Pantyhose continues the story of his early experiences with tights. Until he was eight, his encounters had been solely with the thick woolly ones he had worn when he was younger or the dance tights worn by his sister. In the last instalment we left him as an eight year old boy, watching for the first time as sheer tights were advertised in a TV commercial. He was instantly hooked, and could not wait to try some! G.]
One day my parents left home to do some errands. Instead of asking them to go along, I made a pretext that I wanted to stay in the home to play, which was accepted. I waited to make sure my parents were away, then I went to my parents' bedroom, I opened some drawers until I found a piece of hosiery. It was not tights, but stockings. My mother didn't wear tights. I put the stockings on. The sensation was not so bad, but it wasn't what I was looking for. I put the stockings back in their original place, then I left my parents' bedroom and went to mine to play with my toys like I was supposed to do.
Each time my parents had to leave home, I asked them again and again if I could stay there to play. Every time I opened my mother's drawers, the only piece of hosiery I found was stockings. Except the last time: at last my mom had switched to tights! Hurrah! I tried on the tights: it was exactly what I expected. I experienced the same feeling of comfort as with my woollen tights for babies. I remember the fabric was cold on my skin (maybe because of goose flesh). The tights were cheaply made, but at this very time, it didn't matter! I was so happy to have found tights that it was just a detail. Then, a terrible thought came to my mind: I realised that as a boy, it would be very difficult to live with that, and on the other hand, by no means I wanted to stop wearing tights. All my life, I would have to keep that secret. I would not share that with anybody else. I felt both guilty and terribly alone. I would be alone all my life, did I think...
One of my favourite pastimes then, was to open mail-order catalogues on the hosiery pages to watch the tights. I did that quite openly with my mother around, I never had a comment for doing that. It is by reading these catalogues that, only by logic, I deduced that the higher the deniers the more opaque the tights are.
One day, as I was opening the TV guide, I came across an advert (a new one) for SEB pressure-cookers, featuring a vocal band of four male singers now retired called "Les frères Jacques" (Jack Brothers in English, only two of them were real brothers), hired for the ad. The band members were used to sing on stage dressed in two-coloured unitards. I said in myself, "well, they wear sorts of tights, and nobody bats an eyelid, so it is possible in some limited context for men to wear tights, and it is quite well accepted."

At school, I made friends with a schoolmate who showed me the Marvel comics he had. So, it was the first time I could read the adventures of the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Spider-Man... Even if I was aware that it was just comics, with stories not connected to reality, again I understood there was a certain acceptance for men in tights in society, given that, except maybe the Thing and the Beast for obvious reasons, all Marvel super-heroes wore tights, whether they were male or female. It could not be just comics, they wouldn't have worn tights without a certain acceptance from society, or else the artists wouldn't have drawn them dressed like that.
I once saw the Italian singer Rafaela Cara in a TV pop show. She sang "A fare l'amore comincia tu". She was an exquisite blond and wore a black leotard and black tights. This image is still in my memory right now.
Not only didn't I find a photo of Rafaela Cara in black leotard and tights,
I didn't find any Rafaela Cara photo at all ! Google has been totally
useless here. It is something I don't understand given she had a certain
popularity in Italy and in France in the 70's.