Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.
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Peter was born in Kingston, Jamaica, where his father was a yacht salesman, and grew up in Hertfordshire. As a teenager he modelled himself on Marilyn Monroe.
Boy George and he, using the name, Marilyn, were Blitz Kids and part of the New Romantic movement. They lived in the same squat in Kentish Town, but were chased out by a lustful neighbour who assumed that Marilyn was a woman.
After Boy George went into Culture Club, Marilyn appeared in the Eurythmics’ video, Who’s That Girl. He was then signed and his first single, “Calling Your Name”, 1983, went to no 1 in Japan, and no 4 in the UK. He released two more singles in 1984, and his album, Despite Straight Lines in 1985.
In 1986 Marilyn and George’s brother, Kevin, were sentenced on a charge of possessing heroin. His career declined. A failed attempt to record a second album in Detroit drained his finances, and he cut his hair and quit the industry, until 2001 when he made some club appearances.
In 2002, his character was featured in the stage musical Taboo. In 2003 he was in a Channel 4 reality show based on hairdressing. In 2005 he was in the Channel 4 documentary Whatever Happened to the Gender Benders?, where, looking quite unwell and unglamorous, he discussed drugs and his agoraphobia.
*Not Peter Robinson, the crime novelist, nor the department store, nor the computer scientist, nor the poet.
Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984:116-7.
Andy Baybutt (dir). Whatever Happened to the Gender Benders? With Marc Almond, David Bowie, Boy George, Marilyn. UK 48 mins 2005 Channel 4.
George was raised in Eltham, London by Irish parents.
As a participant in the New Romantic movement in the early 1980s he and his friend Marilyn (Peter Robinson) were noted for their androgynous dressing. Malcolm McLaren, who had run the Sex Pistols, arranged for Boy George, as he became known, to perform with Bow Wow Wow. Shortly after George and three others formed Culture Club. The group took off and had singles and albums at the top of the charts.
George’s dress style resulted in him being regarded as the most famous transvestite of the period, but he frequently insisted in interviews that he did not wear female underwear, and that he was proud to be a man, with no need to be a woman. He claimed that his dressing was more like that of a priest. In his 1995 biography, he said: "I wanted people to know I was gay. In many people's eyes, I was the premier poof, the benchmark by which others would be measured”, although in the 1980s he had avoided admitting to being gay and had famously said that he prefered a ‘nice cup of tea’ to sex.
He developed a serious heroin addiction. Bandmate Michael Rudetski died of a heroin overdose. George’s brother David attempted to save his life by talking about the addiction on national television. In 1986 George was arrested for heroin possession.
His solo career after Culture Club was less successful. For a while he wrote songs under the name Angela Dust. He had a new hit with “The Crying Game”, released with the film in 1992. He started DJing and was asked to mix compilation discs by Fantazia and Ministry of Sound. In 2002/3 he starred in the musical Taboo, based on his own life, but playing a different character. The show lasted for two years.
In 2005, in New York, he called the police over a robbery and was arrested for cocaine possession. He was sentenced to garbage duty for ‘wasting police time’.
In 2008 he was convicted of assaulting and imprisoning a Norwegian prostitute in his home in east London. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, but was released after 4, and was required to wear an ankle monitor for 90 days.
Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984:112-3.
Boy George and Spencer Bright. Take It Like a Man: The Autobiography of Boy George. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1995.
Boy George and Paul Gorman. Straight. London: Century, 2005.
I wasn't in London for New Romanticism, and never related to that phase of the rock-pop rainbow.
'Gender variance' is a wide term. That is why I chose it. Obviously George O'Dowd comes under the wide umbrella, even though his dressing up is only a phase that he passed through. However there is no rule that says that to be gender variant, you have to be so for life. I don't see O'Dowd as either a transvestite or a drag queen. He seems to be more of a theovestite (dressing (up) as a priest). Even in the '80s I was put off by his insistence that he wore male underwear under his frocks.
Some persons have complained that I included Rudy Guliani on this blog. Guliani is a lot closer to being transgender than O'Dowd is. And he does not go around insisting that he has male underwear under his skirts.
Greg Lankton was the third child of a Presbyterian minister in Flint, Michigan. As a child, Greg made dolls, played dress-up and was like other girls. He was also raped by his grandfather.
His family preferred a daughter to a gay son, and proposed a sex change. Greer was rejected by several sex-change doctors, but his mother found a surgeon who would do it. It was paid for with financial help from the father’s church congregation. However within a year Greer regretted the surgery and attempted suicide, although after recovery she did continue as female.
In 1987 she married her long-time boyfriend, Paul Monroe, also an artist, with her father as the minister, and Teri Toye as the bridesmaid. She and Paul experimented with drugs. She was a successful New York artist making dolls, sculptures and drawings. She worked with Jim Henson of Sesame Street. She was featured in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennial of 1995.
Her last showing was in “It’s all about ME, Not You” at the Andy Warhol Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Among her works is a sad-faced bust of Candy Darling; a sculpture of a toddler-hermaphrodite giving birth to twins, and an emaciated near-life-sized Sissy Boy.
She was raped during the preparation for the Pittsburgh show, and died of a drug overdose shortly afterwards.
Jack Doroshow (1939 - 2017) Drag Name: Flawless Sabrina. Drag performer and organizer of pageants from Philadelphia. Through his company, The Nationals Academy, Jack organized 46 pageants a year from 1959-1967. As local laws almost always prohibited cross-dressing, he would meet with officials and propose a charitable donation, and in return the town would pass a variance to permit the pageant. Usually the town officials did not understand that local people would be performing. The 1967 finals held in New York was a much bigger affair. The Muscular Dystrophy Association was announced as the charity, and Lady Bird Johnson, the President’s wife, and Robert Kennedy were initially co-sponsors, but quickly dropped out as the nature of the event became clearer.
The event was filmed as The Queen, 1968, which was a sensation at the Cannes International Film Festival. On this basis Jack was hired as special advisor on Midnight Cowboy, 1969, and Myra Breckinridge, 1970. He played a gay mufti part in the thriller, The Anderson Tapes, 1971.
The 2002 short film, Between Two Worlds, is mainly about him, and he appears in the 2008 documentary about the transgender rock singer, Lisa Jackson.
Rachel Harlow (1948 - ). Born Richard Finocchio in Philadelphia, aka Rachel Billeboult. In 1967 Rachel was a very passable female impersonator, described as a 'natural wonder’, who always won the drag contests she entered, and she became briefly famous in the film, The Queen, 1968.
The contestants are shown chatting in their hotel rooms, discussing how they were not called in the draft, their boyfriends, why they would never have a sex change. Richard throws a fit because he does not have a suitable wig (although her own hair is quite feminine enough). The film includes shots of only Richard (as male as he gets) arriving and departing, and Richard, as Harlow on stage, gets longer and better-lit close-ups than the other contestants. She went to Cannes International Film Festival with the film and was a center of attention. David Bowie, in his androgynous phase, cited her influence.
She transitioned in 1972. In later years she was active running nights clubs, including Harlow’s at 22nd and Market, and in local television in Philadelphia.
For a long while that was all the public knowledge about Rachel. Then Wendy Leigh published her biography of Grace Kelly, and included two pages on Rachel, who had an affair with John B. Kelly, the brother of Grace, who would have married her if his mother had not threatened to disinherit him.
Crystal Labeija(? - ? ). Crystal was the other standout among the contestants in The Queen, under the title, Miss Manhattan. She threw a tantrum at the end after losing to Rachel Harlow.
She was the founder of the New York House of LaBeija in 1972, which in turn inspired others to declare Houses, sometimes named after themselves – e.g House of Corey after Dorian Corey, sometimes named after established fashion houses such as Chanel or St Laurent. Crystal Labeija is discussed, but does not appear in the 1990 film, Paris is Burning.
The young Billy Schumacher, who will later become the famous International Chrysis, and the young Kim Christy are in the chorus line, but are not identified.
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Frank Simon (dir). The Queen. Hosted by Jack Doroshow (Sabrina). US 68 mins 1968.
Hands up those who remember the 1987 film called Eat the Rich, or more obscurely, the 1985 film The Supergrass.Eat the Rich, a comedy that did not quite work, was a comedy, in the English tradition and about the horrors of life under Thatcherism, that had an unusual selling point: the actor(ess) playing the male lead Alex was a recent MTF transsexual. IMDB credits the part to 'Alan Pellay as Lanah Pelley'. The video box image shows Alex as a maternal female feeding the other actors - a scene that is not only not in the film, but has nothing to do with the plot of the film. The Wikipedia article on Eat the Rich, on the other hand mentions only Alan, and says nothing about his sex change.
Alan/Lanah, originally from Grimsby, Lincolnshire, a graduate of London's drag scene, had been a gender-bender punk in the band Spit Like Paint and part of the alternate comedy troop, The Comic Strip in the 1980s, sometimes playing female characters. 'Lana Pelley' played the part of 'Mary' in Supergrass.
In the late 1980s it seems that Lanah was presenting as a completed transsexual, or at least that the press releases that film reviewers get implied or said so. Here is an 80s website called The Blitz Kids which has photographs and publicity material for Lana Pelley, pushing her then new single 'Pistol in Your Pocket' which describes her as 'Alan Pelley, now known as Lanah', and as a transsexual superstar.
....
I had wondered what had happened to Lanah Pelley. Transsexuals in show biz sometimes lose their careers and disappear completely from view, for example Canary Conn, and I thought that maybe that was what had happened to her. However I have now been pointed in the direction of Al Pillay, (note the surname has now been altered also), a rising performer who is moving from successes in London's West End to a stint in Las Vegas. Al is also from Grimsby, was in Eat The Rich and had a successful single called 'Pistol in Your Pocket'. In fact it is the same person. The bio on Al's web page describes him as 'one time transexual disco diva', but that is all on that topic. In an interview on Positive Nation, the interviewer asks:
What happened to Lana and the sex change?
As far as a sex change operation, it was not even on the menu. Transsexuality for me, was more my protest against a macho, posturing gay world, and my subversion of society’s restrictive gender norms. Some of us have to go right out on a limb and overboard to find out who we are as people.
Such are the realities in show biz!
PS IMDB has a separate entry for Al Pillay, and treats him as a separate person from Alan Pellay.
1984. Just three years after Caroline Cossey (Tula) was outed when she came to attention by being a 'Bond girl' in For Your Eyes Only, and as a consequence lost most of her modelling contracts. Just three years after 1981, in New York, the new fashion sensation was the openly transgender Teri Toye, who had moved to New York from Iowa to study fashion. She was offered modeling work, especially for the cult fashion designer Stephen Sprouse, but also for Karl Lagerfeld and Jean Paul Gaultier. Her success allowed Lauren Foster, whose career had wobbled after she was outed, to spring back.
There is a Teri Toye doll by Greer Lankton's husband, Paul Monroe. Teri was maid of honor at Greer's wedding.
However after three years, Teri split the scene. She returned to her native Iowa where she works in historic preservation and real estate.
Boy George and he, using the name, Marilyn, were Blitz Kids and part of the New Romantic movement. They lived in the same squat in Kentish Town, but were chased out by a lustful neighbour who assumed that Marilyn was a woman.London: Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984:116-7.
. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1995.
. London: Century, 2005.
