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Whatsapp The big night has arrived and the tiara looks perfect

Once a year a Sydney hotel hosts a 'Seahorse Ball' for straight men—fathers and husbands—who have always harboured a desire to cross-dress. William Verity was there to make a radio documentary and recalls the privilege of seeing men seeing themselves as beautiful for the first time.

You grow up, you think it will go away. You get married, you think it will go away. You have children, you think it will go away. And then you realise: it's never going away.

There are moments—when you're making a radio documentary—that carry with them the enormous privilege of witnessing something sacred.

To be able to record those moments, and bring them to a wider public in the most intimate medium of sound is a greater privilege still.

Several of these moments occurred to me in making The Cross-dressers' Ball, but one moment stands above all the rest.

It happened on the afternoon of the ball, an occasion where, for one night in the year, a group of heterosexual men who say they have always felt the pull of the woman inside them dress up and dance the night away.

The parallels with Cinderella (or 'Cinderfella' as one girl puts it) are obvious. The ball's theme this year was 'Fantasia', and indeed, there is something of the fairytale about it, and of the girlish obsession with the princess myth.

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Whatsapp A 60-year-old man being made up for the first time. He cried when he saw himself in the mirror

This type of cross-dressing is free of sexual desire. The men identify as straight, and many are married. For these men, cross-dressing is a simple pleasure: the pleasure of dressing up and becoming the woman that known was a part of them inside them.

For a few who came with wives and partners, it was chance for them both to dress to the nines and step out onto the dance floor.

However innocuous, this is a pleasure that has been too confusing—too confronting—for many of us to accept, and so it has been a secret pleasure, a pleasure of stolen, furtive moments. A pleasure at times so buried, so shameful, that is has led men to live twisted, secretive existences whose end has too often been suicide.

So to bear witness to a man—a father and a husband—who has struggled with his desires all his life, finally released from the shackles of conformity is a privilege.

'You grow up, you think it will go away,' he says. 'You get married; you think it will go away. You have children, you think it will go away. And then you realise: it's never going away.'

This man was attending his first ball and receiving professional make-up for the first time in his life.

'I am 60 and I may not have a lot of life left, but what I do have left, I'm going to live it for myself,' he says.

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Whatsapp And the wig completes the look

That moment, when the foundation, eyeliner, lipstick, rouge, earrings and then, finally, the wig are all in place. That moment when, for the first time in a lifetime, the makeup artist shows him a mirror.

That moment when he can't help but call out to the world: 'I'm beautiful.'

That moment before the tears come, the tears of relief, the dam of decades breaks and finally he sees himself as he's known himself to be in the hidden depths for all these years.

'Let's hope the dress will do us proud.'

That moment is surely one that speaks to all of us. One that is so personal that it becomes universal, beyond the private world of cross-dressers and their annual Seahorse Ball in a Sydney hotel.

It is the moment when we become truly and completely ourselves, if only for a short time. And how many of us can remember a moment when we've had no choice but to proclaim to the world, 'I'm beautiful?'

The cross-dressers' ball Listen to this episode of Earshot.

Earshot is about people, places, stories and ideas, in all their diversity.