The Transvestites of Weir House: Collin Weir

In his youth, before he knew there was more than one set of bones buried beneath Weir House, Collin Weir lived "the gay life", had many lovers, and interacted with transvestite scene in Memphis, Tennessee.  In these years, he fit the stereotype of what people who have never known a cross-dresser perceive their lives to be. 

His life changed when he became an uncle, intensely protective of his nephew and niece whose mother, his sister Mary, had only episodic grasps upon her own sanity.  He is also tired of the scene with the endless parties and lack of stable relationships.  He no longer cross-dresses in public places.  The practice of putting on his murdered mother's clothes ceased when he outgrew them.  Now he has replicas of her clothes in larger sizes, but as the years pass, the room where he keeps them becomes a retreat.  He goes there when he cannot cope, when his failure to save his nephew and sister shatter him, when he loses his niece and exists at Weir House alone like a morbid ghost.  His mother's clothes were what they have always been, a refuge.  They embrace him in her ghostly arms. 

In a sense, Col's cross dressing is all about the loss of his mother.  This is true of most male transvestites I have known in real life.  By cross dressing, many of them step into the persona of a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, some female relative who affected them deeply and in inexplicable ways impressed part of their soul upon them.  Few are as straightforward as Col, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother -- to the point that he haunts and terrorizes his father, whose crime has gone undiscovered except for his children who witnessed him kill their mother in a fit of jealous rage.

When Col, dressed up, looks in the mirror, he sees his mother, and this comforted him throughout his childhood, amused him when he turned the resemblance against his father, and outraged him when he discovered the truth about her.

Col's transvestitism does not arise from a conviction that he is born as the wrong gender.  If he and his sister Mary had not witnessed the murder of their mother, he would probably still have identified as homosexual, but whether he would have been drawn to wear women's clothes is difficult to say.  Homosexuality and the urge to wear the clothes of the opposite gender sometimes occur in the same individual but by no means is it universal, any more than it is a given that cross dressers are gay.