"A memoir of one woman's long journey to late transition, in an era before real community or appropriate language was available to help her understand herself"--

How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it? Goetsch brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at New York City's Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city's crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and '90s. Under cover of night, crossdressers risked their jobs and their safety to give expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Here Goetsch chronicles her long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades. -- adapted from jacket