The road to becoming a sissy.

I am a gay man, generally very masculine in appearance, not your stereotypical fag or pansy, who after years of crossdressing has come to realise that I am not a transvestite as such but rather a sissy. Now it is clear to me that while all sissies are crossdressers not all crossdressers are sissies. Rather than attempt a hard and fast definition here and now as to what constitutes a sissy I am pretty sure that this will emerge in the course of this blog over the coming year.

I say I am a masculine gay man and, indeed, for the most part that is true - but my masculinity is assumed, I feel, and has been developed over many years to hide me from my sissy self. For, truth to tell, I was very definitely a sissy boy. The prepubescent me was 'sensitive', disliked boys' sports, and had a liking for girls' playground games. Given a choice between a football and a doll (though I was never asked to make this choice) I would have plumped for the doll. Of course I was innocent and naive and had no idea that I was proclaiming myself to the world as a sissy. A degree of self-knowledge came with the onset of puberty.

In addition to an evident attraction to boys - always older than me, more young adults than boys - I started dipping into my mother's wardrobe and trying on her clothes. They felt so much more sensuous than boys' clothes. I particularly loved a pink girdle which, with stockings and my mother's pink wedding dress, became my favourite outfit. However, though these dressing sessions would culminate in a fierce orgasm, I was always left feeling so ashamed and guilty that they were not by any means common occurences.

Also, of course, I was now a teenager and my peers were by no means so accepting of my perceived sensitivity and bookishness as they had been just a few years before. Now the name calling began... girlyboy, nancyboy, sissy, pansy. The sports master at my all boys' school was also prone to using any and all of these names to produce results on the sports field.

I resolved to end all this by 'butching up'. I became much tougher, I courted girls, I forced myself to take an interest in sports, I became a pretty damned good rugby player. And the name calling stopped. I had learned to pass as a man in a world that clearly hated the feminine if it showed itself in any way in a masculine context.

Inside my mind I was not so convinced. As my teenage years passed I waited for my homosexual feelings to disappear - I hoped that this was a phase I would grow out of. They did not and I hid from them. By the time I went to university I had abandoned all crossdressing activities, weaned myself away from allowing them to come into my mind. My secret life seemed secure even if I was not at all secure in my own mind.

However, I started behaving in a more natural way when I went to university. In the first place it was mixed, male and female, and I discovered that I was really happy in the company of women. I do remember one of my friends telling me that her brother was rather effeminate and was inclined to 'swish' a little - she saw it as an endearing, lovable trait. She added that no one could ever possibly say the same about me. I was alarmed - I thought she was being ironic and was intimating that I, to, was swishy. But no - she was serious. To her I was in no way effeminate. Some years later when I came out as gay to my friends, I reminded her of this conversation and she said that no, she had in no way been ironic, that I came across as super-macho. This was in the 1970s when there was still a tendency to equate homosexuality with effeminacy. The irony, in fact, was that her brother, despite his pansy manner, was straight through and through, whereas I, the butch rugby player, felt inside that I was a total sissy who would not accept it.

And for the next twenty years or so I kept up my masculine act. You could say it became second nature to me and did not feel like an act.

I had a terrible contempt for the effeminate homosexual - I accused them of leading people to think that all gay men are effeminate. I particularly hated drag queens, or the stereotypical poufs that cropped up on television. Warning - be very careful of what you decry; it is usually a sure sign that you fear the same thing in yourself.

And yet... deep down I had never forgotten that I had been sexually excited by women's clothes and as I came to terms more and more with who I felt I was I began to think that maybe I should investigate this again.

So I met a nice straight guy on the internet and after a lengthy correspondence finally acted on his offer to borrow some of his things. I met him on a number of occasions and loved everything I tried. I was particularly attracted to the corset - the feeling was incredible and I loved the way it transformed me. I added black stockings, high heels, a bra with breast forms; he had a go at applying make-up (his skills were rudimentary to say the least); silk panties went on - instantly turning me into a panty fetishist; a classic little black dress went on; and the whole ensemble was finished off with a black wi

It was a startling sight that met my eyes when I looked in a mirror - I was grotesque! The make-up was really bad! And yet... I loved it. I loved the transformation, I loved the difference in the way I was forced to walk as a result of the heels and the corset.

I was hooked - but this was only the beginning of my journey to sissydom.