Trans New York 1963-1965

  See also:

Trans New York 1961-1962

The four years leading to Stonewall – a New York timeline

The five years following Stonewall - a New York timeline

The Gilded Grape

The GG Knickerbocker P T Barnum Room

1963

Reed Erickson became a Benjamin patient and almost completed transition. He then founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), financed entirely by himself.

Through his foundation Erickson agreed to finance the newly created Harry Benjamin Foundation (HBF) for three years at a minimum of $1,500 a month. The money from Erickson enabled a move to a larger office at 86th St and Park Avenue. The foundation sought to enhance Benjamin’s professional status. Robert Stoller at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) had disparaged Benjamin in that he was not psychiatrically trained, and did not publish in the most reputable journals. Stoller politely declined to serve on the Foundation’s advisory board. Nevertheless Benjamin was able to use the Foundation to enhance his working relationship with other doctors and researchers in the field.

Leo Wollman also worked from the new office. He started running a group session the first Sunday of every month, near his other office at Coney Island where transsexuals could meet and exchange ideas and experiences. He also used hypnosis to determine whether a transsexual was authentic.

Meetings of the foundation were held in the office, mainly on Saturday evenings. The members conducted psychological, endocrinological and neurological tests on transsexual patients, and interviewed them before and after surgery, looking to prove or disprove any genetic, hormonal or neurological basis for the condition.

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Susanna and Marie sold their resort property as it was unprofitable.

August: Patricia Morgan was arrested on East 57^th Street for wearing shorts that were too short. She replied to the judge: ““My shorts weren’t too short. It’s just that my legs are too long!”, and the case was dismissed.

After graduating High School in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Marsha P Johnson left home for Manhattan with $15 and a bag of clothes.

Donald Wollheim, being a professional writer and editor, began to consider putting his feelings and experiences of the past year onto paper, especially as the near mental-breakdown of the year before had passed as he had accepted what he really was, and something like normality had been recovered. He returned to Los Angeles, and met Virginia Prince again. However he also socialized with other transvestites who were by then ostracized by Prince.

Vicky West, after two years in Los Angeles as an engineer, and as a participant in Virginia Prince's Hose and Heel Club, returned to New York, and studied Fine Arts and Graphic Design at Cooper Union.

Siobhan Fredericks published Turnabout irregularly from 1963-7. Donald Wollheim was involved, and usually wrote as ‘D Rhodes’. This was in competition to Virginia Prince's Transvestia, and attracted crossdressers who were critical of Virginia Prince, her ideas and her list of femme* words. It was also more open to transsexuality and to activities that Prince regarded as fetishistic. In contrast to Transvestia, Turnabout did not feature autobiographies, especially those that catalogued the writer's wardrobe and measurements. Harry Benjamin described Turnabout as the "more objective approach". Renée Richards later described it as "a poor thing, on newsprint as I recall". Benjamin referred Richards and other clients to the support group held in Siobhan's home.

Benjamin was invited by Dr Robert Hotchkiss, the urologist, to read a paper at New York's Bellevue Hospital. He also read a paper at the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex (of which he was a charter member).

Female Mimics, the glossy magazine for transvestites was launched. Performer Kim August was on the cover. The emphasis was mainly about female impersonators, sometimes ignoring that she had completed transition. An article about Christine Jorgensen, “A Real Woman” was included, but the article on Bambi (who had completion surgery in 1960) is called “French Fooler: Bambi” and uses male pronouns. The second issue featured Coccinelle (both completed surgery and taken a husband) referred to as “France’s Most Fabulous She-Male”, the article being a summary of Carlson Wade’s biography, uses male pronouns and gives only her male name, The third included “How I Changed my Sex” by Patricia Morgan.

The future Bunny Eisenhower/Barbara de Lamere completed military service and lived with his male lover in New York.

Cross-dresser and artist George Maciunas returned to New York and set up the Fluxus art movement, including a shop on Canal Street.

Jack Smith filmed Flaming Creatures, an underground film of an extended party on the roof of the Windsor cinema in New York's Lower East Side with lots of drag and nudity. Francis Francine had been intended as the star of Flaming Creatures, 1962, but disappeared partway through filming, leaving Mario Montez as a replacement. The film became famous when New York City police seized the print at the premier. The film was ruled to be in violation of New York's obscenity laws. Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag mounted a critical defense of Flaming Creatures, and it became a cause célèbre for the underground film movement.

• Harry Benjamin. “Clinical Aspects of Transsexualism in the Male and Female”. Read before the 6^th annual conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, November 2, 1963, and published American Journal of Psychotherapy, 18,3, 1964.
• Patricia Ann Morgan. "How I Changed My Sex". Female Mimics, 1,3, 1963. Online.
• Jack Smith (dir). Flaming Creatures, with Frances Francine, Mario Montez (as Dolores Flores). US 42 mins 1963.
• Avery Willard (dir) Variety, with Minette. US ? mins 1963.
• Avery Willard (dir) If Ads Were True, with Minette. US ? mins 1963.
• Edward Sagarin writing as Donald Webster Cory with John P. LeRoy. The Homosexual and His Society; A View from Within. New York: Citadel Press, 1963. Cory and LeRoy (a sex partner whom he helped out financially) claimed that there is no such thing as a 'well-adjusted homosexual', and also discussed hustlers, but challenged the then common assumption that homosexuals were security risks.
• Carlson Wade. She-male: the amazing true-life story of Coccinelle. Epic, 1963.
• Turnabout, no 1. June 1963. With contributions by Fred Shaw, Siobhan Fredericks, D Rhodes, Quiven Enright. Susanna Valenti listed as Associate Editor.
• Turnabout, no 2, October 1963. With contributions by Fred Shaw, Quiven Enright. D Rhodes and a summary of Harry Benjamin’s “Clinical Aspects of Transsexualism in the Male and Female”, and photographs of Sonne Teal in La Poupée.
• Female Mimics no 1, no 2, no 3.

1964

A 17-year-old transsexual referred to as G.L. who had been convicted of stealing women’s clothing and $800 worth of wigs was ordered by the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City to have sex reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins. Her probation officer delivered her to the Johns Hopkins Women’s Clinic where Howard Jones was to do the surgery. However the psychiatry department intervened at the last moment, and had G.L. referred to them for therapy instead.

John Money introduced Richard Green to Harry Benjamin in 1964, and for two years he saw patients in Benjamin's New York office and wrote letters for them so that they could obtain surgery in Europe.

April: Benjamin gave a talk at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Benjamin met monthly with John Money and Richard Green and the idea was raised of applying the kind of surgery being done on intersex patients to transsexuals as well. Money took three post-operative patients of Harry Benjamin to meet his colleagues at Johns Hopkins. As the Gender Identity Clinic there began to coalesce, it was integrated into the work of the Foundation, which provided them with patient referrals. Reed Erickson’s EEF donated $85,000 to the Gender Identity Clinic over a few years, and Reed became quite friendly with John Money. He went to Johns Hopkins for a double mastectomy repair in 1965.

The Harry Benjamin Foundation similarly endorsed the gender clinic at Stanford University. 

The Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis was considering opening a gender identity clinic led by Donald Hastings. Two members went to New York, met with the HBF and were able to examine patients of Benjamin and Wollman who had had surgery abroad. Their surgeon, John Blum, went to Johns Hopkins to observe transgender surgery.

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British journalist James Morris was in New York and visited Harry Benjamin, who advised him that a change of body must be a last resort, and that he should try working life as a man. He procrastined another eight years

The future Renée Richards, then still in the US Navy, also came to Dr Benjamin, but procrastinated another decade before finally transitioning.

Susanna Valanti and Marie bought a replacement 150 acre property with a large house, close to Hunter, New York. This became Casa Susanna, and like the Chevalier D’Eon Resort was frequented by the transvestite crowd. Susanna and her guests would go, dressed, to drive-in movies and to friendly neighbours. Some transvestite visitors even went into the village of Hunter for shopping, where, if nothing else, they were noted for being overdressed.

Susanna wanted to make movies.  Andrea Malick, a professional photographer as well as a visitor to Casa Susanna, stepped up with a professional 16mm camera. Two films were shot in the same weekend in Marie’s wig store in New York. David/Gail Wilde, one of the richer members, had previously bought Andrea an expensive Roleiflex camera (which cost over $1,000) with the request that Andrea learn how to process color film. Gail also requested a copy of each photograph taken. Gail collected them in expensive albums.

Donald Wollheim/Darrell Raynor became a regular at Casa Susanna and used the name Donna or Doris. He did not drive and so wife Elsie chauffeured him. The daughter Betsy was sent to summer camp for two months every year for 8 years to avoid awkward questions. In 1964 he announced that he was going out for Halloween as his sister, and spent five hours in the bathroom getting ready – even at age 12 Betsy realized that this was odd.

14-year-old Kim Christy was going out in semi-drag, and took up with the young Billy Schumacher (later to become International Chrysis). They were photographed fooling around outside the Astor in Manhattan when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were staying there, and the picture appeared in a Life Magazine article on teenage delinquents.

Holly Woodlawn was briefly employed as an in-house model at Saks Fifth Avenue.

The short-lived Lavender & Lace magazine for transvestites came out – it had a much greater racial diversity than Transvestia.

March: Felicity Chandelle, an airline pilot recently widowed, was arrested in New York near her home by an officer of the West 128^th Precinct for a violation of Section 887, Subdivision 7 of the New York Code of Criminal Procedure which designates as a vagrant any person who 'having his face painted, discolored, covered, or concealed, or being otherwise disguised in a manner calculated to prevent his being identified, appears on a road, lot, wood, or enclosure'. The law dates back to the 1840s when farmers were disguising as 'Indians' to harass Dutch landowners in the Anti-Rent Movement. Despite having no criminal intent John Miller was sentenced to two days, suspended. This resulted in losing her job with Eastern Airlines after 25 years, because such behavior ‘signaled homosexuality’, even though an Eastern Airlines manager actually phoned Harry Benjamin and was reassured that the conviction in no way impacted on Miller's competence as a pilot. Virginia Prince and Siobhan Fredericks worked together and championed her case, raising over $1,200 to finance an appeal. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief as amicus curiae, and the New York Times carried a sympathetic story. The appeal hearing was denied, by the New York appeal court and by the US Supreme Court.

Leonard Wheeler published Sex Life of a Transvestite. He revealed Connie, his female self as an erotic transvestite who was also into bondage, with cruel sadistic fantasies about women. He does state that his bondages and his attitudes to women are separate from his crossdressing, and that he is hardly typical of transvestites. His thoughts were written up by Jack Jardine (1931 - 2009), a lesser science fiction writer using one of his aliases. Using the same alias he had published Girls on Sin Street, about prostitution, the year before. The book contained an introduction by Albert Ellis (1913 – 2007), an associate of Alfred Kinsey, who had published Sex Without Guilt in 1958, and was then writing Homosexuality, Its Causes and Cures which would be published in 1965. He later became the father of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and was known for his liberal use of swear words.

• Harry Benjamin. “Transvestism and Transsexualism in the Male and Female”. Presented at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine on April 13, 1964.
• Harry Benjamin. "Nature and Management of Transsexualism, with a Report on 31 Operated Cases", Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 72, 1964.
• Harry Benjamin & R E L Masters. Prostitution and Morality: a definitive report on the prostitute in contemporary society and an analysis of the causes and effects of the suppression of prostitution. Julian Press, 1964. Review. In this book, unlike The Transsexual Phenomenon, two years later, androphilic transvestites are acknowledged.
• Benito B. Rish. 1964. "Profile-Plasty. Report on Plastic Chin Implants". The Laryngoscope. 74, 1, 1964: 144-154.
• Hugo Beigel. “The Myth of the Latent Femininity in the Male”. Turnabout. He dismissed the idea that a male-bodied person could have a feminine soul. Susanna replied in Transvestia that Beigel was taking the girl-within over-literally rather than as a metaphor. The metaphor of the girl-within, she maintained, was simply an uncomplicated way of expressing these various motivations and urges that make up a transvestite’s second personality, the feminine self that had to be kept hidden in public settings out of fear of social disapproval. She also countered his claim that transvestism is an acquired condition.
• Leonard Wheeler, as told to Jack Jardine writing as Larry Maddock, with an introduction by Albert Ellis. Sex life of a Transvestite. K. D. S. Publ. Co 1964.
• Carlson Wade. The Twilight Sex. S. Publications, 1964.
• Carlson Wade. "Men in Skirts". Female Mimics, 1,4, 1964. 
• Queens in Drag: Female Impersonators … on Parade. S-K Books 1964. Photo essay of the 'Art Students' Ball' held in Manhattan each year under the auspices of the Art Students' League of New York.
• Female Mimics, no 4.

1965

Siobhan Fredericks participated in a panel discussion on New York's listener-sponsored station, WBAI- FM, with Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, co-author of the Kinsey reports.

The teenage Harvey Fierstein was attending the 82 Club. Angie Stardust was the first black star at the club, until she was fired for taking female hormones. One of the owners said to her: "Girls like you are going to be the death of this business". 

Dario Modon graduated from the New York School of Visual Arts in 1965, and started doing drag at Halloween. He advanced to the drag balls and private parties. He was 6’2” (1.88m) and specialized in a simple black dress.

Chris Moore, ex-army and merchant navy, took up female impersonation, and appeared with Frank Bennet in the Follies Mantisque. This led to work with the Jewel Box Revue, at first doing a comedy strip. However it was discovered that he could impersonate Ethel Merman rather well, and he started singing songs from Gypsy. He then added Marlene Dietriche and Bette Davis to his repertoire. He used a special heavy makeup to hide the tattoo on his upper arm. He was also partially blind and required thick glasses.

Kim Christy and Chrysis each left home and shared a tiny apartment in the area that later became New York's SoHo. They met sex magazine pioneer and editor of Exotique magazine, Lenny Burtman who arranged photo-shoots and other favors. Kim had a boyfriend who worked with her to soften her Bronx accent. She got to know New York female impersonators such as Tammy Novak, and performed at Club 82 as a stripper and as a showgirl. Her song was the theme music from A Man and a Woman. She toured North America as a female impersonator.

The State Liquor Authority decided to revoke the Peppermint liquor licence. This was upheld in the state Supreme Court. The club closed in December.

Edward Sagarin was increasingly at odds with the new activists in the Mattachine Society including LeRoy who were advocating for civil rights and liberation for homosexuals. In 1965, after a bitter fight for control, Sagarin quit the Mattachine Society. The conflict, expressed with some bitterness, appears in his PhD thesis, Structure and ideology in an association of deviants, that he submitted in 1966.

Reed Erickson hired Zelda Suplee to run his Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF). From her office in New York she and lesbian feminist activist Phyllis Saperstein (they had met in a nudist camp) managed the daily operations, and the contacts with transsexuals who asked for help. Erickson made the final decisions about who and what he funded, but spent much of his time in Baton Rouge, and then Mexico, with his family.

Howard and Georgeanna Jones with Edmund Novak wrote a textbook of gynecology which went through several editions and in its time outsold all other such textbooks combined.

• Ira B Pauly. "Male Psychosexual Inversion: Transsexualism. A Review of 100 Cases". Archives of General Psychology, 13, 1965:172-181.
• James Mills. "The Detective: a good cop fights for law but the deck is stacked against him". Life, 3 Dec 1965: 90d-123. Online. Contains the photograph of Chrysis and Kim outside the Astor.
• Andy Warhol & Ronald Tavel (dir). Screen test Number 2. Scr: Ronald Tavel, with Mario Montez and Salvador Dali, Dennis Hopper and Lou Reed. US 4 mins 1965. Montez is confronted about his gender and admits that he is a man, but he does so, he says, only because he is a woman.
• John Oliven Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, revised 2^nd edition, Lippincott,1965 (a year before Benjamin’s Transsexual Phenomenon) where he wrote: “The term [transsexualism] is misleading; actually, “transgenderism” is what is meant, because sexuality is not a major factor …”.
• Edmund R. Novak, Georgeanna Seegar Jones, and Howard Wilbur Jones. Textbook of Gynecology. Williams & Wilkins Co, 1965.
• Siobhan Fredericks. The Best of Both Worlds: A Novel of Transvestism. Abbé de Choisy Press, 1965.
  
• Abby Sinclair, George Griffith, Carlson Wade & Latina Seville. I Was Male. Novel Books. 95 pp 1965.
• Antony James. Abnormal World of Transvestites & Sex Changes. New York: L. S. Publications 192 pp1965. Chapters on history, operations, prisons, married tv's, lesbian tv's, tv prostitutes, S&M among tv's and more. James also published America’s Homosexual Underground, in the same year.
• Female Mimics, no 5, no 6, no 7.

Trans New York 1960-1962.

 See also:

Trans New York 1963-1965

The four years leading to Stonewall – a New York timeline

The five years following Stonewall - a New York timeline

The Gilded Grape

The GG Knickerbocker P T Barnum Room

1960

Gynecologists Howard and Georgeanne Jones left their private practice to become full-time faculty at Johns Hopkins Psychohormonal Research Unit. Howard started doing ‘corrective’ surgery on intersex infants.

Female impersonator Libby Reynolds was working in mufti as a bartender at Main Street Lounge in Greenwich Village when actor Raymond Burr (1917 - 1993), who played Perry Mason on television, came in and they spent the night together. Reynolds sold the story to Confidential magazine, and the story now was that Burr had innocently picked up Libby and never realized that she was a ‘man’. The story included a composite photo of Burr and Libby en femme.

Nan Gilbert, author of forced femininity fiction and who had been active among transvestites at an earlier date, had his mail stopped and was fined $500. Donald Wollheim contacted Gilbert, and they corresponded for some time.

Patricia Morgan became a patient of Harry Benjamin, started taking estrogen, and began living full-time as female. She was saving seriously for the $5,000 plus expenses for the operation. She was arrested as a female prostitute, got through the strip search without being read, and declared herself as a ‘boy’ only in court. She was released in that the prostitution law applied only to women.

New Yorker, Susanna Valenti started her “Susanna Says” column in Transvestia.

David Wilde separated from his wife and moved to an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. As Gail he subscribed to Transvestia, and became a New York contact for the Foundation for Full Personality Expression, (FPE). Those who knew both David and Gail found Gail to be less abrasive, but both personae were negative about gays and transsexuals.

Felicity Chandelle first met other cross-dressers through the Transvestia contact ads. Then she took up the practice enthusiastically.

• Edward Podolsky and Carlson Wade. Transvestism Today; The Phenomena of Men Who Dress As Women. Epic Pub. Co, 1960. Online at Queer Music Heritage.
• Edward Podolsky and Carlson Wade. Erotic Symbolism; A Study of Fetichism in Relation to Sex. Epic Pub. Co, 1960.

1961

Ira B Pauly was doing a psychiatric residency at Cornell Medical Center in New York. He was called to urology to counsel a trans man who was in for a hysterectomy. He attempted research in the hospital library but found material on transsexualism only in French and German. He had patients who were willing to do longhand translations for him. He then discovered a paper by David Cauldwell.

“And then there was a brief article by someone named Harry Benjamin. And in those days, it was in a somewhat obscure journal. I don’t quite remember which journal it was. But it had his address. And it was an address that was about five blocks away from the hospital that I was working at. So, I looked up his name in the phone book and told him that I was a psychiatry resident, and I had a little experience with a transgender, transsexual patient. And was there any way I could come over and talk to him, because I had read—he was an endocrinologist. And a lot of these folks, the first step in the physical transition is taking the contrary hormone.” 

For much of that year, he attended Benjamin's Wednesday afternoon clinic.

 “So every Wednesday afternoon, through the generosity and mentorship of Harry Benjamin, I was able to see probably more transsexual patients than any psychiatrist in North America. … As I got to know the patients, they uniformly described being happier into the gender role that they felt they were in from the very beginning. And that the only thing that needed to be done as far as treatment was concerned was to get the body on board with the gender of their choice.“ 

Pauly set out to aggregate 100 cases from the literature and from among Benjamin’s patients.

Patricia Morgan, with arrangements made through Harry Benjamin, flew to Los Angeles in November 1961 for surgery with Dr Elmer Belt. While waiting for a hospital bed, she was in a car crash with a drunken john. She sued the john, a movie producer, to cover her medical bills, and they settled out of court. After four months in Los Angeles, Pat had a penectomy and her testicles implanted in her abdomen. Two months after that she had a vaginoplasty. Afterwards she was in pain, very weak and her money had run out.

Vito Russo, the future gay film historian, was 15 and his parents bought a house in Lodi, New Jersey – to his chagrin. However, he soon found the local queer scenes:

“Vito’s first drag-queen contemporary was a fellow student …. Standing six feet two inches [1.89 m] under a bleached-blond man, Billy knew how to make a striking entrance – particularly when bombing around Lodi in his pink Cadillac convertible. Contact with Billy meant automatic social ostracism. … Billy invited Vito to a New Year’s Eve party held at the home of ‘the most outrageous drag queen in Bergen County’. …

Billy’s friends were working-class drag queens from Lodi and the nearby towns…. Like Billy, these men were wildly out of the closet, almost unwittingly so: they were ‘identifiable on the street whether they liked it or not. They couldn’t hide it even it they tried’. From them, Vito got his first lessons in gay survival. He listened attentively to their tutorials on ‘how to take care of himself on the street and be funny and get out of a raid and go through a window in a bathroom and all that stuff you had to know in the ‘60s’. …

Another favorite haunt was Danny’s in Fort Lee, where the group went to see ‘Bella from the Bronx’, a drag queen whose act consisted of traditional Italian families’ reactions to the revelations of their gay children. … He was also enamored of the headliner at Fran Bell’s in Nyack, New York. Fran herself … donned a tuxedo and top hat and crooned ‘Just a Gigolo’ à la Dietrich. Then there were the drag balls at Newark’s Robert Treat Hotel.”

Susanna Valenti’s male persona, Tito, was summoned by postal officials. Two of her correspondents had been charged with mailing obscene materials, and Susanna’s name had come up. Tito pleaded respectability and denounced the obscenities.

The future Vicky West, after army service, returned to Cornell and completed an engineering degree.

Virginia Prince flew into New York on her way to that year’s Halloween Weekend at Susanna Valenti's Chevalier D’Eon Resort in upstate New York. While in New York City,

“I was chauffeured over to Dr. Benjamin's office for a nice but too brief visit and dinner with him. Those of you who have never met Dr. Benjamin have missed a real treat. People of our persuasion have no better professional friend.”

Donald Wollheim, science fiction editor, was building to a nervous break-down from not expressing his cross-dreaming.

• Greg Garrison (dir) Hey, Lets Twist, with Joey Dee and the Starlighters. US BW mono 79 mins 1961. IMDB. Wikipedia. A fictionalized story of the Peppermint Lounge, partially filmed there.
• Avery Willard (dir) The Last of the Worthington, with Minette. US ? mins 1961.
• Avery Willard (dir) Magic Music Hall, with Minette. US ? mins 1961.

1962

Ira B Pauly obtained a position at the University of Oregon Medical School.

John Money became head of the Psychohormonal Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University Hospital when Lawson Wilkins retired. 

Holly Woodlawn, 16-years-old, hitch-hiking, arrived in New York. She found work as a saleswoman at Saks 5^th Avenue.

11-year-old Sylvia Rivera discovered 42^nd Street where he had heard that the maricónes were to be found. However a neighbour spotted Sylvia, which led to a row with grandmother, a suicide attempt and two months in Bellevue Hospital.

January: New York science fiction editor Donald Wollheim, discovered a copy of Transvestia, and a copy of Justice Weekly, in a store on 42^nd St.

March: Donald Wollheim was in Los Angeles on business. He, having previously corresponded, met first Virginia Prince in his hotel room, and then was invited to dinner with Virginia and wife Doreen. After an interesting evening, it was suggested that in New York Darrell should contact Gail and Susanna who were listed in Transvestia. He also bought the complete back file of Transvestia.

Back home, the first task was to tell Mrs Wollheim. This was done in stages and accomplished after 10 days, and a few days after that they went shopping together on 5^th Avenue for feminine nightwear. 

Wollheim wrote letters to Gail (David Wilde) and to Susanna Valenti. The former had to go via Prince/Transvestia in Los Angeles, and therefore took longer to get a response. Susanna had published contact details in Transvestia, and could be contacted directly. A letter from Susanna arrived quickly, but an actual meeting – for one reason or another – took several months. It was early April, two weeks later, before a letter arrived from Gail, but it gave a phone number, and Wollheim was able to visit the next evening, had a heart-to-heart chat and was given gossip about New York transvestites.

Nan Gilbert advised Wollheim not to contact persons such as Gail and Susanna, in that they were frustrated persons who would be disappointing. On the other hand, Wollheim and Gail met a few times for lunch. In May Gail moved again to an apartment in Greenwich Village, and Wollheim attended a small party where Gail was the only person in female clothing. Gilbert was mentioned, and known by those who were present. Later when Wollheim sent regards to Gilbert from ‘Alice from Canada’, a reference to one in attendance, Gilbert became curt, and the correspondence was soon discontinued.

On the 4^th of July, Mrs Wollheim also attended the soiree at Gail’s. This was the first time that they met ‘Fiona from New Zealand’ (actually Katherine Cummings from Australia).

Patricia Morgan, still in Los Angeles, moved in with her friend Shelley, but was gang raped by two of Shelley’s tricks. Later they were arrested and Pat was charged with living in a house of prostitution. She served 30 days in the prison hospital. She developed urinary problems and had to have a third operation with Dr Belt. She hustled to raise the airfare to go home.

Back in New York Patricia took up prostitution again. She had breast implants to 42DD but then reduced to 38D. She also had her nose straightened. She was booked for prostitution when she accepted a ride in the rain. Her lawyer tried to get her off on the technicality that she was still a man, not having changed her name or birth certificate. The judge ruled that she was a female anyway, and gave her a suspended sentence. She started a business of limousines with female chauffeurs, but it lasted only a year. She also did modeling.

Betty, who had been living full-time, and working in a night club in New York, found a sponsor who paid for her consultations with Harry Banjamin, and a few months later she had surgery in Casablanca.

43 ‘men’ were arrested at the National Variety Artists Annual Ball and charged with ''masquerading to conceal identity”. Judge William Ringel ruled that the ball, of its nature was a masquerade and dismissed the charges.

71 transvestites gathered at the Chevalier D’Eon Resort for Halloween 1962, held a day after the National Variety Artists costume ball raid. The guests at Chevalier D’Eon Resort included Virginia Prince, Katherine Cummings, Felicity Chandelle, Darrell Raynor and Gail Wilde, and psychologists Hugo Beigel and Wardell Pomeroy. Raynor, Cummings and Beigel later wrote about the event. Harry Benjamin was invited bur sent his regrets.

Tobi Marsh was engaged at Club 82 where Tony Midnite was doing the costumes. Midnite also did the costumes for the road shows of Gypsy and Carnival!, for the Metropolitan Opera and some television shows.

Tommy Dorsey (later Issan Dorsey), then a touring stage female impersonator, was the only survivor of a car-full of drag queens that crashed on route from New York to Rochester. He suffered medical problems from it in later years.

Isabel Whitney (1878 – 1962) died. Her companion, the future Dawn Simmons, inherited an estate reportedly worth over $1 million. Simmons flew her body to Heathfield, England for burial, although she had never been there in life, and then moved to Charleston, South Carolina as Whitney and Simmons had intended to do together.

• Edward Podolsky and Carlson Wade. Transvestism. Sexual behavior series, no. 5. New York: Epic Pub. Co, 1962.
• Edward Podolsky and Carlson Wade. Fetichism. Sexual behavior series, no. 6. New York: Epic Publ. Co., Inc, 1962.
• R E L Masters, with an Introduction by Harry Benjamin. Forbidden Sexual Behavior and Morality: An Objective Re-Examination of Perverse Sex Practices in Different Cultures. Julian Press, 1962.
• Avery Willard (dir) The Dead Sister’s Secret, with Minette. US ? mins 1961.

Trans Italy - the 1960s

Trans Italy

1960-70

1971-85

1986-2000

1960

The Olympics Games were held in Rome: The Ukrainian sisters Tamara and Irina Press representing the USSR, who were rumoured to be intersex or something, won gold and silver medals. Two British female athletes were accused in the press of being men.

April Ashley (just before her completion surgery) and Kiki Moustica were in Rome with a hotel booking, but when they showed male passports, the hotel manager called the police. After 10 hours in the police station, they were besieged by the press and had to take the train back to Milan. One of these press photographs would be run in the British paper, the Sunday People, a year later, and lead to April’s outing.

Dominot and Carlo Musto

• Federico Fellini (dir) La Dolce Vita. With Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Nico and Dominot and Carlo Musto as the two trans women at the party. Italy/France 174 mins 1960. Gio Starace quarrelled with the producer and lost his credit. He had inspired Fellini by bathing fully dressed in a fountain, which was copied with Anita Ekberg doing the bathing.

1960-4

The Ballette Verdi gay scandal, centred on parties at a farmhouse in the Municipality of Castel Mella. It ballooned to 200 suspects in a few days and was blown up by the press. Various famous persons were questioned by the police, and actions for libel were started. However, everything proved to be unfounded and prompted by upcoming elections. 16 were brought to trial, but 15 were acquitted. The owner of the farmhouse, only, was convicted of abetting prostitution. Gio Starace who was working for Lo Specchio, a scandal rag, was interrogated by magistrates, and as a protest, he appeared in court in female mourning drag.

1962

Roberta Franciolini established what was then the largest trans community in the Acqedotto Felice slums.

• Vittorio Sala (dir). I don giovanni della Costa Azzurra. With Curd Jurgens, and trans stars from La Carrousel, Coccinelle and Capucine. Italy 98 mins 1962. IMDB.
• Maria Amendola (dir) Totòdi Notte n. 1, with Totò as Nini, Erminio Macario as Mimi and the Spanish Madame Arthur. Italy 100 mins 1962. IMDB

1963

• Mino Loy (dir). 90 notti in giro per il mondo. Scr: Guido Castaldo & Nico Rienzi, narrated by Nico Rienzi, documenting Le Carrousel star, Bambi’s show, amongst others. Italy 88 mins 1963. 

1964

After a consultation with Harry Benjamin in New York and another endocrinologist in London, the then James Morris returned to Venice with a box of oestrogen tablets, but, not yet being ready, flushed them down a lavatory.

++ Le Carrousel star Dolly Van Doll went to Dr Borou in Casablanca and became the first known Italian to have completion surgery.

• Antonio Margheriti (dir) Il pelo nel mondo. With Coccinelle. Italy 1964.

1965

Professor Francesco Sorrentino in Naples was doing a few sex-change operations, and took referrals from Harry Benjamin in New York.

1966

US teacher, Ariadne Kane taught for a year at St. Stephen’s School in Rome, from 1966-67, and transvested for Mardi Gras.

1967

Giò Starace (who transitioned as Maria in 1983) wrote the scandal filled Roma Erotica. This was quickly banned, but not until after it had sold many copies. Stejano was famous. He opened a bar. He worked with the drag star Dominot. 

Dominot

Dominot had done drag shows from an early age, studied in Paris at the Comedie Francaise, and paid for the studies by performing as Dominot at Madame Arthur, and at Le Carrousel. He then lived and performed in Teheran. He also worked in avant-garde theatre.

La Romanina, had completion surgery in Switzerland. On return to Italy, she was detained and confined to a small village in the South, being considered morally and socially dangerous. Only after numerous psychiatric and gynaecological inspections, was she finally allowed to change her legal gender in 1972.

Nicola De Bartolo had been convicted for mascheramento, wearing a mask.   Except that she was not so doing.  She was wearing normal female dress without a mask.  However as the court regarded her as a "man", it ruled that her dress obscured her “natural” biological sex and made it impossible to recognize “him” and this amounted to a criminal act. De Bartolo appealed to the Supreme Court of Cassation, but it affirmed the ruling of the lower court.  This led to increased police usage of the mascheramento against queer persons in general.

•  Giò Starace. Roma erotica, Società Editoriale Attualità, Milano, 1967.

1968

After a controversial trial, the ex-Communist writer and artist Aldo Braibanti was sentenced to nine years in prison for the so-called plagiarism of the mind (plagio – from the Roman plagium, the crime of stealing a child or a slave), a medieval concept used as a repressive tool in the Fascist legal code. He supposedly brainwashed his younger male lover and another man into communism and homosexuality. Prior to the trial, his lover had already undergone shock treatments during 15 months in a mental institution, but steadfastly maintained that Braibanti had not abused him mentally or otherwise – he was discharged on condition that he live with his reactionary parents, and not read any books less than 100 years old. Braibanti’s sentence was reduced to six years on appeal. He served two in prison, and two were excused for his past participation in the antifascist Resistance. In addition, he was presented in the press as living proof that the communists corrupted Italian youth and traditional family values. Nobody had been convicted of plagio during the Fascist period, and only Braibanti afterwards. His conviction led to heated debate and the offence was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court with decision no. 96 of 8 June 1981.

Giò Starace was writing for Men, a fashion and gossip magazine, as a comical agony aunt, Il salotto di Oscar Wilde. This was the only gay column in Italy at the time.

1969

Marcello Di Folco (who later transitioned as Marcella in 1980) had to deliver a letter to the Cinecitta film studios, where he was spotted by director Frederico Fellini and given a part in Fellini Satyricon. From then till 1980 Di Folca appeared in several more Fellini films, and even more films by other directors. Di Folca was usually credited as Marcello Di Falco (actually the originally spelling of the family name).

• Frederico Fellini (dir). Fellini Satyricon, based on the 1^st century novel by Gaius Petronius, with Marcello Di Folco in aminor role as Proconsole. Italy 129 mins 1969. IMDB.  Some cross-dressing and an intersex demi-god.

1970

Giorgia O’Brien from Palermo, Sicily, completed transition with De Burou in Casablanca. Giorgia worked three years at Milan's Teatro Piccolo, and collaborated with directors Franco Zeffirelli and Guiseppe Bertolucci.

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Trans and gay organisings start in the 1970s - coming soon.

Francesco Sorrentino is listed here as doing or arranging sex-change operations in the 1960s in that Joanne Meyerowitz in her How Sex Changed says so based on a letter between Harry Benjamin and Robert Stoller.  However there is a problem in that nothing that I have read re trans in Italy even mentions him.

Eleonora Garosi in her "The politics of gender transitioning in Italy", Modern Italy, 17,4, 2012, also says nothing about Sorrentino.   She claims that La Romanina who had surgery in Switzerland in 1967 was the first Italian trans woman to so.  However there was earlier an Italian tailor of female clothing whom we know of only as "J", who had surgery, also in Switzerland, in 1951, by Dr Charles Wolf. 

As La Romanina had to go to Switzerland rather than Naples, and as she was semi-imprisoned on return, this does imply that Benjamin-Stoller or perhaps Meyerowitz got something wrong in their claim about Sorrentino.

In 1930 Fascist government had instituted the Rocco Code (named for the Minister for Justice, Alfredo Rocco), which did not actually mention homosexuality – repression of such was mainly a matter for the Church. However the Rocco code did prescribe plagio and mascheramento and even the use of masks on stage performance.  These came to be used only in 1967 and 1968, a generation after the end of the Fascist regime. The Fascisti did oppress male homosexual behaviour however, but mainly with administrative punishments, such as public admonition and confinement.  And more severe persecution of gays came in in the later years of Mussoilini’s regime without legal bases. 

Benjamin's Newer Aspects of the Transsexual Phenomenon

Harry Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966. Two years later he presented a paper at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Boston, May 1968., in which he gave some afterthoughts.

At that time, he was able to say (using the old system of genderizing a person by birth sex): 

“My observation of transsexual patients dates back more than sixteen years. Their total number now stands at 439: 387 males, 52 females”.

On the issue of etiology, he said: 

“I am in full agreement with those who believe in a multiplicity of determinants for cross-gender identity, be it in the field of psychology or biology. To my clinical sense, however, a prenatal, neuro-endocrine disorder appeals most for the majority of cases. It offers to me the most likely explanation why psychotherapy cannot cure the transsexual, why the emotional distress goes to such depths as to demand surgery, and why endocrine therapy often brings such dramatic relief. This relief, however, is palliative only. None of our present therapeutic efforts are curative in a sense that the psychological sex will be brought to conform with the anatomical. Until the future can provide new psychiatric or chemical weapons, symptomatic treatment with more or less effective alleviation is all we can offer at present to these often tormented people.

“In spite of poor prognosis, I feel that an attempt should always be made, with the help of psychotherapy in whatever form, to induce the patient to accept himself (or herself) in the role of his anatomical sex. Usually the patient will resist all such attempts because they ‘go against the grain of the inner self’.”

He then mentions use of the anti-epilepsy drug Dilantin based on findings by Swedish sexologist Jan Wälinder who had found an abnormal EEG in “28% of a group of transvestites and transsexuals”. Wälinder gave an anti-convulsant drug to in a patient who had developed “transvestitic and transsexual tendencies” together with epileptic seizures after a brain injury, with the result that the obsessive desire to dress was abolished. Benjamin tried Dilantin with a few transvestites who wanted to be cured, and to two transsexuals who were willing to experiment. This apparently worked for some of the transvestites who desisted [for a while at least] but it had no effect on the transsexuals.

Benjamin does not mention this, but Lyn Raskin, who published a rather racy Diary of a Transsexual a few years later, was given a prescription of Dilantin by a deceitful doctor – and it had no effect at all on her yearning to be a woman.

Benjamin continued by noting that there are three types of relief for a ‘male transsexual’: dressing, endocrine therapy and surgery. 

“But neither dressing nor hormone therapy can be depended upon to accomplish enough for the true transsexual. It can allay but rarely replace the demand for the third alternative, which is sex-reassignment surgery. It is hardly necessary to emphasize its radical, irrevocable and controversial nature. Its pros and cons can tax the physician's conscience to the utmost.” 

He admits to two nightmares: 1) self-mutilation or suicide when transgender surgery is denied or otherwise unavailable 2) post operative regret. Both had occurred. On regret: 

“Actually, there was hardly ever admission to that effect, but that means little. It would be difficult to admit to such a mistake. In possibly 4 to 5% of the operated male transsexuals (and in one female), I have a lingering suspicion that there is a degree of remorse and they would undo what was done, if it were possible.” 

He suggests that psychiatric evaluation with a “prolonged period of observation, up to a year”. He continues: 

“Alas, such is more often a pious wish than a clinical reality. Too often, transsexuals make their own decisions, find their surgeon and, under the driving and blinding force of their sex and gender confusion, act without anyone's consent or recommendation.”

He criticizes the lack of support by doctors: 

“Among them are puritanical and other prejudices, politics, a too dogmatic adherence to psychoanalytic theories”.

He also criticizes: 

“The selfishness, unreliability and questionable ethical concepts of some male and female transsexuals have undoubtedly deprived many of them of the otherwise fully deserved interest and sympathy on the part of the medical profession. Fortunately, there are also those whose touching gratitude and loyalty make up for the deplorable defects of the others.” 

He mentions a scare in 1968 when the British Medical Journal reported the cases of two transsexuals who had conversion operations, had also received breast implants and unknown but probably large doses of estrogen by various methods of administration. Both died of breast cancer. This was publicized by the New York Times. However Benjamin was able to report from his own files: 

“Among more than 300 patients under estrogen medication, not a single case of malignancy was observed in sixteen years. Common sense must tell us that, since a small number of the male population does develop breast cancer, a male transsexual, treated or not, may well be among them.”

He regrets to inform us that although the number of post-operative transsexuals in New York State had significantly increased, applications for legal change of status continued to be denied on the grounds that “the ‘chromosomal male’ is more important than an ‘ostensible female’."

In conclusion he says:

“Transsexuals can be diagnosed by their life's history, showing cross-gender identity from earliest childhood on, by their pronounced emotional rejection of their genitalia and their secondary sex characters, and also by their insistence upon a surgical transformation.

Transsexuals, as a rule, are definitely not psychotic, but often show mental peculiarities aside from their sex and gender role disharmony, peculiarities that can contain neurotic, depressive, paranoid, schizoid, or merely sociopathic and eccentric features. Asexuality is by no means rare. There can also be an unfortunate character defect which I have come to think of as the "transsexual character."

Gender role disorientation has been observed in several schizophrenics.

Transsexuals are deeply disturbed, unhappy people who deserve more sympathy and attention than they have so far received.

Psychotherapy in presently available forms is without value.

Endocrine therapy is usually of sufficiently great benefit as to be indispensable. Oral medication is adequate for the majority of patients, although injections are more effective.

Liver function tests are advisable from time to time under estrogen therapy, especially if there is a history of hepatitis. Thrombophlebitis is a contraindication for large doses.

Sex reassignment surgery is requested by almost all true transsexuals. It is fully indicated in some, and not indicated in others (as too much of a gamble). Patients' families have to be earnestly considered. It is just as wrong to reject the operation as a matter of principle as it is to grant surgery for everyone who wants it and can pay for it. Sometimes, however, the question arises what may be the lesser evil.

The results of the operation are favorable, to a greater or lesser degree, in more than 75% of the patients that I have observed. Their lives have been made more contented, although by no means free from emotional and social problems and complaints. After all, they are still the same individuals, yet sufficiently improved in their ad-justment to life and less troubled so that they have a better chance to be productive and to pursue happiness.”

--------------

Benjamin’s paper was printed in The Journal of Sex Research, 5,2, May 1969.

• Jan Wälinder.  Transsexualism: a study of forty-three cases. Goteborg Akademiforlaget, 1967.
• W St C Symmers. “Carcinoma of Breast in Trans-sexual Individuals after Surgical and Hormonal Interference with the Primary and Secondary Sex Characteristics”. British Medical Journal, 2, 1968: 83-85.
• New York Times, April 11, 1968.
• Lyn Raskin. Diary of a Transsexual. The Olympia Press, 1971: 38.

Colin Markland (1929 - 2012) sex-change surgeon

Colin Markland, whose father owned a butcher’s shop in Bolton, Lancashire, won local and state scholarships to Bolton Grammar School and Cambridge University (Caius College) and trained medically at Westminster Hospital.

At age 24 he started a general practice in a small Canadian town near Windsor, Ontario with office hours twice daily, house calls, surgery, obstetrics, local hospital staff, even serving as the township medical officer. After six years he started a urology residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, followed by a year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Renal Research Unit, Leeds University in the early days of organ transplantation. After being Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa he became an Associate Professor of Urology, University of Minnesota Medical School in 1964 where he worked in neurovesical dysfunction, along with the challenges of resident training. He ran a Graduate Trainee Program in Urology, with research interests involving radical cancer surgery, pediatric urology, neurologic vesical dysfunction and renal function after ischemia.

The Gender program opened at the University of Minnesota Medical School, shortly after the similar program at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The first Minnesota operation was done secretly but the press found out anyway. The program opened officially in December 1966. Dr Donald Creevy, the head of the urology department was in his late 60s and disinterested in such a new development. He delegated to Markland who was pleased to be given such a challenge, and became the chief surgeon on the program, sometimes assisted by Daniel Merrill who later wrote a book about the operations. Markland was under the incorrect impression that Christine Jorgensen’s operations in Copenhagen had included vaginoplasty, although it was noted that the Danish physicians had not described how to do one. But Markland, having to innovate, had given much thought to the procedure drawing on his experience doing perineal prostatectomy where the surgeon must develop a space between the urethra and prostate above and the anus and rectum below to expose the prostate gland – this is the space where the neo-vagina is formed. He intended to use the inverted penile skin to line the neo-vagina, but found it insufficient. He supplemented it with a skin graft from the right buttock. The details of Dr Burou’s penile inversion method did not become available until some years later.

The first two-dozen operations where financed by the state as a research program. Up to closure at the end of the 1970s, 41 trans women were operated on, and later 8 trans men also. This from the 300+ applications that the Clinic received each year. The most famous patient was the Mexican dancer, Shalimar.

In 1969 Creevy retired. Markland hoped to gain his position as head of the Urology Department, but Elwin Fraley, who had been junior to Markland at Massachusetts General, was appointed instead. As Fraley puts it: “Colin decided to be helpful rather than an adversary, as too often happens in these situations”.

In 1971 the Erickson Educational Foundation announced that the National American Urological Association had presented an award to Markland for a film referred to simply as “the University of Minnesota Transsexual Research Project Movie,” which he had screened at the annual meeting of the American College of Surgeons. The film followed Minnesota’s gender identity clinic five-year treatment program, giving what the newsletter called “an interim report on how well the total project is faring” and reviewing “surgical procedures and results” of its twenty-five “male [-to-female] transsexuals.

Markland gave a paper based on his work at the September 1971, Second International Symposium on Gender Identity, Elsinore, Denmark.

In 1974 Markland used bowel segments. This was the first intestinal vaginoplasty done on a trans woman (apart from Charles Wolf in 1942). This procedure was quickly adopted by Dr Laub at Stanford. John Brown also offered it later in his career, but with less satisfactory results.

Markland had lost interest in doing transsexual surgery by 1975, and passed the task to Merrill and others in the department who used his techniques.

Fraley, the Urology Department head and a political conservative, did not like the concept of sex-change surgery and questioned it repeatedly. Finally he closed it in 1979, shortly before the similar program at Johns Hopkins was also closed.

Markland spent a year as Fulbright scholar professor in Burma, followed by three years at Louisiana State University as chairman of a new training programme. After a midlife crisis he was professor at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where he stayed until retirement. Afterwards he acquired a 47 foot Wellington cutter, sailed two years from Newfoundland to South America, and several Atlantic crossings. He regarded the US Coast Guard Captains license the toughest exam ever.

Colin Markland died of a heart attack at age 83.

• Colin Markland. “Testicular Tumors”. Current Problems in Surgery, 5, 9, 1968. 
• Colin Markland & Daniel Merrill. “Accidental Penile Gangrene”. The Journal of Urology, 108, 1972.
• “Symposium Highlights” and “Genetic Females, Too”. EEF Newsletter, 4,4, Winter 1971. Online.
• “Minnesota Film Honored,” EEF Newsletter2, Summer 1972: 3. Online.
• Colin Markland. “Complications in male transsexual surgery”. In Donald Laub & Patric Gandy (eds) Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Gender Dysphoria Syndrome, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1973.
• Colin Markland & Donald Hastings. “Vaginal Reconstruction using Cecal and Sigmoid Bowel Segements in Transsexual Patients”. The Journal of Urology, 111, 1974.
• Colin Markland & Donald Hastings. “Vaginal Reconstruction using Bowel Segments in Male-to-Female Transsexual Patients”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 7, 4, 1978.
• Colin Markland & Donald Hastings. “Post-Surgical Adjustment of Twenty-Five Transsexuals (Male-toFemale) in the University of Minnesota Study”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 7, 4, 1978.
• David M Brown, Colin Markland & Louis P Dehner. “Leydeig Cell Hypoplasia: A Cause of Male Pseudohermaphroditism”. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 46, 1, 1978.
• Colin Markland. “ ‘Red Alert!’ Accidental Penile Necrosis”. JAMA, 244, 11, 1980.
• Margaret Dierdre O’Hartigan. Chrysalis, 2, 3, Spring 1996. Online. 
• “Obituaries: Alan Colin Markland”. BMJ, 2012;345:e7448. 
• “Obituaries: Alan Colin Markland”. ObitTree, September 2012. Online.
• Daniel C Merrill. Trapped: The true stories of Shalimar, Linda and Jackie – transsexuals who believed they were female born in a male’s body. Xlibris, 2012: ix, 23, 26-7, 30-2, 35-6, 49, 51, 54-5, 82. Excerpt. 
• Elwin E Fraley. Teaching Surgeons’ Hands to Heal: A Urological Surgical Chairman’s Chronicle: The History of the Department of Urological Surgery, University of Minnesota 1969-1993. Author House, 2014: 9, 53, 77, 140.

-------------------

Merrill in his book writes: “It also is clear that he [Markland] has no recollection of my contribution to the project other than as an assistant in some of the procedures he performed. Specifically, Dr. Markland believes that it was his idea to use the sigmoid colon to form a neovagina for our male transsexual patients. I expect that, when all is said and done, it is not at all that important whose idea it was to form a neovagina out of a segment of large intestine. It is important, I think, to document that this innovative approach to the problems inherent in the formation of a neovagina were first employed by surgeons of the division of urology at the University of Minnesota.” p49

And “I contacted him recently to fill in some of the blank spots in the narrative I was writing for this book. Dr. Markland indicates that he lost interest in the project because the transsexual patients were very demanding and because he received no compensation for the complicated and laborious surgical procedures he performed on them.” p49

Merrill claims that Shalimar was the first trans patient in the Minnesota program after it formally opened - however he also says that he fictionalized his account.

++Both Elmer Belt and Markland were prostate surgeons.   If Belt published an account of how he did transgender surgery, I have not found it.  I suspect that Marland's method was a re-invention of how Belt did it. 

Three dancers in the mid-1960s who went for completion surgery

These are only snapshots. We know no more.

Zorana Pop-Simonović (1938 - ?)

Born in  Serbia, Zorana worked as a chorus girl from 1955, and then as a belly-dancer in a night club. In 1967 she was a car accident, and was outed by the doctors at the hospital. Thus out, she applied to the Yugoslav 4 government to have a sex change operation. 

• Thomas Porter. “Car Crash 6 Uncovers a 12-Year Secret…Belly Dancer is a Man!” National Enquirer, Oct. 1, 1967.
• TVIC, 2,23, Dec 15 1973: 5. Online.
• Ms Bob. “Tabloids and Men’s Soft Core — Part 6”. TGForum, Sep 17, 2012. Online.

Roxanne Algeria (194? - )

• Roxanne Algeria. “The man who became a woman: America’s Top 14 Topless Star tells All! My Sex Change … Why I Did It … My Love Life”. Confidential, 15 15,1, January 1967.
• Ms Bob. “Tabloids and Men’s Soft Core — Part 6”. TGForum, Sep 17, 2012. Online. 

Shalimar (194? - )

The Ranchio Escondido in Juarez, 1964 A renowned performer originally from Mexico. She took up residence in Minnesota and was able to get in the program at Minnesota University Gender Identity Clinic. Urologist Daniel C. Merrill later took three cases including Shalimar and semi-fictionalized their stories.

• “Latin Illusion: Shalimar”. Female Mimics: Premiere Issue, 1963: 18 12-8. Online.
• “Shalimar … Mexico, Mexico City”. 22 Transvestism Around the World, 23 Number 1, S-K Press, 1964: 52-61. Online.
• Daniel C Merrill MD. Trapped: The True Stories of Shalimar, 27 Linda, and Jackie – transsexuals who believed they were females born in a 28 male’s body. Xlibris, 2012. 

Trans London in the 1960s: Ruminations

Part I: 1960-3

Part II: 1964-7

Part III: 1968-71

Part IV: Ruminations

Revision of Birth Certificates

It is often said that in Britain before Corbett v Corbett transsexuals as well as intersex persons could get their birth certificates re-issued.

I purposely juxtaposed Georgina Turtle and April Ashley re changing of one’s birth certificate. Georgina had to supply medical reports along with affidavits from three doctors Kenneth Walker, A.P. Cawadias and her father. Mr Clarkson, the surgeon, was also obliged to provide a report of her anatomy and Georgina had to provide written assurances that she had never been married or been capable of functioning as a male. A pretty high bar that not everyone was able to meet.

April was apparently advised (incorrectly) that birth certificates were not re-issued. 

As her marriage was to Arthur Corbett, Lord Rowallan, surely he had the clout, the contacts and the money to arrange for her birth certificate to be re-issued. Or was he planning from the beginning that without the revised birth certificate, he would be able to get the marriage annulled whenever he felt like it?

On this page on the Rachel Horsham website, you can view the original and revised birth certificates of April Ashley, Michael Dillon, Robert Cowell and Georgina Turtle. And certainly Ewan Forbes had his birth certificate re-issued. Dillon and Forbes were children of titled aristocrats; Cowell and Turtle were children of prominent medical men.

We might also note the inconsistent application of the rules. Turtle had to provide written assurances that she had never been married or been capable of functioning as a male, while Cowell had been married and had fathered two children.

There was a Scottish case in 1965 wherein a trans woman designated solely as ‘X’, "a person correctly registered as a male at birth subsequently changed sex, a petition to correct an error presented under the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Scotland) Act 1854 (c80) (repealed) was refused".

I fail to find that ordinary trans persons before 1970, that is those without titles, money and/or medical and legal contacts, were actually able to obtain the revised certificate by their own effort.

We know from Peter Stirling’s autobiography that his social worker at Guy’s Hospital was outraged that the Australian High Commission refused to re-issue his birth certificate. “[This] I think is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard! It's a pity you weren't British, there would be no hassle here.” Ironically that was 1968, just before Corbett v Corbett.

Can we therefore assume that up to 1970, the clinic at Guy’s Hospital usually arranged for revised birth certificates for their clients? Was that also true for the clinic at Charing Cross Hospital? I have looked but not found confirmation.

But what about those who had private surgery, maybe in Casablanca? Jan Morris tells us of her re-issued passport, driving licence etc, but no word about a birth certificate.

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Aristocratic Privilege

We have in the 1960s three examples of where having to decide between good governance and the convenience of a titled person, the authorities definitely chose the latter. The fact that Macmillan, of the publishing dynasty, and many other Conservative (and a few Labour) politicians were either born or wed into the Aristocracy was obviously a factor.

1. Ewan Forbes, 11^th Baronet of Carigievar
2. Robert Boothby, Baron Boothby of Buchan and Rattray Head
3. Arthur Corbett, Lord Rowallan

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Contraceptive pills and the decriminalisation of Homosexuality

The contraceptive pill became available in Britain in 1961, at first just for older married women who had sufficient children, then later for younger married women who wished to delay or avoid parenthood, and finally for single women who wished to have a sex life without becoming pregnant.

There were three side results from this.

• Heterosexual sex no longer had the threat of pregnancy. Like homosexuality it could become recreational sex. Thus the objection to homosexuality that it was not procreative fell away.
• As women became more open to recreational sex, straight men stopped having sex with gay men.
• The pill was an available oestrogen source. Where a trans woman could not talk her way into a prescription, non-official contraceptive pills were a way to get started. 

Peter Hitchens, previously a Trotskyite radical who later became an idiosyncratic conservative, says in his book The Abolition of Britain: 

“Logically, there was now no difference between sterile heterosexual sex and sterile homosexual sex. In fact, in some ways, homosexuality was the purest expression of the new doctrine that sex was fun and that we should explore our bodies and experience pleasure as self-fulfillment. Nobody who believed in pre-marital or extramarital sex could object to homosexuality without serious hypocrisy. This is why the relaxation of laws on homosexuality, first proposed in the 1950s Wolfenden Report, was delayed until the 1960s. Before the pill, the liberalization could not happen because of the distaste most people felt for homosexual acts. After the pill, the governing class had to relax the laws, because they were no longer consistent with the national mood or with their own pleasures.”

That of course is an insular British point of view. The US had the pill also but did not achieve nationwide decriminalization of gay love until Lawrence v Texas in 2003 (although Illinois and Connecticut had already liberalised their laws by the late 1960s). This would make England (not Britain or the UK as Scotland and Northern Ireland were excluded) look progressive, but actually it was a laggard in decriminalisation. Similar repeals or decriminalisations had been achieved across Europe, especially in the East before the availability of the contraceptive pill:

1932 Poland

1940 Iceland (actually under UK occupation at the time)

1942 Switzerland

1944 Sweden & Surinam

1945 Portugal

1948 Poland (repeated by the new Communist government)

1951 Greece

1956 Thailand

1961 Czechoslovakia & Hungary

1963 Israel

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Roy Jenkins

Hitchens, a contrarian who regrets the social reforms of the 1960s, makes Home Secretary Roy Jenkins the villain of his book, The Abolition of Britain, but also points out the hypocrisy of the Conservative Party. He quotes Jenkins: “What is particularly hypocritical about the [Conservative] Government’s refusal to act on homosexual law reform is that none of its leading members (nor those of any other major institution in the national life) apply social disapproval to conduct which, for public consumption, they insist on keeping subject to the full rigours of the criminal law.” Jenkins also admitted that there was a ‘radical wing’ of the Conservatives that was supportive of his program. By the very nature of the Conservative Party such reform could come only from Labour – however several key Conservatives such as Thatcher and Enoch Powell did vote for the decriminalisation of Homosexuality.

Later, during the 1980s rule of Margaret Thatcher, she and her cabinet blamed Jenkins’ reforms for family breakdowns, the decline of respect for authority and the decline of social responsibility. Jenkins replied by pointing out that Thatcher, with her large parliamentary majorities, never attempted to reverse any of his reforms.

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Government scandals

The Conservation Government 1951-64 was beset with sex and espionage scandals:

1951 Defection of diplomats Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess to Moscow.

1951 Sarah Macmillan, youngest child of Harold Macmillan, said to be fathered by Robert Boothby, had an illegal abortion – the family considered this a lessor scandal than an out-of-wedlock birth just before the October 1951 election. It left her unable to have children.

1956 Lionel Crabb, a diver sent by MI6 to investigate a Soviet ship visiting Portsmouth, was never seen again.

1957 At the trial of Dr John Bodkins Adams, suspected serial killer, no questions were asked about his involvement in the death of Edward Cavendish, the brother of Dorothy Macmillan. Apparently to avoid drawing attention to the fact that Prime Minister Macmillan was a cuckold. 

1958 When Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister he raised Robert Boothby to the House of Lords. Dorothy Macmillan nee Cavendish (1900-66) married to Harold Macmillan from 1920, had been a lover of Boothby from 1930.  The affair was an open secret but the press chose not to mention it – not even later during the Profumo scandal.

1958 Ian Harvey, Conservative MP and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office was found in the bushes of St James Park with a Coldstream Guardsman. He resigned his office and his seat.

1961 George Blake arrested for spying for USSR. Sentenced to 42 years, but escaped after 5.

1962 John Vassall, spied for the USSR. Sentenced to 18 years, released after 10.

1963 Top British spy Kim Philby fled to Moscow. 

1963 Charles Fletcher-Cooke, Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Home Office was discovered to be living with a young man when the latter was stopped while speeding. Resigned as a minister but continued as MP for another 20 years.

1963 John Profumo shared a mistress with a Soviet Naval attaché. He lied to Parliament, and then resigned his office and his seat.

1964 Robert Boothby sharing rent boys with East End gangsters – hushed up by both major parties.

The Conservatives were of course hoping for a Labour Party scandal in the late 1960s in return. They thought that they had one when Marcia Williams, divorced, Harold Wilson’s political secretary, had two sons. The Daily Mail sent its political editor, Walter Terry, to see if Wilson was the father. However he was unable to do this as he himself was the father.

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Synchronicity

A synchronicity is two or more events happening around the same time without a clear causal nexus.

We had three apparent such in the 1960s. 

July 1964.

1964. After the George Brinham murder and subsequent trial, it was felt by the judicial authorities that persecution of gay men should be toned down. The Director of Public Prosecutions issued instructions to police forces that in cases involving consenting adults in private no prosecution should be initiated until an opinion had been obtained from the Director. The story was leaked by the London Evening Standard in July 1964.
1965. The Daily Mirror ran a story about a Peer and a gangster (both unnamed) implying a sexual relationship. They were named by the West German magazine Stern as Robert Boothby and Ronnie Kray.

Presumably no one in authority anticipated the Boothby-Kray dalliance when the toning down was instructed.

Incidentally, neither event is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for July 1964.

May-December 1967

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 was debated 4 July, and received Royal Assent on 27 July. 

The in-camera trial between Ewan Forbes and his cousin John Forbes-Semphill took place May-December.

Logically they should have complemented each other, one giving a few rights to gay men, and the other recognising a gender change. However the latter was not permitted to apply in general.

It is quite likely that the authorities were pleased to accept the synchronicity.

Corbert v Corbett and Dawn Langley Simmons

November –December 1969 were the main hearings in the Corbett annulment trial, and quite fortuitously Dawn Langley Simmons and her husband arrived in England, and drew much greater press attention.

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Birth Certificates and Marriage

If we accept the assumption that a marriage of a trans person is null and void if the birth certificate was never re-issued with the later name and gender, we must explain these cases:

Dawn Langley Hall Simmons. Her biographer, Edward Ball, travelled to Crowborough, East Sussex, and in the local records found two birth certificates. Both named the child as Gordon Ticehurst, the first in 1922; the re-issue in 1939 named a previously missing father, but no other changes. Despite the lack of a re-issue as female, Dawn's marriage to John Paul was never challenged on those grounds.

Peter Stirling. The Australian High Commission refused in 1968, as per standard practice, to re-issue Stirling’s birth certificate. Despite this he married his girl-friend. A few years later Peter took his English wife to Australia as his wife. Their marriage was never challenged. His only problem was that when he renewed his passport, they put sex=F. It took months, but with the aid of Guy’s Hospital he was able to get that fixed.

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Intersex Wannabees

It would seem that Stirling, Turtle-Somerset and Dee Palmer actually had an intersex condition, but there is no satisfactory evidence that Cowell, Dillan, Forbes, Hall-Simmons, Ashley or Morris had such. It had been made clear even before Corbett v Corbett that courts favoured intersex persons, especially those where chromosomes, gonads and genitals were concordant see for example S vs S, 1962, and the failed petition of X in 1965. Thus the lengths that trans persons of that generation went to present themselves as intersex. That was understandable – they were not playing on a level field. What needs more attention is why 21^st century writers continue to claim some of them as intersex – as they do with Lili Elvenes (Elbe) also.

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• Alkarim Jivani. It’s Not Unusual: A History of Gay Britain in the Twentieth Century. Indiana Press, 1997.
• Michael Bloch.C10set Queens: Some 20^th Century British Politicians. Abacus,2015.
• Peter Hitchens. The Abolition of Britain. Bloomsbury, 2018.
• Zoe Playdon. “Who’s Offensive Now? Trans law at the time of the Sexual Offences Act. SEXing the Past. 3-5 March 2017.