The Triple-Whammy 1928-9

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I have previously referred to the triple whammy of 1928-9 - when, within a few months, trans men and masculine women in London and Paris were involved in three much publicised trials which, while they did not lead to legislation about clothes, gender or civil rights, did sent a message to trans men that they should be careful.

Note regarding pronouns: Most of the persons discussed here never stated a preferred pronoun. In addition, Swann, Gluck, Lowther, Carstairs, Radclyffe Hall and Sackville West had considerable inherited wealth, and were therefore less affected by the laws about clothing and gender which the lower orders had to conform to. Swann, Gluck, Carstairs and Barker masculinised their names and wore male clothing. Barker, Wood, and Holtom had to work for a living, and therefore they had to pass. They are close enough to the 21^st century concept of a trans man that anything but male pronouns would be wrong. Pelletier and Morris both kept their female first name, but dressed in male clothing, and worked at a time when women of their class did not, Pelletier as a doctor and Morris in sports and with motors. Morris also had a double-mastectomy (top surgery). But because of their retained first names, Madeleine and Violet, it is difficult to use male pronouns for them.

The biographers of Gluck, Lowther, Carstairs, Morris and Pelletier use female pronouns, but I expect that this will change for future biographies.

Contrariwise to Pelletier and Morris, Radclyffe Hall did take a male name: John, and was so addressed by friends. However her manner of dress was only in-between: usually a skirt topped with a male-style jacket and tie – a style that had been very fashionable for upper-class women through the 1920s. Laura Doan, author of Fashioning Sapphism comments on Radclyffe Hall:

“Her haircut was thought to be the most feminine of all the short cuts popular at the time, and she had her hair done at Harrods — not a barbershop. Even Hall’s famous sartorial choices were on the feminine side of what was known as the ‘severely masculine mode’… Nor did Hall and her partner Una Troubridge dress in a bizarre manner, wearing, as some biographers have claimed, clothing from a costume shop. The couple studied fashion magazines and built their wardrobes not from men’s tailors in Savile Row, but from the most chic of London’s department stores for women. [unlike Gluck who bought suits from the expensive men’s tailors].  Hall always wore a skirt and conducted herself in a completely womanly way - in short, Hall definitely didn’t model her protagonist, Stephen Gordon, after herself.” 

Diana Souhami’s biography frequently refers to Radclyffe Hall as John, but she never uses the pronoun ‘he’. While Radclyffe’s anti-hero Stephen Gordon in the Well of Loneliness is very definitely a trans man, perhaps also intersex, his author was not so. And we should note that Radclyffe Hall uses female pronouns for her protagonist in The Well of Loneliness.

Sackville-West had done soldier drag as part of her affair with Violet Trefusis, and as such the pair had fled to France pursued by their husbands. However she did not persist in such gender expression.

Trans men not mentioned below: Madeleine Pelletier was a doctor in Paris; Camille Bertin and his wife were residing with their three daughters in Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d'Azur.

Radclyffe-Hall, Carstairs, Barker and Morris

1924

Wynsley Michael Swann, Lieutenant-Colonel in the Women’s Army Corps during the Great War, quietly transitioned.

Ernest Wood, cellarman, waiter, died age 24 from consumption, and was found to be female-bodied. He was buried as “Miss Ernest Wood”.

Gluck, now having taken male clothing and appearance, has first one-man show of 56 paintings in South Kensington.

Joe Carstairs bought and developed a secluded estate in Hampshire, which he named Bostwick after his grandfather. He bought a yacht, Sonia, and became so proficient that by 1924 he was winning yachting prizes.

Toupie Lowther had run an ambulance unit that was incorporated into the French Army, 1917-8, and in the 1920s ran a lesbian salon, and Radclyffe Hall and other female writers popular at the time attended. Toupie loved to tell how, while motoring, she was stopped at the Franco-Italian border for masquerading as a man. On the return journey she wore a skirt and was arrested for masquerading as a woman. In 1926, Toupie Lowther was elected a member of the French Academie d’Armes, the only woman to that date to be so.

Mary Weston was the best UK shot-putter 1924- 1930.

Multi-event athlete (put-shot, javelin, football, swimming, cycling, motor-racing) Violette Morris, who had set new records in the 1922 Olympics, opened a car/motorbike accessories shop, Spécialités Violette Morris, at 6, rue Roger-Bacon, Paris, using the inheritance from her mother. The rent was 8,000 francs per annum, and the 41,000 franc valuation was all in the stock. She lived in the flat upstairs.

• Vita Sackville-West. Challenge. George H. Doran 1924. A novel, based on the affair between Vita and Violet Trefusis, with Vita’s male persona, Julian Davenport,  the leader of a revolution on a Greek island. His cousin Eve (Violet) joins him as his lover but becomes jealous of his attachment to the island. The book was published in the States only, for Vita’s father found the portrayal obvious enough to identify his family. In the real world, Julian and Violet broke up because the latter had sex with her actual husband.

1925

Joe Carstairs commissioned the best motorboat that money could buy, a hydroplane from Samuel Saunders of East Cowes, Isle of Wight. Joe named the boat Gwen after his lover, Gwen Farrar. After the boat capsized and came up again, Joe reversed the name to Newg.

1926

Carstairs took part in and won the Duke of York’s International Trophy. On Lake Windermere Joe set a world record of 54.97 mph for a 1½ litre class boat.

Morris had been temporarily suspended for giving performance-enhancing drugs to her football team, for questioning the referees and for doing nothing when the referee was hit by a member of her team. In 1926 Morris was indefinitely suspended from football. She used her name to recruit female athletes for a film. She refused to transfer her licence to another club.

Gluck had an exhibit at the Fine Art Society in London.

Radclyffe Hall wrote a short story, "Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself", although it was not published until 1934. It drew on Toupie Lowther's accounts of her life during the war, her masculinity and her lack of fit in society. Ogilvy, "My God! If only I were a man", who, even as a child had insisted that "her real name was William and not Wilhelmina", finds a role in the war leading an ambulance unit, but afterwards finds that again her masculinity has become absurd. She commits suicide.

• Oscar Paul Gilbert. Men in Women's Guise: Some Historical Instances of Female Impersonation. John Lane The Bodley Head Limited. 284 pp 1926

1927

Wynsley Michael Swann took a wife. Unlike what happened to Victor Barker two years later, this marriage was never challenged.

Victor Barker was the live-in secretary of National Fascisti. After a fracas with dissident members, he was charged with “uttering a forged firearm certificate”. He was found not guilty, but his firearms certificate was cancelled. The Public Prosecution Office did find rumours about a woman masquerading as a man, but did not pursue them.

Joe Carstairs commissioned Samuel Saunders to build three hydroplanes designed to be the fastest craft ever at a cost of £50,000. In a significant lapse of memory, Joe named the boats Estelle I, II and III after his mother Evelyn.

Mary Weston was the best UK javelin thrower.

Anton Prinner , artist, moved to Paris from Budapest taking a male name and from then wearing male clothes, a beret and smoking a pipe. Picasso would greet him as "Monsieur Madame".

The Fédération française de sports féminins (FFSF)  notified Morris that she was suspended for violations, and for wearing male clothes. Her smoking and drinking did not help. The FFSF also banned shorts that were too short, playing without a bra, and costumes that were too tight.

A journalist from Paris Midi who questioned Morris apropos the new regulations thought that he must be meeting her husband or brother, "mais non, c'était bien elle, en chair plus qu'en os, habillée d'un complet veston, avec pantalon - comme vous et moi, monsieur - faux col et cravate (but no, it was her in the flesh, dressed in a full jacket with trousers - like you and me, sir - collar and tie)".

Morris won the motor-racing Bol d'Or against male competitors, and practised boxing, sparring with Raoul Paoli (1887-1960), the male Olympics athlete, champion boxer, wrestler, and rugby player for France.

Morris attended a meeting of the FFSF, and issued a defense of her dress style: "L'habit masculin n'a, à ce que je sache, rien de malséant. J'y suis tenue de par mes obligations professionnelles et tant que les lois de la République française ne m'en empêcheront pas, rien ni personne ne peuvent m'interdire un costume qui, vous en conviendrez, est toujours décent (There is nothing, to my knowledge, unseemly about male clothing. I am bound by my professional obligations and as long as the laws of the French Republic  do not prevent it, nothing and nobody can forbid me to dress in a way that you will agree, is still decent)". However this argument did not convince, and Morris was expelled from the FFSF, and thereby from all French championships and the French team for the Olympics where she was expected to win gold medals.

1928

The novel The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall was rejected by three publishers, and then accepted by Jonathan Cape, who priced it at 15/-, twice the price of an average novel.

• Radcliffe Hall, with an appreciation by Havelock Ellis. The Well of Loneliness. Jonathan Cape, 1928. The cover page names the author as ‘Radclyffe Hall’, not as Marguerite nor as John.

Plot: Aristocratic parents, the Gordons are expecting a boy and so call the child Stephen anyway. Stephen is narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered, hates dresses, wants short hair and longs to be a boy, and from age seven develops crushes for heterosexual women. The father reads Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing to understand Stephen, but does not share his findings. After his death Stephen opens his locked bookcase and discovers the concept of ‘invert’. Stephen is an accomplished fencer, tennis player and motorist, and during WWI is in the ambulance unit in the battles at Compiègne, and is awarded a Croix de Guerre. This draws on the life of Toupie Lowther. The book presents inversion as natural, but Gordon’s self-loathing leads him to pretend an infidelity so that his girl-friend will leave him to go with a real man. The word ‘lesbian’ does not appear in the book at all. Radclyffe Hall uses female pronouns for Stephen throughout.

27 July: published. Reviews were mixed. No calls for it to be banned.

28 July-12 August The Olympics were held in Amsterdam. Although only a few women's events were included, Morris was not on the French team.

19 August: Christian reactionary James Douglas’s editorial in the Daily Express: "I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul”. Cape sent a copy to the reactionary Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks who had been supressing alcohol, nightclubs and gambling. Joynson-Hicks replied after two days that the book was "gravely detrimental to the public interest". Proceedings would be brought if publication not stopped. Cape secretly transferred printing to Pagasus Press in Paris.

28 September: Pegasus editions on sale in London.

3 October: Joynson Hicks issued a warrant for shipments of the book to be seized.

11 October: publication of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography.  A magic sex-change novel.

"Orlando had become a woman - there was no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity". 

Based on Woolf’s affair with Vita Sackville-West, imagining Vita as Orlando. Despite the fuss about The Well of Loneliness, no fuss was made about Orlando.

• Virginia Woolf. Orlando: A Biography. Hogarth Press, 1928

19 October : the Chairman of the Board of Customs balked. He had read The Well and considered it a fine book, not at all obscene; he wanted no part of suppressing it. On 19 October he released 250 seized copies for delivery. However police were waiting when they were delivered. Jonathan Cape and the bookseller were summoned to appear at Bow Street Magistrates Court.

9 November: the trial. Havelock Ellis was not willing to testify, his book Sexual Inversion having been previously convicted of obscenity and thus his presence might be counter-productive. Sexologist Norman Haire was to be the star witness for the defence – he argued that homosexuality ran in families and a person could no more become it by reading books than if he could become syphilitic by reading about syphilis. However he and the other witnesses were not called.

16 November : The chief magistrate ruled that the book was obscene.

For a while after the trial, Toupie Lowther took to dressing as a heterosexual woman: skirts, silks etc, and disassociated herself from Radclyffe Hall and her wife Una Troubridge.

• Havelock Ellis. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol 7 Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies. FA Davis 1928. “On the psychic side, as I view it, the Eonist is embodying, in an extreme degree, the aesthetic attitude of imitation of, and identification with, the admired object. It is normal for a man to identify himself with the woman he loves. The Eonist carries that identification too far, stimulated by a sensitive and feminine element in himself which is associated with a rather defective virile sexuality on what may be a neurotic basis.” Perhaps not the very best time to publish this work.
• Anonymous. The Sink of Solitude. 1929. A lampoon in verse by "several hands", satirised both
  
  sides of the controversy over The Well of Loneliness. Its primary targets were Douglas and Joynson-Hicks, "Two Good Men – never mind their intellect". The introduction, by journalist P. R. Stephensen, described The Well's moral argument as "feeble" and dismissed Havelock Ellis as a "psychopath". The Sink itself endorsed the view that lesbianism was innate: “Though Sappho burned with a peculiar flame/ God understands her, we must do the same,/ And of such eccentricities we say/ "'Tis true, 'tis pity: she was made that way”. It portrayed Hall as a humourless moralist who had a great deal in common with the opponents of her novel. One illustration, picking up on the theme of religious martyrdom in The Well, showed Hall nailed to a cross. The image horrified Hall; her guilt at being depicted in a drawing that she saw as blasphemous led to her choice of a religious subject for her next novel, The Master of the House.

1929

January: Victor Barker was arrested after he did not respond to a bankruptcy notice that he did not receive. He was arrested and put in Brixton prison until medically examined. He was then quickly transferred to Holloway women’s prison.

February: using the excuse of fitting into a racing car, Violet Morris publicly had a double mastectomy (what today we would call top surgery) at the clinic of Dr. Cazalis in the suburb of La Garenne-Colombes.

10 March: both Victor Barker and his wife published accounts of their marriage in different newspapers.

• Valerie Arkell-Smith. “The Man-Woman – My Story” Sunday Dispatch, 10 March 1929.
• Elfrida Barker. “My Story: By the Man-Woman’s Wife: Mrs Barker Reveals the Truth”. Sunday Express, 10 March 1929.

27 March: Barker was charged with “wilful and corrupt perjury in an affidavit” re his bankruptcy. Of this he was discharged, but was then charged with having “knowingly and wilfully caused a false statement to be entered in a register of marriage”.

24 April: the second trial. Barker was sentenced to nine months imprisonment.

11-12 May: William Holtom of Evesham, Worcestershire, coal heaver, a cow-man, a road mender, a timber haulier and a navvy, was taken ill, and admitted to the Evesham Poor Law Hospital men’s ward with enteric fever. He was then 42. This led to a discovery of strapping around his chest, and he was hastily transferred to the women’s ward.

Radcliffe Hall wrote: 'I would like to see [Colonel Barker] drawn and quartered. A mad pervert of the most undesirable type'. Radclyffe Hall considered herself an invert and Barker a pervert, but despite what was said at Barker’s trial about passing as male to earn a wage, it was Barker, not Radcliffe Hall who lived full-time as male.

16 June: Claude Lowther, brother of Toupie, died age 59 after a period of illness. He was unmarried but the father of two, and had established a career as a right-wing Conservative. The outing of his sister during the trial cannot have helped.

9 September: The World League for Sexual Reform held its third congress in London in 1929, organized by Norman Haire. The two trials were not on the programme.

Toupie spoke of being the inspiration for Stephen Gordon and some books say that John and Una dropped her for saying so. Una wrote in her life of Radclyffe Hall: “She passed out of our lives when John wrote The Well of Loneliness, and we afterwards heard that she had resented the book as challenging her claim to be the only invert in existence. Later still, when she was growing very old, I was told that she had moreover acquired the illusion that she had served as a model for Stephen Gordon.”

Morris sued the FFSF for reinstatement and 100,000 francs in damages. While her case was against the arbitrary use of power, the trial focused on the right to wear male clothing. Her male lawyer defended the inherent decency of trousers, and questioned why trousers had been okay with the FFSF for ten years, but no longer. He contrasted Morris with Victor Barker in England who had attempted to pass as male. The FFSF had two female lawyers, one of whom, Yvonne Netter, was a noted feminist, divorced and an advocate of planned parenthood. They explained that because of their responsibility to the government (which provided grants) and to parents, they must set good examples. Morris was accused of cross-dressing to attract attention. They noted how female clothing had evolved from the long skirts and corsets of the pre-war era. They portrayed Morris as being a moral danger in female locker rooms, and criticized her in that she had never applied for a permission de travestissement. Morris' lawyer produced a letter from the Commissioner of Police giving assurance that they no longer pursued women in trousers.

The court ruled: "nous n'avons pas à nous occuper de la façon dont se vêt à la ville et dans ses autres occupations Mme Violette Morris, mais nous estimons que le fait de porter un pantalon n'étant pas d'un usage admis pour les femmes, la FFS avait parfaitement le droit de l'interdire. En conséquence, le tribunal déboute Mme Violette Morris et la condamne aux dépens"(we do not have to deal with how Mme. Volette Morris dresses in the city and in her other occupations, but we believe that to wear trousers is not permitted by custom for women, FFSF had every right to prohibit it. Accordingly, the court dismisses Mme. Violette Morris and awards costs)".

• Gladys Mitchell. Speedy Death. Victor Gollancz, 1929. The first (of 66) Mrs Bradley detective novel. Explorer Everard Mountjoy is discovered dead in the bath, and to everyone’s surprise – especially his fiancée – he has a female body. Review. Included the delightful untrue story of Captain Jack Tremain who was part of the British team sent to Khartoum in 1884 to rescue General Gordon. Tremain died of malaria and a post mortem revealed his secret. He was previously Miss Wilhelmina Nash.....who wrote in a diary "to be a woman with ambition beyond that which society will allow is to endure a slow death. I was determined to live a life."
• Joan Riviere. “Womanliness as a Masquerade”. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 1929: 303-313. Analyses how intellectual women in particular practice an artificial femininity as a defensive mask that is put on to hide masculinity. An important contribution to the concept of gender as social construction.

1930

Evan Burtt in a village near Salisbury, Wiltshire, had been declared male at age 29 after examination by a doctor, and supported by Salvation Army solicitors had his birth certificate changed.  Saturday 30 March he married a childhood friend.  This was reported favourably by local and national newspapers.  

Aftermath

The boyette fashion style of a skirt with jacket and tie had, as clothing fashions do, run its course by 1928 and was being replaced by more feminine styles. While Radclyffe Hall’s appearance had been regarded “on the feminine side of what was known as the ‘severely masculine mode’” before 1928, afterwards it came to signify lesbianism, much as effeminacy came to signify male homosexuality only after the Oscar Wilde Trial in 1895.

Despite this, skirt, jacket and tie in later decades became the standard female school uniform – without any suggestions of lesbianism.

1932

• Gerald Berniers writing as Adela Quebec. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Privately published, 1932. A spoof which featured Berniers, Cecil Beaton and others as lesbian schoolgirls at an institution named after the famous writer. Beaton attempted to have all the copies destroyed and it became a very rare book until reprinted in 2000.

1934

Joe Carstairs had seen an advert in a US newspaper for the sale of an island in the Bahamas. He bought Whale Cay for $40,000, and moved there. He was sensitive to the growing hostility about gender variant persons in the press. He never returned to England.

• Radclyffe Hall. Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. William Heinemann, 1934.

1935

Bill Allen had a mysterious stay in hospital, and afterwards claimed that he was now a man.

1936

Mark Weston, previously England’s best female shot-putter and javelin thrower, underwent two operations by Lennox Broster at Charing Cross Hospital, and was declared male.  Unlike Violet Morris, he took a male name.  Two months later he married a female friend. Not Britain’s first surgically completed trans man – there had been others operated on by Broster – but the first to garner press attention because Weston was a well-known athlete.

1948

Una Troubridge, Hall’s partner, petitioned the Home Office to reconsider the ban on The Well of Loneliness (as she hoped to include it in the republication of Hall’s major works), all the relevant files were drastically purged and then closed for one hundred years.

1949

Falcon Press brought out an edition of The Well of Loneliness with no legal challenge. It has been in print in the UK continuously since.

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It is ironic that Douglas and Joynson Hicks regarded The Well of Loneliness as dangerous in that it would lead young women into an inversion composed of depression and self-hatred, while they had no problem with Orlando that presented inversion as a high-spirited romp – in fact as gay in the old sense. But experience teaches that those who would censor are rarely consistent.

Both Woolf and Radclyffe Hall seem to be incapable of imagining inverts who are not aristocratic and wealthy. Readers had to wait until the 1950s for invert stories where the protagonists are ordinary people.

Radclyffe Hall’s books give the author’s name as just that, without a given name, and many write as if Radclyffe were her given name (what in the 1920s would be called a ‘christian name’). Radcliffe Hall’s given name was Marguerite and later John. Radclyffe-Hall was a double-barrelled surname. Her father was Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall.

You could easily argue that Morris’ law case was wrong-headed. It is a pity that Morris did not follow Weston’s example of, after gender surgery, taking a male name and pronoun and leaving female sports behind. However Morris was 13 years older than Weston and had her operation seven years earlier. It is indicative that she did not claim top surgery as gender surgery, but excused it on the grounds of fitting into a racing car. Morris had been sparring with the male Olympics athlete Raoul Paoli, and in motor racing had held her own against male drivers – and actually won the Bol d’Or in 1927. It was time to leave female sports behind – and she was already 36. Neither Morris nor her lawyer nor the FFSF discussed whether a trans man should be involved in female sports. No-one used those concepts in 1929.

Either way, Morris’ trial came immediately after those of Radclyffe-Hall and Barker, and the three together had an impact.

So where are the trans women and female impersonators in this period? Actually there were very few in England and France 1924-9. Once we move into the 1930s it changes significantly. Also of course the situation in Berlin was significantly different and Magnus Hirschfeld oversaw the surgical completion of a few trans women.

Ina Barton (1934 - 1974) friend of April Ashley

In the best trans (auto)biographies there are accounts of other trans persons, who are otherwise unknown. This is one such.

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Ina, who was from Newcastle, and April Ashley first met in 1955. Ina was then still in male mode – in fact doing National Service in the RAF. Ina was introduced into the house in London where April was living with other gender variant persons. April was at that time going by the unisex name of Toni, and was androgynous in appearance. This was before she went to France. While others were cruising for men, Ina did not. As April wrote: “Ina however was a true transsexual and very unhappy, as I had been in the Merchant Navy. He didn't want to be discharged for being a homosexual because he didn't consider himself one.”

In 1960, after being a star in Paris, and after going to Dr Burou in Casablanca, April was back in London, modelling and being filmed for her very small part in The Road to Hong Kong. Ina had been accepted at Charing Cross. April commented: “Ina Barton who was in the throes of a marathon sex transformation, the specialty of London's Charing Cross Hospital.  They insist on lengthy intervals between each stage and use skin grafts from the legs which leave tell-tale scars on the thighs. So much messier than Dr Burou's technique. But her doctor, John Randell, was very solicitous for her well-being and wrote her letters which began, 'My dearest Galatea...'”.

In 1962 April and Ina were sharing a flat in South Kensington.  This was after April had been outed in The People newspaper, and The News of the World had had run her story in six parts.  Ina went to Spain with April. On a previous trip they had gotten into a drunken slap fight about who was to drive. This time April did drive, but Ina freaked out when April mentioned that she’d never taken a test and didn’t have a license. In the commotion they went over a small cliff .

When Ina’s surgeries at Charing Cross were complete, April took her to Jersey for a week. They rented bicycles. On the second day Ina fell heavily on the cross bar and her vulva was enlarged. She left immediately and returned to London to see her own doctor.

After the trauma of Corbett v Corbett in 1970 , April rallied by opening a restaurant just round the corner from Harrods, that was an immediate sensation, and continued to run it for five years until she had a heart attack. During this time Ina was having problems of her own, and passed on. April: “Ina Barton had recently died from a combination of booze and pills. I believe an open verdict was recorded but that's splitting hairs - in effect she killed herself.”

• Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley. April Ashley's Odyssey. Jonathan Cape, 1982: 46, 104, 139, 140, 156, 257. Also Online.

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In April's second autobiography, The First Lady, the 1955 meeting and Ina's death are mentioned but not the other incidents. 

Kubrà (1912 - ?) Iran's first surgical gender confirmation

In the late 1920s the police in Garrus in Iranian Azerbaijan became aware of a young person with a non-standard gender. The person was referred to as “Kubrà, son of Tahir Sultan”, although Kubrà is a female name.

Kubrà was sent to Tehran, where the Police Health Office referred her to the state hospital. Kubrà was demanding that her male organs be surgically removed and her female ones be completed or she would kill herself. The doctors considered her a “khilqat-i ‘ajib” (wondrous creation) in that she had both male and female organs. While her body was considered to be predominantly male, in her feeling she was predominantly feminine, and her sexual "lust" was female.

A team of doctors led by Dr Khal‘atbari granted her desire, and she was operated on 24 October 1930. A report in the daily newspaper Ittila‘at reported that Kubrà was recovering well and was very happy. “This event is a wondrous story that speaks to Iran’s medical progress and the advance of its surgical capabilities”. It congratulated the hospital for having such specialised doctors.

•  Afsaneh Najmabadi. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Duke University Press, 2014: 41.

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Unlike so many others at that time, Kubrà's sense of being female was allowed to override the masculine predominance of her body.

The GG Knickerbocker P T Barnum Room

Part I: The Gilded Grape
Part II: The GG Knickerbocker Barnum Room

The Knickerbocker Hotel

The Knickerbocker Hotel  1466 Broadway at 42^nd Street, opened in 1906 – two years after the first NY subway line, the IRT, reached Times Square. It was "a Fifth Avenue Hotel at Broadway prices" - $3.25 a day (<1% of today’s rates). 

It was owned by John Jacob Astor IV until he went down with the Titanic in 1912. Legend has it that the martini drink was invented at the Knickerbocker and named after the house bartender. World-famous tenor Enrico Caruso and his family lived in the hotel (until his death in 1921). 

After that the hotel was closed and converted to commercial use. The same building was reopened as the Hotel Knickerbocker in 2015.  However in-between, the brand name Knickerbocker was free for others to use, and in the 1960s the name was taken by a down-market hotel located at 128 West 45^th Street.

The Peppermint Lounge

The ground floor premises at128 West 45^th Street had been licensed on numerous occasions since 1934. Over the years there had been numerous arrests of gay men, and citations for disorderly premises and Administrative Code violations. The NY State Liquor Authority had stated that no renewal was to be issued for 1959 until a bona fide buyer took over. It was then rented to 128 Restaurant Inc, and the owners of record were Ralph Saggesse and Orlando Grippo. In reality they were employed by Sam Konwiser who ran businesses for Johnny Biello, a capo in the Genovese crime family.

The Peppermint Lounge opened in 1958. It had a lengthy mahogany bar running along one side, lots of mirrors and a dance floor at the back, a capacity of just 178 people. There was a back door into the Knickerbocker Hotel Lobby. Johnson et al describe the hotel at that time: it “rented as many rooms by the hour as they did to the luckless out-of-towners, the unemployed and those only a week away from living on the streets”.

 The Peppermint Lounge was mainly a gay bar. The major dance craze 1960-1 was the Twist. Much to the surprise of Johnny Biello, this became associated with the Peppermint Lounge, and celebrities, especially Hollywood stars, flocked there to do the dance, and to be photographed doing it. The house band was Joey Dee and the Starlighters. Jackie Kennedy arranged for a temporary ‘Peppermint Lounge’ in the White House. A sister club was opened in Miami Beach. Gays and lesbians liked the dance because it did not necessarily require a partner, and if dancing with a same-sex partner when the police raided, one could spin around to face a partner of the other gender. It is said that (female) go-go dancing (alone on a raised platform for others to watch) originated at the Peppermint Lounge.

1961

Proprietor Ralph Saggesse appeared as a contestant on the popular television program What's My Line? 

• Greg Garrison (dir) Hey, Lets Twist, with Joey Dee and the Starlighters. US BW mono 79 mins 1961. IMDB. EN.Wikipedia. A fictionalized story of the Peppermint Lounge, partially filmed there.

The Ronnettes made their professional debut at the Peppermint Lounge.

1962

• The Starlighters. “Peppermint Twist”. 45 rpm single. Three weeks at number 1 in January.
• Sam Cooke. “Twistin’ the Night Away”. 45 rpm single. "a place/Somewhere up a New York way/Where the people are so gay".

1964

The Beatles were filmed at the club. Many musicians of the period performed there including the Beach Boys, the Crystals, Chubby Checker, Liza Minelli, the Four Seasons etc.

1965

The State Liquor Authority decided to revoke the Peppermint liquor licence. This was upheld in the state Supreme Court. The club closed in December.  Within two months Matty Ianniello on behalf of the Genovese family had arranged a new front company to purchase the club. Mar-Jear Restaurant paid $20,000 and received a liquor licence at the end of June 1966. A September 1966 FBI memo stated:

“On 08/29/66 the informant advised that Matty Ianiello whom the informant has previously met had recently bought a piece of the Peppermint Lounge Nite club on West 45th St. NYC. He continued that Matty has an interest in a number of ‘Fag Joints’ in NYC and that the Peppermint Lounge is now a ‘Fag Joint.’ ” (Crawford:113).

The designated owner was Abraham Margorgolies (the ‘mar' in Mar-Jear) who also owned a jewelry business on 135^th Street, a factory in Puerto Rico and was co-producer of a Broadway show. The manager was John Mink, who had just retired as a police captain in the 10^th Precinct. He had been an army buddy of Ianniello – they had been in combat together in the South Pacific.

Initially the place opened as a topless bar. Geri Miller who had been in the Warhol/Morrissey films Flesh, Trash and Women in Revolt, IMDB, and had been one of the Peppermint Twisters and had dated Ringo Star, was one of the performers.

Johnny Biello was whacked in 1967 in a Miami Beach parking lot on orders from Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno.

The topless bar was not too successful, and the place reverted to being a gay bar, The Turntable. Later it was called the Hollywood. Richie Kaczor was the DJ, and Abe Glanstein was the manager. It was popular with Puerto Ricans. By 1977 Disco music was the craze. That was also the year that Studio 54 opened, and Kaczor took his skills there.

 The GG Kickerbocker Barnum Room 

When the Gilded Grape closed, most of the staff went to the Hollywood. Glanstein’s mainly Puerto Rican clientele had pretty well moved on and he needed a new crowd. He changed the name of the club to GG Knickerbocker – the GG was a signal to the Gilded Grape crowd that they were welcome. The new club was a moderate success from its opening in May 1977. Police harassment was way down in that the hookers were off 8^th Avenue. Also being on the south side of 45^th Street, the policing was done by the Midtown South Precinct – who were less uptight than their colleagues to the north.

Most of the Knickerbocker Hotel was being converted into condos – the Knickerbocker hotel was no longer so down-market. Ianniello arranged for the remodeling of the ground floor incorporating the hotel lobby into the new version of the club. Jerry Cohen’s design company got the contract. The new club could hold 400 comfortably, nearly three times as many as the Peppermint Lounge. The big innovation was the circus theme: a trapeze and a net were put up and aerialists performed. Some of them were trans.  All this to a disco beat.  As had the Peppermint Lounge, this had a long bar with seating in the front, and a dance floor in the rear, Caraballo from the Gilded Grape was still the doorman. The GG Knickerbocker P T Barnum Room (named after PT Barnum the 19^th century circus entrepreneur) opened July 20, 1978.  The name was quickly shortened. Jerry Cohen was now the manager.

Generally admission was $5, $10 after 11pm.

Not only trans women from the Gilded Grape started coming: also Truman Capote, Robert Redford and Andy Warhol. Cohen commented:

“A celebrity is no more to us than the average transvestite. Besides they are the cheapest people around. They don’t spend any money.”

Three Italian television journalists making a documentary on the state of US women came and filmed in the Barnum room.

Victoria Cruz did sex work out of the GG Knickerbocker, and the Grapevine.

Timmy Scott had been the show co-ordinator at both the Gilded Grape and at the Barnum Room. He made a point of using regular customers in the show. A regular talent show packed the club every Monday night. He also selected themes for the Sunday shows. He kept things moving and the crowds jumping, and his comebacks on the microphone quieted unruly customers. He died in 1978 age 42.

Tish Gervais:

“GG’s Barnum Room wasn’t exempt from providing us girls with the opportunity to make some extra cash. The clientele from the old Gilded Grape soon discovered this new location and men were continuously on the prowl for some action. Another way you could make some money there was by doing some lip-synching performances. As the reigning Miss 220, I got to perform there and was paid a hundred bucks a night. It was easy money. While I wasn’t comfortable with lip-synching, I rose to the challenge.” (p 106)

Carmen Xtravaganza:

“The club had a circus trapeze on the roof of the club, Salvador Dali and many celebrities would come through the Barnum Room, at the time celebs would mix with people and it wasn’t such a big deal like it is today. Ava Hollywood was a great beauty and a great friend of Dali. I remember seeing them coming out of a large limo with ‘Hollywood’ on the limo’s number plate entering The GG’s Barnum Room. Grace Jones did a show there as well and Taxi, a beautiful girl did the show with her, it was history for Taxi, Grace Jones was her idol and became mine after that!”

Rosalyne Blumenstein mentions that Ava Hollywood was also a hit at Studio 54. She also says:

“I worked in the Barnum Room as a coat-check girl. … It was right around the corner from my old school. Down the block there was a restaurant where all the thugs hung out. I was always scared to go there but because I worked in the bars and I was friends with some of the thugetts, the women who hung out in the restaurant, I would never get jumped or ripped off. The Barnum Room was as hip as studio 54, Zenon’s and the Limelight. But the Barnum Room catered to a more eclectic, shall we say common and perverse, clientele. Trans women and non-trans women who were working girls working out of the Barnum Room would sometimes take their tricks past the restaurant on 45^th and Sixth and then their boyfriends would come out and rip the johns off or beat them up. This was the cultural norm in my life.”

In September 1980, New York Magazine, in its True Tales of New York retold an anecdote from August the previous year. Two housewives from Litchfield County, Connecticut, in town for the day, having had an all-day pampering at a 5^th Avenue beauty salon, and a meal in an expensive restaurant, all put on their husbands’ credit cards, decided that they would go slumming, to the notorious GG Barnum’s that they had seen on television. Inside they were even daring enough to strike up conversation with a ‘tasteful’ black trans woman sitting nearby. “This your first time here?” she said. “Then lemme give you some advice. You two ain’t never gonna score. Shit, you guys look like dogs. You’re made up like hookers, and frankly, you’re both much too butch!.” The ladies quickly left, and in their hotel scrubbed off the effect of the expensive pampering. They returned early to Litchfield County the next morning.

In 1980 the Barnum Room hosted a Miss Gay NY contest. Blumenstein:

“I entered the contest not even thinking the word ‘gay’ had anything to do with me or the contest. … And gay just meant that women who were not TS could not participate”. 

It was judged by gay men. The winner was Mara Devau from Cuba, the reigning champion. The first runner up was Sugar Belane.  Blumenstein, under the name ‘Roe’ was third runner up.

Chicky died while working at the Barnum Room. His eldest daughter had become a cashier at the club.

In 1980 Motown singer Diana Ross had her second hit single with “I’m Coming Out”. Writer Nile Rodgers got the idea after seeing three different Diana Ross impersonators at GG Barnum Room. For Ross the lyrics had an additional meaning in that she was about to leave - that is to come out from - Motown Records. The song became a sort-of gay pride anthem.

Finally, later that year, after complaints from surrounding businesses, complaints about pickpockets, of johns getting rolled, and finally a pair of murders, the GG Barnum Room lost its liquor licence. It closed November 1980.

Aftermath

Some went back to the Grapevine, although that was a letdown after the Barnum room. A new club for trans women with new owners was the Casa Dario on 46^th Street between 6^th and 7^th Avenues. The hostess was Edie Lane, back from completion surgery with Dr Biber in Colorado. She was found stabbed to death in her apartment on the upper East Side – apparently she had taken the wrong man home.

Jim Fouratt was a gay activist who had been at Stonewall but was critical of trans women as reinforcing gender stereotypes. In the late 1970s, in partnership with Rudolf Pieper, he was running the rock music nightclub Danceteria, which was closed by the police and fire department 4 October 1980 in that they did not actually have any licences. As the Barnum Room was about to be closed, Fouratt investigated the site. In the basement he found the old signage for the Peppermint Lounge. Fouratt and Pieper reopened the place as the Peppermint Lounge, this time as a cutting edge rock club with acts such as Black Flag and British bands such Gang of Four. However they did not get on with what Fourett referred to as the Italian ‘uncles’ in the back room, who were asking for a bigger cut. After threats of violence, the two of them left. The Peppermint Lounge continued at the same address until May 1982 when the building was condemned. The club moved to 100 Fifth Ave. as the New Peppermint Lounge, where it continued until 1985.

The building at 128 West 45th Street was torn down in the mid-1980s.

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GG Barnum Room was not the first New York nightclub with live circus performers. That credit goes to Jerry Brandt who opened the Electric Circus at 23 St Marks Place in the East Village back in 1967.

Was the Barnum Room the first to have go-go boys? For a nightclub, perhaps yes. However go-go boys had been noticed at the GLF dances several years before.

Some source documents talk as if there were two moves, with GG Knickerbocker being in the hotel on 42^nd Street for a short while. This threw me off initially, and I had to read the better sources carefully to establish that this was not so.

Apparently Ava Hollywood was somewhat of a legend in the New York party scene from the late 1970s through to the 1990s. She must be at least 60 now. Google gives me an Ava Hollywood who is a porn star. This cannot be the same person who was dating Salvador Dali in 1978? Somebody else must have taken the name.

I could not find any details about the two murders that happened at the Barnum Room.

The building was converted to condos in 1978 and then condemned and pulled down in the mid 1980s.  Bad luck if you bought one.

There is no mention at all of the Gilded Grape or the Barnum Room in Julian Fleisher's The Drag Queens of New York, 1996. There is no mention at all of them in Laurence Senelick's The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre, 2000,

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• “GG Changes Name / Location”. Drag, 7, 25, 1977: 9. Online.
• “Gilded Grape’s Timmy Scott … Gone”. Drag, 7, 26, 1978: 9. Online.
• Orde Coombs. “Le Freak, C’est Chic on 45^th Street”. New York Magazine, 8 Jan 1979:47-50. Online.
• John P French. “Drag” in True Tales of the City, New York Magazine, 1 September 1980. Online.
• Rosalyne Blumenstein. Branded T. 1^st Books, 2003: 99, 101, 104-6, 112-3, 117, 144, 177.
• Jim Fouratt. “Studio 54, 1982”. RudolfPiper.Com, 2008. Online.
• John Johnson, Joel Selvin & Dick Cami. Peppermint Twist: The Mob, the Music, and the Most Famous Dance Club of the '60s. Thomas Dunne Books, 2012: chp 23.
• Paul Vitello. “Matthew Ianniello, the Mafia Boss Known as ‘Matty the Horse,’ Dies at 92”. New York Times, Aug 22, 2012. Online.
• Carmen Xtravaganza. “The Late 70s”. carmenxtravaganza.biz, February 4^th, 2013. Online.
• Phillip Crawford Jr. The Mafia and the Gays. 2015: 23, 40, 50, 51, 58.
• Martin Aston. Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out. Constable, 2016: 104, 134-5.
• Tim Laurence. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-1983. Duke University Press, 2016: 58.
• Ric Tennenbaum interviews Melissa Sklarz. New York City Trans Oral History Project, July 5, 2017. Online.
• Duncan Osborne. “Feds Tracked Mob Control of Gay Bars into the 1980s”. Gay City News, August 30, 2018. Online.
• Brian Belovich. Trans Figured: My Journey from Boy to Girl to Woman to Man. Skyhorse, 2018: 106.
• “GG’s Barnum Room”. DiscoMusic.Com. No Longer available.
• Victoria Cruz. Where Love is Illegal: A Witness Change Project. Online.

EN.Wikipedia(Peppermint Lounge)      MotherboardsNYC     PlayerListenLive(I’m Coming Out)            NY Disco Clubs

The Gilded Grape

Part I: the Gilded Grape
Part II: The GG Knickerbocker Barnum Room

Matty The Horse Ianniello

We have already met Matthew Ianniello (1920 – 2012) who co-ordinated what happened at the Stonewall Inn on behalf of the Genovese crime family.

Born and raised in Little Italy, Manhatten, and then Brooklyn, Ianiello returned from service in the Second World War with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

In 1951 he was arrested for possessing heroin, but the charges were dropped. He acquired the nickname ‘the horse’ either from the heroin (which is sometimes referred to as ‘horse’) or from the strength of his punch.

In the early 1960s Ianniello joined the Genovese crime family, which already had experience of running gay/trans clubs - especially the 82 Club. Ianniello eventually built a string of gay/trans clubs including the Stonewall, the Peppermint Lounge and the Gilded Grape as well as heterosexual strip clubs, porn theatres and restaurants. In addition to more than eighty bars and restaurants, Matty’s enterprise included support businesses supplying alcohol, laundry and trucking, and of course a talent agency that supplied topless dancers. And also an interior decorating firm and a garbage collection firm.

Under a negotiated arrangement he paid tribute to all five New York Mafia families.   A NYPD detective was quoted:

“You don’t run a bar and grill or sex establishment between 34^th and 59^th streets, from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River, without Matty having a piece of the action.” (Johnson et al p250), 

Johnson et al say that

“In a large sense, Ianniello was the man who made Times Square the tawdry place that it was in the seventies.” 

In 1972 he was in the kitchen of Umberto’s Clam house when Colombo crime family rebel Joe Gallo got whacked at 4.30am.

In 1986 he was convicted of racketeering and went to prison until 1995.  On release Ianniello became the acting boss of the Genovese family until 2006 when he was convicted again.  He was released in 2009, and died at home in 2012, aged 92.

The Gilded Grape 719 8^th Ave, Manhattan

By 1974 there was a lack of bars/nightclubs for trans persons in New York. The Stonewall had closed after the riots in 1969, and the Washington Square at Broadway and 3^rd Street where Sylvia Rivera liked to drink had also closed.

The Gilded Grape opened that year as a mixed disco.  Drag Magazine described it as New York’s “sole and only drag hangout”. Gerald Cohen, from the Bronx, was the manager; Angel Caraballo was the doorman, and Matty Ianniello – of course – was behind the scene.  At first Cohen did not realize that there were trans women among his clientele. One evening, passing the ladies’ room, he found his enraged floorman with a hand up a woman’s dress. He made a decision: “if it looks like a woman it can use the ladies’ room”. Word spread and trans women came.

In 1974. Italian art dealer Luciano Anselmino suggested to Andy Warhol that he do a series of drag queen portraits, and named  Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. It was pointed out to him that Candy was dead. Later Anselmino suggested doing a series of “funny looking” transvestites, those who were obviously men trying to pass as women. Andy suggested The Gilded Grape, where his entourage and rich European clients visiting Warhol’s Factory were sometime taken after dinner to witness the ‘dark underbelly of Manhattan nightlife”. The project started: Bob Colacello, artist Ronnie Cutrone and art student Corey Tippen found most of the models, including Wilhelmina Ross.

"We would ask them to pose for 'a friend' for $50 an hour. The next day, they'd appear at the Factory and Andy, whom we never introduced by name would take their Polaroids. And the next time we saw them at the Gilded Grape, they invariably would say, 'Tell your friend I do a lot more for fifty bucks’." 

These large format polaroids were transferred to paintings as a silk screen. This became part of Andy’s “Ladies and Gentlemen” series first shown in Italy, September/October 1975.

Eddie, Miss Gilded Grape 1974.

The Gilded Grape announced a Miss Gilded Grape Contest, and the editors of Drag Magazine (some of whom were in the Queens Liberation Front) attended. Desi Duvall was turned out from the dance segment when people recognized her as a winner of previous dance contests; Cindy could not answer the questions as she spoke mostly Spanish; the winner was Eddie, a bartender at the Grape, in drag for the first time. The most sensational was Judy Bowen who spoke for ten minutes about her operations. Her operations seemed to count against her. Drag commented that rules against surgery should be spelt out clearly in advance. The third runner up, Miss Toni Stevens, was on the cover of the next issue of Drag Magazine. The next year, Toni won the Grape’s Broadway Award for the best performance in their regular Sunday Night Show.

Despite the publicity, The Gilded Grape declined to pay for an advertisement in Drag Magazine.

Tish Gervais (who many years later reverted to being Brian Belovich) and her friend Easha came:

“Still dressed as a boy, I secretly longed to be part of the transgender milieu. It was quite a scene; the Grape was a hodgepodge of every possible gender and sexual identity. While it was predominately transgender women, there was also a heady mix of gay men, lesbian women, bisexual folks, and tranny-chasing tricks. There was also a small group of transvestite men like those portrayed in the book, Casa Susanna, who liked to dress as women but were married with wives and families.”

Rosalyn Blumenstein also came:

“The crowd was an eclectic bunch. Remember the thugs, rapists and tricks? This made up a percentage of the population entering the Gilded Grape. There were trans girls, girls of trans experience, cross dressers, street punks looking for extra money, drug dealers, businessmen in female attire, transsexuals from all over the country, illegal aliens, kids dressed up as adults, and runaways."

And again:

"The Gilded Grape crowd was predominantly African-American, Jamaican, South African, Nigerian, Latino/a, Puerto Rican, Cubana, Mexicana, Dominicana, Panamanian, street-wise, transsexuals, drag queens, drag kings, hustlers and prostitutes. The tricks, Johns and tranny-chasers, were predominantly white. However, the bangy-boys were Latino and represented the many cultural groups I just described. The crowd was filled with tranny thugs, drug addicts, performers, wannabes, immigrants and our followers. The club was also filled with atmosphere, acceptance, community, safety, and a sense of family, as well as hate, remorse, hustle, desire, escape, and revenge. The music was loud with a mixture of disco, show tunes, salsa, and melodramatic sex vigilant reverberation.” (p 52-3)

Another at the Gilded Grape was Romain Atura who went to Dr Benito Rush and was approved for transgender surgery. The surgery was done by Dr David Wesser in 1976. She afterwards regretted the operation, although still spending time at the Gilded Grape. She killed herself a few months later.

The future film-star, the young Mickey Rourke hung out at the Gilded Grape for a while, and if a woman was being hassled by a trick, he was known to step in and help her.

Cohen, the manager, was interviewed by R. Thomas Collins Jr. of the New York Daily News:

“Drag queens, transvestites came to my place. I had a market and I served them. The only people I didn’t let in were whores. I’ve been harassed by the SLA and police. ... Once a cop told me they kept the pressure on me because the ‘establishment’ didn’t like drag queens. My lawyer has been fighting all the way. I wanted to stand by my customers. They’ve got a right to be that way.” … 

“Of course I know Matty Ianniello, and I was being harassed by law enforcement just because he was reputed to be associated with the Mafia. My only connection with Matty is knowing him, and one of my partners at Jericho used to work at the Peppermint Lounge, when Matty owned it.”

Despite what Cohen said about not letting in whores, sex workers did gather at the Gilded Grape and plied their trade up and down 8^th Ave. in open competition with their cis co-workers. Some of the trans woman lived above the Gilded Grape in the Camelot Apartments. Quack doctor Jimmy Treetop sold hormones to some of the regulars at the Gilded Grape.

Tish Gervais:

“Although I felt comfortable in the predominantly trans atmosphere at the Gilded Grape on Eighth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, which was a short walk from our apartment, I was often anxious and fearful there. Instead of punching a time clock at some job, I went to the Grape to earn my keep. It was safer than working on the stroll in Times Square and the guys knew what they were getting looking only for those “girls with something extra” like myself. Being a younger trans woman might have made it easier for me to find tricks, but it also created tension with some of the heavily-seasoned regular girls who frequented the bar.”

The police of Midtown North Precinct were not amused at the uptick in trans solicitation. In three years Cohen received 26 tickets and repeatedly went before the State Liquor Authority.

NYC Mayor Abraham Beame (1974-7) had made a crusade to eliminate pornography and the trans bars in New York. This did not get very far. In April 1977 the Highways Commissioner Anthony Ameruso made a surprise visit to the Times Square area with the press attending and had workers use acetylene torches to cut down the canopies in front of four enterprises including the Gilded Grape on the excuse that they did not have permits for them.

No summons against Cohen was ever sustained, but his legal fees had added up to over $40,000, and now canopies had been destroyed. Exhausted, he voluntarily surrendered his liquor license a few weeks later. The Gilded Grape closed, and was reopened as the Grapevine. Some trans women still went there but others heard of a new place: the GG Knickerbocker Barnum Room.

__________________________________

Sharon Churcher writing in New York magazine in 1980 portrayed Romaine spending her last evenings in the GG Knickerbocker Barnum Room. However as Romaine died in 1976, and the GG Knickerbocker Barnum Room did not open till 1978, she must have meant the Gilded Grape.

Orde Coombs spelt Gerald/Jerry Cohen's name as ‘Cohn”.

Blumenstein p53 refers to the manager of the Gilded Grape as Chickey, and says that he let some of the girls in in exchange for a blow job. It is not clear whether or not Chickey is the same person as Gerald Cohen.

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• “Drag Drops in on New York’s Drag Oasis: Beauty at the Gilded Grape”. Drag, 4, 14, 1974: 30-41. Online
• “Annual Awards at Gilded Grape: Drag Cover Girl Winner”. Drag, 6,24, 1975: 6. Online
• Lena Williams. “Manes Asks Revision of Pornography Plan”. New York Times, April 2, 1977. Online. 
• Orde Coombs. “Le Freak, C’est Chic on 45^th Street”.  New York Magazine, 8 Jan 1979:47. Online.
• R Thomas Collis, Jr. Newswalker: A Story for Sweeney. Ravensyard Pub Ltd, 2002: 99, 123-5.
• Sharon Churcher. “The Anguish of the Transsexuals”. New York, June 16, 1980: 50.
• Rosalyne Blumenstein. Branded T. 1^st Books, 2003: 50-3, 71, 73, 83, 100.
• “The Gilded Grape at 719 Eight Avenue”. Jigiart.blogspot.com, 11/01/2009. Online.
• Paul Vitello. “Matthew Ianniello, the Mafia Boss Known as ‘Matty the Horse,’ Dies at 92”. New York Times, Aug 22, 2012. Online.
• John Johnson, Joel Selvin & Dick Cami. Peppermint Twist: The Mob, the Music, and the Most Famous Dance Club of the '60s. Thomas Dunne Books, 2012: chp 23. 
• Phillip Crawford Jr. The Mafia and the Gays. 2015: 80,
• Patricia Hickson (ed). Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls. Yale University Press, 2015: 6, 42, 162, 169.
• Duncan Osborne. “Feds Tracked Mob Control of Gay Bars into the 1980s”. Gay City News, August 30, 2018. Online.
• Brian Belovich. Trans Figured: My Journey from Boy to Girl to Woman to Man.  Skyhorse, 2018: 71-3, 101-2. 
• Josh Milton. “Andy Warhol’s unseen portraits of drag queens and trans women to go on display for the first time”. Pink News, October 29, 2019. Online.

EN.Wikipedia(Matthew Ianniello)             WarholStars(Ladies and Gentlemen paintings)

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