74 marieclaire.com.auPHOTOGRAPHED BY CORINNA KERN. TEXT BY KATIE BREEN AND CORINNA KERNmale. “I am not a top model and I don’t
have an ideal physique, but I can create
an illusion that’s almost perfect,” she
says. “It’s my only passion. It is a way of
living out a deeper part of myself.”
Others say their fascination comes
from childhood experiments. For Katrina
it was in the kitchen. “My fetish started
when I was wearing household gloves. Iwas 11 and being inside
those gloves was a
phenomenal feeling. After
that, I regularly bought
new ones, the very tight
ones. At that age, I liked
masks but I had no money
to buy them. Sometimes, I
secretly used my mother’s
tights. Maybe I wanted to
hide. Maybe I felt that I
was not in the right body.
The idea that the ‘real me’
was not there fascinated
me. This is how I built
my own small world.”
Germany had a
liberal and experimental
sex scene between the two World Wars:
the word “transvestite” was coined by
German physician Magnus Hirschfeld
and the first gender reassignment
surgery was performed in Berlin after
WWI – until it was banned by the Nazis.
Yet today, Germany has retained a
tolerance to practices that might seem
fringe elsewhere. In fact, the governmentrecently allowed male and female
prisoners to dress as men or women,
whatever sex they were born with.
While masking goes beyond gender
play and speaks to something darker,
there is an incorrect assumption that it’s
linked to extreme sexual practices. (If
you Google “maskers + sexuality” you’re
directed towards links that take you to
“bondage” and “hot female masking”.)
“But the practice is not always
sexually motivated,” says Luke Malone.
“The assumptions that it’s a sex thing, or
that all Maskers are gay, are wrong. For
some, it’s just about fun, for others, it’s
the pursuit of beauty and identity.”
But sex comes into it, whether it’s
heterosexual men like Christian with
his girlfriends, or gay and transgender
people having occasional sexual
encounters. In the main room of fetish
clubs in Christian’s town, people drink
and dance, but the back room, which
he calls the “play area”, is open for sex, as
in many straight or gay clubs. Maskers
are humans after all. You may just need
to dig a little deeper to find them.“I am not a top
model and I don’t
have an ideal
physique, but I
can create an
illusion that’s
almost perfect”- Bear Girl
Bear Girl in the kitchen
of her Munich home.
Below left: Chrissie
Seams goes out for a
walk in public – many
maskers would like to
do the same thing but
aren’t brave enough.Society