It wasn’t long before he started selling them to other maskers. His side business became so successful that he quit his day job as a printer and turned a room of his Seattle home into a masking workshop, much to the chagrin of his wife of 12 years.

“She thinks it's weird,” he explained, adding that she steers clear of the workroom and its row upon row of female faces. “She doesn't have anything to do with it. Once in a while she might help me with something but it's not really her thing.”

Her response also quashed the possibility they’d incorporate masking into their sex life, which Kerry insists is a good thing. “It's one of those things where we all sort of have fantasies, scenarios we'd like to do but I think the reality would be really, really disappointing. So probably better not to try that,” he said.

“In a way I don't want to fetishize my wife. You know, I have sex with my wife because I love her. And I don't want to turn her into a sex object, if that makes any sense at all. Because the mask is a fetish object, that's the only thing it really exists for.”

He believes his wife’s discomfort reflects society’s attitude toward masking, even if people know about it it’s not something they openly discuss. “A lot of people are very creeped out by the whole masking thing,” he added. “It'd be the same as talking about autoerotic asphyxiation, no one wants to talk about it, you don't want to read about it, and you don't want to hear about it, it's just not part of polite company.”

But that hasn’t stopped those at the vanguard of popular culture from taking note of Kerry and his masked brethren. Fashion photographer Steven Meisel shot women in female masks for Vogue Italia in 2012 after coming across videos online. Actress Jamie Brewer also wore a female mask during the Halloween episode of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, screen grabs of which were taken and quickly shared among members of the masking community.

These non-judgmental representations are considered a welcome departure from what’s usually on offer. Masks are a familiar trope used in horror movies to build fear around the concept of the unknown, and Silence of the Lambs took things one step further, with serial killer Buffalo Bill skinning his female victims to make a bodysuit—not entirely dissimilar to the silicone ones maskers sometimes wear. Kerry believes the association helps to demonize and further marginalize maskers, though he’s not completely humorless about it. “If I had him as a customer we would have saved all those girls lives,” he laughed.

While most maskers realize the practice is not broadly accepted, the criticism they get from others within the fetish community, as well as non-masking cross-dressers, carries a particular sting.

“It does strike me odd though that people who practice some of the most socially unacceptable behaviors can also be the most prejudiced,” said T-Vyrus, 34 “in doll years,” a self-described “drag queen, tranny, female masker” and editor of masking magazine Hot Girls. “Among cross-dressers, shemales, trannies and the like, there is often the thought that masking isn't real, that it's a put on, a surrogate, a farce. The thought that if a person were truly serious, they wouldn't hide behind a mask.”

This fear of rejection is what keeps truck driver Lisa, 47, from wearing a mask in public. Like Kerry, she identifies as a heterosexual man and maintains an active “male life” during the day, but uses the female pronoun when she transforms into Lisa, his alter ego, at night. She lives with her two sisters in New Jersey, and though they are aware of what their brother gets up to behind a locked bedroom door, it’s never discussed.