Creating a Style to Call Their Own : About 200 cross-dressers will attend a convention in Burbank for five days of fashion education and entertainment.

Those who attend next week’s “Holiday En Femme” convention at a Burbank hotel will no doubt be dressed to the nines.

Elegant gowns, jewelry, high heels. They will be entertained by a fashion show. They will attend seminars on developing their femininity and on hair care.

They will, for the most part, be men.

“Holiday En Femme” is the yearly gathering of the National Society for the Second Self, or Tri-Ess for three S’s. Founded in 1978, the organization includes 1,200 cross-dressers in the United States and Canada. About 200 of them are expected to arrive Wednesday for five days of entertainment and education.

Tri-Ess promotes itself as an organization specifically for heterosexual cross-dressers. Members say they dress for purely emotional reasons, as a means of expressing their feminine side.

“Some men are so macho they wouldn’t pick up a flower,” says John, a Canoga Park resident and longtime society member. “Some men enjoy soft things and cats. They enjoy beautiful clothes.”

John is not the man’s real name. While his wife and many of their friends know of his deep appreciation for feminine attire, his bosses at a Valley aerospace company do not, and John fears for his job. For similar reasons, organizers of the convention asked that its exact location be withheld.

“There are all sorts of crazy people out there,” one of them says. “Who knows what they’d do to us.”

In fact, for most members, Tri-Ess serves as a haven. The organization was co-founded by Joe (Carol) Beecroft, a Tulare, Calif., man who has devoted himself to providing support among cross-dressers and educating the American public.

“If you bring out feminine qualities, the gentleness and tenderness and caring, it makes you a better man,” says Beecroft, who was married to his wife, Norma, in a wedding gown. “Just like Dustin Hoffman said in ‘Tootsie.’ ”

But experts suggest there are other motivations behind wearing women’s clothes, and other types of cross-dressers.

Walter L. Williams, an anthropology professor at USC’s Program for the Study of Women and Men in Society, says that some cross-dressers are sexually aroused by wearing women’s clothes. Others see themselves, in a physical way, as female. Still others--and this type is prevalent in the gay “drag” community--cross-dress as a way to confront society’s gender rules.

Other cultures, Williams explains, are not so specific when it comes to gender fashions.

“In medieval Japan, samurai warriors wore military outfits and they wore makeup because they wanted to look good,” the professor says.

Western culture’s insistence on strictly defined clothing for men and women may, to some degree, force people to go from one extreme to the other.

Tri-Ess members offer no scientific or sociological explanations for their cross-dressing. They do, however, offer similar personal stories. It is a bond they often speak of. John says he is telling a common tale when he tells his own.

“My mother had a hope chest in my bedroom, at the foot of my bed,” the 55-year-old man recalls of his childhood, speaking in a deep voice. “She used to keep these real pretty silk pajamas in there. I would wait until everybody went to bed and then, in the darkness, put them on. I’d wear them under the covers and . . . luxuriate in them.”

Later, he snatched women’s clothing from the laundry line behind a neighborhood apartment building. His parents found out and chastised him. He wondered, for a time, if he was gay.

“Then I started dating and found I was responding perfectly normally, just like any other red-blooded American male. I liked holding girls and dancing with them and kissing them,” he said. “I knew I was a man. I just enjoyed these beautiful clothes.”

Experts say that even if a man wants to stop cross-dressing, the habit is difficult to break. Many Tri-Ess members, Beecroft says, have gone through “purges”--throwing away their women’s clothes only to begin a new collection shortly thereafter.

John, as an adult, was no different.

“I’d think, ‘This is wrong,’ ” he says. “I’d drive up to Mulholland Drive and throw it all off a cliff.”

He got married and had a son, keeping his habit secret until his wife caught him in her nightgown. They divorced. John continued to cross-dress, mostly in the privacy of his apartment.

Cross-dressing is, if nothing else, time-consuming. It can take hours to shave arms and legs, to painstakingly apply makeup over facial whiskers and tease normally straight hair into bangs and curls.

“I’m 6-foot-4 and have size 13 feet, and it’s kind of hard to disguise all that,” John said. “A girl looks like a girl to start with and just has to enhance it. For me, it’s a four-hour transformation.”

When he began dating a new woman shortly after his divorce, he decided to tell her early in their relationship. An opportunity arose when she returned from a shopping trip to show off new clothes.

“I made a comment that I’d always wanted to try wearing something like that,” John recalled. “She just tossed it to me. That was the first night we went to bed.”

The couple has now been married 26 years. They recently renewed their vows in a ceremony in which both wore wedding gowns. His wife, working through Tri-Ess, counsels other wives of cross-dressers.

“I found it wasn’t a threat to me. It was a part of him that I had to know,” she said, adding: “He’s a far better dresser than I am. I’m a jeans and shirt type person. He’s more fashion oriented.”

John and his wife believe that society is coming, if slowly, to accept cross-dressing along with other preferences and behaviors that were previously discouraged. Williams suggests that the gay liberation movement, with its successes, has forged the way. He also wonders if gender fashions will change with greater acceptance.

“If cross-dressing loses its stigma, there actually might be less cross-dressing,” he says. “More people would feel comfortable to blend the way they dress and not feel they have to do this extreme back-and-forth.”

In the meantime, next week’s convention offers Tri-Ess members a rare opportunity to wear women’s clothing among other men who like to do the same.

They will attend seminars and tour the NBC Studios and visit the Max Factor cosmetics museum. They’ll take a day trip, shopping in Santa Barbara, and see female impersonators at the Queen Mary in Studio City.

And a North Hollywood photography studio will offer a discount to convention-goers. A glamour session, with professional makeup and a complimentary 8-by-10-inch color print, is being offered for only $35.