd been going after school ended and before he picked me up at a library for the ride home; he said it was a rough, dangerous part of town. So I didn't tell him about the biker bar I sometimes stopped into to on the same block, to see the huge motorcycles. Or the dark used-book stores I frequented up and down the Main, searching for anything trans. I was an idiot when I was young, but not THAT big an idiot.

But back to why all this is being mashed together, sad death and stupid childhood: when I told Mom and Dad that I needed to explore surgical options, Dad told me to do whatever I had to, whatever made me happy, with all his love. Mom had a harder time, but Dad knew the nitty-gritty truth.