taking a break

I am taking a few weeks off. I will be back in August.

Those interested in Angela Douglas should note a new eyewitness comment on my posting about her, from someone who knew her in her later years.

There is a new trans biography site at Trans Mirror. I recommend it.

1969 – a year of much activity

1969 was the year of the Woodstock and Altamont Music Festivals, of the first US men on the moon and a Soviet probe on Venus, of Richard Nixon as US president, Golda Meir as Israeli PM, Yasser Arafat leader of the PLO, Georges Pompidou as President of France, Gaddafi as president of Libya, Olaf Palme as PM of Sweden and Willy Brandt as Chancellor of West Germany, of escalating troubles in Northern Ireland, of the US forces expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia, withdrawing the first troops, starting secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris and the My Lai massacre, of the last Beatles performance and John & Yoko’s bed-in in Montreal, of the FLQ bombings and martial law in Montreal, of the first Concorde test flights, of the Football War between Honduras & El Salvador, of the Manson murders, of the first ATM machine, of the Beijing Metro, of the first Monty Python and Sesame Street series, of the first ARPANET (precursor of the Internet) link.

Stonewall was not the only trans event of interest in 1969. Corbett v Corbett was a legal disaster for trans and intersex persons. The biggest soap-opera of the year was Dawn Langley Hall’s marriage.

Legislation, court rulings & protests

Canada (albeit with an age of consent for anal sex of 21) and West Germany (partially) decriminalize homosexuality,. Similar decriminalizations had been passed in Iceland (1940), Switzerland (1942) Sweden (1944), Surinam (1944), Portugal (1945), Poland (1948), Greece (1951), Thailand (1956), Czechoslovakia (1961), Hungary (1961), Israel (1963), Chad (1967), England & Wales (1967), East Germany (1968), Bulgaria (1968). In the US, only Illinois (1962) has decriminalized homosexuality. It will not achieve nation-wide decriminalization until Lawrence v, Texas which went to the Supreme Court in 2003.

Arthur Corbett applies for an annulment of his marriage to April Ashley and is granted his prayer. The judge, Lord Justice Ormrod, also rules that a person born male is legally male in perpetuity. Corbett v Corbett becomes case law in the UK and in Australia. The correcting of birth certificates for intersex and transgendered persons ceases, and such persons lose the legal right to be treated as their new gender – in particular to marry a person of the now opposite gender. This situation will continue in the UK until the Gender Recognition Act of 2004.

The Stonewall Riots.

Persons having already completed transition

British celebrity biographer Dawn Langley Hall, now resident in Charleston, South Carolina, follows up her transition with marriage to a black artist, John-Paul Simmons. A year later they would have a baby girl. This did not go well with other residents of Charleston.

Reed Erickson sells his family business for $5 million and goes on to amass over $40 million, mainly from investments in oil-rich real estate. Some of this was used to finance the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) which placed some its money in transsexual research.

Jeanette Schmid, has moved to Vienna, and is now a professional whistler.

Billy Tipton is living with his last wife and three adopted sons. As his arthritis worsened, he quit playing piano a few years later.

Amanda Lear is in London.

Marie-Pierre Pruvot, previously a star at La Carrousel, is studying at Sorbonne University.

Mario Martino, the author of the first FTM autobiography has organized the Labyrinth Foundation Counseling Service in New York.

Terry Rogers is well employed as a ventriloquist and designer of magical tricks.

Terry Noel, previously a performer with The Jewel Box Revue and at the 82 Club, working as a typist, moves to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where she would find her husband.

Christine Jorgensen had published her autobiography two years earlier. It is now being turned into a film.

Aleshia Brevard is in her first Hollywood film, The Love God.

---------- and the non-ops -------------

Perry Desmond is running a beauty salon and working as an astrologer in New Orleans.

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf is curator of her Gründerzeit Museum.

Persons starting transition or living full time

Angela Douglas, who would shortly found the Transsexual Action Organization, starts to transition.

Della Aleksander is transitioning. She will go to Dr Burou the next year.

Previously a female impersonator, Liz Lyons was in transition. She would later put out x-rated LPs.

Erik Schinegger the champion female skier, having been told by the International Olympic Committee that he was chromosomally male, starts to transition.

Daniel van Oosterwijck, who will appeal to the European Court in 1980, starts transition.

---------------- and the non-ops ----------------------

Virginia Prince, after a second divorce, has had electrolysis and is taking female hormones again. She starts to live full time as female

Charlotte Bach is starting to live fulltime as female.

Persons who will transition later

The soon-to-be Paula Grossman is still a music teacher in New Jersey.

The future Joanna Clark is still a Chief Petty Officer in the US Navy.

Susanna Valenti is writing for Transvestia, and hosting social events at Casa Susanna.

The future Renée Richards is a New York ophthalmologist and is playing men’s tennis.

The future Leslie Elaine Perez is on death row in Texas. After a last minute reprieve she will be released and will transition.

The future Carol Riddell is at Lancaster University. She will be in Dr Burou’s clinic at the same time as Jan Morris.

The future Michelle Duff, who had won the Belgian Grand Prix in 1964 at a record average speed, returns to motorcycle racing and wins the Eastern Canadian Championship.

The future Sandy Stone is a recording engineer. She will transition in the mid 1970s.

The soon-to-be Jan Morris has completed her Pax Britannica, the first part of three on the history of the British Empire.

The future Maria Starace is working as an agony aunt.

Persons who never do transition

Bunny Breckinridge opens his San Francisco home as a hippy drop-in.

Vaughn Bodé starts his Deadbone comic strip in Galaxy Magazine, and wins a Hugo as best fanzine artist.

Herman Slater, drag queen and future publisher of the Necronomicon, is crippled with tuberculosis and in convalescence.

Criminals

Ottis Toole, a sometimes transvestite, has left his child bride and is living by prostitution.

Transvestite Jerry Brudos murders four young women. He will die in prison.

Gerard Schaefer avoids the draft because he was a transvestite. He will later become a cop and a murderer. He will be killed by a cellmate.

Female impersonators

Rae Bourbon, aged 75, is convicted in Texas of being an accomplice to murder and sentenced to 99 years. He dies in prison.

The Cockettes are founded.

Minette is working with Avery Willard’s Ava Graph films.

Chris Shaw had moved to Southern Rhodesia, but as the Zimbabwean independence struggle intensifies, he moves to South Africa, and then to Australia.

Michelle DuBarry, adopts that name, and does a first Canadian National Tour.

David Raven and James Court found the Trollettes.

José Sarria is working as a restaurateur at the World Fairs.

Frederick Ashton, the artistic director of the Royal Ballet, does his dame performance in the film Cinderella.

Tommy Dorsey, the future Zen priest, has stopped doing drag shows and is exploring Buddhism at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Danny La Rue appears in a film version of Charley’s Aunt, and did a Royal Command Performance.

Pudgy Roberts, publishes his second novel, Seafood, and appears in Avery Willard’s 6 minute film, Camp Burlesque. He is still editor of the monthly The great female mimics.

Jean Fredericks and Ron Storme organize the first drag balls at the Porchester Hall, which would become a major part of London’s drag scene.

David Alba, at 21, first comes to US national attention for his impersonations, his hairdressing and his cosmetics.

Writers on transsexual issues

Mary Daly acquires tenure at Boston College after demonstrations by the then all-male students. She would later mentor Janice Raymond, and ban male students from her classes.

H Taylor Buckner presents a paper to the American Sociological Association that concludes that heterosexual transvestism is a pathology.

Surgeons and sexologists

Harry Benjamin had published The Transsexual Phenomenon three years earlier, and is considered the world expert on the subject.

John Randell, of the Charing Cross Hospital, is mentioned several times in press reports about the First International Symposium on Gender Identity, and he testifies at the Corbett vs Corbett trial that he ‘considered that the respondent (ie April Ashley) is properly classified as a male homosexual transsexualist'.

The John Hopkins University School of Medicine Gender Identity Clinic is active at this time. David Reimer had been surgically reassigned two years earlier, and Dawn Langly Hall had her surgery there in 1968. Surgery is done by Howard Jones, endocrinology by Milton Edgerton, and John Money is the director.

The Gender Identity Clinic at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto opens for the first time.

Kurt Freund, the phallometricist, has fled Czechoslovakia after the failed uprising in 1968, and will find employment at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto.

Georges Burou had been doing genital surgery, using his own technique, for 10 years.

In Trinidad, Colorado, Dr Stanley Biber has performed his first male-to-female operation the previous year. He would do thousands of operations before he retired in 2003.

John Brown, the future ‘Butcher Brown’, after twenty years of general practice, is taking a program in plastic surgery. He fails the oral.

Milton Diamond is a new professor of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawai’i.

Theatre & Cinema

Rachel Harlow is still riding on her fame from being in The Queen the previous year. She would transition shortly after.

Jack Doroshaw, who made The Queen, is a special advisor on John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.

The 1969 film, Dinah East, tells of a female film star (Jeremy Stockwell in his first role) who is found to be male-bodied after she dies. The suggestion that this was a reference to Mae West is too strong, she threatens legal action, and the film is withdrawn.

Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis, who had been in the Andy Warhol film, Flesh, the year before, and Holly Woodlawn who would be in Warhol’s Trash in 1970, appear in Curtis’off-Broadway play, Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit.

Edward Wood writes and acts in The Photographer/The Love Feast, a tale of forced femininity.

Francis Francine played the transvestite sheriff in the Andy Warhol western, Lonesome Cowboys

Divine is in The Diane Linkletter Story and Mondo Trasho.

Luchino Visconti’s La caduta degli dei (The Damned) about Germany in the early 1930s features Helmut Berger doing a Marlene Dietrich impersonation on the night of the Reichstag fire and miscellaneous SA queens in drag on the Night of the Long Knives.

The Japanese drag star, Peter, is in Bara no soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses), a gender-reversed Oedipus Rex set in a Tokyo drag bar.

Another Japanese drag star, Akihiro Miwa, is in Kuro bara no yakata(Black Rose).

The Magic Christian, written by Terry Southern, has Peter Sellers briefly in nun-drag, but is most memorable for the uncredited Yul Brynner drag scene.

Federico Fellini’s Satyricon, based on the ancient novel by Petronius, has Tanya Lopert as the male Nero and an albino intersex,

The films Myra Breckenridge, The Christine Jorgensen Story are in pre-production.

Music

Lou Reed records ‘Candy Says’, about Candy Darling.

Books

• Richard Green & John Money (ed). Transsexualism and Sex-Reassignment. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press,. 1969.
• E. C Crowder, with a forward by Alfredo Rathermann. The Transsexuals. Libertyville, Ill.: Oligarch 192 pp 1969.

A new science fiction writer, James Tiptree Jr, almost wins the coveted Nebula prize. It will not be revealed for another eight years that he is a woman, Alice Sheldon.

Penelope Ashe’s Naked Came the Stranger becomes a runaway best seller. Shortly afterwards it is revealed that Penelope was not a woman, but a team of 19 men and 5 women.

Joe Tish (192? - ) female impersonator.

Joe was a well-known drag performer in New York from the early 1950s when he worked at the Moroccan Village on Eighth Street.

In the late 1960s he had a long-running show at the Crazy Horse.

He was refused admission to the Stonewall Tavern when in costume, although he was so admitted at some uptown straight clubs, where his artistry was recognized.

It was to Joe’s apartment that Tammy Novak ran after escaping from a police paddy wagon on the first night of the Stonewall riots.

Joe continued doing drag shows into his seventies, even performing at retirement homes.

• Martin B Duberman. Stonewall. New York : Dutton, c1993. New York: Plume, 1994: 188,197, 290n.

Tammy Novak (1951 - ) performer.

Tammy was a performer at the 82 Club.

She was one of only a few favored patron who were permitted into the Stonewall Tavern in female clothing, having lived with Fat Tony and Chuck Shaheen who ran the place.

She persuaded Sylvia Rivera to come down to the Stonewall on June 28, 1969. During that night’s riot, she was arrested and put in the paddy wagon, but escaped in the confusion, and ran to Joe Tish’s apartment where she holed up for the weekend.

*Not the gynecologist.

• Martin B Duberman. Stonewall. New York : Dutton, c1993. New York: Plume, 1994: 188,191,192,196,197.
• David Carter. Stonewall : the riots that sparked the gay revolution. New York : St. Martin's Press 2004. New York: Griffin 2005: 75, 149, 293n54.

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Nothing seems to be recorded about what happened to Tammy after 1969.

Sylvia Rae Rivera (1951-2002) activist.

Rey Rivera Mendoza, an orphaned New Yorker of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent, lived on and off the streets from age 11. She became Sylvia and was mentored in her early days by Marsha P. Johnson.

Both were prominent participants in the Stonewall Riots, 1969, the iconic origin of Gay Lib. Sylvia was only 17 at that time. She was a founding member of both the New York Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, and helped found STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) with Marsha for homeless street queens.

She organized with Lee Brewster. At the 1973 Stonewall rally, a feminist leader objected to the trans and drag persons as mocking women. Sylvia and Lee jumped on stage and shouted: “You go to bars because of what drag queens did for you, and these bitches tell us to quit being ourselves!”.

Sylvia fought long against the assimilationist gay leaders and the New York Human Rights Campaign (HRC) who would ignore transgendered issues. She fought for homeless queers.

She was also involved with Puerto Rican and black youth activism with the Young Lords and the Black Panthers.

She mentored Chelsea Godwin. She was an active member of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York. She was married to a fellow trans woman Julia Murray.

From 1997 she lived at Transy House, the home of Rusty Mae Moore and Chelsea Godwin. She was an alcoholic at this time, but after discussions with Rusty and Chelsea, she went cold turkey.

She renewed her political activism, giving speeches concerning the need for unity among trans persons, and their position at the forefront of the GLBT movement.

In 2000 she went to Italy for the Millennium March, and was acclaimed as the Mother of all gay people.

In 2001 she revived STAR and they fought for the New York City Transgender Rights Bill and for a trans-inclusive New York State Sexual Orientation Non Discrimination Act. They also agitated for justice for Amanda Milan a trans woman who had been murdered the previous year. She still had to fight with the HRC and the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA) who were neglecting trans issues. She was still negotiating with ESPA on her deathbed.

She died, with Julia at her side, of complications from cancer of the liver at age 50.

In her honor: MCC New York's queer youth shelter is called Sylvia's Place; In 2005, the corner of Christopher and Hudson Streets was renamed Rivera Way; the Sylvia Rivera Law Project is dedicated "to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination or violence".

*Not known to be related to Birdy Rivera.

• Martin B Duberman. Stonewall. New York : Dutton, 1993. New York: Plume, 1994. xix,330 pp. 1993: 20-24,65-71, 117,122-8, 190-3,195-6,198,201,202-3,235-9, 246,251, 259, 262-5,282.
• David Isay, with photographs by Harvey Wang. Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes. New York : W.W. Norton, 210 pp 1995. Contains a chapter on Sylvia.
• Leslie Feinberg. Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Boston: Beacon Press. 147 pp. 1998. Contains a section on Sylvia.
• David Isay, with a photograph by Harvey Wang. “Sylvia Rivera”. New York Times Magazine. June 27. Online at www.soundportraits.org/in-print/magazine_articles/sylvia_rivera.
• Michael Bronski. “Sylvia Rivera: 1951-2002: No longer on the back of the bumper”. ZMag. April. 2002. www.zmag.org/Zmag/articles/april02bronski.htm
• Sylvia Rivera. “Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones”. In Joan Nestle, Clare Howell & Riki Wilchins (eds). GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary. Alyson Books 297 pp 2002.
• Dora Francese (dir). Sylvia, rimembri ancora? Scr: Adi Gianuario, with Sylvia Rivera. Italy 21 mins 2001.
• “Sylvia Rae Rivera”. Stonewall Veterans. www.stonewallvets.org/Sylvia_Rivera.htm.
• Victoria I. Muñoz. "Fabulous Resistance: Carmen Miranda, Sylvia Rivera, and Queer Latinidad" National Women's Studies Association Conference. 2005.
• “Sylvia Rivera”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Rivera

Watch SYLVIA RIVERA TRANS LIFE STORY in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

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Sylvia is, of course, a major character in Duberman's 1993 book on Stonewall.

Of course Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis, 1997, ignores her in his account of Stonewall. His book ignores all trans women. It is a de-transification of gay history.

But what is going on in David Carter's Stonewall, 2004? He does not appear to be transiphobic. He tells of transies and drags who are not told of in Duberman's book, and he tells us further details of Marsha P. Johnson not in Duberman's book. So where is Sylvia Rivera in his book? She is not mentioned at all. There is not even a footnote saying that he disagrees with Duberman re Sylvia. Surely if he thinks that Sylvia was not at Stonewall - he is permitted to disagree with what the rest of us think - it behoves him to explain that he thinks that Sylvia was not there, and that every other account of Stonewall (except Kaiser's) is wrong on this point.

Allyson Allante (1955 - ) performer.

Raised in Long Beach, Long Island, New York, Allyson Anderson was 14 when she was at the Stonewall Tavern on June 27, 1969, and apprehended on the first night of the riots.

She took her name from two Lana Turner films: the daughter Allison in Peyton Place, 1957, and Holly Anderson in Madame X, 1966. She became Mrs Allante by marriage. She has been married to men three times.

In more recent years she has been active in the Stonewall Veterans Association, and has been elected Queen and president of the Imperial Queens and Kings of New York.

She was the only real Stonewall transgender person to appear in the 1996 Stonewall film.

In 1997 she was the only transgendered person to speak before the New York City Council on Domestic Partnership Law.

• Jean Marie Stein. “From Stonewall the Rebellion to Stonewall the Movie & All Parts in Between”. Transgender Tapestry. Summer 1997. Online at www.stonewallvets.org/QueenAllyson.htm
• “Queen Allyson Ann Allante”. Stonewall Veterans Association. www.stonewallvets.org/QueenAllyson.htm

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She is not mentioned in either Martin Duberman’s nor David Carter’s book on Stonewall.

Vaughn Bodé (1941 - 1975) artist.

Vaughn Bodé was born in Syracuse, New York. His father was an unpublished poet and frequently drunk, and his mother worked at General Electric. From the age of five, Vaughn was drawing. At the age of 16 he first drew what would become his major creation, Cheech Wizard.

He served one year in the US army, and then ran away but received a honorable discharge on a psychiatric basis. He married Barbara at 20.

His self-published Das Kampf, 1963, was one of the first underground comics. He was editor of Gothic Blimp Works, the first weekly underground comic in the 1960s. His Deadbone was featured in Galaxy Magazine 1969-71, his Cheech Wizard in National Lampoon 1971-5, and his Junkwaffle comics were published by Last Gasp 1971-4. In 1969 he won a Hugo Award as best fanzine artist, and in 1975 a Yellow Kid Award.

Much graffiti art is based on templates pioneered by Vaughn. He pioneered putting sexual content in comics and cartoons, and inspired others such as Ralph Bakshi.

He was a heterosexual swinger, participating in group sex. He boasted how he had had sex with four women in four different cities in four days. He made Barbara submit to S&M practices such as being locked in a trunk for six hours.

By 1970 his interest in transvestity had developed from looking at pictures to dressing in private. As he continued to desire women, he believed that he must be a unique ‘unisexual’, a forerunner of humans to come. He started wearing female slacks, blouses and boots, grew his nails long, and began carrying a shoulder bag. He was encouraged by fellow cartoonist, Jeff Jones, to move on to skirts and shaving his body. In 1971 they shared a studio in Woodstock, New York.

He met Guru Maharaj Ji (Prem Rawat) in New York in 1971, and felt that he had received his holiness. He chose to attain full enlightenment by the fast track of using autoerotic asphyxiation to induce mystical experiences.

Barbara was granted a divorce in 1972 on the grounds of cruel and inhuman treatment. He responded by saying that he loved her.

Bodé and Jones continued to dress femme together. He found a female partner with whom he could be submissive. He started a relationship with a male drag performer. He took female hormones for six weeks but stopped because he still wanted his erections.

In his last work, Schizophrenia, he included a confessional running below a collection of Cheech Wizard strips. He describes himself as “auto-sexual, heterosexual homosexual, mano-sexual, sado-sexual, trans-sexual, uni-sexual, omni-sexual..”. In 1974 Vaughn moved to San Francisco. He did lots of drugs. It was said that he was looking for a woman who would kill him, who would sacrifice herself to a life in prison by doing a ritual murder.

He had found god by means of autoerotic asphyxiation successfully four times, but on the fifth, the strap became entangled with some necklaces.

His son Mark, who was twelve when his father died, has continued drawing in the style of his father.

• Vaughn Bodé. Schizophrenia. Last Gasp Eco Funnies 1973
• Bob Levin. “I See My Light Come Shining”. Volume 5 of The Comics Journal, March 2005. Also at The Official Bode Site: www.markbode.com/site/article_2.html
• Angela Frucci. “Following a Wiz to a Far-Out Oz”. The New York Times. May 31, 2004. www.nytimes.com/2004/05/31/books/31BODE.html
• Mark Bodé. Vaughn Bodé. www.markbode.com/site/vaughnbode.html.
• “Vaughn Bodé”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughn_Bode.

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Some online sites describe Vaughn Bodé as homosexual. This is odd as he was obsessively heterosexual. If we use the Kinsey Scale, he would probably be a 2.

Note that he thought that being a heterosexual transvestite made him unique. Many histories of Virginia Prince and her movement exaggerate its importance. In the late 1960s/early 1970s both Vaughn Bodé and Charlotte Bach had not heard of it.

The obvious speculation is how Vaughn Bodé would have moved if he had not died at 33. He may have moved to a Kinsey 3. Would he have restarted hormones? I have known trans persons who also said that erections were too important, but who, a few years later, did complete a transition. However this is but speculation.

Birdy Rivera (194? - ) street queen.

Robert Rivera came from a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx.

While his Jewish father had a male lover, Robert’s parents did not want him around. At age eleven, he became the lover of Joe, a police officer. Joe, who became his legal guardian, insisted that Birdy wear dresses, and also beat him.

Birdy and other gays at school formed a gang, the Commando Queens. They staked a claim to Riker’s, a restaurant at Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue, which they took over from the winos.

He was at Stonewall.

*Not the DJ.

*No known relation to Sylvia Rivera

• David Carter. Stonewall : the riots that sparked the gay revolution. New York : St. Martin's Press 2004. New York: Griffin 2005: 59-60,167,177,179.
• David Isay & Michael Schirker (producer). “Remembering Stonewall”. Weekend All Things Considered. July 1, 1989. Radio. Partial transcript at: http://queertoday.ning.com/profiles/blogs/remembering-stonewall-40-years.

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In the 1989 radio documentary, Birdy says that he has been cross-dressing all of his life.

Apart from the 1989 documentary, I cannot find anything about him after 1969.

Edward D. Wood, Jr (1924 - 1978) film-maker, pornographer

Ed was born and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. After tentative jobs as a cinema usher, and in musical groups, he joined the US Marines at age 17 just after the US entered the Second World War, and served until 1946.

He claimed that he was in combat in the Marshall Islands, Naumea and Tarawa, that he had his front teeth knocked out by a Japanese soldier, and was later machine-gunned in one of his legs. That he was awarded several medals and honorably discharged, and that he had fought in battle with a bra and panties under his uniform. However he completed his service as an office typist.

He also claimed that after discharge he worked in a carnival as the geek and as the half-man-half-woman. He also worked in San Francisco as a female impersonator. His trick at parties was to disappear and reappear en femme, sometimes even shaving off his moustache to do so. Often he used the name, Lily. In 1950 he worked as a drag stunt double for Ellen Drew in The Baron of Arizona. He had a special thing for angora sweaters, and would borrow one from his then girlfriend, Dolores Fuller (who would later write songs recorded by Elvis Presley). She put up with his cross-dressing for a while, but could not really handle it, and so would not marry him.

In the early fifties he was trying to break into Hollywood as a director. Exploitation producer, George Weiss, was seeking to take advantage of the media fuss surrounding Christine Jorgensen, and Wood talked himself into the film. Jorgensen, quite sensibly, wanted nothing to do with the project, so Wood rewrote the script drawing on his own experiences, and starred himself (under the name of Daniel Davis) and Delores Fuller. The film was released under various names, but is best known as Glen or Glenda, 1953. It is actually a plea for tolerance of transvestites and transsexuals.

While it is made in the format of psychiatric case studies it does not have the attitude of condemnation common to the genre. However Glen or Glenda is also camp with a surreal narrator, played by Béla Lugosi completely separated from all the other characters and situated in a laboratory with smoking test tubes and human skulls, more suitable to a cheap horror film or exploitation movie, and it includes passionate psychodramas involving sex changes, bondage and flagellation.

In 1955 Ed married Norma McCarthy, but she kicked him out when she found that he was wearing female underwear. The marriage was annulled six months later. He then married Kathy O’Hara who remained his wife until his death.

Bela Lugosi starred again in Wood’s Bride of the Monster, 1955, and then died after shooting only a few seconds for Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1959 (which also features Bunny Breckinridge). It was largely financed by the local Southern Baptist Church, which retained the rights to the film.

Wood’s films were quickly and cheaply made, up to 30 scenes per day as compared to only one in Hollywood A-movies. Retakes were rarely done even when they were obviously needed. Wood’s films rarely made money. Other actors in his stock company included the Swedish wrestler, Tor Johnson, the psychic Criswell and television horror hostess Vampira (Maila Nurmi).

Ed’s wife Kathy reports that that when Ed and Tony Curtis were both at Universal Studios, they would borrow dresses from the wardrobe there and try them on.

Wood expanded the adventures of Glen Marker, the protagonist of the Glen or Glenda, in two of his porno-thrillers: Killer in Drag, 1965, and Death of a Transvestite, 1967, where Glen is doing contract killings to pay for a sex-change, and then, on death row, will tell all if he can die in drag.

His writing of pornography became his major source of income, although he worked with Steven Apostolof in making soft-core films.

In the 1970s he became acquainted with the science fiction writer who would later become Jean Marie Stine. Jean later wrote of his early life.

He died in poverty, of a heart attack, while watching television.

Two years after Wood’s death, he was the winner in the Medved Brothers’ Golden Turkey Awards as the worst director ever. This started his cult, that culminated in the film of his life made by Tim Burton in 1994, and in founding in 1996 of the Church of Ed Wood which has over 3,500 baptized members.

*Not the British Foreign Secretary, nor the Canadian philanthropist.

• Harry and Michael Medved. The Golden Turkey Awards: the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History. Berkeley Books. 1980:252-61, 308-16. Includes a short but unreliable biography.
• Michael Copner (dir). On the Trail of Ed Wood. US 1990. A biography of Edward D. Wood Jr, with clips from the films, interviews with cast and crew members, and a tour of his home.
• Mark Patrick Carducci (dir & scr). Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion. Scr: Lee Harris, with narration by Lee Harris, and interviews with Rudolph Grey, Stephen C. Apostolof, Harry Medved. US 11 mins 1992. A documentary about the making of Plan 9 from Outer Space, that is also a film about Edward D. Wood Jr.
• Rudolph Grey. Nightmare of Ecstasy: the Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Feral House 380 pp1992. A collage of interviews with friends, colleagues and fellow transvestites.
• Ted Newsom (dir & scr). Ed Wood: Look Back In Angora. Narration by Gary Owens, with interviews with Stephen C. Apostolof. US 51 mins 1994. A documentary about Ed Wood's life and films with clever re-editing of clips from Wood's films to illustrate his life.
• Tim Burton (dir). Ed Wood. Scr: Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, based on the book, Nightmare of Ecstacy, by Rudolph Grey, with Johnny Depp as Ed wood, Marton Landau as Bela Lugosi, Sarah Jessica Parker as Dolores Fuller, Bill Murray as Bunny Breckinridge. US 127 mins 1994.
• David C. Hayes and Hayden Davis. Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Ramble House 168 pp 2001.
• Jean Marie Stine. “Ed Wood” Fetish Alliance. www.fetishalliance.net/Stories/Other_Stories/edwoodsbyjeanmariestine.htm
• Jean Marie Stine. Ed Wood – The Early Years. Renaissance E Books. 112 pp 2001.
• “Edward D. Wood, Jr.”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_D._Wood,_Jr.
• “Edward D. Wood, Jr.”. IMDB. www.imdb.com/name/nm0000248/bio.

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Glen or Glenda uses the word “transsexual” the same year that Harry Benjamin is supposed to have coined it.

Glen or Glenda is in effect the first cinematic defence of queer lifestyles, eight years before Basil Dearden's Victim, 1961.

Ed was active in heterosexual transvestite groups in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. So was Virginia Prince. But neither appears in the books about the other.

Glen or Glenda is not Bela Lugosi’s only drag movie. The year before, 1952, he had gone to England to star against Arthur Lucan in Mother Riley Meets the Vampire.

Désirée (194? – 196?) housewife.

Désirée became involved with Petey, a freelance gangster who hung around the Stonewall Tavern in Manhattan in the late 1960s. They were both Italian-Americans.

Désirée was a natural beauty who passed as a beautiful woman with no problem. They moved to the suburbs to live as a heterosexual couple, until Petey, in a fit of jealousy, shot and killed Désirée.

• Martin B Duberman. Stonewall. New York: Dutton, 1993. New York: Plume, 1994: 185-6.

Sally Mursi (1966 - ) medical student, dancer.

Sayed 'Abd Allah Mursi was raised in Cairo. He was a student at Al-Azhar’s Medical School for Boys in Cairo, one year from graduation, when she transitioned to Sally with surgery in 1988.

Her doctor was Dr Ezzat Ashamallah, a Copt. They were both summoned to the State Prosecuter’s office and investigated for public disorder. However no charges resulted, although Ashamallah was expelled for a time from the Physician’s Syndicate, and they were both featured in almost every Egyptian newspaper and magazine.

Sally approached a sheik, Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, then mufti and now Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, and he issued a fatwa that her change was necessary for her health but that before the operation she should for one year dress, behave and comply with all obligations of Islam for women, except for marital obligations. This fatwa was the first Sunni ruling about sex changes.

Sally was refused a transfer to Al-Azhar’s Medical School for Girls, and she has won two legal rulings against the school, but it has ignored them, and also blacklisted her at other medical schools.

She was accused of trying to get out of military service, and was ordered to report for induction into the army. Army doctors examined her, and finding that she was a woman, concluded that Sayed was not medically fit for military service.

Sally worked as belly dancer in nightclubs under the name of Rahma, where she was out as transgendered, and this drew the customers, although she had to battle the Ministry of Culture which refused to issue her a dancing permit. Her show was raided twice by the vice squad.

She has completed a degree in literature at Cairo University. She has been married twice to men.

• Azza Khattab. “Sally’s Story”. Egypt Today. July 2004. http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1737.
• “An Appeal from Transsexuals”. Transgender Egypt. 12 Jun 2008. http://tgegypt.com/?p=10.
• “Sally Mursi”. Wikipedia: De vrije encyclopedie. nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Mursi.

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The Transgender Egypt article says that Sally was intersex, and the Egypt Today article implies that she wasn’t. I first went with the former, but then reversed after Jasmine's comment.

Dr Ashamallah says that sex changes have been done in Egypt since 1920, but gives no details.

Danny La Rue (1927 - 2009) drag star.

Daniel Patrick Carroll was born in Cork. Although Irish, he served in the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War where he first started doing drag shows.

He had a brief career as an actor of male roles after service in the Navy, but achieved success as Danny La Rue in impersonation. He progressed from repertory theatre to cabaret in London’s West End. He became a star appearing in smart London nightclubs, and in 1964 opened his own club.

He was the most successful drag artiste in Britain, and among Britain’s highest paid performers in the 1960s, although hardly known in the States. His act emphasises that he is a man in drag with giveaway comments, and, in the old tradition, his wig comes off at the end.

More at home in pantomime and revue, La Rue is not really an actor, and his attempts at film, Every Day’s an Holiday, 1965, Charley’s Aunt, 1969, Our Miss Fred, 1972, Come Spy with Me, 1977, have been failures.

He appeared before the Queen in 1969, 1972 and 1978. A notable success was the live version of Hello Dolly, which opened in Birmingham in 1982 and then transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End. This was the first time that Dolly had been played by a man, and also the first time that a man played the female lead in a major musical.

He was awarded an OBE in 2002.

He spent most of his career emphasizing that he was a “normal heterosexual”, but in recent years has been more candid that he was in fact gay. He lived many years with his manager, Jack Hanson, until Jack died of a stroke.

‘La rue’ has been absorbed into Cockney rhyming slang to mean ‘a clue’.

In 2006 he suffered a mild stroke, and he died in 2009 at age 81 after suffering from cancer.

• Peter Underwood. Life's a drag!: Danny la Rue & the drag scene. London: Frewin 192 pp 1974. London: Star Books 160 pp 1975.
• “Danny La Rue”. This is Your Life. 18 Apr1984. Thames Television.
• Danny La Rue & Howard Elson, with a foreword by Donald Sinden. From Drags to Riches: My Autobiography. London: Viking 360 pp 1987. Bath: Chivers 1988. Penguin Books 1988.
• Jimmy Tarbuck. “Biography” www.dannylarue.com. 2006
• David de Alba. De Alba on La Rue. http://members.cox.net/portabello/La-rue.htm.

Anthony Storr (1920 – 2001) psychiatrist.

Anthony Storr was the youngest child, 10 years younger than his closest sibling, son of the Sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey who was 51 when Anthony was born –his mother was 44. Anthony was lonely and miserable at boarding school, partly because of his inability at sports. He was bullied and had only average marks. He suffered all his life from asthma and depression.

He went up to Christ's College, Cambridge, where his moral tutor was C.P. Snow. After two years he was given a wartime courtesy degree without taking a tripos.

He studied at Westminster Hospital and qualified as a doctor in 1944, and subsequently specialised in psychiatry. His asthma precluded his having to do military service. He gained a Diploma in Psychological Medicine in 1951, and then trained in the Jungian school but was not a strict adherent. In 1942, he married Catherine Cole, who subsequently became a children’s novelist. In 1964 Storr published a book called Sexual Deviation which sold quite well, and strongly influenced thinking in the English-speaking countries. Quite possibly, from the internal evidence, Storr thought that he was writing a liberal book, an intelligent mix of common sense and psychoanalysis, a plea for compassion rather than condemnation of the poor perverts. However looking from 45 years later, the book comes across more as a compendium of heterosexist prejudices and untested assumptions. A particularly dubious technique of Storr's is to give one, that is only one, anecdotal example as the basis of his generalisations. There are no footnotes or other references to evidence, or refutations of alternate positions. One is expected to accept his wisdom.

His standard in deciding what is sexually deviant is 'emotional maturity', a concept on which 'there is so much agreement' that it can simply be defined as 'the ability to form a stable relationship with the opposite sex which is both physically and emotionally satisfying, and in which sexual intercourse forms the main, though not the only, mode of expression of love'. He does acknowledge that there are homosexuals who are stable, balanced and mature, and that there are immature heterosexuals: 'Nevertheless, it is still true to say that heterosexuality is a more mature form of sexual behaviour'.

He admits that ‘minor degrees of fetishism can be detected in every man, and there is no point at which one can say that normality ends and pathology begins’. He also thinks that fetishes have their origin in very early childhood. Only men are fetishistic; women have no such need ‘because they do not have to achieve or sustain an erection’.

His chapter on transvestity follows immediately on his chapter on fetishism, and it is presented as a variation thereupon. He also repeats the common misconception that transvestites dress usually to masturbate. He gives no reason to assume that masturbation is more common among transvestites than among other men. This false premise also leads to his conclusion that there are no female transvestites and that female cross-dressing is of a completely different nature. He gives the standard psychoanalytic interpretation of transvestity as follows:

“The homosexual man replaces his love for his mother by an identification with her: the fetishist refuses to acknowledge that a woman has no penis. The male transvestite assumes both attitudes simultaneously. He fantasies that the woman possesses a penis, and thus overcomes his castration anxiety, and identifies himself with this phallic woman.”

He adds to this that the transvestite is imagining a “seductive courtesan” and identifying with her as a phallic woman. This phallic woman need not be his mother for such images are easily found, e.g. witches and mother goddesses, both of which come with many phallic symbols. To a small child women in general appear threatening and powerful. Therefore a transvestite gains masculinity rather than loses it by identifying with such a masculine and powerful woman. Such an identification argues a “fairly complete failure” in the normal separation of a boy from his mother in growing up, and also “a failure to relate emotionally to any person other than the mother”.

He does note that for ’normal’ men, the desire to dress as female is widely catered for vicariously in public entertainment.

He discusses that there are also men who seek an operation to “change their sex”. This is possible for anatomical hermaphrodites, but “this is very far from changing the sex of an individual with normal organs, and such an operation is of course impossible”. This was written in 1964, a decade after Christine Jorgensen’s operation had received extensive media coverage. The word “transsexual” is not used at all – although he is writing a full decade after Cauldwell, Benjamin and Ed Wood had put the word into circulation. Such men are submitting to “castration” because they have “given up all hope of competing with other males on anything approaching equal terms”. Those who express the “delusion” of becoming the opposite sex “are invariably psychotic”. In such a schizophrenic the patient's ego “is overwhelmed, so that he is no longer able to exercise conscious control, and is at the mercy of phantasy and unconscious contents”.

Female cross-dressing is merely a part of lesbianism which is merely the normal schoolgirl crush for another female extended into adulthood because of a shortage of men or because of emotional immaturity. Such lesbianism is of course always “faute de mieux”, although it may be better than nothing. Female cross-dressing is on the decline.

“Thirty years ago England seemed peculiarly apt at producing a stalwart breed of commanding women clad in collars and ties, tweeds and boots, striding manfully through life with hair cut short and faces innocent of cosmetics. Increasing psychological sophistication has diminished the numbers of those who display their adoption of the masculine role so blatantly.”

He also wrote books on depression, the psychology of music, gurus and charismatic leaders, and the value of solitude. He also served on the Parole Board and a Home Office committee on obscenity and film censorship.

He had three daughters with his first wife, Catherine Storr. They divorced in 1970, and he married again.

He died aged 80 of a heart attack.

• Anthony Storr. Sexual Deviation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1964.
• Anthony Stevens. “Obituary: Anthony Storr, formerly Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, Oxford Health Authority”. Psychiatric Bulletin. 2001, 25:365-6. http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/25/9/365.
• Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. “Anthony Storr, 80, Psychiatrist and Writer”. The New York Times. March 28, 2001. www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/anthony-storr-80-psychiatrist-and-writer.html.

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For the female fetishism that he does not acknowledge see the references in my article on Autogynephilia. For the sexuality of female-to-male cross-dressing see Lou Sullivan.

There is very little that is original in Storr’s book, but, as a Penguin, it was widely available, for many in the 1960s it was the only book that they read on the subject. It was on the reading list for my first year psychology course at university. Almost all his ideas had been previously proposed by psychoanalysts.

These psychoanalytic ideas are fortunately not as common now as they were in the 1960s. However they were largely and uncritically accepted by Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard and have been incorporated into their concept of Autogynephilia. They are also being recycled in a simplified and mean-spirited way by many of the HBS people.

Storr got indifferent marks at school, and got into Cambridge anyway. The British class system at work.

Charlotte Bach’s theory of evolution

Sexual Deviation Is The Mainspring Of Evolution

Every member of any species 'divided' by sex, having to unite with a member of the other sex to reproduce, experiences to some degree the tensions inherent in its 'separateness' from the other sex, its inability ever to attain complete individual integrity as a member of the species.

Her theory applied such observations, arguing that a group deviation from the norm of reproduction – thwarting, or self-thwarting – of the reproductory drive, will to some degree creates inner tensions in individuals, and those individuals may resolve them in different ways: for examples, an excessive drive to dominate the environment (including other individuals), to challenge or replace (for the 'good' of the group) established rituals and values, or to celebrate, or bemoan, the existential experience of being a member of the group, or even to withdraw from the life of the group as far as practicable.

She argued that though expressing a deviation may for an individual be an evolutionary dead end, deviations create a repertoire from which a species may select behaviours advantageous to its survival, and reject others, in the way Darwin believed that ‘Natural Selection’ operated.

Thus, deviations from the reproductory norm are an essential part of the evolutionary process. In a complex dynamic involving the individual’s internal and external environment, the drive to express deviations is countered by the drive to resist them. Their expression will be channelled into the environment, in terms of established social rituals, or by the creation of new patterns or pieces of behaviour. The established patterns she termed ‘stable’, the novel expressions of behaviour she termed ‘emergent’, and creating them is what all of us are doing, all the time. Every man, she said, is a new Adam; every woman, a new Eve.

She believed this was the source of creativity. She also argued that deviations from the norm could be expressed negatively or positively - homosexuality, withdrawal into monasteries and nunneries or other forms of celibacy, but were often expressed within a context of reproductory behaviour - homosexuals having and rearing children, or people who do not want children of their own nevertheless acting in loco parentis (as teachers, carers, advisors) in the nurture and socialisation of the children of others.

Quoted from The Theory on www.charlottebach.org/the_theory.htm.

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Central to Bach’s theory is an eight-box typology that is based on the old trapped soul concept.  You may be a male soul in a male body, a female soul in male body, a female soul in female body or a male soul in a female body.  Which gives four options.   However the soul strives to become the other sex, and this striving can be denied or asseverated.   Now we have  eight options:

1. The stable options:

1. Male positive denialist.   The heterosexual male, physically and psychologically male, denying the pull to become female.
2. Female positive denialist.   The heterosexual female, physically and psychologically female, denying the pull to become male.
3. Male negative denialist.  A female soul in male body who denies the pull to the other psychological sex, i.e. male.   This is a transvestite or drag queen.
4. Female negative denialist.  A male soul in female body who denies the pull to the other psychological sex, i.e. female.   This is a butch lesbian

2. The changeable/creative options:

1. Male positive asseverationist.   The male, physically and psychologically male, accepting the pull to become female.   (This is not properly explained.  Would this be a metrosexual or a psychologically androgynous male who is accepting of his female side?)
2. Female positive asseverationist.   The heterosexual female, physically and psychologically female, accepting the pull to become male.  (This is not properly explained.  Would this be a psychologically androgynous female who is accepting of her male side?  Would one type of this be a career woman?)
3. Male negative asseverationist.  A female soul in male body who accepts the pull to the other psychological sex, i.e. male.   He will be masculine, and dress definitely so, and might be quite aggressive.  (This is what others have called a homovestite.  Would homophobia fit here?)
4. Female negative asseverationist.  A male soul in female body who accepts the pull to the other psychological sex, i.e. female.   This is a femme lesbian who dresses extra femme.  (Although surely a heterosexual femme or homovestite would fit here also.)

This, of course, is done in terms of 1960s stereotypes.  There is no actual place here for a transsexual, nor actually for a non-op like Bach herself.  

In rereading Wilson’s Mysteries in an attempt to write this I found contradictions.   Wilson first assigns a transvestite to 1.3, but two paragraphs later to 2.1 !   Wilson himself first accepted that he is a Male positive denialist.  He is very much the cisgendered heterosexual.  He later twigged that that would deny his creativity.  Surely he would want to be a Male positive asseverationist?  Perhaps being of his generation (born 1931) he does not do so.   He leaves 2.1 and 2.2 unexplained.

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I am not a fan of 4-box or 8-box typologies.   They can be useful in laying out ideas, but they also restrict ideas to their simple forms.   There are some good bits here:  

• the important idea that one can deny or asseverate the pull to be the other sex.
• the incorporation of cisgendered heterosexuals into the schema.
• the inclusion of the concept but not the word homovestity (Zavitzianos did not coin the word until 1972).
• the ideas that a female soul in male body is in denial of her male sexual pull if she is transgendered.  This is of course contrary to what most transgendered persons assume.

On the other hand:

• where do transsexuals fit?
• 2.1 and 2.2 would need to be much more clearly developed.
• there is no comparison or correlation to other theorizing on sex and gender.

Charlotte Maria Beatrix Augusta Bach (1920 -1981) hotel employee, accommodation agent, hypnotherapist, would-be philosopher, fake baron.

Karoly Hajdu, the son of a tailor, was raised in Budapest. Karoly did badly at school but read voraciously on his own.

After Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941 he managed to obtain a ‘student exemption’. In 1942 he forged a birth certificate that he was Karoly Mihaly Balazs Agoston Hajdu, son of the Baron of Szadelo and Balkany. Shortly afterwards he was conscripted into the Railway Builders Regiment, but managed to wrangle a transfer to the army propaganda unit – where he stole cameras and sold them on the black market. He later admitted that he had cold-bloodedly killed a teenage soldier because he could not show the right papers, and claimed to have been in the German SS.

After the war his sister emigrated to Venezuela, and later was joined by their mother.

Calling himself Karl Hajdu , Karoly managed to get to the British sector in Austria, and from there, as he spoke good English, to Britain in 1948 as a refugee. Presenting himself as Baron Carl Balkanyi who at been a university lecturer, he got a job at Harwich Labour Exchange, and then at the British Council.

He was experimenting with cross-dressing. A friend left a suitcase with his wife’s dresses and underwear and Carl tried them all on. He asked the friend to remove the case. He bought female clothing, and then purged them.

He worked in small hotels and nightclubs, and in Brighton met Phyllis Rogers. She and her son moved to London to be near him, and they were married in February 1953. Carl put his female clothing into storage.

He opened an accommodation agency in Paddington, illegally charging prospective tenants. He was taken to court several times on this charge and for not registering his business, being fined increasing amounts. Shortly after the 1954 conviction, he presented at the Hungarian Embassy declaring that he was a fugitive and prepared to go back. This was reported in the Daily Mail. The Sunday People sent a reporter to his agency, and ran a lengthy article on how he ran his business.

After the Hungarian Uprising, Hajdu collected ₤2,000 to send ‘freedom fighters’ into Hungary, and led a march to Downing Street. However he was not able to explain where the money went.

In 1957 he was pressed into bankruptcy listing 26 creditors. He retrieved his case of women’s clothing.

Shortly afterwards he took the name of Michael Karoly and took a course in hypnotherapy. He never graduated but set up in business as a hypnotherapist anyway. He also was taken on as a psychology lecturer at the Stanislavsky Studios in Knightsbridge, and wrote a column on psychology for Today magazine. He was also commissioned by Paul Elek, a Hungarian, to write a book on hypnosis. The book, the only one of his ever published, includes an early explanation of the joys of cross-dressing, and many of the patients in the book are aspects of himself.

In 1963 he was charged at Knebworth with a breach of the peace after being arrested dressed as female. He separated from his wife, founded Divorcees Anonymous and seduced several of the women who attended. After a denouncing article in the Sunday People, both his hypnosis patients and members of Divorcees Anonymous stayed away.

He attempted to return to his wife, but she had a new lover. She died of a severe uterine haemorrhage that erupted while she and her lover were on holiday in Germany. It then came out that she had embezzled thousands of pounds from her employer. Her son Peter died in a road accident a few weeks later.

In shock Michael retreated into Phyllis’ flat, avoided all contact and took lots of photographs of himself in his wife’s clothes. He wrote two novels in this period: One, Siobhan, was about one of his lovers. Although she was newly married, he sent it to her. She and her husband instantly contacted their solicitor, and warned Karoly off. The Second Coming was a science fiction novel with a sex-change theme.

In May 1966, he was charged with 13 offenses of obtaining credit under false pretences, and trading as a psychologist without disclosing that he was an undischarged bankrupt under another name. He was jailed for three months.

In 1967 he wrote to the prominent female impersonators Danny La Rue and Ricky Renée for advice on cross dressing.

He placed an advert in the New Statesman as a psychologist seeking transvestites, and got a dozen replies. One was from the person who would transition as Della Aleksander, but who at that time was a novice. Another, a silk fetishist, persuaded Michael that he could be a ‘spiritual transvestite’ for whom the clothes are merely an emblem. He acted as male escort for several of his new contacts, and started a book, Man and/or Woman: A Comprehensive Study of the ‘Tammuz Complex’ (Transvestism), using the anecdotes of his new contacts.

He also started to go out dressed as Charlotte. At the same time, as Michael, he took his last female lover. Through Della, Charlotte was able to obtain female hormones, although she persuaded herself that living as a woman in itself altered her hormones. Her method of coping with being read was to engage the person in conversation, and to repeat the story of how her husband and son had died. From 1968, Charlotte was more or less living fulltime as female. The major exceptions were signing on for unemployment pay, and Michael the psychologist’s one paying client.

Karoly’s mother in Venezuela had not heard from him since his bankruptcy in 1957. A friend from Caracas visited London and discovered Charlotte. The mother, at 82, accepted her new daughter. Two years later she came to visit.

Charlotte changed her name by deed poll in 1970 to Charlotte Maria Beatrix Augusta Hajdu, but normally used the surname Bach. She started writing the enormously long Homo Mutans, Homo Luminens which presents the transsexual urge as the key to human evolution, but could not interest any publishers. She also wrote an autobiographical novel Fiona which also has never been published.

Using the name Daphne Lyell-Manson she went into business as a spanking madam. She later wrote about the spanking trade: “On the Basic Axioms or Lemmata of a Universal Theory of Relativity”.

Charlotte started giving weekly talks in a friend’s flat. One of her acolytes, Don Smith, produced several pamphlets on Bach’s ideas, each of which sold between 500 and 1,000 copies. She was several times invited to speak to gay and lesbian groups. She wrote to television programs and the science editors of The Times offering her assistance, but was not taken up. She wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to advise him that god is a human invention.

She sent a 521 page version of Homo Mutans, Homo Luminens, all in capitals and on orange paper, to the writer Colin Wilson, who eventually read it, and became an enthusiast. He interviewed her for the magazine Time Out, and featured her prominently in his book, Mysteries, 1978.

Brian Lewis, a professor at the Open University used his research budget to print 100 copies of her book, and she sold it at her weekly meetings. She was invited to give seminars at a few universities, and she upstaged the featured speakers at a debate at the Royal Institution. A wealthy doctor, Michael Kirkman, endowed the Kirkman-Bach College of Human Ethology, and Charlotte wrote to the eminent ethologist Desmond Morris to be a patron, but Morris was quite puzzled by the approach.

Charlotte died of untreated liver cancer, having refused to go to a doctor, at the age of 60. The revelation that she was a ‘man’ was a surprise to Wilson and Lewis.

She left her papers to Bob Mellors who had been a gay activist. He researched her life for several years until he was murdered by a burglar in 1996 in Warsaw where he was teaching English. A friend of Bob passed the papers onto Francis Wheen.

• Comer Clarke. “The Baron” The Sunday Pictorial 13 Jan 1957 “Man Dressed as Woman Walks into Hotel”. Hertfordshire Mercury. 26 April 1963.
• Michael B. Karoly. Hypnosis London: Elek, 190 pp 1961. Hajdu/Bach’s only published book.
• Colin Wilson. Mysteries: An Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal and the Supernatural. New York : Putnam, 1978 London: Grafton Books 1979: 514-523.
• Bob Mellors (ed). Extracts from an unpublished Work: An Outline of Human Ethology by Charlotte M. Bach. 4 Pamphlets London: Another Orbit Press. n.d.
• “Bent is best, said Charlotte Bach”. Gay News. Feb 18, 1982.
• Colin Wilson. The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders. Grafton Books. 271 pp1988 New York : Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1989: chps 1-2.
• Colin Wilson. The Devil’s Party: A History of Charlatan Messiahs. London: Virgin 358 pp 2000: chp 12. Also published as Rogue Messiahs: Tales of Self-Proclaimed Saviors. Charlottesville, Va: Hampton Roads xxvii,274 pp 2000: chp 12.
• Francis Wheen. “Move Over Darwin”. The Guardian 28 Sep 2002. www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4509155-103425,00.html
• Francis Wheen. Who was Dr Charlotte Bach? London: Short Books, 2002.
• www.charlottebach.org.
• “Karoly Hajdu”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoly_Hadju.
• Michael Roth. “Sex, Sin and Evolution: Dr Charlotte Bach and Emergent Evolution”. Apes, Angels and Outlaws: New Science, New Philosophy, New Directions. www.apesangelsandoutlaws.com/downloads.htm.

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Although the Beaumont Society, the UK Princian group, had been founded in 1965, Michael/Charlotte never bothered with it. Nor did she attend the Porchester Balls which started in 1969, nor the Gay Lib dances in the early 1970s. Nor Yvonne Sinclair’s TV/TS Support Group after 1976. She probably would not go to any event where she was not in charge.

Michael was charged with trading as a psychologist without disclosing that he was an undischarged bankrupt under another name. Should he not also have been charged with trading as a psychologist under false pretences?

There are a small number of trans persons who are in Wikipedia under their pre-transition name. This is one.

There is no mention of Charlotte Bach in Kris Kirk & Ed Heath’s Men in Frocks, 1984. I was active in London Gay Lib in the early 1970s, but I never heard of Charlotte Bach until I read Colin Wilson many years later.

Some of our enemies would suggest that a fraudster is a natural for doing a gender change and getting away with it, as would be an actor. However the reality is probably that a person who is a fraudster in their life before transition, will use the same approach when they do transition. There are others, almost certainly greater in number, who strive for authenticity, and a gender change comes naturally, as part of that authenticity.

Amazon has a product review of this book that is so negative that I am going to reproduce it as a curiosity: “Mercifully published by Short Books, this nasty little work is not short enough. It is just possible that Wheen, formerly a Guardian columnist, may be writing a spoof but, even so, the point of the book escapes even the most generous reader. It's not funny, it's not interesting and it is stuffed with extremely tasteless photographs which leave a scummy feeling in the mind. According to Wheen, Charlotte Bach wrote unpublished and unpublishable books about sexual deviancy, both fiction and non-fiction, frequently using her own life as material while attributing her own experiences to other 'patients'. The relevance of the title escapes the reader for Wheen gives ample documentation about his subject.”

Jean Marie Stine (1945 - ) writer, publisher.

Henry Eugene (Hank) Stine, who also has written as Allan Jorgenson, Robert Randall, Victor N. Davich, Janice Morgan Stevens and Sibly Whyte, is most famous for his novel Season of the Witch, 1968, in which a man, accused of rape, is punished by having his consciousness transferred to the woman’s body. Still having a male consciousness, s/he hopes to regain his original body, but has to kill the body to kill the personality now occupying it. Finally she realizes that she is pregnant from her original male body, and accepts her femaleness. The story was filmed in 1996 as Memory Run (also released as Synapse).

Stine was editor of Galaxy science-fiction magazine from 1979, and transitioned to Jean Marie in the 1980s.

Jean Marie is also a writer of self-help books, and is the publisher of Renaissance E Books.

She was a board member of the transgendered groups IFGE and the Tiffany Club of New England; a contributing editor for both the online magazine International TG and the print zine Transformation.

She has also written biographical material about Ed Wood, the filmmaker.

• Charles Platt. “Hank Stine”. Who Writes Science Fiction? London: Savoy Books 1980. New York: Berkley Books as Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction. 1980.
• Jean Marie Stine. “Ed Woods” Fetish Alliance. www.fetishalliance.net/Stories/Other_Stories/edwoodsbyjeanmariestine.htm.
• Allen A. Goldstein (dir & scr) Memory Run/Synapse. Scr: David N. Gottlieb & Dale Hilebrand, based on the novel Season of the Witch by Hank Stein, with Chris Makepeace as Andre Fuller and Karen Duffy as Celeste/Josette. US 90 mins 1996.
• Jean Marie Stine. Ed Wood – The Early Years Renaissance E Books. 112 pp 2001.
• Jean Marie Stine. Trans-Sexual: Transgressive Erotica for Gender Queers. Renaissance E Books. 2002.
• Janice Morgan Stevens. Everything you wanted to know about sex changes ... and were afraid to ask: a primer for male to female transsexuals. Renaissance E Books. 2002.
• “Jean Marie Stine”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Stine.

Did Virginia Prince have Harry Benjamin Syndrome?

I have previously written an entry on Virginia Prince.

Here I would like to pursue an unexplored position. In my essays on Prince and on autogynephilia, I proposed that Prince was the classic autogynephile. That is still my position. However let us see what happens when we line up the chief femmiphilic and the HBS side-by-side.

1. Virginia Prince was an actual patient of Harry Benjamin, just as much as Sally Barry, Reed Erickson, Barbara Wilcox, Christine Jorgensen, Lynn Conway, Renée Richards or Diane Kearny. Benjamin prescribed female hormones to Prince.
2. Of the three major criteria for a transsexual -- hormones, genital surgery and living full-time in the target gender -- Prince scores 2 out of 3. Benjamin did not recommend surgery for all his transsexual patients.
3. Diane Kearny writes: “my brain gender of female was quite clear to me and others including family long before a hint of puberty. That in essence describes those born with HBS”. Prince passes this test easily.
4. Prince urged privacy, stealth even closetry, for those in her groups. Surprise: the HBS people urge the same for their membership.
5. Diane Kearny writes of “evidence that true transsexuals/HBS are born and not nurtured”. Much the same evidence supports the idea that femmiphilics are born and not nurtured.
6. Prince was intolerant of most transgendered persons, especially drag queens, homosexual transvestites, all gender queers, all transsexuals, and all non-ops who did not conform to her own transgenderist (a different word from transgender) or femmiphilic template. Surprise: HBS people are intolerant of most transgendered persons, especially drag queens, homosexual and heterosexual transvestites, all gender queers, all non-ops, and the vast majority of transsexuals who did not conform to the HBS template.
7. Trans men are totally ignored by Prince; while there do seem to be a few HBS trans men, you can easily read the HBS web sites without being aware of them.
8. Prince was often domineering to the point of bullying and rudeness, often telling potential transsexuals that they were ‘delusional’. HBS persons are constantly telling people that they are ‘fetishists’ and ‘autogynephiles’.
9. Prince advocated a false respectability of a dated concept of being a 'lady'; many of the HBS persons object to being described as gender variant, and are even proud to self-describe as gender conformist, which is also a false respectability.
10. Both Prince and many HBS persons are indifferent or hostile to feminism.

HBS persons make the point that Prince did not desire a sex change. Of course that is what she said. But surely she protested too much. You don't need a PhD in psychology to understand that if you are fanatically against something, it is likely that you are actually attracted to that thing, but are unable to be honest about your attraction. It is now generally accepted that homophobes are actually aroused by their own sex. A self-confident heterosexual has no need to be homophobic.

In any case, Benjamin posits three kinds of transvestite, one of which is the transsexual. If there is such a thing as a "Harry Benjamin Syndrome", it surely covers all three kinds. To limit it to the third only, is tendentious.

Idaho

This Sunday 17 May 2009 is IDAHO.

It is a shame that some gender variant persons are intolerant of others.

I would like to quote from Harry Benjamin. He writes with regret of intolerance: “Too many individuals are that way; what they do not like must be forbidden and punished. Then they are satisfied. I have even met transvestites who dislike (or pretend to dislike) transsexualism so much that they are against estrogen treatment and operation (for reasons of self protection?). There are also transsexuals who dislike transvestites as well as homosexuals. Intolerance can be found in strange quarters.” The Transsexual Phenomenon, p114-5 of the Warner Books 1977 edition.

In particular, those who organize in his name, should respect his sentiment.

The Eurovision Song Contest

This Saturday the Eurovision Song Contest is being held in Moscow, at the same time as the banned Pride march.

Here is a recap of transgendered competitors in past years:

Wally Stott, the future Angela Morley, in 1962 and 1963 arranged and conducted the UK entries for the Eurovision Song Contest, ‘Ring-A-Ding Girl’ and ‘Say Wonderful Things’, both sung by Ronnie Carroll.

In 1998, transsexual Sharon Cohen, under her stage name of Dana International, won with her song Diva, despite not getting the full support of her country. Orthodox Rabbis and the Shas Party tried to have her selection cancelled.

In 2002, the Slovenian drag trio Sestra came 13th.

In 2004, the Swedish drag act, After Dark, competed to be the Swedish entry with the song “La dolce vita” but came only third. They tried again in 2007 with “(Åh) när ni tar saken i egna händer” (which has masturbation suggestions), and they came fifth in the Swedish competition.

In 2007, the Danish entry was by the drag persona DQ of Peter Anderson. The song came 19th in the semi-finals.

Also in 2007, the Ukrainian entry was Verka Serduchka, the drag persona of Andriy Danylko, singing “Dancing Lasha Tumbai”. Verka Serduchka came second. A nationwide radio station and some members of Parliament objected to Verka’s selection which they saw as “grotesque and vulgar”. “Lasho Tumbai” is a somewhat made-up expression that Verka says sounds like the Mongolian for ‘milkshake’, but this was denied in Mongolia. To Russians it sounded like “Russia Goodbye” which caused offense.

• “A Tranny Guide to the European Song Contest”. Vicky’s Vault. www.mf2fm.com/cellar/eurovision.php

Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Wood and the coining of ‘transsexual’.

In Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten, 1910, the word he uses for what we might call transsexualism is ‘Geschlechtsuebergaenge’, which would literally be a sexual over-going. This word is translated as ‘transsexual’ in Michael Lombardi-Nash’s 1991 English translation of Die Transvestiten. Obviously 'sexual over-going' was not going to catch on in English.

In 1923, Hirschfeld did use the expression 'seelischer transsexualismus' (psychic transsexualism) in a journal paper, ‘Die intersexuelle konstitution’. Although, of course, one wonders whether it was his own expression, or one suggested by one of his minions.

Die Transvestiten was not translated into English until 1991, and ‘Die intersexuelle konstitution’ has never been translated. Kurt Freund, as a German-speaking Czech sexologist, probably read read both of them. Harry Benjamin, being German, could have read them, but he shows no evidence of taking the word ‘transsexual’ from Hirschfeld. There is no evidence of British or US doctors having read Hirschfeld.

The word ‘transsexual’ next appeared in Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, 1948: 612, as a kind of homosexual considered as an intermediate sex.

The next year, 1949, David Cauldwell wrote a paper for Sexology about a girl who wanted to be a boy. He entitled the paper ‘Psychopathia transexualis’ (note the one S). This paper was not much noticed. Harry Benjamin later commented: "Whether I had ever read that article and the expression remained in my subconscious, frankly, I do not know". It was Louise Lawrence who introduced Benjamin to Cauldwell’s writings.

The word next turns up in Edward D. Wood, Jr’s 1953 film, Glen or Glenda. This is intriguing. Was the word in use among trans people before Benjamin started using it? Did Louise, having read Cauldwell, pass the word on to other transvestites? We do know that the word ‘homophobe’ was used in Screw magazine two years before it was officially coined in 1972. Probably by the early 1950s, the word ‘transvestite’ was sufficiently common that that different people coined ‘transsexual’ independently.

Harry Benjamin first used the word in December 1953, and went on to popularize it, particularly in his 1966 book. He spelt the word with two-SS.

By the early 1970s doctors were dissatisfied with the word 'transsexualism' because it had lost its medical connotations, and so Norman Fisk in 1973 proposed 'gender dysphoria syndrome' to remedicalize the concept.

John Money pays homage to Cauldwell by using his one-S spelling, as does The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show, 1973 on stage, 1975 film (“I'm just a Sweet Transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania“. However the two-S spelling has proved more popular.

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon, New York: The Julian Press. 1966.
• Harry Benjamin. “Introduction”. In Richard Green and John Money (eds.), Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1969.
• David O. Cauldwell. ‘Psychopathia transexualis’. Sexology, 1949. 16: 274-280.
• Richard Ekins, Dave King. (2001) Pioneers of Transgendering: The Popular Sexology of David O. Cauldwell. IJT 5,2, www.symposion.com/ijt/cauldwell/cauldwell_01.htm.
• Norman Fisk. "Gender Dysphoria Syndrome. In D. Laub & P. Gandy (Eds.)". Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome. 1974: 7–14.
• Magnus Hirschfeld,. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Material. Berlin: Pulvermacher, vi, 562 pp1910. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. 424 pp 1991.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. ‘Die intersexuelle konstitution’. Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, 1923. 23: 3-27.
• Andrea James. “Magnus Hirschfeld”. Transsexual Road Map. www.tsroadmap.com/info/magnus-hirschfeld.html.
• Kinsey, A.C., Pomeroy, W.B., and Martin, C.E. (1948) Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders.

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Bullough and Bullough in Crossdressing, Sex and Gender, 1993: 257, state that "Hirschfeld in 1910 called one of his patients a psychic transsexual". They give no reference. Presumably they are confusing his book and his 1923 paper.