Married to a cross dresser!

 
It must take a special type of woman to be married to a cross dresser. Do they turn a blind eye? Put a lock on their clothes cupboard? Do they go along with the thrill of it all? Are their minds full of deep suspicions? Do they accept this aspect of their husband’s personality. These themes are explored in a film I have recently seen called “The Danish Girl”. The film is based loosely on the life of Lili Ilse Elvenes, who was born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener. Lili married Gerda Gottlieb at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and they married in 1904, when Gottlieb was 18 and Wegener was 22. Elbe started dressing in women’s clothes one day filling in for Gottlieb’s absentee model; she was asked to wear stockings and heels so her legs could substitute for those of the model. Elbe obviously took to wearing women’s clothing. The way the films portrays Gerda and Lili’s relationship, is that from the start it was a “game”… a game for thrills, to see how things could go. The introduction of this new ingredient in their marriage is bound to have an impact. Lili/Einar suffer terribly, as he/she faces the fact that he is a woman caught in a man’s body. Gerda suffers as she comes to the realization that the game has moved on and she now has to face the fact that she is losing her husband, who is not the person she married. Gerda does however benefit from the fact that her paintings of Lili, suddenly elevate her artist’s career. However going by what we see in the film, she does accept losing her husband in an almost saintly manner. We have to remember that this is a film set in a time when ignorance prevailed, most doctors perceiving Lili/Einar as being perverted or insane. These are pre-David Bowie days.

Lili finally concluded his/her salvation is to go the full way and become a fully-fledged woman, even entertaining the idea of being able to have a child. Consequently she opted for sex reassignment surgery, which was experimental at the time. Sadly this led to her death.

Grayson Perry, like Lili is an artist. There may be some discernable differences between the two. Perry is married and has a child. From an early age he liked to dress in women’s clothes and in his teens concluded that he was a transvestite. The artist first borrowed a dress from his sister when he was 10-years-old, but never told her why. The artist says that his alter-ego Claire – whose style is inspired by Little Bo Beep, “the crack cocaine of femininity” – gives him a certain level of anonymity.
Aging is a constant battle, Grayson Perry says Trannies go through this horrible cycle,” he said. “When they’re really young and just post-pubescent, they can look gorgeous as a woman – you’re fairly androgynous, you’re thin, you just look good. Grayson Perry’s wife is a psychotherapist, quite a useful métier, not surprisingly Grayson Perry’s childhood was fraught with family problems.

Why does he cross dress? Because I feel compelled to, I suppose,” he ventures. “It gets me excited. A whole raft of feelings, really. It’s not just an erotic thrill. It’s also kind of like a coming-home.”

Other known cross dressers include J. Edgar Hoover’s femme name was apparently “Muriel”. Herman Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe in WW II, was also a crossdresser and partial to silk nightwear.

Comedian/actor Eddie Izzard describes himself as “a straight transvestite or a male lesbian”. He has also described himself as “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body and “a complete boy plus half girl”

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Men watch out for Black Widows!

You come home from work, perhaps your loving wife greets you with a kiss. The smell of the dinner your wife has prepared wafts from the kitchen. You exchange small talk and sit down for dinner. The food looks good and wholesome…but there’s a catch…your wife has only gone and laced it with arsenic…you have succumbed to a Black widow.

There are quite a number of them out there… Back in the mid 1860s, we encounter Lydia Sherman who was facing life with an unemployed husband and six dependent children. She found the idea of getting divorced as unappealing, her answer lay in poison a cheap and easy solution. So she served her husband a bowl of oatmeal gruel laced with arsenic. Following this, she gave arsenic-laced chocolate to her six children and calmly collected the insurance money.

On to pastures new Lydia found a wealthy farmer considerably older than her. She didn’t bide her time she poisoned his clam chowder a year later.
After hitting the marriage trail again she just couldn’t help but poison her third husband for good measure. Between 1864 and 1871, Lydia Sherman dispatched 10 people to an early grave. Dubbed “The Derby Poisoner,” “America’s Queen Poisoner,” or “Connecticut’s ‘Lucrezia Borgia’,” Lydia Sherman was accused of murder in 1871. She escaped the gallows because women were not sentenced to death at the time. Instead, she received the maximum penalty of life in prison.

Gesche Gottfried, seemingly a sweet attractive blond had men flocking to her doorstep, only to choose a loser alcoholic called Mittenberg, a handsome yet unsuitable man who she married in 1815.Their marriage proving a disaster Gesche took a lover, while deciding it was best to get shot of her husband. Having slipped arsenic into his beer, with no suspicians raised as to all and sundry he’d died alcohol poisoning, her next move was to induce her lover into marriage. He declined, due to her having two children, so she promptly poisoned them. When her parents raised objects to the marriage she cherished, of course they joined her list of victims. Due to his persistent refusal to marry her, Gesche poisoned her lover, however they did marry on his deathbed and Gesche was recipient of all of his fortune. She was finally brought to justice, the exact number of her victims is hard to define, but it could be up to 30.

Madeleine de Brinvilliers, a French aristocrat was reckless in the way she went about poisoning people, her Father and two brothers were among hher victims, her motives finacial. She attempted to poison her husband , having earlier taken on a cavalry officer lover. Her end was not so happy she was tortured, beheaded, and her body was burned at the stake in 1676.

Vera Renczi from Bucharest was a woman of rare beauty sent a grand total of sent two husbands, 32 lovers, and her own son to early graves.
What can we deduce? Most Black Widows are after their husband’s fortunes and are particularly interested in insurance money. Some are distrustful of men, driven by jealousy and paranoia. Another trait of a Black Widow is they have to be accomplished liars, to cover the tracks of their heinous crimes, especially if their murders are botched jobs, as in the case of Michele Williams who murdered her husband, successful businessman Greg, claiming she had been shot by an intruder, adding other unlikely stories in the mix, which only thrust more suspicion in her direction.

It is advisable that any Black Widow, plays the role of the grieving widow, something Michele failed to do, the next day going a restaurant for a celebratory big fry-up breakfast. It was later claimed Michele was a man-eater, who moved from one man to the next to get what she could, living the dream life. Under the pressure of the police Michele kept changing her story, coming up with ludicrous alternatives, for example that her husband had committed suicide and that she was simply try to hide this fact from her young daughter. In the end all fingers pointed to her and she was arrested. This compulsive liar continued to spin lie after lie, including saying she was pregnant with twins. It also turned out she was dating a toy boy Gene, a personal trainer. After angering judges, repeatedly changing her story, she finally was awarded a sturdy prison sentence.

In my book Flight of Destiny, one of my stories is called Black Widow. A woman Mercedes Shwartz, is a young woman whose marriage was short-lived. She lives in a remote luxurious house, on her own. She lures a man to house and then after they have had sex has his inexplicable urge to kill him. Suddenly luring unsuspecting men, having sex with them and murdering them becomes a ritual way of life for her.

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What you wouldn’t want for Christmas.

 

What you wouldn’t want for Christmas.

I was doing some research on an explorer, adventurer, favorite courtier of Elizabeth 1 , poet, amongst other things, Sir Walter Raleigh, a man known to many British children who have studied the basics of British History, when I unearthed an interesting fact concerning what happened to the executed Sir Walter’s head, following its encounter with an axe.

Sir Walter who discovered and brought back tobacco and the potato, was implicated as a foe of King James I and imprisoned with a death sentence hanging over him. He was later freed and was sent on another expedition, which ended in failure.

At his execution in 1618 in the Tower of London, Sir Walter Raleigh asked to see the axe that was to behead him and said, “This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all Diseases.” This leads us to think he still had a bit of a sense of humor, despite the fact that he was about to shortly parted from this world. It took the executioner two blows to remove his head, and then after it had been displayed to the crowd that had assembled for the event, it was placed in a red bag, covered with velvet, and presented to his wife. Imagine getting a knock on the door and then someone hands over the head of your dead husband. Apparently it was the custom that the head of the person executed would be presented to the widower.

Most people would freak out, however Lady Raleigh, once Elizabeth Throckmorton, lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, retained her love her doomed husband, never remarried, and somewhat bizarrely kept her husband’s head with her until the day she died, she lived to her eighties no less. She had his head embalmed and kept it by her side for the 29 years she outlived him. According to some stories, she kept the head in a glass case in her home, and curiosity seekers and family friends alike would travel to visit and pay their respects to the head.
Once she passed away, like mother like son, the head passed on to their son, Carew. That son continued the tradition of keeping the embalmed head, and when he passed away, the head was buried with him in Surrey.

 

 

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Francis H Powell, author of Flight of Destiny, 22 quirky short stories…

I enjoyed these tales as they gave me a fantastic break from my daily routine and I enjoyed remembering them and day dreaming about them afterwards. They’re a little Ray Bradbury, a little Stephen King, but with Powell’s own unique twists. Very interesting read.

Dark and quirky places in Paris

 

If you live in Paris, or are on a long visit and have a taste for the dark and quirky side of the city, there is plenty to fulfill your hunger. It is the city known (in previous times) for the use of the guillotine, in fact not far from where I used to live in the fifth district, there was a bar that included a guillotine as part of its decoration. It might seem a rather bizarre form of marketing (bars have to stand out in competition to the many other bars). I’d imagined a guillotine was rather a bulky apparatus, but no…this guillotine was sleek and I suppose very efficient…
Not very far from the bar with the guillotine (it has since been removed, perhaps it made too many punters jumpy, fearful what happen to them if they didn’t pay up at the end of the evening…) is the place where Marie Antoinette was kept before being shunted off to meet the fore-mentioned method of dispatch, the guillotine. The place named La Conciergerie (an infamous place in the reign of terror) were meager to say the least.
Another place I have visited are the Paris catacombs, a place where many skulls and other bones are kept…to form the world’s largest grave…the so called “empire of the dead”. I went there on a “night time” illegal tour. I would not do this again, it is a fascinating place, now smothered in graffiti. If you happen to choose an illegal trip down the catacombs, firstly go with some experts, who have a map and know their way round…secondly if you are spotted by the police, you are liable to a fine.
If you want an above ground safer destination, you could go to the Musée des Arts Forains. The problem is this a private museum…that is not normally open to the public. I was fortunate enough to go last Christmas, when the museum was opened for a short time to the public. It is a museum, which was opened as a labor of love by a man called by Jean Paul Favand. If you visit this museum you feel like you are being transported back in time…into the world of fairgrounds, with old merry-go-rounds. There are many quirky antiques, gathered together by the proprietor, an antiques dealer and actor…who seems to have had an eye for the theatrical…It is like being brought into the a Tim Burton type microcosm. You would need to check the museums website to see if it is possible to visit. It seems to be used as the unusual setting for lavish parties and events. On the day I went, there were musicians, performers and circus acts including the incredible Zaza.
One evening I was the visitor to another rather exclusive and unusual museum in Paris, the Dracula museum. Stuck away in an unlikely setting, you have to walk through rather gloomy surrounding before you reach it. The museum has a garden and among other artifacts of significance to the proprietors , are two graves, ( unoccupied I presume). Contrary to the norm, some of the artefacts have not been tended with loving care and the weather in some cases had done its worst, but no matter. Spread about the garden are objects from previous soirees, goblets left unattended. It was like somebody has chosen to dedicate they garden to the fearful figure of Dracula.
If you have a lust for the darker aspects of life Paris will more than satisfy your needs, it is steeped in history, some it might choose to cover up.
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