Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

by Susan Stryker

In 1961, she convened a clandestine meeting in Los Angeles of several local Transvestia subscribers—instructing them all, unbeknownst to one another, to rendezvous at a certain hotel room, each carrying a pair of stockings and high heels concealed in a brown paper bag. Once the men were assembled, Prince instructed them all to put on the shoes she had asked them to bring—simultaneously implicating all of them in the stigmatized activity of cross-dressing and thereby forming a communal (and self-protective) bond. This group became known as the Hose and Heels Club and began meeting regularly. In 1962, once Prince’s legal troubles were behind her, her community-organizing efforts kicked into high gear. She transformed the Hose and Heels Club into the “Alpha Chapter” of a new national organization, the Foundation for Personality Expression (FPE), which she modeled on the collegiate sorority system and which soon had several chapters across the country. Prince used FPE, later known as the Society for the Second Self, or Tri-Ess, as a platform to promote her personal philosophy about gender, which she outlined in books such as How to Be a Woman Though Male and The Transvestite and His Wife.