Veronica
Vera, Dean of Students, Founder and Author
For Veronica
Vera "Necessity was the mother of invention." The
Academy started as a way to finance a book about what she
had learned exploring her own sexuality in the erotic entertainment
media as a journalist, model and performer.
Miss Vera is
the creation of Mary Veronica, a "good Catholic girl"
whose career was inspired by religious repression, a healthy
libido and curvy comic book sirens like Katy Keene. Mary came
to New York to be a writer but could not pass the typing test
and wound up in Wall Street where she learned to trade stocks.
She left the world of high finance to pursue her dream and
the first story she sold was to a sex magazine, Penthouse
Variations. Thus the door was opened to a brand new liberated
world. Veronica began to meet others who were exploring the
field of human sexuality from an artistic point of view, in
pursuit of understanding more about themselves and the world.
Annie Sprinkle became her best friend and collaborator. Others
included photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, director Gerard
"Deep Throat Damiano. With her gay neighbor
and great friend, Robert Maxwell she travelled "around
the world in 80 lays" and wrote about her adventures
posing for Max's camera in garters and stockings before religious
temples and erotic monuments. Throughout the 1980's Veronica
wrote the column, Veronica Vera's New York which appeared
in Adam, the sex magazine. The column became a sort of diary
of VV and friends and now remains a sexual archive. Veronica
chronicled Times Square pre-Disney. She interviewed pre-op
transsexuals who worked in peep shows and others who performed
in bars and aroused scores of admirers. She met swingers at
Plato's Retreat, s-m afficonados, prostitutes, pimps, porn
stars, sex rights activists, fetishists, artists and construction
workers - people of all sexes and sexual persuasions. She
did her homework.
In 1984, Veronica
testified on the side of freedom of expression and described
her experiences in sexually explicit media before Sen. Arlen
Spector and a committee of the Senate Judiciary. Her testimony
became part of the Report of the Meese Commission. Miss Vera
has always held firm that in order to make the world a better
place we must accept our sexuality and so decriminalize prostitution
and she has worked as an activist for that cause. In 1986
she attended the Second World's Whores Congress which took
place at the European Parliament in Brussesls. In 1989, she
helped to re-organize P.O.N.Y. (Prostitutes of New York).
Want to get
things done? Join a support group. Miss Vera has been a member
of Club 90, the porn star support group whose members include
Veronica Hart, Gloria Leonard, Candida Royalle, and Annie
Sprinkle. Over the years the Club 90 women have helped each
other to expand their horizons and become true pioneers of
sex-positive feminism. In 1993 Veronica Vera's Portrait
Of A Sexual Evolutionary, the video she produced that
documents her career as a porn star as well as her testimony
before the Senate Judiciary Committee was included in a show
about sex work at the University of Michigan Law School in
Ann Arbor, Michigan. The explicit video caused a stir, and
curator Carol Jacobsen was asked to remove if from the exhibition.
A censorship battle ensued in which with Miss Jacobsen, Miss
Vera and the other participating artists represented by Marjorie
Heins of the ACLU, triumphed.
Earlier that
very same year, Veronica held a "coming out" party
for Miss Vera's Finishing School. Until that time, she had
been working quietly with just a handful of clients. New York
magazine asked if they could attend the party and photograph
the attendees, especially the cute little sissy maids. The
result was a full page story in New York magazine that started
the academy's publicity ball rolling, and the rest is herstory.
Students have come to study with Miss Vera from across the
country and around the world.
"Even the
simplest evening gown can be ruined by a penis." So runs
the line in the award-winning ad campaign designed in 1996
by Jeff Griffith and Joe Lovering in collaboration with Miss
Vera's academy. The two Madison Avenue men succeeded in winning
the prestigious ANDY award and ONE CLUB nomination, as well
as numerous other advertising prizes.
Though Veronica
accomplished her dream to write books-- Miss
Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls
(Doubleday, 1997) and Miss
Veras' Cross-Dress for Success
(Villard, 2002)-- she is just as surprised as anyone about
the topic. No one grows up with the idea to become the founder
of the world's first cross-dressing academy, but she did hope
to make her mark on the world. Through her advancement of
gender play she is helping to change the face and the figure
of society.
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