Transvestites challenge the established norm for gender behavior. While the most visible transvestites are the male drag queens, whether politicized or in show business, others have adopted crossdressing as a more private behavior. Adoption of clothing, hair and facial preparation and other attributes appropriate to another sex has deep roots in American folklore and history.

For women, this allowed more freedom to take on roles of power and independence in wars and immigration (as fictionalized by Barbra Streisand in Yentl, 1983). As women’s clothing has become casual and functional, cross-dressing is more complex. Few women who dress in men’s clothes would call themselves transvestites.

Males have also taken on female clothing for ritualized occasions, including mock weddings and mock cheerleading in the South, rites of initiation for male fraternities and vaudeville humor, whether Milton Berle in early television or New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Saturday Night Live. Like many others perceived to be engaged in alternative sexuality, transvestites tended to keep their interests private until liberation movements in the 1960s opened a wider discussion and range of public behavior. Transvestite males, in particular, are often taken to be gay although their use of women’s clothing may be based on other aesthetic or tactile features.

The most flamboyant modern exposure of transvestite life has been the “drag show,” with male and female celebrity impersonators, following lip-synched song and dance routines and attracting diverse audiences. Drag shows, as urbane entertainment, have also broken through in Hollywood and Broadway with comedies like Victor/Victoria (1982) or To Wong Fu Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995), and the celebrity status accorded to RuPaul. Director Ed Woods, who treated transvestisim as a clinical condition in his own terrible (now cult) films, was treated as a sympathetic closet transvestite in Tim Burton’s 1994 bio-pic. Dennis Rodman, the NBA star, has made cross-dressing a more confrontational issue of masculinity and choice in his public demeanor.

This is an area fraught with multiple and contradictory meanings as well as reactions.