The dressing room

A suburban dad makes himself into the girl of his dreams.

By Virginia Vitzthum

Oct 5, 1999 | Robert is a suburban dad, he's the co-owner of a high-tech small business with his wife and he's a man with an penchant for pink. For the past three years, he has rented a room in the city where he makes his fantasies come true. There, Robert becomes Tracy, a self-beautifying girl who cleaves by all the images of extreme femininity. The 8-by-10-foot space fairly vibrates with white lace and ruffles, Barbies, mirrors, ribbons, scarves, stubble-disguising makeup and 200 pairs of panties.

But the room is more than a sugary glut of girlish paradise: It is also a peculiarly male place, where feminine images are filtered through the hardcore visual stimuli of male sexuality. And perhaps this is why Tracy has trouble inviting me -- a straight, natural-born woman -- into her room as a journalist. "I don't want to just be in there, talking into your tape recorder," she explains, suddenly skittish. "Why don't you pose for me?"

Tracy, who recently began doing erotic photography, somehow feels that getting me naked will level the playing field of mutual exposure. She cajoles me with promises of sexy portraits. Tracy considers this a win-win situation: She gets to share her sexual life with me (and the public) and I become a pinup, something she assumes every woman wants.

But I don't want that. I want to be the eyes here, the anthropologist who studies this foreign view of femaleness. We compromise by dressing up together but I end up changing in the bathroom. Tracy has expressed concern about my being judgmental and, having seen her room, I understand why. We both may inhabit female worlds, but her world -- in all its fervid frills, graphic sexuality and conscious self-creation -- is nothing like mine. And as I look closer, I see her evolution reflected in the room.

Framed pictures from men's magazines cover the walls -- which are painted the dark pink of flushed genitalia. Like a series of cave paintings, the pictures narrate the 40-year odyssey of Tracy's sexuality, beginning at his childhood and ending at her blossoming -- if middle-aged -- womanhood ... each set of pictures tells one chapter of her story.

In the earliest pictures, 1950s magazine ads feature women in torpedo-breasted foundation garments. Tracy began cross-dressing as a child in the late '50s and early '60s, and those first forays into his mother's underwear drawers are burned into his sexual wiring -- big white briefs are still his favorite undies. The rest of the room's hundreds of pictures come from porn magazines, slamming home the reminder that this 6-foot-2-inch person in heels and stockings and dressing gown grew up to be a heterosexual man.

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