Two books that never arrived

 Over the years I noticed again and again comments in various places, and particularly on maewest.blogspot.com, by R Mark Desjardins (1963-2025) that had something interesting to say about Ms West. He often mentioned that he was writing In Search of Mae West, but the book was never published.

Mark recently died. Hopefully his executor will be arranging publication.

"I've been asked many times when my manuscript "In Search of Mae West" will be available. Hopefully sharing this backstory will shed some light on my journey. Originally, my interest in Mae West was casual, and an intense dream encouraged me to delve deeper into her life. In 1994 I travelled to Los Angeles and by stroke of good luck, had the opportunity to meet several of the fellows who surrounded Mae during the last ten years of her life. Many previously unknown facts were disclosed and I was dumbfounded that these stories were finally being shared.

Returning home to Vancouver, Canada, I pondered over what I was told, and in 1996, I returned to Los Angeles and got these fellows to relate more insights on tape. When I shared my 2001 first draft of "Saint Mae Our Lady of Hips & Quips," weighing in at 350 pages, it was enthusiastically received. One very important close friend of Mae's thought my chapter on one personal assistant was overly harsh. Truth be known, communication with that individual had broken down, and information I utilized was from other members of the "inner group" who had axes to grind.

It took over a decade to mend fences and to obtain a face to face taped interview, which took place over two days, June 4 and 5th, 2013, to be fair in getting his story right. In the ensuing years, many more previously unavailable sources have become available to me to provide a much deeper examination of very important people extremely close to Mae whose voices have never been heard from before. Blending all this new material into my original work has proven to be a huge undertaking. Frankly, I may have more than one book worth of original material, but that ultimately will be the decision of a good editor.

Meanwhile, I would like to share two different cover possibilities I have entertained over the years. However, no final decision has been made. Brian J. Bradley's new book, "Outrageous Misfits" has cited my first draft, "Saint Mae Our Lady of Hips & Quips" in his bibliography. His book on the life and times of Craig Russell is a must read, and he has been very supportive of my project." Mark Desjardins on Facebook.

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Margaret Branch had a fascinating life, in the French Resistance, studied with Carl Jung, psychiatric social worker with gifted children, did liaison with trans and intersex persons at Guys Hospital, etc. In 2016 it was announced that Ed Knox, a relative of Margaret's wife, was working on a much anticipated biography of Margaret.

That was 10 years ago.

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See also: Three books – expected but never arrived.

A review of James I. Martin’s Sexual and Gender Minority History: A Counter-Narrative. Oxford University Press, 2025.

This is a LGBT+ history book. However I will be reviewing mainly the trans elements.

Despite the title, this book is a history of LGBT in the US only, apart from a quick foreshadowing in Weimar Germany. The one and only mention of England is the names of the last two men to be hanged for sodomy in 1830 - that is it, really. I am surprised that Martin’s English publisher, Oxford University Press, did not insist on adding the term “US” into the books title.

James I. Martin was an Associate Professor at the NYU Silver School of Social Work where he published several sociological and social psychological studies of sex and gender minorities. He did not publish as a historian.

In chapter 2 “Germany in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries” Martin gives quickie summaries of Károly Mária Kertbeny, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Adolf Brand etc. Of Hirschfeld (p 14-16) Martin tells us that he was a co-founder in 1897 of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee which applied three times to the Reichstag to decriminalise homosexuality, and in 1919 he founded the Institute for Sexual Science. As Martin tells it, he presumably did no work with trans persons in that none are mentioned. On p27 we are told of the destruction of the Institute. On p95, while discussing Virginia Prince, Martin says erroneously: “At the time, such men referred to themselves as transvestites, the English translation of a term invented by Magnus Hirschfeld more than 40 years earlier”. And equally erroneously “transsexuals, an identity label also invented by Hirschfeld”.

Having skirted around Germany’s trans history, Martin then totally ignores that of England, France, Italy, Brazil, India, Thailand, etc.

The first transvesting, anywhere, that he mentions is in Chapter 4 “Foundations in the United States” where there is a single paragraph on female-born persons who fought as men in the US civil wars of the 1770s and the 1860s such as Deborah Sampson and Albert Cashier. This is followed by a full page on Charlie Parkhurst, Mary Fields and other unnamed masculine women/trans men on the frontier. (p33-5) For male-born persons, he mentions only the gender social construction of ‘fairy’ particularly in New York (p40-1), drawing mainly on George Chauncey’s Gay New York - although one searches in vain in Martin’s book for the best known ‘fairy’ who published two books and many journal articles in this period, that is Jennie June/Ralph Werther/Mowry Saben. Nor is there any mention of the first sexological study of trans women in the US, that by Bernard Talmey, 1913-4.

In his chapter 4 summary, Martin writes: “Men developed devoted and sometimes sexual relationships in the all-male cowboy, railroad, mining, and logging communities of the frontier West before encroaching settlement extinguished their freedom to do so. Many women escaped their prescribed gender role by dressing and behaving as men in military service or by living independently in the rural West.” There is no mention of the few male-born persons who did socially transition such as Alice Baker and Mrs Noonan, army wife.

Chapter 5 “The Jazz Age” quickly summarises prohibition and the Harlem Renaissance. Cross-dressing singer Gladys Bentley (p47,60) is mentioned, as are the Hamilton Lodge Balls (p50,60), Julian Eltinge (p51) and The Pansy Craze, where only Gene Malin (p52) is mentioned. Strangely he mentions Radclyffe-Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, in The Pansy Craze section - John Radclyffe-Hall would not be amused. Pansies such as Frankie Jaxon, Valda Grey, Rae Bourbon are not mentioned.

Chapter 6 “The 1930s and the Great Depression ” tells of the post-Prohibition drag clubs in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. But not much else re trans persons.

Chapter 7 “The World at War” is almost all about gay man and lesbians in the military. It does not mention then-starting ball organizer Phil Black, nor the research by Jan Gay that included several biographies of trans women and was published as George W. Henry’s Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, 1941, nor the arrival of the US’s first completed trans woman, Charlotte Charlaque, a patient of Magnus Hirschfeld who had been deported from Nazi Germany.

Chapter 8 “The 1950s and the Homophile Movement ” describes the Lavender Scare and state oppression on one hand, and the emerging gay and lesbian self-help organizations on the other: Mattachine, One Inc, Daughters of Bilitis - and then very quickly (p95) Virginia Prince and Christine Jorgensen. However the trans pioneer activist Louise Lawrence is not mentioned at all, and Harry Benjamin who introduced Prince and Jorgenson to each other is not mentioned until later.

Likewise: Claire Elgin, who would later become a successful business woman and the first trans woman millionaire, was creating waves in 1953-4 but is not mentioned, nor is Tamara Rees. In 1953 Harry Benjamin participated in a symposium with the Austrian neuro-psychiatrist Emil Gutheil. Benjamin’s paper, “Transsexualism and Transvestism as Psycho-Somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes” is in effect the first draft of what 12 years later will become his book The Transsexual Phenomenon. From the early 1950s, Dr Elmer Belt in Los Angeles started doing vaginoplasty for trans women at the urging of Benjamin. This predated the team led by Poul Fogh-Andersen in Copenhagen, and Belt was doing vaginoplasty using skin grafts from the thigh, buttocks or back while the Fogh-Andersen team was doing only orchiectomy and penectomy. In 1958 the 19-year-old trans woman we refer to as Agnes approached Dr Robert Stoller at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center and persuaded him that she was intersex, leading to successful vaginoplasty. These are major events in the history of transsexuality in the US, and yet Martin seems totally indifferent to them.

Chapter 9 “A Rising Tide of Resistance” opens with the general uprisings of the 1960s, by blacks, feminists and anti-war protestors. The gay/trans riots at Cooper Do-Nuts, Los Angeles; Dewey’s restaurant, Philadelphia and Compton’s Cafeteria, San Francisco are mentioned. After more details of gay/lesbian activism, there is a short summary of Virginia Prince and the creation of the Foundation for Personality Expression (FPE) and Reed Erickson and his financing of Harry Benjamin’s work. The Transsexual Phenomenon is mentioned. (all p111) Stryker is given as the sole authority for all three. Neither Docter’s nor my biographies of Prince are referred to.

However Donald Wollheim/Darrel Raynor’s influential book, A Year Among the Girls, is not even mentioned; nor is Susan Valenti’s Casa Susana’s trans getaway in the Catskills; nor Andy Warhol’s ‘superstars’, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis; nor Jane County; nor Rachel Harlow.

A major omission is the opening in the late 1960s of the university hospital gender clinics: Johns Hopkins, Minnesota; Stanford, UCLA. Even major sex-change doctors other than Benjamin, such as John Money at Johns Hopkins and Robert Stoller at UCLA are not mentioned as such, only as authors of one or two papers. Drs Stanley Biber and Marci Bowers are also not mentioned.

Chapter 10 “Stonewall and its Aftermath” briefly summarizes David Carter’s book, avoids naming any persons who may have been present at the riots, but does names journalists who wrote about them. The Queens Liberation Front founded by Lee Brewster and Barbara de Lamere is mentioned (p120-1), but Martin follows Susan Stryker in not naming Barbara correctly - but only by a short-lived stage name of ‘Bunny Eisenhower’. This is to refer to a trans woman only by one of her dead names. Barbara was one of very few New York trans women of the late sixties to eventually achieve completion surgery. Brewster’s Mardi Gras Boutique which lasted for 30 years, and was the place to shop for trans persons, impersonators and others, is not mentioned. Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and STAR house, both founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson are mentioned but we are not told what happened to Sylvia and Marsha in later years, not even that Marsha was murdered.

However trans activist groups in other US cities at the same time are not mentioned at all: such as TAO in Miami or COG in San Francisco, nor entertainment troupes like the Cockettes.

Martin writes (p124) “During the 1970s, Virginia Prince used the term transgenderist to refer to gender-variant people who did not consider themselves transsexuals, particularly those who were male bodied. However, it would take until the 1990s for transgender to become an umbrella term for most, if not all, gender-variant people”. This sentence has several difficulties. Prince did use ‘transgender’, ‘transgenderist’, ‘transgenderal’ but only a few times. She was by nature transgenderphobic, but the false attribution of her endorsing the word while being the most divisive of trans activists caused many to not adopt the term ‘transgender’ for a long time. For more detail see my The Myth that Transgender is a Princian Concept.

Chapter 11 “Turbulence and Visibility in the 1970s”. A lot happened re trans persons in the later 1970s: Lou Reed and Rachel; Benjamin’s practice was inherited by Jeanne Hoff who herself transitioned; the Diane Delia murder; DSM III removed homosexuality and added transvestism; Kim Kristy discovered Sulka and reverted to male and became editor of Female Mimics; Rachel Harlow dated the brother of Grace Kelly; the film Let Me Die a Woman was released; The Johns Hopkins Gender Clinic was closed; Dog Day Afternoon.

However the only trans event for this period mentioned by Martin is the Erickson Educational Foundation’s symposiums that later became the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) symposiums, and their first Standards of Care. He does not mention that HBIGDA later became WPATH.

Chapter 12 “The Deluge and Beyond”. This is the 1980s and the scourge of AIDS. Martin says nothing of trans women dying of AIDS although many did. He lists (p158-9) Leslie Feinberg, the adoption of the word ‘transgender’, states allowing birth certificates and driver’s licences to be changed, The International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, GenderPAC, Brandon Teena and Boys Don’t Cry, Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Here the book stops. Was a first draft written 35 years years ago, but only now published? That would certainly explain some of the omissions, although there are citations to much more recent books.

Why does Martin call this book a ‘counter-narrative’? “Counter-narratives are stories told from the perspectives of people who are marginalized in society, and thus they serve to resist the domination and marginalization perpetuated by the dominant narrative.” The problem is that such a counter-narrative has already been done many times in books by George Chauncy, Lillian Faderman, Florence Tamagne etc. These three are cited, and are mainly histories of gays and lesbians. Histories of trans people that are not cited and their contents not used in Martin’s bibliography: for Weimar Germany: Rainer Herrn, Raimund Wolfert; for the US: Michail Takach, Barry Reay.

Reay had previously named his book Trans America: A Counter-History. However I would deny the term ‘counter-history’ in both cases as they both draw on established and published histories. At this point in time, a counter history would draw on neglected sources and alter our perceptions of our own history.

Not that I have any problems with the books by Chauncey, Faderman, Tamagne etc. They are on my shelves and I do return to them now and then. But there is a new generation of historians who are looking at our history differently: Benjamin Kahan, Laurie Marhoefer, Ben Miller, Sabine Meyer and of course Rainer Herrn and Raimund Wolfert.

At £49.00/US$109.30/C$121.55/€76.99 Martin’s book is outrageously overpriced, without delivering quality content.

If you want a trans history of the US, despite much repeating of what is well known, I suggest Reay’s book, at a fraction of the price.

If you want a queer history of the US, mainly about gays and lesbians, but with a lesser part on trans history, I suggest (also at a reasonable price):

Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States - a review.

Francois-Timoléon de Choisy - cross-dreamer or out transvestist?

Part 1: Life, and the 1695 short-story

Part 2: discussion and bibliography

Was de Choisy more trans than a cross-dreamer?

Joan DeJean in her introduction to the 2004 edition of The story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville:

“Modern biographers and critics generally assume that Choisy's memoirs may be taken at face value. His tendency to hyperbole and self-aggrandizement makes me more than a bit skeptical with regard to the reliability of the memoirs.”

Paul Scott is the major advocate that de Choisy’s memoirs are mainly fiction. 

“I argue that these memoirs, from the time of their discovery, have been taken at face value and wrongly treated as autobiographical. It is my contention that, when they are examined with a degree of critical scrutiny, the inescapable conclusion is that they represent nothing other than an elaborate and sustained fantasy on their creator’s part. The primary problem in attempting to verify the accuracy of Choisy’s account is the absence of supporting evidence. This has been noted by some, if by no means the majority, of the scholars working on Choisy. It should be emphasized that this lack of substantiation is absolute and comprehensive, for there is not a single reference, allusion, or description, no matter how cursory, to Choisy’s cross-dressing escapades by any of his contemporaries.” [p15] 

… “The memoirs are filled with accounts of events that surpass any reasonable degree of plausibility. The level of social and, in particular, clerical acquiescence that the cross-dressed Choisy receives beggars belief. It is not only the parish priest, the curate, and M. Garnier, his confessor, who tolerate his unusual flamboyance, but also the cardinal archbishop of Paris. He becomes the principal collection-taker during Sunday offices at Saint-Médard and does not tone down his extravagant dress: ‘je m’y préparai comme à la fête qui devait me montrer en spectacle’ (‘I prepared myself for it as for the party that was to show me off’ p. 439). There is no question that parishioners do not realize that this lady is not all she seems, for Choisy boasts that ‘il est certain qu’il vint beaucoup de gens d’autres paroisses, sachant que j’y devais quêter’ ( ‘it is certain that many people from other parishes will come, knowing that I had to collect there’ p. 440). The pinnacle occurs with a mock marriage between Choisy, dressed as a bride, and her fourteen-year-old bridegroom, Charlotte, dressed in male garb, which is witnessed by a crowd comprising clergy, parishioners, and the girl’s family members (p. 448). The simulated nuptials are an extremely dubious occurrence in a period when marriages, and indeed all the other sacraments, were prohibited from being enacted on stage for fear of profanation,” [18-19]

… “In the fourth part, for example, Choisy goes to great lengths to explain his acquisition of a recently built chateau close to the city of Bourges, noting that the exact purchase price is 28,000 livres. The estate, called Crespon, belongs to a trésorier, M. Gaillot, and Choisy’s agent is named M. Acarel, to whom Choisy grants a procuration générale authorizing him to conclude the affair (pp. 479–80). Despite this detailed account, not one of these references can be verified or documented. There is not, and has never been, an estate called Crespon in the locality of Bourges, and no official named Gaillot working in local government. One critic has attempted to argue that Crespon might be identified with the chateau and estate of Vouzay, but this assumption can easily be refuted by the fact that it never changed hands during the seventeenth century. Choisy commissions a joint portrait of himself, dressed as Mme de Sancy, and his lover, Charlotte, vested as a boy, by a M. de Troyes, with sittings lasting for a month (p. 446). This is likely to be the society artist François de Troy (1645–1730), yet this painter did not begin to specialize in portraits until 1675, a full decade after he is supposed to have captured the cross-dressed pair. [p19-20]

By the late 17^th century literacy rates in France, using the very simple measure of being able to sign one’s own name, was 29% for man and 14% for women. This was lower in rural areas, and higher in Paris -- 74 percent of men and 64 percent of women in Montmartre could sign their names, and on some streets literacy rates reached 93 percent. Literacy was of course higher among the rich and titled – the top 1% - many of whom went to prestigious schools and universities. Many who attended the Royal court in Paris and Versailles, and their servants, kept diaries and wrote letters to each other – often containing gossip. Historians specialising in this group read theses diaries and letters – many have actually survived. What is not found in these documents are accounts of de Choisy en femme. This alone is sufficient to reject de Choisy’s posthumous memoirs as such and to categorise them as fiction, or cross-dreaming.

Scott’s examples of anachronisms and of details that simply do not check out further the argument.

Works by de Choisy:

• Quatre dialogues. I. Sur l'immortalité de l'âme. II. Sur l'existence de Dieu. III. Sur la providence. IV. Sur la religion (with Louis de Courcillon de Dangeau, also an Abbé), Paris, Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1684.
• Interprétation des Psaumes avec la Vie de David, Paris, Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1687 (reprinted 1690 and 1692)
• Journal du voyage de Siam fait en 1685 et 1686, Paris, Sébastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1687 ; 1688 ; 1740; Éditions Duchartre et Van Buggenhoudt, 1930 ; critical edition by Dirk Van der Cruysse, 1995; reedited Orchid Press, 1999.
• Recueil de plusieurs pièces d'éloquence et de poësie présentées à l'Académie française pour les prix de 1687, donnez le jour de S. Louis de la mesme année, avec les discours prononcez le mesme jour (par MM. l'abbé de Choisy et de Bergeret) à la réception de M. l'abbé de Choisy en la place de M. le duc de Saint-Aignan, Paris, Pierre Le Petit, 1687
• La Vie de Salomon, Paris, Claude Barbin, 1687.
• Les Pensées chrétiennes sur divers sujets de piété, Paris, Claude Barbin, 1688.
• Histoire de France sous les règnes de Saint Louis… de Charles V et Charles VI, 1688-1695.
• Histoire de Philippe de Valois et du roi Jean, Paris, Claude Barbin, 1688.
• La Vie de Saint Louis, Paris, Claude Barbin, 1689.
• Histoire de Charles cinquième, roi de France, Paris, Antoine Dezallier, 1689.
• Histoire de Charles VI, roi de France, Paris, Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1695.
• De l'imitation de Jésus-Christ, Paris, Antoine Dezallier, 1692.
• La Vie de Madame de Miramion, Paris, Antoine Dezallier, 1706
• Histoires de piété et de morale, par M. L. D. C., Paris, Jacques Étienne, 1710.
• Les plus beaux événements de l'histoire sacrée et de l'histoire prophanes rapportés à la morale par M. l'abbé de Choisy, Paris, Jacques Étienne, 1711.
• La Nouvelle Astrée, Paris, Nicolas Pépie, 1712. An adaptation of the novel byHonoré d'Urfé. 
• Histoire de l’Église, Paris, Jean-Baptiste Coignard, Antoine Dezallier & Christophe David, 1703-1723, 11 vol.
• Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Louis XIV, par feu M. l'abbé de Choisy, edited with a preface by François-Denis Camusat, Utrecht, Van de Water; Amsterdam, Jean-Frédéric Bernard et N. Étienne Lucas, 1727 ; new edition with notes by Georges Mongrédien, Mercure de France, 1966, 1983, 412 p.
• Mémoires de Madame la comtesse des Barres, à madame la marquise de Lambert, Bruxelles, François Poppens, 1736 ; reedited under the title : Aventures de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme en 1862 ; reedited under the title : Aventures de l’abbé de Choisy déguisé en femme en 1923 ; again reedited and retitled : Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme, comme suite des Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Louis XIV, Mercure de France, coll. « Le Temps retrouvé » n^o 7, 1966).

La marquise-marquis de Banneville,

• Anon. Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville, nouvelle parue dans le Mercure galant, Feb 1695.
• Anon. Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville, nouvelle parue dans le Mercure galant, Aug 1696. – extended version.
• Paul Bonnefon, “Les dernieres annees de Charles Perrault,” Revue d’histoire litteraire de la France, Oct.-Dec. 1906 : 606-75.
• Jeanne Roche-Mazon, ‘“Une Collaboration inattendue au XVIL siecle: L’Abbé de Choisy et Charles Perrault’. Mercure de France, Feb 1928: 513-42.
• Paul Delarue. “Les Contes merveilleux de Perrault: Faits et rapprochements nouveaux." Arts et traditions populaires 1.1, 1954: 1-22; 1.3, 1954: 251-74.
• Marc Soriano. « Une Enquête difficile » Les Contes de Perrault. Paris: Gallimard, 1968 : 55-71.
• François-Timoléon de Choisy, Charles Perrault, Mémoires de l'abbé de Choisy habillé en femme. Suivi de Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville, Éditions Ombres, 1995.
• Deborah J Hahn. “The (Wo)Man in the Iron Mask: Cross-dressing, Writing and Sexuality in L'Histoire de la Marquise-Marquis de Banneville”. Paroles Gelees, 15, 1, 1997.
• Daniel Maher. « Monsieur ma femme? Le travestissement au XVIIè siècle » in Elzbieta Grodek (ed), Écriture de la ruse, Faux Titrenumber 2000.
• Francois Timoléon de Choisy, Marie-Jeanne L’Heritier & Charles Parrault, translated by Steven Rendall, introduction by Joan DeJean. The story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville. Modern Language Association of America, 2004.
• Caroline Jumel. Review of the 2004 The story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville. Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, 21,2, 2007.

Works by others who accept the Memoirs at face value:

• Abbe d'Olivet. La Vie de M. de Choisy de l’Academic Française. Lausanne: Bousquet, 1742.
• Oscar Paul Gilbert (translated from the French by Robert B. Douglas). Men in Women's Guise: Some Historical Instances of Female Impersonation. John Lane,1926: chp I-IV. The standard account.
• C J Bulliet. Venus Castina : Famous Female Impersonators Celestial and Human. Bonanza Books, 1928: 186-195.
• Pierre Vachet. “Histoire de l’Abbé de Choisy”. La Psychologie de Vice : Les Travestis. Editions Bernard Grasset, 1934 : 95-132.
• J.S. Thompson. The Mysteries of Sex: Women Who Posed as Men and Men Who Impersonated Women. Hutchinson, 1938. Causeway Books, 1974. Dorset Press, 1993: chp XX. Another standard account.
• Hector Uribe Troncoso. “De Choisy … Prince of Tranvestites”. Sexology: Sex Science Magazine, August 1953: 19-24.
• Edward Podolsky & Carlson Wade. Tranvestism Today: The Phenomena of Men Who Dress as Women. Epic Publishing, 1960: 36-44.
• Jacque Lacan, ‘L’Objet de la psychanalyse’. Online: 259-260.
• 
  The Abbé de Choisy, translated by R H F Scott. The Transvestite Memoirs. Peter Owen, 1973.
• Dirk van der Cruysse. L’Abbé de Choisy: androgyne at mandarin. Fayard, 1995.
  
• Nancy Arenberg. “Mirrors, Cross-dressing and Narcissism in Choisy’s Histoire de Madame la Comtesse des Barres”. Arenberg Cahiers, 17,2,2005.
• Pierrick Brient, ‘La Perversion normale de l’abbe´ de Choisy’, La Clinique lacanienne, 11 (2006), 195–202.
• Hervé Castanet. Tricheur de sexe: L'abbé de Choisy : une passion du travesti au Grand Siècle. Max Milo, 2010.

Works critical of the memoirs:

• Paul Scott. “Authenticity And Textual Transvestism in The Memoirs of The Abbe De Choisy”. French Studies, 69,1, 2014. 
• “Professor Casts Doubt on One of History’s Greatest Cross-Dressing Memoirs”. The University of Kansas, 02/20/2015.

Other:

• Catherine Ornstein. Little Red Riding Hood uncloaked : sex, morality, and the evolution of a fairy tale. Perseus, 2002: 198-200.

EN.Wikipedia          FR.Wikipedia.

Francois-Timoléon de Choisy (1644 - 1724), Part 1: Abbé, diplomat, author, cross-dreamer

Part 1: Life, and the 1695 short-story

Part 2: discussion and bibliography

François-Timoléon was born in August 1644, a week after the Battle of Freiburg which eventually led to the end of the Thirty Years’ War between Europe’s Catholics and Protestants.

François-Timoléon was a grandson of Jean de Choisy Jr. (1562 - 1652), receiver general of finances of Caen. He was the fourth and last son of Jean III from Choisy, lord of Balleroy (1598 -1660), a State Councillor, intendant of Languedoc, chancellor of Gaston d'Orléans, and Jeanne-Olympe Hurault de L'Hospital (1604-1669), a granddaughter of Michel de L'Hospital and an intimate of the Queen of Poland Marie de Gonzague. From the ages of 18 to 22, he studied philosophy and theology at the Sorbonne, and in 1663 became an abbé de cour (a low rank tonsured cleric, not usually connected to an abbey or a religious order, but with a sinecure). His mother’s death in 1669 left him an inheritance which he frittered away in Venice.

He returned impoverished, and lived off his sinecure. In 1676 he visited Rome as a part of the retinue of Emmanuel-Théodose de La Tour d'Auvergne, Cardinal de Bouillon (1643-1715), and was part of the Conclave that elected Pope Innocent XI. After serious illness in August 1683, de Choisy retired for a year to the seminary of Paris Foreign Missions Society, and co-wrote Quatre dialogues. I. Sur l'immortalité de l'âme, II. Sur l'existence de Dieu. III. Sur la providence. IV. Sur la religion. After that, in 1685, he accompanied the Chevalier de Chaumont on a year-long diplomatic mission to the Kingdom of Siam. It was there that he was finally ordained by Louis Laneau, bishop of Métellopolis, envoy of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and Vicar Apostolic of Siam. 

On return to France in June 1686, de Choisy wrote Interprétation des Psaumes avec la Vie de David, and in 1687 was admitted to the Académie Française on 24 July 1687. In 1689 he received the benefit of the priory of Saint-Benoît-du-Sault. From then until his death in 1724, de Choisy wrote a series of hagiographies on French monarchs, histories of France and tracts on Catholic devotions. 

In February 1695 an anonymous short story, a cross-dressing fantasy, Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville, was published in Le Mercure galant, and then an extended version of the same story was published in in the same magazine in August of the next year.

De Choisy was given the deanery of the chapter Bayeux Cathedral, in April 1697.

He died aged 80 in October 1724.

His nephew and executor, the marquis d’Argenson, following his death, found among his papers an apparent autobiography. The manuscript was carefully written (unlike the majority of his other texts, which had been subject to additions and corrections). The document related that, when young, de Croisy had lived as a woman for at least two years in Paris, Bordeaux, and Bourges using three different personas, which he used to seduce young women and even dress them as boys. One result was the fathering a daughter - he paid for the upbringing and education of this child, later arranging a happy match for her. This account was first published as Mémoires de Madame la comtesse des Barres, 1736,

Who wrote La marquise-marquis de Banneville?

Summary of the story :

A young man raised as a woman and a young woman raised as a man. They meet and fall in love, unaware of each other's sex. They marry. On their wedding night, each lover reveals their secret, to their mutual surprise and relief. They decide to keep living in their chosen genders, move to the countryside, and conceive a child, ultimately achieving an unconventional happy ending.

There is obviously a similarity to the Mémoires de Madame la comtesse des Barres, first published 1736.

Three candidates have been proposed as the author of La marquise-marquis de Banneville, either alone or working together:

• Charles Perrault, a major advisor and bureaucrat at the court of Louis XIV who supervised the building of the Louvre and Versailles and wrote fawning biographies of prominent French men. Posterity remembers him for the fairy tales he wrote later in life, Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye (Tales of Mother Goose) which includes "Little Red Riding Hood", "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty", and "Bluebeard".
• Perrault’s niece Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, who also wrote fairy tales under her own name, and collaborated with her uncle. In her story, Marmoisan, a young woman takes her dead twin brother’s clothing, passes as a man, and becomes a courtier, a soldier, and a lover.
• Francois-Timoléon de Choisy whom Perrault knew in that both were members of theAcadémie Française … and as France’s most famous transvestite??

Scholars disagree about who wrote it:

• Paul Bonnefon, 1906, proposed L'Héritier alone.
• Jeanne Roche-Mazon, 1928, proposed Perrault and de Choisy together,
• Paul Delarue, 1954, proposed Perrault and L'Héritier together.
• Joan DeJean, 2004, proposed all three authors.

As Joan DeJean tells us (p x-xi):

“In February 1695, Jean Donneau de Vise, the editor of Le Mercure galant, an early French newspaper and the richest source of information on the doings of the French court and the lifestyles of its rich and famous, called his female readers' attention to the short story of the month, an early version of Marquise-Marquis. It was, he said, written by “someone of [their] sex" and displayed “charm" and “intelligence," as well as all the “delicate wit" that, he argued, “only women possess" (12-13). This was not at all an unusual thing for Donneau de Vise to say: he stands out among early journalists for his consistent desire to advertise women's accomplishments — Le Mercure galant published many women writers and promoted women's writing—and to cover news of particular interest to female readers. The paper gave so much space to every aspect of la mode, for example, that it can be thought of as the beginning of the fashion press. The story that followed Donneau de Vise's introduction opens with a prologue in which its author identifies her-self as a woman and addresses her self to readers of“[her] sex, assuring them that they can always be sure when a work is written by a woman and listing all the ways in which her style is typical of women's writing in general.

Fast forward to August 1696. In that issue of Le Mercure galant, Donneau de Vise included a far more extensive version of Marquise-Marquis. He claimed that its author, identified once again as a woman, “had forgotten" to include certain parts the first time around (171). In the meantime, in February 1696, Donneau de Vise had published another story, “Sleeping Beauty" (“La Belle au bois dormant"), which he introduced in this way: 

“We owe this work to the same person who wrote the story of the little marquise"

—in other words. The Story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville (74). Here is where the mystery of the story's authorship begins. No one has ever believed that “Sleeping Beauty" was written by a woman; it has been included in every edition of Perrault’s tales. Indeed as soon as the first collection of those tales was published, Donneau de Vise sang its praises in the January 1697 issue of Le Mercure galant and told his readers that all those who had enjoyed “Sleeping Beauty" were sure to want to read the rest of Perrault's stories.”

Based on the similarities between the Banneville story and de Croisy’s posthumous memoirs, it is generally assumed that he contributed to the story by example or by text. However De Vise’s editorials suggest L'Héritier as the likely author, and as he also attributes “Sleeping Beauty” to her, we wonder how much of Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye was her work rather than her uncle’s. Further: it is possible that the similarities with de Croisy’s memoirs are because he drew up on the Banneville story, and, as several commentators have suggested, the Red Riding Hood story as well.

La Forest Potter (1855-1951), an early 1930s witness to queer New York

• 
  La Forest Potter. Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities. Robert Dodsley Company/ National Library Press, 1933.
  

Trigger warning: Some of the quotations from Dr Potter include words and opinions relating to sex and/or race that are today considered objectionable.

1933 was not a good year for being queer. The ending of alcohol prohibition in the US (good in itself) unfortunately led to the end of the Panzy Craze, and increased police raids on queer bars and nightclubs. In Germany, Hitler’s Nazi Party took control of the government. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s OGPU started a reversal of the decriminalization of homosexuality that had resulted from the Revolution by arresting 198 gay men, and claiming that there was a link between homosexuality and fascism.  In England and France trans men and masculine women had been shaken after Victor Barker, John Radclyffe-Hall and Violette Morris had each lost in their very different law trials.

The New York that La Forest Potter describes falls in between that found in the earlier publications, Mowry Saben/Jennie June’s three books and the psychological study of five transvestites by Bernard Talmey, and the later study Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941) attributed to George Henry but based on the research of Jan Gay. 

George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, published 1994 mentions Potter in its notes as a source for details, but he is not in the book’s index, and there is no mention of him or his book in the text. 

The term ‘fairy’ was commonly used in this period for effeminate gays, trans feminine persons and drag performers. Chauncey’s book goes into a lot of detail on this.

Two anecdotes referring to the book’s influence

David K Johnson’s “The Kids of Fairytown: Gay Male Culture on Chicago's Near North Side in the 1930s” in Brett Beemyn’s Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, p111 tells us:

“Although most Chicagoans had never read a medical text on homosexuality, Harold's list of the books that introduced him to gay life did include one work by a medical expert. La Forest Potter's Strange Loves: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities was an attempt to bring medical expertise on the nature, causes, and curability of homosexuality to a general audience to help eradicate ‘the problem.’ But by outlining the prevalence of homosexuality — how America had ‘Gone Pansy;' as he titled one of his chapters — he inadvertently suggested that it was normal. Potter asserted that ‘homosexuality ... is diffused not only through all the anthropological forms of mankind — savage and civilized life — but also throughout every strata of society, and among every class of population.’ ” ... “To Harold and undoubtedly many others, Potter's line of argumentation intrigued more than it dissuaded.”

Robert Darby. “The Censor as Literary Critic”. Westerly, 31,4, December 1986: 37 tells us:

“Genuine scientific texts on sexual abnormality might be allowed in serious libraries for research use by approved scholars, but popular works were a different matter. Garran read Strange Loves, by La Forest Potter MD, as professing to be "a serious study of homosexuality", but he found its general style suggesting that it was, rather, "a book to excite curiosity". American authors, he remarked, "show no squeamishness in an open discussion of this subject; but I think its discussion in this way offends against present standards of decency in Australia." Allen agreed: ‘This book is not desirable for public bookshelves, and I should not regard it as in any way a serious contribution to medical science. It is a popularisation of information regarding sexual abnormality ... It is not well written: and in places is incorrect. For instance, it repeats mere garbled gossip about Socrates; and I do not believe that the author has read a word of the Symposium.’ ” 

Who was La Forest Potter?

La Forest Potter graduated from Boston University School of Medicine in 1884 and contributed articles to Physical Culture, the food faddist magazine run by Bernard MacFadden. He was apparently interested in 'cancer cures'; at one time he was associated with a proponent of the so-called 'grape juice cure' for cancer. Strange Loves was banned in Australia in 1936. He also wrote The psychology of health and happiness, 1897; A new treatment of cancer and chronic diseases, 1929 and various other popular medical texts. He lists membership in the New York County Medical Society, Massachusetts Medical Society, Boston Gynecological Society, Associate Professor of Rhinology, Laryngology, and Otology, New York School of Clinical Medicine, and Surgeon, Malden Hospital.

Potter's other books as listed on page opposite title page

The Advertisement

This is the advertisement that ran several times in the magazine Broadway and Hollywood Movies.

The chapters of interest:

Chapter IV THE “INTERMEDIATE SEX"

“For while admittedly there are mental hermaphrodites and mental deviates in uncounted numbers, the true “third sex, if we are to be really accurate in our description, consists only of individuals who are anatomically bisexual. … These individuals are unquestionably atavistic or retrogressive in their biological status. Nevertheless, true hermaphrodism is an extremely rare phenomenon. I stress the anatomical basis of this condition at this time in order to differentiate true hermaphrodism from pseudo -hermaphrodism -- or what I might term " mental " hermaphrodism.” 

So far, not too bad. 

However, Potter then has a sub-heading, REAL WORLD PROGRESS MADE BY HETEROSEXUALS where he proclaims that the “[homosexual] abnormality should be considered anti-social, anti-racial, and anti-biologic”.

Then still in the same chapter WHEN MEN DON WOMEN'S CLOTHES, where he writes: “To the average person it would seem that all this bother is ‘much ado about nothing’. For it would be rather difficult to see what particular harm can come to the police force, or to society in general. … However, it may be because these transvestites, as they are called, suggest abnormality (whether they are abnormal or not) that they are arrested, hailed into court and fined.” 

In his next sub-heading, IS INVERSION COMMON AMONG TRANSVESTITES? Potter contrasts William Stekel who regarded trans persons as homosexuals with Magnus Hirschfeld who from a much larger sample knew otherwise. Potter attempts to reconcile this difference with the opinion of the psychoanalyst Andre Tridon who claimed that transvestites are in the majority of cases unconscious homosexuals. 

His final sub-heading in the chapter is THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE GERMAN URNING. He writes:

 “While it may not react greatly to the prestige and glory of Berlin in the minds of many people, it is nevertheless true that this highly cultured city boasts perhaps a greater number of homosexuals than any other city in the world -- not excluding Paris, which, for several centuries, has been notorious for its sexual profligacy. Of course, it may be that this seeming preponderance of abnormals arises merely from the fact that, in Berlin, and in Germany and Austria, the urning comes out into the open, so to speak. He does not find it necessary to skulk and slink in the hinterlands of society, as he does in European and American centers generally. However, we may attribute this apparent epidemic of homosexuality to the fact that there is less hypocrisy in Germany and more real science than is to be found anywhere else on the face of the earth.” 

This of course had been previously true, but it is ironic, sad and frightening that by the time Potter’s book was published, the Nazis had become the German government, and the purge of queer culture and persons was ongoing.

Chapter VII FEMALE MEN AND MALE WOMEN

This is a rather nasty chapter where the question is should his readers 

“place these individuals either in the same category with burglars, swindlers, and automobile thieves, or else it would permit them to be recognized as men and women who are mentally and morally sick — neurotics who are no more to blame for their condition than they would be for having dyspepsia, or sciatica, or a deviated septum”. 

Potter quotes Dr. W. Beran Wolfe, Director of the New York Community Church Mental Hygiene Clinic who blames the second opinion almost exclusively on Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), 1903. However he goes on to discuss opposite sex characteristics such as male gynecomastia and women with beards. He misleadingly connects this to homosexuals, whom he regards as having a female psyche. He has a brief discussion of the work of Eugene Steinach and his transplanting of gonads to animals of the other sex.

Chapter XI “The Drag”

I have previously written of the Hamilton Lodge Balls, the premier drag event in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, which attracted thousands each year. Potter does not mention them by name. He writes of the Philadelphia Mummers parade, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, The Rose Pageant in Pasadena, California. He quotes from Blair Niles’ 1931 novel, Strange Brother, but he wrote too early to include The Young and Evil, 1933 by Charles Ford and Parker Tyler. Both novels include scenes at the Hamilton Lodge Balls. 

He then comes to “THE DRAG BALL”. 

“These are the famous ‘Drag Balls’, held in many of our principal cities, on the average of once a year. The men, dressed in the clothes of women, are called ‘drags’. In New York City there are at least two outstanding Drag Balls yearly - one held at Webster Hall, in Greenwich Village, the other in the Manhattan Casino, up in Harlem. Of late years this place has had ‘the run’."

 And in a purple passage using terms, that no modern writer would, he refers to 

“the motley throng that surges and sways to the blood-boiling rhythm of a Negro band. Hundreds and hundreds of Negroes also- of every shade of black and brown— from the octoroon, hardly to be distinguished from a strikingly lovely brunette Caucasian girl, to the burly blackamoor, of pure Ethiopian type are crowded, cheek by jowl, into sense -maddening proximity. For the Harlem Drag Ball is a ‘mixed’ affair, attended by whites and blacks alike.” 

THE PARADE OF THE FAIRIES. 

“Finally the dancing floor is cleared by the police for the chief event of the evening. It is the big ‘kick’ for which most of the spectators have come -the ‘parade of the fairies’, with a prize of two hundred dollars to be awarded to the ‘fairy’ who displays the loveliest and most artistic costume.” 

$200 in 1932 = $4,700 today.

Reviews and comments

In December 1934, the pioneer gay activist Henry Gerber reviewed Potter’s book in his Chanticleer newsletter (as summarized by Jonathan Katz):

... I think the history of psychology is . . . damning evidence of man’s credulity and outright stupidity. The volume under review by Dr. La Forest Potter, who boasts of being a “late member of the New York County Medical Society, Massachusetts Medical Society,” etc., etc. . . . proves to me two significant facts: 1) that the medical authorities in America, of which Dr. Potter is a shining example, are about 100 years behind the times, and 2) that most psychologists in this country are mere yes-men who blindly and obediently follow the current authorized moral code without any regard to common sense or the results of modern scientific research ….

While the title of the book would indicate that the author had in view all phenomena of sex which seem strange to him and to the ignorant public alike, Dr. Potter deals mainly with homosexuality. . . . such a title is a profitable device for the sale of books, for the morons are always looking for something new and “strange” in sex matters. In other words, the book of Dr. Potter is just another instance of the morbid sex racket, a lurid description of sex abnormalities under the moral guise of condemnation of the queer sinners dealing in such “strange” loves in order to get the filthy details by the post office censors of “obscene” literature. Krafft-Ebing was perhaps the first author to start this racket and the volume in review is evidence of the sad fact that the end of it is not yet.

In the accepted fashion of Krafft-Ebing’s pot-boiler, Dr. Potter goes through the various artificial classifications of homosexuals. He has Chapters on the Riddle of Homosexuality . . . a chapter on the history of . . . the various unsuccessful attempts of “scientists” to solve the “riddle,” .. . special chapters on Lesbians (female homosexuals), in which the author makes the sensational statement that “there isn’t a man on earth who has a Chinaman’s chance against a Lesbian, once she has thoroughly seduced a woman to her wiles” (any doctor having knowledge of gynecology ought to know the reason to be due to the fact that males are very deficient in the fine art of satisfying a woman’s sexual needs.) [etc.] ….

.. . Dr. Potter views the psychoanalytical method of dealing with homosexuals and cites cases in which homosexuals have been “cured” by psychoanalysts. . .

But the author does evidently not think so much of this “cure” of homosexuals, for he cautiously warns that homosexuals can be cured only if they want to be cured. The only way to cure a [male] homosexual of his foible is to make him love women, a very simple process indeed, but Dr. Potter does not seem to realize that heterosexual men can be cured exactly in the same fashion from their love for women, by getting them to like men. By the same method, Pop-eye, the sailor cures children who do not like spinach by making them believe that spinach is really good for them and that every normal citizen must eat it.

Byrne Fone. A Road to Stonewall, 1969:

“Dr. Potter’s cliches resonate against the common currency of homophobic texts of the period and centuries before. He deploys the familiar accusations and links homosexuality not only with the destruction of what he suggests are virtually nationally encoded gender roles but clearly implies that homosexuality and homosexuals are effectively un-American. Because of the ‘infestation’ of homosexuality, however, the pioneer and heterosexual American virtues have been weakened and now the danger is clear and increasingly present: ‘Today there are homosexual ‘joints,’ ‘queer’ clubs, pervert ‘drags’ or homosexual plays in practically every considerable American city.’ Not only general society but American youth has been tainted by homosexuals, for ‘today there is scarcely a schoolboy who doesn’t know what a ‘pansy’ is’ ”. (p233-4)

Andrea Ens, Pain, Pleasure, Punishment, 2024:

“The book’s ad promised sophisticated adult readers clinical findings that would ‘tear away the veil of mystery that hides the facts behind homosexuality’ by demonstrating ‘the abnormal ties and the unnatural desires and erotic reactions of these twilight men and women’. But while Strange Loves’ marketers emphasized its titillating narratives of perverse sexual trysts hidden in darkness, the text itself repeatedly insisted ‘abnormals’ were often not malicious, intentional criminals, but ‘neurotics who are no more to blame for their condition than they would be for having dyspepsia, or sciatica, or a deviated septum’. This blamelessness – revealed by contemporary medical and scientific advances into the origins and impacts of ‘sexual abnormality’ – meant that American medical, social, and legal treatment of non-heteronormative Americans might allow their re-entry into ‘normal’ heterosexual society’. (p26)

• Henry Gerber, “More Nonsense about Homosexuals,” Chanticleer, Vol. 1, No. 12 (Dec. 1934), 2-3. Partially reprinted in Jonathan Katz (ed) Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay men in the USA: 595-6, and in Tracy Baim’s Out and Proud in Chicago: 38-9.
• Byrne Fone. A Road to Stonewall: Male Homosexuality and Homophobia in English and American Literature, 1750-1969. Twayne Publishers, 1995: 233-4.
• Byrne Fone (ed). The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature. Columbia University Press, 1998: 669.
• Byrne Fone. Homophobia: A History. Henry Holt and Company, 2000: 386-8.
• "More Hilarious Zeitgeistiness". Autist's Corner, February 28 2009. Online. 
• Anna Lvovsky. Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Construction of Public Knowledge about Homosexuality, 1920–1970. PhD thesis, Harvard. May 2015: 34, 38, 39, 41, 48, 49, 53, 54, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92.
• Alysha Maree Crossan. Liberals, Ground Breakers, and Graduate Students: Reinvestigating US Sex Surveys and Research Before Kinsey, 1900-1953. PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 2022: 46, 154, 155, 156, 157.
• Andrea Ens. Pain, Pleasure, Punishment: The Affective Experience of Conversion Therapy In Twentieth-Century North America. PhD Thesis, Purdue University, May 2024: 26-7, 47-8, 50-2, 55-6,

Potter's Bibliography