Cross-Dressing: A Sign Of Culture In Transition

The "menswear" look in women's fashion has been one of the few hot trends in recent seasons. Just last week top models were sauntering down runways in New York in gray and navy pin-striped pantsuits for fall with double-breasted jackets, pegged trousers and brogue flats.

Hollywood has also had plenty of women trend-setters over the decades, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn, who've vamped on and off the set in men suits, ties and fedoras. On the set, such male actors as Jack Lemmon and Dustin Hoffman have won acclaim for playing parts in drag.

And the list of current pop stars who sometimes appear in drag, and whose fans find it fashionable and fascinating, is endless: Madonna, Boy George, Prince, David Bowie and k.d. lang are but a few.

Meanwhile, in a humorous new commercial, Converse Inc. has dressed National Basketball Association rookie Larry Johnson in a house dress, pearl strands and a prim woman's hat in an effort to show that even Johnson's grandmother could play top-notch basketball in Converse shoes.

But relegating such popularly accepted instances of transvestism to the whims of fashion and marketing or the conceits of the theater is a superficial view of cross-dressing, according to Barbara Garber, a Harvard professor whose analytical, exhaustive and interesting book on cross-dressing is making her a regular on talk shows and in the pages of the nation's book reviews.

In "Vested Interests, Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety," (Routledge, 443 pages, $35) Garber suggests that transvestism signifies a culture undergoing change. By testing society's views on what is acceptable in men's and women's dress, transvestites push society into questioning stereotypes of gender, sexuality and appropriate behavior. She says that transvestite behavior occurs across a broad spectrum of society, ranging from inner-city gay drag queens through high fashion, theater, and elite men's clubs.

Garber adds that mainstream society places different value judgments on transvestite behavior depending on who is doing it - even though, in her view, all transvestism suggests a desire by the cross-dresser to escape our society's overly simplistic behavioral norms.

In Seattle recently to promote her book, Garber, who is a professor of English and director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard, said that one of her most surprising discoveries when she first started researching the book five years ago "was how omnipresent cross-dressing is in our society."

She noted that cross-dressers - either men or women - are by no means mostly homosexual. She found many organized groups of recreational cross-dressers around the nation. The majority of their members are married, heterosexual men, she said. Often their wives or girlfriends accompany them to cross-dressing events. The women also may go out shopping to women's clothes shops with their cross-dressed husbands.

A Shakespeare scholar whose interest in transvestism was sparked partly by Shakespeare's frequent use of cross-dressing in his plays, Garber said there are many reasons why men and women cross-dress. Some, such as Billy Tipton, the late Spokane woman who for decades passed herself off - even to her wife and adopted children - as a male saxophone player, may have begun cross-dressing in order "to pass," as Garber phrases it. In her book she discusses how women such as Tipton, trying to make it in a traditionally male-dominated profession, have always had incentive to cross-dress.

In a chapter called "Cross-dress for success" she analyzes the way the dress-for-success look for career women of the '70s and '80s was, in her view, a version of transvestism with an eye to career enhancement. The masculine, navy suits and floppy ties recommended for ambitious corporate women were nothing more than an acceptable version of cross-dressing, Garber said, noting that it often worked. Women who dressed that way were considered team players, meaning like men, and were more likely to move ahead of their more femininely dressed female colleagues.

But she says that it is overly simplistic to view such people as Billy Tipton as merely career-oriented cross-dressers. The fact that Tipton married a woman, adopted children and was by all accounts a much loved father and husband gets into larger questions of gender stereotypes and roles, said Garber.

"It says something about our cultural anxiety that we try to explain that kind of cross-dressing away as utilitarian and not talk about it in terms of pleasure," Garber said. "Our culture is still very puritanical. Still very attached to the idea of gender roles and what is appropriate."

Feminists and gay leaders have long argued that American society needs to move toward accepting a wider range of gender roles and behaviors, and Garber's book continues that debate. She says transvestites make people nervous because they are not easily labeled as either male or female, which confuses and frustrates a society such as ours, which likes to quickly and efficiently categorize people and behavior.

The dilemma is worsened for mainstream society because, Garber says, most cross-dressers - aside from the minority who strictly dress for success - get some degree of pleasure from transvestism, even though it may not be easily defined as either heterosexual or homosexual.

"Certainly cross-dressing for some is sexual," said Garber. "But for teenagers going to a dance, dressing is also sexual."

She noted that transvestism is most threatening to mainstream society when it is associated with "low culture." The mostly African-American and Hispanic transvestites eloquently captured in "Paris Is Burning," a 1990 documentary about drag balls in Harlem, is about a subset of urban, gay men who live their lives on some of the lowest rungs of the social and economic ladder. After they leave their menial day jobs, they build fantasy lives for themselves by competing in contests where they dress as wealthy upper-class women or as elite men, such as Wall Street power brokers.

At the same time, Garber notes that when privileged heterosexual males, such as members of Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Club or the elite Bohemian Club of San Francisco, put on skits in drag, society calls it good-natured fun:

"One thing that struck me a lot is how differently cross-dressing is valued depending on whether it's done from the top, in high culture, where it's called `high jinks,' or whether in the lower class, where it's seen as destabilizing."