my first experience with an AGP
In an earlier post I mentioned that Devin was not my first relationship with an autogynophile. The first encounter was actually many years prior, with a young man named Kevin (yes, their names were only one letter different. Surely an amusing coincidence and nothing more). I was about to turn 24 and attending a new college where I had decided to add to my seemingly endless list of gen-eds by taking a theater class. At that point in my life, I had nearly a decade of failed relationships which had made me the object of much advice and criticism amongst my friends who felt it was my choice of boyfriends - I was evidently too picky yet simultaneously blind - that was the cause of my problems. Up until that time, I sought out a certain “type” that if contemporary might be described as “woke, pretty hipster boys with beards and long hair”. I decided to seek out-of-type and see if there was something to their criticism. Kevin was tall, awkward, and nerdy. He was almost obsessively into comic books, role playing games and collecting character figurines with a particular interest in Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel etc. He was not particularly good looking and had no muscle tone to speak of but quirky and funny and shy - “shy” was also something I had not previously been attracted to. As he began to display some interest in me I slowly decided to throw caution to the wind and accept his offer of seeing a new Star Trek movie that was about to hit theaters the following Friday, however nervous I was about it. I was extremely nervous, and I didn’t know why - I had sat in class with this person for over two months at that point and had acted in some pretty ridiculous scenes in front of him. I had butterflies before a date before, but my stomach was in such an uncomfortable knot that I showed up to our meeting place (the mall with the movie theater) 20 minutes early to order a plate of white rice to try and settle my stomach. That was the only time in my life I have gotten that kind of nervous feeling about a date, and honestly I think I somehow knew it was a bad idea.
Kev was just 21, so younger than me by nearly 3 years and had almost no experience with women save for one girlfriend he had from about age 17 to 19 who I am not sure he ever had sex with (they may have, I forget). He was quite different from anyone I had dated, which was my intention, but I would find out he was FAR more different than I expected.
Kevin had worked in an independent video rental shop from high school on, and they rented porn movies as well as typical releases. The porn movies were displayed in a large binder only adults could access, with the cover of the VHS tape enclosed in a page protector, and a numbered tag velcroed on. The renter was to detach the Velcro number and hand it to the clerk (Kevin, most of the time) who would go in the back and retrieve the otherwise unmarked VHS tape. Kevin had seen every single one of those tapes, often multiple times. This was before the internet was in everyone’s home and before either of us had our own computers at all. We both still accessed the net through our school’s computer lab - so he did not yet have access to computer porn. However, make no mistake, he was completely porn addicted and it was a huge problem from very early on. In fact, at that time in my life, he was the first truly porn-addled male I had ever encountered.
I don’t remember how the topic came up, but it was very early on. Most likely by me joking about him having to wear my underwear if we got snowed in but his elated reaction said it all. He got genuinely excited and spilled out his fascination with wearing lingerie, especially stockings and garter belts. it slowly became apparent that he could not be fulfilled sexually without some kind of AGP stimulation, either watching a porn in which the woman was wearing stockings, or wearing them himself while watching any porn. He had no trouble at all getting an erection and maintaining it indefinitely but he could not have an orgasm via sex with me or oral sex. We would have sex, I would have an orgasm then he would lie on the bed and masturbate to the porn he always had or wear my stockings and masturbate but rarely if ever looking at or acknowledging me during that orgasm. In 9 or 10 months that we were having sex, he had an orgasm during that sex only once, and only because he was watching a porn film at the same time - and at that, only with great effort - barely acknowledging me at all.
He confided to me that when he was 12 or 13, another boy approximately his age (maybe 6 months younger) had “abused” him by introducing him to cross-dressing (which is what he always called it) when - remember this is according to him - one day randomly suggesting they go into his mother’s underwear drawer and check it out. He described this boy basically “making” him put on the bra and pants and then masturbating with him as they both wore various pieces from that drawer. He told me this with a convincing anger at the boy, as if it were against his will and had “ruined” him. For a short while I also felt anger toward the boy (who I had never and would never meet) for introducing this limitation to his sexuality but after a while I began to doubt his account. More about that later1.
This led to an adolescence of taking his mothers underwear, masturbating while wearing it, then guiltily returning the items to the drawer and feeling remorseful and ashamed. Somehow his mother either caught him in the act or otherwise found out but being the incredibly loving and sweet mother that she was, responded kindly and simply asked him not to use her belongings. Eventually he branched out to buying his own lingerie, having an orgy with himself, then feeling shame and throwing the lingerie out in the woods near a train track that ran a couple hundred yards from the perimeter of the property. That was his cycle for years. He also collected lingerie catalogs and regularly masturbated to images of women in garter belts and stockings. He expressed an entirely heterosexual preference, which I believed then and continue to believe. Note: before sitting down to write this, I did go to social media to see what he was like now, and to my surprise he still presents and lives the exact same way - as an average male, still into comic books and in a (I believe second) heterosexual marriage.
Because I enjoyed being with him, and frankly because he was so incredibly helpful to and supportive of me (taking care of my pets, being “the neat one” in the relationship, driving me to school every day and being generally very chivalrous - at first) and because we could have sex even if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, I stayed in this relationship for well over a year. I believe it was 16 months altogether even if we had sexually “broken up” before a year in. However, the AGP creep was going on that entire time. And as in my previous story, I hardly noticed it taking over my life.
At first my friends were amused - this was so very different than the kinds of boys I usually brought by and at first all seemed quite supportive and eager to accommodate my new “nice” boyfriend. Over time however, they began to notice the changes in me and in him which ultimately led to him being banned from certain social events.
It started out the same, just a harmless kink - I probably even told some of my friends about it at the time as if it were just a novel experience - but slowly became an obsession that seemingly had no end. If anyone had told me that afternoon in theater class that the geeky kid who was shyly asking me to the movies would eventually have me living in a world defined by the pornography I was against - indeed had protested with civil disobedience and had published writing about - I would have run away and maybe even dropped the class. After all, the belief at the time, which I absorbed, was that only attractive, extroverted men are jerks. The shy, smart nerds are all sweet and respect women.
In that year I gained over 60 pounds. That’s not easy to do. I also became more withdrawn socially, spent less time on the phone and socially with my large group of friends, and somewhat less time on schoolwork. If Kevin weren’t also going to the same school and therefore driving me every day, I might have stopped going altogether. It was like the more kinked out and porn-dependent the sex became, the harder I tried to hang in there in the hopes indulging it would make it subside. He just kept feeding me, and I just kept eating. I remember joining a community theater play since our theater teacher also directed plays in the area and asked me to fill in for someone who dropped out. Kevin always came along to about 90% of the practices - the teacher knew him too and allowed it, and also I think she was hoping he would tape the performances (he always did - I forgot to mention his area of study was film, and he was an avid videographer). However, his reasons were that he was jealously worried I might meet another man there and he would sort of act weird and off-putting and embarrass me whenever I was talking to a male cast mate. The very few abusive relationships I have been in (only 2 or 3 I can think of including this one) the man always learned I can be easily controlled through threat of embarrassment. The way he encouraged me to eat, and sort of placated me through food also make it obvious in hindsight he was trying to make me gain weight. I have noticed that all of his subsequent relationships were with larger women. Kevin himself was very thin and the type that never seemed to gain weight no matter what he ate.
Once he found some loose photos in my bookshelves of me and a boyfriend I had up until a few years before we met and he just lost his shit - he was enraged there was an image of me at age 21 kissing another man and he brought it up continuously. I eventually hid any and all pictures I had of me which had another man in them, whether it was a previous relationship or not. His self esteem issues which he never explicitly elaborated on made him bitchy and controlling about who I could talk to, even as far as being uncomfortable with me ordering food for myself if the cashier was a young male. Most of the time it was embarrassing and I noticed my behavior being altered - it was a time of burned bridges.*
He went through and wore all of my underwear, lingerie and stockings - but he wasn’t interested in my actual, everyday cotton underwear. Only the silk or satin lacy pieces. The more it went on, the more obsessive and dependent on porn and lingerie he became so that any sex eventually had to first begin with me actively dressing him in my lingerie, forcefully calling him misogynist words, and even spanking or tying him up. I was into that for about 3 minutes and quickly got disgusted and uncomfortable. In retrospect, I see he was trying to be “sissified” but I had no notion of that for many years to come. Early on I also stopped talking about our sex life - or about Kevin at all - when I did see or talk to friends. At first, I was excited to bring him around and hang out with my friends but after maybe 4 months that faded. My friends’ discomfort with Kev started before they ever knew of him being an actual douchebag to me - it started with how they saw me changing. In just 6 or 7 months he had drastically changed my day to day life so I was only ever with him, except when he was at work at the video store. He drove me everywhere, arranged what we would eat and where, and kept me on a tight leash. When I say “tight leash” I mean that he wasn’t even consciously, overtly controlling the way his father was. He wasn’t any kind of “tough guy” nor was he at all paternalistic. He was just so ruled by irrational emotions that he almost never thought through anything he said or did, and the pattern he automatically fell into was one of worst case scenario, hysteria and mistrust.
Kev did have his own circle of 3 or 4 close childhood friends who knew he was a quirky guy but loved him for it. They knew absolutely nothing of his other side - indeed they had only seen him with a girlfriend once before and later one friend admitted to me he didn’t like the obsessive and possessive traits he saw in his friend during that relationship, but he didn’t put too much stock into it since all adolescent boys are finding their way with girls and making mistakes. However, Kev’s rage at that one girlfriend lasted throughout our relationship and he regularly expressed disgust with how she had treated him, claiming she “cheated” on him (she broke up with him and eventually started dating someone else). Once, while riding in a car with his mom on the way to some family gathering, he randomly went off again bitterly about this girl and his mother scolded him for talking about another girl in front of me (seriously, her sympathetic look to me said volumes - there was much I didn’t know) and also the way he was speaking of her. Surprisingly, despite his paranoid jealousy about me speaking with other males, he did often have me over with his friends, and seemed to enjoy being in a group of all of us. A couple of times we all worked together on the boys’ film projects. Another time, he had me draw the characters for their role playing games (Kev’s was always a hot female with some sort of stockings, but the other guys’ were almost always males).
That started to change when I was having an in-depth conversation during a drive with his observant Jewish friend Daniel about Judaism and Yiddish (I had studied Hebrew at college and was interested in Yiddish) and Kev became quiet and rigid in the driver’s seat. Suddenly he snapped “why don’t you just go fuck each other then?!?” It was totally irrational and Dan was extremely embarrassed and frankly shocked. He cajoled Kev and tried to placate him while I sat red faced in the passenger seat. Nothing was ever said about it after that but I felt embarrassed around all his friends and became more careful. I got the immediate feeling though that Dan was somewhat familiar with Kev’s explosive reactions - in fact, all three of his best friends liked to jokingly refer to him as “the king of non-sequiturs” - but even this was beyond what he was used to.
Kev also vacillated between wanting me to dress up in a girly - goth way (the way I always dressed when we first met in that theater class, and what he said first attracted him) and then suddenly sniping at me and saying I looked whorish. As I was gaining weight rapidly anyway, my dress style morphed into a more asexual, baggy pajama style. I didn’t have disposable income at that time in my life so my budget didn’t allow for clothes shopping - when I could get to one, I would grab a couple things in a thrift store but I grew out of everything I had that was attractive or which I had actually enjoyed wearing. My parents (who I saw every few months since they lived about 2 hours away) immediately noticed the weight gain and at first joked about it but I could see my mother became concerned. I will give her some credit, she did ask me how the relationship was when commenting on my weight.
At this point I want to note that though this relationship lasted well over a year, he still lived with his parents, who he said “wouldn’t let” him sleep over and he only actually slept at my apartment maybe 2 or 3 times. And only then, because there was snow or we had to get up especially early for something. I still don’t know what that was about, his mother was so sweet and so supportive of me I have a hard time imagining her telling him he couldn’t sleep at my house but his father on the other hand was a loud-mouthed bully, and extremely controlling. I suspect it was possible that may have been his rule although his son was 21-22 and a grown ass adult. Looking back I wonder if his mom was worried about his behavior in relationships, or whether it really was just an Irish-catholic “no sleepovers” thing, as Kev claimed. Speaking of Kev’s dad, at the time I wondered if the cross dressing was because his father was such an over the top macho bully - think of older conventional theories of gay behavior being a rebellion against an overly macho dad or other BS - but I was certain that if he ever found out Kev had so much as tried on a bra, he likely would have thrown him out of the house. One dynamic I noticed at that household was how much his mother seemed to be continuously “protecting” Kev from his father. Clearly his dad had wanted a son he could play sports with and he didn't get that - he got a son that enjoyed watching sports with him for sure, but was too uncoordinated to even try a sports team. He seemed very disappointed in his son and had a closer relationship with his daughter who was athletic and academic. His dad was so obnoxious he was actually fired from his job for gross sexual harassment of the women who worked with him, and he carried a chip on his shoulder about it. I also didn’t like the way he talked to his wife, a woman I really liked (and still like). An interesting dynamic, that Kev was raised by such an overt misogynist bully and with such a lovely mom, I even wondered at the time if the cross-dressing was a way to identify with his mother / with women. I had no idea then about fetishes or autogynephilia, just that I was somewhat bewildered and disappointed by his sexual difficulties.
Incidents like the one with Dan increased. He began to get irrationally angry and lash out at increasingly unpredictable things. This is what led to my closest friends - a couple - eventually banning him from coming along with me to events. He was specifically not invited to their wedding for example. Another friend confided in me that because of Kev, she would never trust my judgement in men again. She said it in a joking way, but it stung me because I knew she had a good reason and before that, she had sought my relationship advice. It was (and remains) perhaps the worst judgement of character I have made in a relationship - though of course he will compete with Devin for that title in my mind for all eternity.
Now, my story of Devin was loaded with gross and explicit sexual detail and there isn’t that much of it here - there’s a reason for that. Kevin was a very different kind of AGP. He is what Blanchard and Lawrence would describe as a transvestic fetishist - he was sexually attracted to himself in female undergarments but apparently not sexually aroused by the ideas of himself with female genitals. Blanchard posits that the nature of the autogynephilic fantasy - arousal by the idea of himself in female garments versus the idea of oneself with female body parts - can predict the likelihood of future desire for transition: “the female attributes a man imagines when sexually aroused are related to the type and degree of feminization that he desires at other times (Blanchard 1993)”. Kev showed no interest in being stimulated nor penetrated anally, and only a passing interest in performing oral sex on a theoretical man but then only “as a woman”, and even so he may have only been saying so for shock value since he liked to come out with shocking things to say. He was most interested in wearing lingerie and masturbating, watching a self-made video of him wearing lingerie and masturbating, watching porn and masturbating, or having intercourse with a woman - in that order of importance. Considering he was unable to achieve orgasm during sexual acts with a woman I suspect that falls farther down a list than it appears. This is very different than Devin, who felt aroused at wearing women’s lingerie but also women’s clothing of any kind, of doing certain activities that are thought to be solely female (applying makeup, shaving his legs, tottering in heels etc) and the idea of himself at least with breasts, if not female genitals as well. They both strongly associate masochistic sexual desire with femaleness. This also explains why so many AGPs seem to have no interest in “bottom surgery” even when they do want to have breast implants. It really is about what part of autogynephilic attraction they have. Blanchard states that a AGP with arousal specifically at the idea of himself as a nude woman is more likely to seek surgical transition at least of his chest. Kev didn’t have that, at least not when I knew him. He did show some interest in what he called “She-male” porn - partial-op transsexuals - but in the mid-late 90s he was limited in the porn he had access to so it was harder for him to condition himself into that kind of eroticism. Lawrence discusses an article by Blanchard, who “described anatomic autogynephilia and gender dysphoria in men with partial autogynephilia—men whose ‘erotic self- images include a mixture of male and female anatomic features, most often women’s breasts and men’s genitals’” (Lawrence 2013 p.23) and Blanchard described partial AGPs “as experiencing ‘agonizing levels of gender dysphoria’ presumably because they experienced severe discontent with their secondary sex characteristics, albeit no discontent with their primary sex characteristics (i.e., their genitals).” (Lawrence p24). Kev was in fact very proud and even boastful of his penis, and he had seen enough porn to know he was considerably larger than average. Compared to my experiences much later with Devin, Kev had a very different autogynephilic presentation - though at first it looked the same to me.
As Kev became more unpredictable and angry, sexual acts together decreased to just about none. He would just masturbate to porn while wearing stockings while I did other things. Blanchard describes (in 1992) how the AGP is also heterosexual, and both desires can co-exist but that usually one predominates the other - the AGP presentation (whether its simply transvestism like Kev or more involved “sissification” fantasies like Devin) can often subside with the advent of a new and exciting heterosexual relationship. The AGP basically has a romantic relationship with himself “as a woman” (in however that presents for him) which can then be put aside somewhat if he falls in love with another person and directs that romantic attachment to her. However, “autogynephilia arises in association with heterosexuality but also competes with it” (Blanchard 1992 p273). He goes on to describe how as erotic excitement for the new relationship wanes, the autogynephilic urges again prevail - the AGP essentially falls back in love with himself as he gets bored of his relationship with his female partner. I felt this acutely both times I was involved with an AGP.
By the time we were about 9 or 10 months in, I was more than ready to be out of it. I felt somewhat “stuck” as it seems AGPs use a modified “DENNIS” system which focuses heavily on “Nurture dependence”. Like Devin many years later, he made himself indispensable to me while also effectively isolating me from everyone else in my life and chipping away at my confidence in various (and variously subtle and overt) ways.
I brought up breaking up with him several times, usually after he broke something in irrational anger or used a slur to refer to me (often in front of others) and he would go absolutely ballistic; hitting the wall, slapping himself, sometimes holding me down on the floor or bed with his body weight and screaming in my face “I WON’T LET YOU” or “THEN GO” or both. He could become so frightening that I turned to bargaining, eventually even trying to set him up with another woman at school who had approached me about him, saying she thought he was cute. I knew the only way I was going to get him to separate cleanly from me was if he had a new interest. This took a long time. One way I started to assert independence was that I began to insist on doing some of the driving although I hated driving. This was easy though since my car had AC and was just a nicer car. Once I was dropping him off from class and he started getting angry about something, I think I didn’t want to come in the house with him probably because his dad’s car was there and he got so enraged he picked up a phone book from my pile of mail in the footwell and hit me in the face with it. Unknown to me, his father was in the garage and saw him do it. The next day his mother asked to speak to me and I went in the kitchen with her and she was extremely concerned that he had hit me. I do not remember exactly what our discussion was, or whether any of it was away from Kev, but she was concerned both for me and also that her son was capable of this. She repeatedly assured me that she had discussed this with her son and told him it was completely unacceptable to treat me that way. She had no idea! I knew she recognized in him her husband’s potential for violence despite the fact that her son was otherwise the polar opposite of him and it rightly concerned her. I could see that she was genuinely shocked that her gentle, sweet son could ever possibly hit someone. A few years later, long after Kev and I were history, I would discuss this with her again.
The absolute final straw with my best friends was one evening, in trying to placate me and show me he had changed, Kev insisted I invite this couple over for dinner etc. to show he could be sociable again. They were willing, and we decided to watch a live concert version of the movie Spinal Tap, a movie I had watched with these friends many times. During the stonehenge scene we laughed so hysterically - rewinding the tape even to see the scene again - that Kev became incensed. He was just too jealous that I was laughing about something with other people even though he was there laughing about it too. To him, it was just somehow an enraging reminder that once, 5 years before I had had a threesome with both of them - something I told him early in our relationship which he seemed amused about at the time. Something that became just more outrage fodder for someone always looking for reasons to be mad at me, and to be a victim. He stormed off into the kitchen and I followed, afraid he was going to be embarrassing. I tried reasoning, I mean what was the problem? It was funny, we were all laughing but he was spitting with rage, whisper-hissing “why don't you just go FUCK HIM then!” And he began slapping at my face and head, which the female of this couple heard and she ran in just in time to see him kick me in the thigh. She absolutely had enough at that point and rightfully blew up at him, held him by the chest away from me and called to her husband for help. At that point they forbid Kev from every invite and refused to interact with him again. Here i need to point out that the reason these people didn’t have a stronger reaction to witnessing physical attacks like this (like calling the police or just punching him out) was I believe because Kev was so deceptively weak and awkward, I think they didn’t see him as a real threat in the way a stronger, less gentle and nerdy man might appear. I guess I can see how someone might think they are seeing a truly singular incident, and considering by that time I weighed 60 pounds more than him, it was difficult to see the “real” danger. While I understand that misconception, I would not ever share it. Also, I was loathe to divulge how many incidents like that there had been.
At that point we still spent a significant amount of time together (usually at my place) often going to get shit food at the mall and watching movies. I also started to venture out with new friends I was making in a certificate program I had started. It was the same college but a campus 3 miles away, so I only rode in together with Kevin occasionally. I was out with this same married couple on a rare evening to a bar and we left early but stopped at a pizza place. While in there, I was recognized by a boy I had a math class with a year and a half earlier, the same semester when I first met Kev. He acted really excited to see me and asked for my number and I was so thrilled because I had gained so much weight and I felt unattractive in every possible way so I couldn’t imagine he even recognized me never mind wanted to see me. My friends were thrilled because they wanted me to meet someone new and get rid of Kev completely. I went to dinner with this boy a few days later and we hit it off. He dismissed by self-esteem weirdness by saying, “we have all gained weight who cares”. We kissed and did a little feel up but I cut it short and said I didn’t want to have sex or go any further since I didn’t know what was going on or what he was about. He looked me straight in the eye and said “I really like you, and I want to keep seeing you”. I was over the moon.
The next day at school I was gushing to a classmate about how I met this cute kid I used to have class with - my newer friends also knew by now I was in a shit relationship I was trying to gently extricate from. I had already arranged for another date that weekend, and after class Kev once again came over to take me to the food court at the mall and talk about what girls he might be interested in if I could set him up. While we were there, I saw the math class boy also at the mall - he was a PCA and was there with a small group of special needs children in the same book and media store we were in and I immediately dropped down to my knees behind the aisle I was in so he wouldn’t see me. I was so embarrassed to be seen with Kevin, but also to be dressed in my PJs which is how far I had fallen. I knew that if math class boy so much as waved to me, Kevin would have made an enormous scene and it would have been so much more embarrassing than just being seen in my pajamas with duck sauce stains. Math boy was preoccupied and didn’t see me but there was absolutely no hiding that something was up to Kev who was standing right there wondering what the hell I was doing. When I saw math boy and his group make their way out the door I got up and walked out the other side of the store, into the mall and right toward another door to the car, insisting we go. I wasn’t going to tell Kev why I was hiding, at least not in public. When we got outside I told him I had been on a date and he lost his shit. He was livid. He drove like a lunatic back to my apartment then screamed at me to get the fuck out of his car, then followed me into the house demanding to know what happened (as in, how far I went with math boy). I rushed him into my apartment because he was making a scene and he went in and threatened to start tearing up the school papers he had just snatched out of my hand if I didn’t tell him what happened. Later when relating this humiliation to my new school friend she said the best way to avoid not being seen out in my pajamas was to not go out in my pajamas - her unspoken meaning was, and also not to go out with anyone you’re embarrassed to be seen with.
I knew that I had to either quickly find someone Kev could turn his interest to, or failing that maybe appeal to his mother about his behavior. Things began to change very quickly after that however. I don’t remember how I managed it, but I was able to get away for another date with math boy. I had had a car accident in between this and was OK but kind of shaken up. I had a new rental car and drove to math boy’s apartment and he was acting a little strange when I got there. More distracted, and not a ton of eye contact. I had brought a movie and suggested we watch it, hoping that if we settled on the couch maybe he’d come back to the same rapport we had less than a week earlier. He kept trying to get me to give him a back massage and I explained I was really sore from being hit and actually a little shaken up by it and he was really rude about it, saying I should just get over it. It was a really shitty couch date, I didn’t drink the alcohol he offered but he did and we had terrible sex with the bright lights on in his room and I really didn’t enjoy myself. I just couldn’t get aroused at all, which was strange for me. As I was getting dressed to leave he casually mentioned he was moving across country in 2 days and “oh did I mention that?” I felt really stupid and used and incredibly disappointed. I mean, it’s about the worst time to get misled by someone - when you’ve been in a bad relationship and have finally gotten up the courage to step out again. Subsequently I was way more upset about it than I would normally have been. I still don’t know why. I ended up not being able to eat significant food for an entire month, which is something that normally only happens to me in periods of the worst possible heartache. I definitely didn’t have heartache over a boy I barely knew, but I think I was heartbroken over what the past 16 months had brought. I cried a lot, and subsisted on Diet Coke and rum. I lost a lot of weight which actually increased my willingness to get out there again. Coincidentally, an unrelated legal settlement suddenly came through and I had some money and the relief that brings. I also bought my first computer.
Kev’s anger over my date with math boy was immediately lifted once he found out the guy was a prick who basically tricked me. It was also inexplicably lifted by realizing this was a popular boy he had been to high school with. He began trying to get me to see the funny side, and admittedly, he made me able to. I started going out with my friends more and one night I was out and saw another of Kev’s friends at the same bar. I went over and talked to him and since I was drunk (I had been drinking a lot by then) and just gushed to him about how I needed Kev with someone else. He was trying to be diplomatic, I could tell, but he agreed with me and said that Kev had just begun seeing someone new, someone they introduced him to. I was so happy I remember slapping my hands down on his thighs and going oh thank god a little too close to his face. He must have been very uncomfortable. He told me a little about her and I asked that he encourage this, that Kev needed to be paired off and it couldn’t be with me anymore.
As I expected, as soon as he met another girl, he completely cooled off towards me - and I was so relieved. It was almost like he was back to himself again, the kid I met a year and a half before. Almost. There was still moments of unpredictable rage that I worked to avoid triggering. He confided in me that the boy who he said “made” him dress in his mother’s underwear 10 years earlier had recently gotten in touch with him, and they met up and immediately began cross dressing together. He also said they blew each other. This confirmed my suspicion that the activity had always been mutual and that he had actually missed his friend. In fact, I seriously doubt that it was this boy who introduced him to cross-dressing and suspect the opposite.
To my ears, this was great news. I still didn’t understand anything about autogynephilia hand so suspected it was possible he could still be a closeted gay, and even wondered if his irrational anger at me was a result of frustrated gay feelings he was trying to suppress. Things were finally over between us, though we occasionally caught up - always for him to try and shock me with his new sexual adventures which of course failed to shock me (and also being totally unwilling to hear anything of mine). I was dating again and having a good time, and finishing my program. My friends quickly became a daily part of my life again, though none - not a one! - has ever let me forget about my colossal error in judgement. I still get made fun of for Kev’s antics. I never talked with anyone at the time that the relationship had so many abusive qualities, so they are not totally cold to tease me. My best friend only knew of that one time she saw him kick me and slap at me. She thought it was one isolated incident that she had stopped. However, my GP did refer me for counseling at a women’s shelter about 7 months into the relationship. I had gone in one day and just started crying and when she finally got out of me that I felt controlled and not totally safe, she insisted I get counseling specific to women in abusive relationships.
A couple of years after this, I ran into Kev’s mom at her place of work. She had heard what happened to me (an amusing story about being arrested with my dog, and my dog being looked after by the janitor for two hours) and said if anything like that happened to call her since she worked at the court and that she would have taken my dog had she known. She announced that her daughter had a baby and I gushed over a picture her new granddaughter. Then she got around to the point. Kev had recently been arrested outside a local mall when an onlooker called the police after seeing him hit and kick his girlfriend in a way that she fell down off the curb to the pavement. She described how traumatized he’d been by being in lockup, and that there was a restraining order on him now and she felt that “maybe this will really scare him into shape”. Out of purely morbid curiosity, I asked her to have him call me if he wanted to talk about it and a couple days later he did - he saw himself as the victim of a nosy bystander, and also that the restraining order was keeping him and his girlfriend apart. He claimed she still wanted to be with him and that she was violating it but it (understandably) made him scared. I admit at this time I was feeling schadenfreude about it. I wasn’t really speaking to him as a compassionate “friend”. I wanted to know how bad he was to her, and if he had simply gotten worse in general. I mostly went along with his account, and we ended the call with him expressing a hope that soon the order would be lifted and “we’ll be free to be together again”. He truly saw himself as part of a pair of star crossed lovers, kept apart by forces outside themselves. He ended with “thanks for being on my side”.
Years later, maybe between 2009 and 2010 or thereabouts he randomly got a hold of me though Facebook - I am not that hard to find with an unusual name. He didn’t make a friend request, just sent a message explaining who he was (as if I could forget) and saying he was recently divorced and asking if I was single. Preposterous, I know.
*Quick aside. In the second play I did for that teacher, there was a really fascinating young man I co-starred with and I so loved working with him. He was confident and smart and funny and just a dream to be in a cast with. It is guys like him I am thinking of when I say being with Kevin “burned bridges”. Sometimes you just know when there’s some mutual attraction and while its common to get chummy with cast during those many close hours of working together I just felt like had I been single we would have become a thing. Instead, Kev was always there, standing around and not letting me speak with him when he wasn’t right there. I was joking around with Steve during a re-read as I had sat next to him (Kevin arrived later) and Kev started doing something to distract me, he was scratching his face in an attention getting way to embarrass me and I was getting nervous and hot in the face and then I saw out of the corner of my eye that Kev had drawn blood somehow and I jumped in my seat to grab a napkin from the table to hide what he had done and accidentally farted in my surprise. Oh god. I had never been so embarrassed, but Kev had done what he set out to do. He got up and walked to the bathroom with the napkin to look at his face and Steve was being so sweet, trying to lessen my embarrassment. He was laughing and saying “can you work that into the show?”. I am the sort of person who never recovers from that kind of embarrassment. Almost year later I was in front of the magazines at a book store and Steve walked up to me and said “hey!” - I was so happy to see him and settled quickly into leaning on the magazine stand because I knew we were going to have a long catch up. I saw in the paper he was one of the leads in a new staging of Waiting for Godot that weekend. I had missed my friend! But, of course I was there with Kev who appeared out of nowhere and grumpily sidled up next to me, glaring. Steve said something like, “hey, Kevin right?” but got a sort of curt reply that let me know I just needed to get out of there. I was just too embarrassed about all of it to ever look him up later either. In fact even if I ran into him today I would still feel embarrassed about having been with Kev.
more likely, he had had some AGP impulses years before that even if he hadn’t acted on them