The First Drafts of Trans Histories Part III: 1970 onwards

It is a cliché that journalism is the first draft of history, and so it is with trans history. The following are journalists who were in the right place at the right time and saw the potential story.

Part I: 1900-1950

Part II: 1950-1969

Part III: 1970 onwards

Arthur Bell (1939 - 1984)

Brooklyn born, Montreal raised, Arthur Bell was an early member of the New York Gay Liberation Front and a founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance, and became a journalist mainly for The Village Voice. Bell was in Europe with his lover Arthur Evans the summer of 1969, and thus was not at Stonewall.

Bell and Sylvia Rivera publicized the plight of Chris Thompson, a dancer who went for treatment for asthma at New York’s Bellevue Hospital in 1970, but was locked in the psychiatric wing for being black, gay and trans.

Bell publicized Sylvia Rivera’s trial in 1970 for soliciting signatures on a petition for gay rights, and then later her involvement in Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and then STARHouse. It is presumably the fame resulting from this that led David Isay and Martin Duberman to include her in their accounts of Stonewall (although apparently she was not actually there).

Arthur Bell chronicled STAR’s relationship to both Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance, theorizing that internal GAA ideological conflict contributed to its recalcitrance toward providing financial support.

Perhaps Bell had said too much about the hustling patterns of STAR members in that a flurry of 42nd Street arrests followed The Village Voice article “STAR Trek”.

Mafiosi Mile Umbers owned the rundown building where STAR house was located. In July 1971 he confronted them about unpaid rent and settled for eviction. His bar Christopher’s End was also raided, and Bell wrote about Umbers’ influence in straight and gay pimping and in the gay bar scene in The Village Voice, 22 July, and shortly afterwards GAA organized a protest campaign outside Christopher’s End.

In December that year, Bell wrote about the wedding of Liz Eden and John Wojtowicz/Basso, and in August 1972 John attempted what became known as the Dog Day Afternoon bank robbery which turned into a hostage situation. Bell phoned into the bank and Wojtowicz answered and gave his version of what he was doing. Bell understood that Wojtowicz had shared his plans with Mike Umbers who supplied guns in exchange for 50% of the take. Bell later that evening went on Barry Farber’s radio program to discuss what he knew about the incident. Bell also interviewed Liz.

Arthur Bell’s investigation of claims that Wojtowicz had been set up by the Gambino mafia family brought bomb threats to the Village Voice. At Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) meetings

“conservative and radical gays debated over whether Wojtowicz was a counterrevolutionary lumpen adventurer victimized by the mob or a proud gay superfly caught in an act of righteous expropriation, but the debate was inconclusive.” (Holm, 1976)

In May 1972 Bell also found time to interview the Andy Warhol ‘superstar’ Candy Darling.

In May 1979 Bell interviewed composer Wendy Carlos who had just revealed that she had transitioned some years earlier.

And later that year he wrote in support of the campaign against William Friedkin‘s film Cruising being filmed on the streets where real gay and trans persons were endangered. While the film was partially based on news articles he had written about unsolved murders of gay men, he was leaked the screenplay and deplored its negative depiction of gay men.

Arthur Bell died in 1984, age 44, from complications related to diabetes.

*Not the golfer, or the convicted murderer, or the dancer.

• Arthur Bell & Sylvia Rivera. “Chris: Gay Prisoner in Bellevue.” Gay Flames, Nov. 14, 1970. Online
• Arthur Bell. “NYU Sit-In Story.” 1970, NYPL.
• Arthur Bell. “Ray Rivera is known as.” 1970, NYPL.
• Arthur Bell. “Sylvia goes to college”. Village Voice, October 13, 1970.
• Arthur Bell. “Statement to G.A.A. About the Weinstein Sit-In.” Sept/Oct 1970, NYPL
• Arthur Bell. “STAR Trek: Transvestites in the street.” Village Voice, July 15, 1971, 1, 46.
• Arthur Bell. “Mike Umbers: The Emperor of Christopher Street”. Village Voice, July 22, 1971. Online.
• Arthur Bell. Dancing the Gay Lib Blues: A Year in the Homosexual Liberation Movement. Simon & Schuster, 1971.
• Arthur Bell. “For immediate release: Transvestite Forum to Kickoff Series on Alternate Life Styles.” March 5, 1972, NYPL.
• Arthur Bell. “Candy Darling, Where Were You the Night Jean Harlow Died”. Village Voice, May 18, 1972. Online.
• Arthur Bell. “Littlejohn & the mob: Saga of a Heist”. The Village Voice, August 31, 1972. Online.
• Eric Holm. "Dog Day Afternoon, Dog day aftertaste". Jump Cut, 10-11. 1976:3-4. Online.
• Arthur Bell. Kings Don't Mean a Thing, William Morrow and Co, 1978.
• Arthur Bell. “Wendy/Walter Carlos: a candid conversation with the “switched-on Bach” composer who, for the first time, reveals her sex-change operation and her secret life as a woman”. Playboy, May 1979. Online.
• Arthur Bell. “On ‘Cruising’: The Hollywood Hassle”. The Village Voice, September 3, 1979. Online.
• Stephen L Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail”. Routledge, 2008.
• Zagria. “Sylvia Rivera Part II: GAA & Weinstein Hall”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 8 September 2017. Online.
• Zagria. “Sylvia Rivera Part V: Later Years”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 14 September 2017. Online.
• Zagria. “Liz Eden and Dog Day Afternoon: Part I - Two Weddings and a Bank Robbery”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 22 August 2020. Online.
• EN.Wikipedia(Arthur Bell (journalist))
• Village Voice(Arthur Bell)

Kris Kirk (1950-1993)

Christopher Pious Mary Kirk (1950 – 1993) was a journalist for Gay News in the early 1980s. Later he was the first openly gay music journalist writing for Melody Maker, The Guardian and other publications. In 1984 he published Men In Frocks, with photographs by his lover Ed Heath.

The title, Men in Frocks, was of course ill-chosen. Kris, several times in the book has to apologize that a person (Poppy Cooper, Roz Kaveney, Letitia Winter) is not a man in a frock, she having become a woman. However the book is of major historical interest, and many of its observations are still valid.

The book remains the best history of drag and trans women from the 1940s to the early 1980s. In the ‘40s there was drag performance in the soldiers-in-skirts revues; in the ‘50s some went to Paris and were employed at Madame Arthur/Le Carrousel. A very small number were able to transition, and others did drag acts on the ships of the merchant navy, and there was actually still a molly house, that of Stella Minge in Silvertown, London. In the ‘60s drag shows in pubs became common, and then drag balls which attracted drag performers at first, and then trans women started coming. The ‘70s started with the Gay Liberation Front in which otherwise cis gay men did political drag. There was also a Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen group for the more committed. In the ‘80s Kirk and Heath went to the London TV/TS group and featured several of the participants in their book.

In their ‘TV & TS’ chapter Kirk discusses the differences between DQ, TV and TS. The stereotypes, and the fact that many do not fit the stereotypes. He concludes:

"If there is any one lesson to be learned from studying this field it is that the individual is individual. People define themselves and the self-definition must always takes priority over the received wisdom. I have met self-defined drag queens whom others would describe as TV either because they enjoy 'passing'; or because they 'dress' so often that it could be seen as a compulsion; or because they wear lingerie, either to turn men on or to make themselves feel sensuous. I have met drag performers who have grown to dislike drag, and men who insist on being called 'cross-dressers' because they dislike what the word 'drag' stands for, and men who wear part-drag in order to create confusion and doubt amongst others, but who would never wear full drag because that would defeat their object. I know self-defined TVs who are gay or bisexual or oscillating, some of them having learned to cross this sexuality barrier through their cross-dressing. I have met TVs who dress like drag queens and drag queens who dress like TVs, and TVs whose cross-dressing has encouraged them to question their 'male role', which in turn has made them examine their idea of 'femininity'. And perhaps most important of all, I have learned how marshy a terrain is the middle ground between our earlier clear-cut distinction between transvestites and transexuals."

In 1986, Channel 4 television broadcast a documentary-drama about Kris Kirk entitled A Boy Called Mary. In 1988 Kris and Ed moved to rural Wales to open a bookshop, but three years later Kris found that he had Aids. He went blind in 1992, and died in 1993.

• Kris Kirk with photographs by Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. Gay Men's Press 1984.
• Kris Kirk. Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk's Greatest Hits. Millivres Books, 1999.
• Zagria. “A review of Kris Kirk & Ed Heath - Men in Frocks, 1984”. Gender Variance Who’s Who 16 April 2013. Online.
• “Men in Frocks”. LGBT+ Language and Archives: Cumbria’s Queer heritage, August 3, 2020. Online.
• EN.Wikipedia(Kris Kirk)

Liz Hodgkinson (1945 -)

Liz Hodgkinson and her husband became journalists at first in North-East England. In 1970 they moved to Richmond, London and both obtained work with the national and the London papers then located in Fleet Street. Liz found work at The Sunday People, The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Times.

In Richmond she heard rumours of the local trans woman, and then encountered Roberta Betty Cowell in the post office. Betty took a shine to Liz, and made many of her documents available. They started writing a book together about Cowell's life, but in the end Betty did not approve it for publication.

Later Liz met Judy Cousins who established SHAFT (Self-Help Association For Transsexuals) in 1980, and Julia Grant who had just been featured in a BBC documentary. She wrote an account of the two for The Sun in October 1980, her first publication on trans persons.

Hodgkinson visited SHAFT and interviewed several of its members. This resulted in her 1987 book, Bodyshock (review). The book is dedicated to Judy Cousins, but an account of her life is missing in the book. However Hodgkinson also published a profile on Cousins in The Sunday People around the same time that the book came out. Likewise Betty Cowell is mentioned only in the section on birth certificates, and no profile otherwise given.

Betty Cowell had told Liz about Michael Dillon, and in researching her book Liz was introduced to Andrew Hewson, the literary agent who had taken over John Johnson Ltd, and who was holding Dillon's then unpublished autobiography and others of his documents. In addition to writing about Dillon in Bodyshock, she wrote a full-length biography of him, based on the autobiography. Her collection and the autobiography of course are a major source of Pagan Kennedy's more recent joint biography of Michael Dillon and Betty Cowell, which gives Hodgkinson only the most cursory credit.

Cowell never re-established contact with her two daughters. She died age 93 in 2011.

In 2015 there was a Channel 4 television documentary about Michael and Betty, and Hodgkinson contacted one of Cowell’s daughters, and wrote up an article for the Daily Telegraph, and issued a second edition of Michael, Née Laura, but with a slightly changed title.

• Liz Hodgkinson. “Why are Julia and Judy different from other women”. The Sun, 14 October 1980. Online.
• Liz Hodgkinson. "Father, Dear Father: Ex-officer and gentleman Judy Cousins and her daughter Penny Croucher talk to Liz Hodgkinson". The People, ?, 1987. Online.
• Liz Hodgkinson. Bodyshock: the truth about changing sex. Columbus, 1987.
• Mary Kenny. “They've looked at life from both sides now”. The Irish Independent, 26 September 1987. Review of Bodyshock.
• Liz Hodgkinson. Michael, Née Laura: The Story of the World's First Female-to-Male Transsexual. Columbus, 1989.
• Liz Hodgkinson. “Bridges across the divide to the opposite sex: how attitudes to transsexuals have changed and what help is on offer”. The Independent, 9 October 1990.
• Liz Hodgkinson. “Goodbye Samantha, hello Sam: What motivates increasing numbers of cross-dressers to escape their sex”. The Independent, 14 September 1992. Online.
• Review of Bodyshock. The Tartan Skirt, 6, April 1993. Online.
• Pagan Kennedy. The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution. Bloomsbury Press, 2007.
• Liz Hodgkinson. "The true story behind Britain's first transsexual woman". The Daily Telegraph, 24 Oct 2015. Online.
• Liz Hodgkinson. From a Girl to a Man: How Laura Became Michael. Quartet Books, 2015. A second edition of Michael, Née Laura.
• Maggie Hartford. "Liz Hodgkinson explores the history of transgender people in new book". Oxford Mail, 9th February 2016. Online.
• Zagia. “A Rereading of Liz Hodgkinson’s Bodyshock: The Truth About Changing Sex, 1987”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 5 June 2022. Online.
• EN.Wikipedia(Liz Hodgkinson)

David Batty (1974? -)

David Batty graduated BA in literature from the University of Birmingham in 1995, and BA in journalism at Cardiff University, 1997, and became a Guardian journalist in 2001. He specialises in social affairs, inequality, cultural politics, adoption and trans issues.

In 2004, as the Gender Recognition Bill was proceeding through parliament, psychiatrist Russell Reid faced a complaint to the General Medical Council (GMC) that he too easily accepted patients for hormone therapy and surgery. The complaint was brought by four of his colleagues at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, psychiatrists James Barrett, Richard Green, Donald Montgomery and senior registrar Stuart Lorimer on behalf of four of his former patients. Batty wrote this up for The Guardian in January, February and June.

Starting with some of Russell’s patients, Batty reached out and met other transsexuals, especially those with doubts or regrets. He was preparing an article on such.

In July, a few weeks after the Gender Recognition Act had been passed, Batty returned to the University of Birmingham where Chris Hyde ran the Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility (ARIF). The Guardian had actually asked ARIF to study more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals. Hyde said: "There is a huge uncertainty over whether changing someone's sex is a good or a bad thing. While no doubt great care is taken to ensure that appropriate patients undergo gender reassignment, there's still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatised - often to the point of committing suicide." He also warned that “the results of many gender reassignment studies are unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants” - and that “the high drop out rate could reflect high levels of dissatisfaction or even suicide among post-operative transsexuals”. He ignored the much higher suicide rate of those denied transition, and that it is well established that post-operatives often disappear because they are pleased and completed, not dissatisfied.

This article was later cited in various places against the acceptance of gender surgery - notably at the US Supreme Court case Joel Doe Et Al., V. Boyertown Area School District Et Al., and Pennsylvania Youth Congress Foundation, 2018 on whether trans persons are protected under Title IX. Online.

Batty followed up the article, the very next day, with a major account in the magazine supplement to The Guardian’s sister publication, The Sunday Observer, “What happens if you change your sex ... and then change your mind” with before and after photographs of some regretters. He featured Marissa who changed sex three times (m-f-m-f) having reversed after joining an evangelical church and then having regretted reversing, and Claudia, a singer, who transitioned 18 years earlier, lost her confidence to perform and only in 2004 was suing Russell Reid. Marissa and Claudia were then cited in other publications. Batty cites the ARIF estimate that 3-18% of transsexuals regret transition (most other estimates say 1-2%). He quotes the Australian changeback Alan Finch who advocates for all sex changes to be banned, and for supposed balance Batty tells of a single successful transition, that of physicist Rachael Padman.

In 2006-7 the GMC proceeded with its inquiry into Russell Reid, and Batty wrote up the developments. He profiled some of the patients under single letter pseudonyms, and Charles Kane by name. Kane was suing Reid separately. Kane who was then in his reversion-to-male phase, later also had a third sex-change again to female(m-f-m-f), and settled on the name Samantha.

Russell Reid’s practice was taken over by Richard Curtis, himself trans. In 2013 similar complaints were made as those against Russell Reid, and again it was Batty who reported this in The Guardian.

*not the footballer

• David Batty. “GMC inquiry into gender change expert”. The Guardian, 20 January 2004. Online.
• David Batty, “Sex-change patient complains to GMC”. The Guardian, 18 February 2004. Online.
• David Batty. “Inquiry into sex change specialist”, The Guardian, 19 June 2004. Online.
• David Batty. “Sex changes are not effective, say researchers”, The Guardian, 30 July 2004. Online.
• David Batty. “What happens if you change your sex ... and then change your mind: Mistaken Identity”. The Observer, 31 July 2004.
• “I need some rebuttals for this study that says sex changes are not effective”, r/asktransgender, Reddit. Online.
• David Batty. “Sex change experts should err on the side of caution”. The Guardian, 10 October 2006. Online.
• David Batty. “Psychiatrist rushed me into having sex change, says patient”. The Guardian, 26 October 2006. Online.
• Julie Bindel. “Mistaken identity”. The Guardian, 23 May 2007. Online.
• David Batty. “Sex Change Doctor Guilty Of Misconduct”. The Guardian, 25 May 2007. Online.
• David Batty. “Russell Reid inquiry: key figures”. The Guardian, 25 May 2007. Online.
• David Batty. “Sex-change doctor found guilty of misconduct”. The Guardian, 26 May 2007. Online.
• David Batty. “Doctor is accused of breaching rules on sex-change surgery”. The Guardian, 7 January 2013.
• Zagria, “Claudia (1958 - ) opera singer, drag performer”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 3 November 2008, Online.
• Zagria. “Russell Reid (1943 - ) psychiatrist”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 18 May 2010. Online.
• Zagria. “Richard Curtis (1967 - ) doctor, yacht racer”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 24 July 2019. Online.
• The Guardian(David Batty)
• Muck Rack(David Batty)