Seven years ago, I had my first tutorial in becoming a man. The idea for this book came to me then, when I went out for the first time in drag. I was living in the East Village at the time, undergoing a significantly delayed adolescence, drinking and drugging a little too much, and indulging in all the sidewalk freak show opportunities that New York City has to offer.

Tolstoj -- tri medvedja. Lev i sobachka. Bazhov -- skazka: serebrjanoe kopytce. 61 skazki samym malen'kim -- teremok. Tri porosenka. 325 vera inber -- rasskazy: kak ja byla malen'kaja. Zowenko -- rasskazy: lelja i min'ka. 144 malysham pered snom: marshak -- skazki v stikhah: usatyj-polosatyj. Skazka pro glupogo myshonka.

Back then I was hanging around a lot with a drag king whom I had met through friends. She used to like to dress up and have me take pictures of her in costume. One night she dared me to dress up with her and go out on the town.

I'd always wanted to try passing as a man in public, just to see if I could do it, so I agreed enthusiastically. She had developed her own technique for creating a beard whereby you cut half inch chunks of hair from unobtrusive parts of your own head, cut them into smaller pieces, and then more or less glopped them onto your face with spirit gum. Using a small round freestanding mirror on her desk, she showed me how to do it in the dim, greenish light of her cramped studio apartment. It wasn't at all precise and it wouldn't have passed muster in the daylight, but it was good enough for the stage, and it would work well enough for our purposes in dark bars at night. I made myself a goatee and mustache, and a pair of baroque sideburns. I put on a baseball cap, loose-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt.

In the full-length mirror I looked like a frat boy - sort of. She did her thing-which was more willowy and soft, more like a young hippie guy who couldn't really grow much of a beard - and we went out like that for a few hours. We passed, as far as I could tell, but I was too afraid to really interact with anyone, except to give one guy brief directions on the street. He thanked me as 'dude' and walked on. Mostly though we just walked the streets of the Village scanning people's faces to see if anyone took a second or third look. But no one did. Obrazci detskogo portfolio dlya maljchika v det sadu. And that, oddly enough, was the thing that struck me the most about that evening.

It was the only thing of real note that happened. But it was significant.

I had lived in that neighborhood for years, walking its streets where men lurk outside of bodegas, on stoops and in doorways much of the day. As a woman, you couldn't walk down those streets invisibly. You were an object of desire or at least semi-prurient interest to the men who waited there, even if you weren't pretty - that, or you were just another piece of pussy to be put in its place. Either way, their eyes followed you all the way up and down the street, never wavering, asserting their dominance as a matter of course. If you were female and you lived there, you got used to being stared down, because it happened every day and there wasn't anything you could do about it.