In painting I was able to satisfy my leg and nipple fetishism. —P. MolinierI WAS SHOWING A FRIEND some pictures by cross-dressing painter-photographer Pierre Molinier, and we were arrested by one of the artist en travesti, posing beside one of his paintings, wearing a maniacal grin of the sort one comes to expect in his photographs—a grin that is rich, beautiful, luxurious, desirable, insane, “Joan Crawford stars in Possessed!” The interior is drab, dreary, “comfortable,” in that asphyxiating way we’re familiar with from Zola’s Thérèse Raquin. Molinier is a character mostly of the postwar period,