When He’s a She : Lifestyles: Drag queens, cross-dressers and transsexuals slip out of the closet at Van Nuys conference.

Psssst. Susan has this little secret.

Her other half is her best girlfriend, her lover and her husband--all rolled into one.

In the daytime, he drives a truck. Sometimes when they go to bed, he wants to borrow her silk little nothings.

Susan calls him he when he dresses in men’s clothing and she when he wears feminine things. Sometimes, it gets confusing.

Susan hasn’t told her parents, her co-workers, her friends. Nobody. “My parents are going to find out about our little secret at their funeral,” she said wryly. “And not one day before.”

Susan (not her real name) is married to a cross-dresser named Jan. On Friday, the couple stood in the outdoor garden of a Van Nuys hotel, surrounded by a bunch of bulky, broad-shouldered Mrs. Doubtfires. Men shoe-horned into women’s clothing. Men in too much makeup and beehive hairdos.

But this wasn’t “The Crying Game.” It was the smiling game.

Because for this one day, and for this one day only, perhaps, more than 100 heterosexual cross-dressers, gay drag queens and transsexuals breathed the heady air outside the closet.

They were “out” without shame or punishment, attending the three-day “International Congress on Gender, Cross Dressing and Sex Issues” sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at Cal State Northridge. For many, it was an important meeting to assess the state of the subculture, addressing the issues that confront this publicly shunned community.

Those issues include how to break the news of a cross-dresser’s behavior to family and children, how therapists can learn more about the behavior to better treat its emotional stresses, and the sources of antipathy between different types, such as heterosexual cross-dressers and gay drag queens.

Organizers say the conference marked the first time that cross-dressers, commonly called transvestites in the past, have met face-to-face with more than 200 social scientists, psychologists and therapists from the United States and around the world who study them and the phenomena many are calling “America’s newest sexual revolution.”

For transsexual Michele Kammerer, the conference was like standing in the broad sunlight after so many years in the darkened closet. Kammerer, a Los Angeles city fire captain, underwent a sex change operation several years ago.

“I’m just having a good time,” she said, displaying a lapel button that said “Nobody knows I’m a transsexual.”

“I like all the open-minded people. That’s quite different from what you’re usually accustomed to if you’re a member of this community. And I think a lot of the girls are learning at this conference that the therapist is not the enemy.”

Kymberleigh Richards, a spokeswoman for the conference organizers, said the gathering was designed with the therapists in mind. “We’re hoping to bring the future professional educators and therapists together and give them hard factual information, so that if they cover such issues with a client they can deal in facts instead of rhetoric or popular media misconceptions.”

On the first day of the conference, the participants had to share the hotel with a convention of police officers, who walked through the lobby doing double takes.

“You can tell a cop the way they slice through a crowd like a knife slicing bread and the way they stab the air with their finger when they talk to each other,” said cross-dresser Suzanne Burk of Las Vegas, who described herself as a trashy club girl.

But Joyce Andrews, a cross-dresser and former Orange County police officer, says cops aren’t the only ones who discriminate against men who dress as women.

“All cops aren’t bad,” she said. “I know a cross-dresser who got pulled over once, and after the officer made her walk the line on a field sobriety test, he let her go with a warning: Go work on her voice.”

Susan is another one who has come to terms with her husband’s predilection. But it has taken time.

Back when she and her husband were dating, he told her he had a secret he would share one day.

“I imagined these horrible things,” she said. “So, one day, I told him that I had to know. When he admitted that he was a cross-dresser, I said, ‘Oh, is that all?’ ”

Slowly, she has been shown a world she never dreamed of. Now she and her husband shop for dresses together and trade clothes and jewelry. But they never talk about their secret.

The only people who know are themselves and their support group within the transgendered community. And that troubles Susan.

“It’s really hard when I hear people making fun of the transgendered,” she said. “If I speak up and defend them, then I’m suddenly under question. And if I just keep quiet, then I’m letting my community down.

“I’m on the fence. And that’s not a good feeling. Not a good feeling at all.”