Two Snapshots

Some people are featured once in the press, and never heard of again.

Lorraine Campbell-Craig

Lorraine, originally from New South Wales, met and was inspired by Coccinelle (presumably in Paris) in the 1950s, and then found work “travelling with theatrical shows through Egypt and Italy” and arrived in London in 1957. She worked as the manager of a bistro, and saved up the £700 needed for sex-change surgery. However her voice gave her away, and by 1966 and she descended into drugs and sex work while living in Manchester.

This much was featured in the Sunday People in November 1967, at a time when she was down.

Lorrains on Cross's blog

There is also a blog post from Peter Cross remembering a club on Sydney’s Oxford Street called Capriccios or simply Caps, where the featured performer was a Lorraine Campbell-Craig, “one of the great personalities of Oxford Street”.

He describes her:

"Lorraine was also a very, very large woman… to say the least, how she made it up the stairs I was never sure but this was her throne. Her history is shrouded in myth and mists of time. Some say she was on the run from the police in Britain, although I doubt she could have run anywhere very fast or far, others say she was just a local girl who liked a frock. One or two people know the truth; sometimes the stories are better than the facts.” 

Cross does not give a date, but I assume that it was the 1970s.

• Alwyn Thomas. “The Tragic Case of the Woman Who was Once Called Donald”. The People, 5/11/1967: 7. Online.
• Peter A Cross. “Riah, eek and slap… bona… must be Caps”. https://peteracross.wordpress.com, 1 October 2009. Online.

Stephen Goad (1929 - 1990)

Goad, from Birmingham, Alabama, worked as a nurse pre-transition, and was married for a while, but was divorced in 1953. He had surgeries in April and June 1960, and then in September, in Miami, legally changed his name. He was living with a common-law wife, mainly working as a cab driver, and doing some free-lance writing. The journalist described him as “an admitted genius and unpublished novelist”.

However it seems that he never was published, at least not under the name Stephen Goad.  He died age 60, in Florida. 

• Gene Miller. "Once a Bride. and Now a Man". The Miami Herald, 1 Sep 1960:30.  
• “Sex Change Is revealed by ‘Genius’ “. Sarasota Journal, 2 September 1960.
• Kyle Phalen.  Email.  2 November 2023.