At Miss Vera’s, the Mirror Reveals a Changed Man

In offering something for everyone, New York City instantly becomes anyone’s niche.

There are barbershops for children and shoe stores for petites; there are shrinks for cats and dogs and specialty shops for witches and warlocks; there are hangouts for Caribbean cab drivers and restaurants that cater to Israeli secret agents; there are groups for overeaters, over-workers and liars. And there is a store that sells only five items of Venetian glass for the table.

But this only partially explains Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls.

The life of Veronica Vera provides more insight.

She is a 40-ish former porn star with thick raven hair and enormous breasts. She spent her girlhood in New Jersey where she excelled as an English major at a local college, she says. Later, she crossed the Hudson River to pursue a publishing career and along the way got into the sex industry. Robert Mapplethorpe once photographed her in an erotic pose. Annie Sprinkle, performance artist and porn queen, is a close friend.

“Ironically, repression laid a foundation for my exhibitionism,” Miss Vera declares in one of many articles she has written about her sex life. “I have carried this concept further to evolve a theory of sexual evolution--the idea that no practice is kinky, bizarre or perverse. In terms of each individual’s development and experience, everything makes absolute sense.”

And so, in this context, does Miss Vera’s school in the heart of this great metropolis.

But really, if there were a reality, it lay in students’ testimony.

“I needed to learn makeup,” says “Patricia,” a six-footer with a deep voice who takes a class once a month at Miss Vera’s. “The lessons are fun.”

With a curriculum that covers everything from Personal Maid Training to High-Heel Walking, this school for cross-dressers has attracted almost 200 students in two years, says Miss Vera, the founder, headmistress and primary salesman for the academy.

Students find the school through ads in magazines like Transvestian; they request brochures and then come in for 2 1/2-hour private make-overs with Miss Vera and her female staff of deans. They pay $300 a class and $100 an hour if it goes overtime. There are weekend pajama parties and outings along Fifth Avenue.

And each class begins with a ceremony.

“I dedicate myself to releasing all the juicy female energy inside of me,” recite the students, mostly 35- to 45-year-old professionals who are heterosexual or bisexual or married or whatever.

They all fall into what Miss Vera insists is 3%-5% of the population that likes to cross-dress. The International Foundation for Gender Education in Waltham, Mass.--an informational group--is her source.

The “main campus” is in the Chelsea section of Manhattan in a studio apartment in a building a block west of the exclusive shop Barney’s and a few blocks east of the Ganesvoort Street “meat market.” (Miss Vera lives next door to the studio; her best friend, a gay man, lived in it until he died of AIDS several years ago.)

Inside, everything is shocking pink, neatly cluttered and slightly worn--like those manor houses British aristocrats can’t quite afford to keep up. Wigged mannequins and pots of makeup cover the top of a laminated bureau with a half-dozen drawers overflowing with lace panties, corsets and falsies. A pink moire curtain hides a closet of large-sized clothing and racks of pumps. Miss Vera takes out a pair of Size 12 red patent-leather stilettos and says, “These are not really recommended by Miss Dana. Two-inch heels are best.”

Miss Dana is one of the deans. Each dean has a specialty. She heads up the Department of High Heels; Miss Dorothy teaches Voice; Miss Vicki instructs in Home Economics; Miss Paulette guides the “girls” through the overwhelming world of Cosmetology.

“I use professional makeup with bases containing beeswax,” says Paulette Powell, a 25-year-old poet/housewife from Alabama who performs miracles covering up 5 o’clock shadows with such a thick base. She has done makeup for female models in department store catalogues but finds working on men more rewarding.

“For them to see themselves in the mirror when they’ve been made up to passable is fantastic,” Powell gushes. “They embrace their ‘fem selves’ with adoration. Tears are in their eyes. They say, ‘I can’t believe it. It’s me! I’m so beautiful.’ ”

Feeling women’s clothing against their skin and seeing themselves dressed up in the mirror is as sensual as it is sexual for the students, according to Powell and Vera.

But such observations, again, need not come from the staff.

Miss Vera asks several satisfied students to call a reporter; they give only the identities of their “fem selves.”

“I look on the school mostly as a place to have fun,” says “Stephanie,” who says he is a lawyer in his late 40s. He is calling from his office in New Jersey. “Yeah, I learned the basics of makeup and walking in a more feminine manner, but mostly Miss Vera’s is fun.”

Sexual pleasure is what he remembers most from his first experience wearing women’s clothes, as a teen-ager. But now that he is older, he says, he mainly appreciates the comfort of the clothes and how they make him feel.

“Patricia,” a 41-year-old computer programmer, says he wears ties to work but likes conservative women’s clothes for Miss Vera’s--A-line skirts and simple sweaters. During his monthly visits to the academy, he concentrates on voice lessons.

“My voice is monotone,” he says. “I don’t express anything with it. I’m not trying to sound more feminine, just more expressive.”

The first time he went out dressed as a woman with Miss Vera, he wore a skirt, two black sweaters, pearls and low pumps. “I’m 6-foot-4, so no one was a slight bit fooled. But it was something I always wanted to do. It was outrageous. It was great. It was like prom night.”

Miss Vera insists that the thrill of going out, “to feel the wind up their skirts,” far outweighs the double takes of passers-by.

But Miss Vera’s hopes for her students are for more than a passing thrill.

“To me, being a woman is not just about makeup and clothes,” she says, sounding--as she often does--downright lofty about it all. “It’s also about assimilating a consciousness.”

Which is why as part of the introduction to her school Miss Vera has students pick five role models. Simone de Beauvoir, Cher and Diane Sawyer are quite popular.

“Men have had to endure what I call ‘Venus envy,’ ” she says. “Now I want to liberate them.”

Indeed, the way she talks about the academy, the curriculum, her students and her deans puts a middle-class imprimatur on the whole phenomenon--and diffuses leering of these people on the fringe.

In fact, as she describes it, this sounds very mainstream. Unlike the drag queens in the renowned documentary “Paris Is Burning,” Miss Vera’s students apparently do not don women’s clothes as a way of jumping class lines. They already have status. Miss Vera is trying to bring their secrets and fantasies into the mainstream.

She is even teaching a course at the Learning Annex in Manhattan this winter. It is advertised on the same page with a course by famed New York madam Sydney Biddle Barrows and a course entitled “How to Marry a Rich Man.”

Gazing at the pink boas and long blond wigs in the classroom, it is hard not to think of the emperor’s new clothes.

“If it wasn’t for the school, these men would have to dress the way they do in the S&M; clubs and the dungeons downtown,” says Vera. “I wanted to create a place for my students to be comfortable embracing their sexuality, the way I am comfortable embracing mine.”

Vera is writing a book about her haven for cross-dressers. She also hopes to expand to improved quarters and buy additional props.

“This is a new business,” she says. “There’s always a need for a new wig.”