Edee King mastered the art of keeping secrets.

Perhaps known best as the cleaning lady at the Heretic, where she has tidied up each night’s chaos for the past nine years, King has lived two fascinating lives: one as the happy-go-lucky woman she is today, and the one she lived as Ed King, a successful engineer desperately seeking refuge for the part of himself he kept in the dark for 40 years.

King identifies as a heterosexual man who leads a "multi-gender" life as a cross dresser and prefers to be thought of as a woman. The life she leads today comes after a guilt and shame-ridden adolescence and young adulthood that turned positive through acceptance in gay Atlanta.

Born in 1938 in Tennessee, King says there was never a time she didn’t want to dress in her mother’s clothes. The family allowed the behavior in secret, telling no one but King’s grandmother, who took the secret to her grave.

"I remember coming home from the first grade and taking my clothes off and putting my mother’s clothes on," King recalls. "It just seemed to be natural. My parents didn’t understand that it wasn’t just happenstance."

Tragically, both parents died before King turned 10, forcing her to take an attic room in a home with several extended family members. The money was short, but the work on the family farm was plentiful.

The move ended opportunities for the young boy to dress in female clothing in everyday life. But a stash of clothes stored in the attic room exponentially increased the secret wardrobe she donned every evening after the chores were done and the door was closed.

"I never went out," King says. "I took every opportunity to dress, even when it was such a secret. I thought I was the only boy in the world that wanted to dress up because back then it was very hush-hush."

King also learned to play the flute, a hobby that later leant itself to a scholarship at Peabody College in Nashville, where interests in math and physics eventually overtook music.

After three years at Peabody, King left to work a technical job that later led to enrolling at Rochester Institute of Technology, a degree in optical engineering and a contracting job with government agencies including NASA and the Department of Defense. As Ed, he married and fathered children.

King didn’t dare talk about the truth behind the suit and tie. When the secret was finally revealed, the family didn’t take it very well.

"I told my wife about the dressing, and she told everyone, my friends, my family and my job," King says. "She could not handle it. Neither could the family."

Shortly after the news broke, King followed an ad in a transgender magazine featuring affordable high heels at Carousel, a now-defunct store in Atlanta.

The owner noted King’s withdrawn nature and asked if she ever went in public dressed as a woman. When King said no, plans were set, make-up was done and she enjoyed a night that changed her life forever.

"It was like being shot out of a gun," King says of her first appearance at the old Onyx bar at the corner of Peachtree and West Peachtree streets. "It was just such a revelation that there were thousands of people that just didn’t care. I just thought, ‘I’m in the wrong town.’"

King left her family, quit her high-powered job and packed her belongings for a new life in Atlanta. Ed could finally become Edee.

"If you keep personal secrets, they will form a prison around you," King says. "And the key is having the courage to say ‘This is what I am, like it or leave.’

In Atlanta, King started dressing as a woman full-time, married her second wife in a "friendship marriage," and eventually began hormone therapy, with no plans to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

After years of secrecy, King’s life became an open book. Three years ago, Joy Fox, a graduate student at University of Wyoming, heard King’s story by chance and shifted her masters in counseling thesis to focus on King.

"I was struck by Miss Edee’s story that so clearly portrayed innocence, curiosity, shame, determination and ultimately self-actualization," Fox says.

Fox was familiar with "people who cross dressed and fantasy dressed at any opportunity," she says. "But Edee is not masquerading. She is determined to exercise her right to identify as a heterosexual male who prefers to express and enhance the feminine part of her identity."

Happy and healthy, King rides nine miles a day on her stationary bicycle and relishes "multi-gender" life among Atlanta’s gay men and lesbians — as a woman in her personal life and as a man when cleaning for clients.

King says she’s blessed to be part of Atlanta’s gay scene.

"My challenges today are to continue to give back to the community what it’s given me, which is my freedom, my piece of mind, my self-worth more than anything," King says. "The gay community has given me my self-worth."