As I sat on Lucy’s bed, on a comforter adorned with tiny pink flowers I couldn’t identify—maybe peonies, or gardenias—she opened her closet door and pulled out dresses on hangers one by one, then draped them in front of her. I wanted to examine the details of those garments, admire the lace pattern of one and the pleating of another, but I would have needed to get really close, and it felt too early to expose my poor vision to my new friend. But she must have sensed a heightened reaction when she showed me a sleeveless dress made of black velvet, a fabric I immediately identified because its shade was darker than any other cloth, a depth of color I hadn’t known back home.

“I bet this would look great against your skin,” Lucy said.

She left the room so I could change. After I stripped down to my white briefs, I stepped into the dress, put my arms through the sleeve holes, and shivered at that forbidden thrill I’d only known about secondhand, of being a man in women’s clothes. I’d grown up seeing such men, had even worked with a few when I was a child actor in the Philippines, those bakla a staple of slapstick comedies on TV and in movies. But while my culture tolerated bakla, nobody ever took them seriously, so I wasn’t interested in being like them. But maybe because I knew I could dress up as a girl if I wanted to, I also didn’t really find the idea particularly exciting, not until I got to America and noticed how men dressing up as women seemed so much more taboo than it did back home.

I was able to zip the dress up most of the way, as it stretched to encompass my back, muscular from pull-ups at the gym. The neckline scooped tastefully in front and was bordered in a shiny material, maybe satin, which I didn’t notice from afar. I looked down to observe that the dress ended a couple of inches above my knee and had a slit on one side. I remembered a woman on a talk show say that every girl needs a little black dress in her closet; this was the kind of dress she must have meant.

“I hate you,” Lucy said when she came back into the room and helped me zip up the rest of the way. “This looks way better on you than it does on me.”

As Lucy looked through her jewelry box to see what might work with my outfit, I recalled the moment a few years earlier, I must have been thirteen, when my cousin Baby walked in on me as I was about to put a shirt on in front of our old wooden house’s only mirror, attached to a weathered armoire.