I’m a straight woman with a gay son. I’ve read a couple of your columns and figured you might have an answer for a question I don’t know who to ask. No, it’s not about my son; it’s about his father. He likes to wear my bras, panties and dresses.
He only likes to do it when we’re having sex. I agreed to it the first time, thinking maybe he’s just drunk and God knows I’ve been with worse in my checkered past so what the hell. But now he wants to do it all the time. My question: Is my husband gay? The sex is great but the bra and panties thing is making me wonder. And if he’s not gay, how do I get him to stop?
— Dreaming of jock-straps
Dear Dreaming:
I doubt he’s gay. Studies show the majority of men who like wearing women’s clothes are straight.
Technically speaking, most therapists wouldn’t even consider him a cross-dresser because he isn’t walking around with dresses and skirts and wearing make-up like certain editors I know.
Okay, like most editors I know.
Studies show that straight men who wear women’s clothes don’t think of their wives or girlfriends as masculine, so don’t think he’s femming out because you’re too butch. He simply has a fetish, an erotic attachment to women’s garments.
Like a lot of straight men, your husband likes seeing women wear lacy undergarments. Most men like to feel the fabric pressed against their bodies, see it being taken off or take it off themselves. It can be an important part of their eroticism.
The only difference between your husband and the run-of-the-mill heterosexual pig is that he likes to wear the things they like to see.
Think of this as a continuum in a big fat a–. At one end of the cheek are people like your husband—fetishists who like wearing women’s undergarments. At the other end of the cheek are the transgendered, the people who really feel like they’re in the wrong body.
Make no mistake, every gay man has felt like he was in the wrong body at some point in his life. But usually we just kick him out of bed and order a pizza. I guess you could call us “Transtrickers.” That’s when you feel like you’re in the wrong body but you don’t want to change your gender, just your partner.
Anyway, in the crack of the continuum are the cross-dressers—people who like to dress up as women. These are the guys who get in the shower and sing, “A little makeup, a little paint, will make a man what he ain’t.”
According to statistics, your husband will probably stick to his end of the a– continuum. If he starts going to the grocery store dressed like a woman and complaining that he’s in the wrong body, well, that’s a completely different column and frankly, I’m out of vodka.
Your husband’s fetish will go away if you just put your foot down. Order him not to do it and he’ll stop.
Wait. Did you hear it? The laughter, I mean. That was Mother Nature. That b-tch laughs hysterically every time she hears me say something stupid.
You’re never going to change your husband so don’t even try. Instead, think the way most gay activists do when they join a civil rights group: “What’s in it for me?”
Your husband’s fetish is a bargaining chip if I ever saw one. I know one woman who got her husband to hire two gay guys for regular four-way sessions in exchange for submitting to his cross-dressing. While she’s f–king her husband the two gay guys are downstairs cleaning and preparing dinner.
Now that’s what I call sexual negotiation.
My point is, don’t think of this as something you don’t want, think of it as something that can get you what you want.
