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[Image]Back in the BI (before Internet) days I was searching for any information I could get on transgender people. If I spotted a newspaper article on a transperson, I clipped it out and stuck it in an envelope to peruse later. I saved, but eventually lost in the process of moving from my parents house to my apartment the JET magazine issues that chronicled the stories of transsistahs Justina Williams and Sharon Davis.

But one unlikely source of info for me came from a glossy magazine called Female Mimics International, or FMI for short.

[Image]I ended up getting dragged into the Bellaire News adult store one day by a friend who was looking for adult movies to rent. While he was perusing the movies, I was hanging around the magazine racks and spotted an issue of FMI that had an African-American transwoman on the cover. Since I was with my homeboy and wasn't even remotely ready to tell him that I was hanging out in Montrose but dressing a bit differently when I did so, I couldn't purchase it at that moment. I came back a few day later and picked up it because I was curious about the magazine and its contents.

[Image]FMI was part of Kim Christy's adult publishing world. While part of each issue served to promote whatever adult transgender themed video she had just produced or some of her regular Kim Christy starlets such as Heather Fontaine, Dana Douglas, and Summer St. Cerly, there were in many FMI magazines short fiction stories, transition tips, coverage of the California transgender pageant scene and San Francisco and LA transgender events. There was also one Kim published when her longtime friend and New York transgender icon International Chrysis died that had a tribute article.

[Image]I ended up with a large collection of them before an ex-girlfriend found them in the box I kept them in while rummaging through my apartment closet. She unilaterally took them to the dumpster while I was at work. I was royally pissed about it when I found out about it later not only because they were my property, now it's hard to even find FMI magazines and the collection I'd built up over several years would have made a nice addition to some GLBT archive.

But in its own way, FMI not only showcased the beauty of transgender women, but actually managed to inform and open a window to another aspect of that world at the same time.