Barbara de Lamere (1940 - ) proof-reader, magazine editor

Most of the trans women in New York in the 1970s who are written about did not get as far as completion surgery. One who did so was Barbara de Lamere who transitioned at work in the late 1970s, and had surgery in 1982. She retained her job at Kaye Scholer law firm. She became active in The Gay Veterans Association and the Irish and Lesbian Gay Organization.

Enid & Eddie

She had been born as Eddie Dame and mainly raised in New York City. Eddie was in the US Air Force (1959-63) where he found a male lover, Larry. They continued as a gay couple after leaving the Air Force, until Larry married a woman in 1967 saying that he wanted children. However, they continued to meet for sex until Eddie became Barbara in 1982. Eddie had been transvesting since the age of 3, and continued even though Larry was uncomfortable with it. 

In 1967 Eddie joined Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company and was given the stage name of Bunny Eisenhower. The same year he met Enid Jacobs who accepted Eddie’s cross-dressing. Eddie gave up acting. In 1970 Eddie and Enid were married. The same year Eddie was a co-founder with Lee Brewster, Bebe Scarpinato (a teacher), Vicky West (artist) and Chris Moore (a Jewel Box Revue performer) of the Queens' Liberation Front, where he used his stage name, and photographs of Bunny are in Drag magazine 1,1. His affair with Larry continued. The QLF agitated and several New York ordinances that constricted transvesting were removed.

Enid and Eddie were divorced in 1977. Enid kept Eddie’s surname, even after she remarried. 

Eddie started social transition.  In 1982 Eddie took the name Barbara de Lamere and had completion surgery.  The sexual affair with Larry ended.

Enid gained a PhD in English from Rutgers University in 1983, and taught there and at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She became known as a poet, and with her new husband Donald Lev edited Home Planet News, a literary review. Enid and Barbara remained good friends and Barbara was well-known to Enid’s family. Barbara was Associate Editor at the Home Planet News using the name Careufel de Lamiere.

Arthur David Kahn (1920-2009) was a communist author and politician, journalist, classics scholar and professor, and gay rights activist. He had been an officer in the OSS, and was a war interrogator in Germany from 1945. Back in the US he was involved in the Communist Party and the Progressive Party and blacklisted. In the 1960s he did a PhD in Philosophy, and then taught English and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Later Kahn helped found and later chair the Classics department at the new Brock University in Ontario. (Books by Kahn)

In the early 1990s after interviews and the subsequent book Aids, The Winter War: A Testing of America, published 1993, his interest turned to gay activists in New York City. One of the interviewees was Barbara de Lamere. The resulting book was The Many Faces of Gay: Activists Who Are Changing the Nation, 1997. As a courtesy to protect Enid’s privacy, he gave her name as Esther.

Enid died in 2003, and The Academy of American Poets each year bestows the Enid Dame Memorial Poetry Prize for the best poem by an undergraduate. Tributes.

Barbara/Careufel then became Executive Editor along with Donald Lev.

Susan Stryker’s Transgender History came out in 2008. Presumably she had not read Kahn’s book. She simply wrote: “More significant was the Queens’ Liberation Front (QLF), founded by drag queen Lee Brewster and heterosexual transvestite Bunny Eisenhower”. That is it. Stryker gave only Barbara’s short lived stage name, and a very incorrect and unneeded sexual orientation.

In 2015 I wrote up and published an account mainly based on Kahn’s book.

The second edition of Stryker’s book came out in 2017, with the QLF sentence unchanged.

In March 2021, Enid’s brother commented on my account, mainly to criticize that I had Barbara’s wife’s name wrong - that she was Enid not Esther. That enabled me to google Enid Dame and I found an interesting poet.

DeDe Jacobs-Komisar, Enid’s niece then posted and gave interesting information about how Barbara was welcomed by the Jacobs family even after transition.

The third edition of Styker’s book came out in 2026. Again the with the QLF sentence unchanged, and no other mention of Barbara.

• “Drag Queens Demonstrate”. Drag: a magazine about the transvestite, 1,1: 1970: 6-7. 3 photographs of Bunny.
• Arthur David Kahn. The Many Faces of Gay: Activists Who Are Changing the Nation. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1997: 3, 15-20, 266-9.
• Barbara writing as Careufel de Lamiere. “Remembering Enid”. Home Planet News, 10 March 2003. Online.
• Susan Stryker. Transgender History. Seal Press, 2008: 87. 2nd edition, 2017:111. 3rd edition, 2026: 74.
• Zagria. “Susan Stryker: Transgender History – a review”. April 2010. Online.
• Madeline Tiger & DeDe Jacobs-Komisar. “How Enid Dame led us beyond paradigms”. Bridges, 16,1, Spring 2011.
• Zagria. “Barbara de Lamere previously known as Bunny Eisenhower”. September 2015, revised March 2021. Online.
• DeDe Jacobs-Komisar. Comment online.

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On page ix-x in the Preface, Kahn wrote: “ three interviewees asked to be identified solely by their first names; others are represented under first-name pseudonyms”. So is Barbara de Lamere a pseudonym? Well, we know that she wrote under the name Careufel de Lamiere. However DeDe Jacobs-Komisar’s comment clarifies that she was indeed known as Barbara de Lamere.