Chapter 1

Okay, so I know I'm a bit spoiled, and I can be something of a diva. I blame it all on my mother, but more about her later. I'd rather talk about me, as usual, so I'll tell you a bit about myself.

My problem is I can't seem to decide if I want to be a boy or a girl. I was born a male, and I have all the standard male equipment, but I've always been small-boned, thin, blonde, and I've had girlish features my whole life. I have crystal blue eyes and what's called cornsilk blonde hair, and a cute little turned up nose. My skin is smooth and hairless. People stop and stare at me sometimes, and I've had times when perfect strangers, usually women, will stop me on the street and say, "You're beautiful!". It's happened so many times I almost expect it, and if I'm out at the mall and I'm dressed in something cute, I've been known to pout if I don't get at least a few stares from men or women.

My mother says she prayed for a girl when she was pregnant with me, and although you might think her prayers weren't answered, she's a woman who always gets what she wants.

Actually, it's a family trait. Mom has four sisters, and they are a very loud, boisterous group of women who all lived less than a mile from the house I grew up in, so they were always around. I never remember a time when I wasn't surrounded by women. I guess that's why I'm so confused about who I am.

Like I said, there were a lot of very strong women in my life. I feel like I've been struggling to assert myself against the domination of strong women forever. Here's an example: My name is Joe, but my mother still calls me Joey, even though I'm 22 years old. Mom was a ballet dancer in her youth, and she ran a dance studio when I was a boy, so of course she got me involved in ballet. There are never enough boys for the male parts in a small town ballet studio, so I basically had no choice -- she needed a warm male body. She had me in every production from when I was six years old to eighteen, when I went away to college.

You can just picture how that went over with the boys in school can't you? I got teased unmercifully, and bullied constantly. I hated the taunts of the boys, but somewhere down in my secret self I had to admit that I liked the attention. I mean, ballet is great for building up your body, especially your legs and butt, and by the time I was in high school I knew I looked pretty good in a pair of tights.

That's been the story of my life, you know, wavering between the two poles of masculinity and femininity. I never know exactly who I am from moment to moment. There are times when I feel very male, and all I want to do is stand around and belch and scratch myself and look at pretty girls -- lifting a girl in a tutu, with my hand on her crotch, was a pretty sensual experience I have to admit.

Other times I want to BE one of the girls, especially the pretty girl in the tutu. I admit, on more than one occasion I snuck into the ballet studio and changed into one of the spare tutus my mother kept there, and pirouetted around the studio like a prima ballerina, all the while admiring myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the walls.

My mother found out, of course. She was a smart woman and you couldn't hide much from her. And why should she be surprised that I liked to dress up in a tutu? She loved dressing me as a girl when I was little, and I still remember going out to lunch when I was eight years old with Mom and my aunts, dressed in a cute yellow sundress and sandals, with ribbons in my hair, and how the women in the restaurant all fawned over me and told my mother what a beautiful daughter she had.

I loved the attention. I absolutely adored it. To have all those dressed-to-kill women telling me I looked cute, it was the best feeling in the world. I sometimes think those days were the happiest of my life. At least back then I knew what I was -- a boy who liked wearing dresses and was very happy to be mistaken for a girl. And I was the center of attention among my aunts. They were all loud and boisterous like I said, and they made a big fuss over me. They told me I was a pretty little thing, I was adorable, I had such perfect manners, I was so well-behaved. I was their little pet. They took me shopping to buy dresses and underwear, and I remember my Aunt Josie holding up a pair of pink panties with little yellow tulips on them, making a scene in the middle of a department store and saying, "Wouldn't these look so adorable on Joey?". Then, just to make sure that everyone in the store knew I was a he and not a she, she said to the saleslady, "Isn't he the cutest little boy you've ever seen?". The saleslady, who had a blue beehive hairdo and looked like she'd eaten nails for breakfast, rolled her eyes and said, "Yes, but I bet he'd rather be outside playing football, wouldn't you, sonny?"

I knew how to get a laugh from an audience though, and I said, "Maybe that's where you'd rather be, honey, but I'm happy here."

Of course, my mother and her sisters thought that was hilarious, and they made sure to load up on even more girly things to buy for me, just to see the combination of embarrassment and anger on the saleslady's face.

I was my mother's only child and three of her four sisters had no children either. To be honest, they were difficult women to be married to, and they were all on their second or third marriages, so they simply weren't the motherly types. They got all their maternal instincts satisfied by mothering me and my cousin Marly, who was two years older than me and as much a tomboy as I was a girly boy. Marly didn't like their attention, but I ate it up.

They were quite a crew. They had all been dancers in their youth, and they still had the lithe bodies of dancers, although they were a lot curvier now. Two of them, Aunt Josie and Aunt Bobbi, had been show dancers, even spending a few years as part of a revue in Las Vegas. Aunt Violet had been a ballerina like my mother, and Aunt Helene, the oldest, had been a dancer in some rather lower class venues. She had gone to work at 17 in the burlesque houses to support her mother, whose alcoholic husband had walked out and left her with five little girls to support.

Helene had a woman's body in high school, and she put it to good use, working the burlesque circuit all through the South and Midwest in the 1960s, earning $500 a week when that was a fortune, and she sent most of it home to her mother. She always said she earned every penny, though, bumping and grinding for those small town audiences full of farmers with their hands down their pants.

Of all my mother's sisters I think Helene was the one who had the biggest grudge against men. They all had a pretty jaundiced view of the male gender, but Helene really seemed to have it in for guys. I guess you couldn't blame her; with the life she led for so long, she came in contact with the worst aspects of the male of the species.

Helene, like all my aunts, was a looker, and men were attracted to her like flies to honey. She was a beautiful woman even in her late 50s, with big expressive eyes, hair like Jackie Kennedy, and breasts like a stripper. I never saw her without makeup, which was the same for my mother and all of her sisters. They didn't believe in letting anyone see them without their "war paint" on.

All my aunts exuded female power, but Helene was the Queen Bee when it came to that. Even after my mother decided on my 12th birthday that I was too old to be dressing as a girl even for fun, and she made an announcement at a family dinner in the middle of a crowded restaurant that "Joey is not allowed to wear panties anymore," Helene wasn't buying it. She secretly kept a closet full of dresses, pants, tights, and heels in my size at her apartment, and she had a whole drawer in her bedroom that was just for me, full of panties, bras, stockings and even a padded girdle for times when I might want a little more curve in the bottom. When I was in high school she used to invite me over for sleepovers and she'd spend hours trying outfits on me after we went shopping at the mall.

I went along with it, although as I got older I tried to resist. Helene was a very strong personality, though, and I never felt like I could fight her. It was like wrestling with a bear, trying to get your way with her. Besides, like I said, I'm terribly vain, and Helene knew it was hard for me to resist once I saw how good I looked in her bedroom mirror. I'd say, "Just one outfit, Aunt Helene," but before I knew it she had me trying on all sorts of things and I'd be flouncing around her bedroom like a fashion model. "Oh, God, I love your cute little butt in those leopard pants," she'd say, and it was all over for me. I mean, tell me I look good in a pair of pants and I'll follow you forever. She knew that, and she played me like a violin.

I was lucky, in that when I hit puberty my skin stayed smooth and girlish, and I never had a problem with pimples. My voice got a little huskier, but I had no facial hair till I was 19, and even that was just peach fuzz. I kept my slender girlish figure, and my legs got longer, which made me look even more like a fashion model. I grew my hair long and it always had that shiny, silky quality that girls would die for. When it was brushed the right way, perhaps set off with a ribbon or bow or a bright-colored hair tie, I looked like a teenage hottie.

Although Helene could always get me to dress in private, the times when I would dress like a girl in public were long gone. When I got to high school it became important to me to be accepted by the boys, and I refused to dress like a girl and go out anymore.