David Petillo (1908 – 1983) hitman, mafioso

Original Version March 2010.

Antonio Petillo from Pollico, Salerno south of Naples, emigrated to New York in 1885, and married Michelina, also an Italian immigrant, the next year. They had seven children – David was the sixth. Antonio was a sanitation worker and later a driver. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1910. 

David attended a public school sometimes, and left for good when he was 14. He became involved with Giosue Aiello, a criminal who ran an area in the Lower East Side of Manhattan around Cherry Street. Petillo became regarded as a finocchio, or even a fairy. At age 18 he was sent to Chicago where Al Capone was to straighten him out.

Aiello disappeared, probably killed, around 1920, and David Petillo, along with partner Charles “Chalutz” Gagliodotto, and others of Aiello’s crew, were initiated into the Lucky Luciano's  (Genovese) organization. 

Petillo and Gagliodotto were contracted to carry out murders for the bosses of the Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago Mafia organizations. It was during this time that “Little Davie” earned a reputation as the “cross-dressing killer”, as he often dressed in drag in order to get close to unsuspecting victims, although it was sometimes Gagliodotto (who had the advantage of being barely 5 feet/1.5m) in drag, and sometimes both. It is said that both dressed as female mourners for a funeral, complete with veils, and slipped into a car after their target to kill him without detection. The FBI estimated that Petillo and Gagliodotto were involved in as many as 30 murders.

In 1924, Petillo was charged with "jostling" (intentionally and unnecessarily placing one's hand in close proximity to another person's pocket or handbag) and given sixty days. That same year in October he was charged as Joseph Rose Richmond with attempted grand larceny, but discharged. He served a day in jail in May 1925 and in June, he was charged under the name Joseph Rose and given 30 days. He was charged again in October in Danbury, Connecticut with vagrancy: this time as Herbert Quell.

David married Madeline in 1928 or 29. In the 1930 federal census he gave his profession as a salesman. He had a unit on Canal Street buying odd lots, although other sources say that he was in Chicago as Al Capone’s bodyguard. 

In 1932 Petillo made his first trip to Italy with his sister Lavinia. He made another trip as part of Luciano’s entourage.

On return to New York, he reported to Lucky Luciano, and in 1936 he was arrested on ‘white slavery charges’ in a racket that grossed $12 million a year with over 3,000 prostitutes working at over 200 brothels. Enough women were happy to testify against him.

“Among the brothels Luciano and Petillo had under their proverbial thumb was one operated by the husband-and-wife team of Pete Harris and Mildred Balitzer. Harris pleaded guilty, and Balitzer turned state’s evidence. Balitzer testified about meeting both Little Davie and Charlie Lucky numerous times, and that she was required to collect from each of the girls at her brothel $10 a week which “bonded” them to the mobsters.” (Crawford, 2015 p 85).

“It was the gangster trial of the decade. After beer baron Dutch Schultz was shot to death in a New Jersey tavern, Luciano was declared public enemy number one on the East Coast. [Special Prosecutor Thomas E] Dewey vowed to take him down. Instead of narcotics or gambling, both of which fell under Luciano’s domain, Dewey went after what he saw as the gangster’s weak spot: his control of the city’s $12-million-a-year “vice rackets,” including two hundred brothels and two thousand prostitutes.

Indicted under his given name, Salvatore Lucanía, the trial of Charlie Lucky garnered daily headlines. Dewey depicted the crime lord pulling the strings as he strutted around his luxury suite in the Waldorf-Astoria in a silk robe. Luciano’s main instrument of terror and control over the prostitution ring was “Little Davie” Petillo, or Betillo as he often allowed his name to be misspelled.

'You guys are through,' a brothel operator testified he was told by Luciano. 'I am giving the business to Little Davie.' Those who resisted suffered beatings, bullets pegged in their direction, and guns and knives in the ribs, Dewey told jurors.” (Capeci & Robbins)

Petillo was sentenced to serve 25-40 years in New York State’s Sing Sing prison. Luciano was sentenced to 30-50 years. Later in 1936, authorities moved them to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, NY, a remote facility far away from New York City. At Clinton, Petillo prepared special dishes for Luciano in a kitchen set aside by authorities. After the US entered the Second World War, Luciano struck a deal with the  government to get Mafia co-operation re security on the New York waterfront to prevent Axis infiltration, and then provided Mafia contacts in Sicily to aid the Allied invasion in 1943. In return Luciano was released but deported to Italy. Petillo was still in prison.

David’s wife Madeline died in 1950; his parents returned to live in Salerno, Italy. Antonio Petillo died in 1954. One of David’s brothers, Roland, became an Italian police officer, and another an agent for the IRS.

David was paroled in 1955, and then trafficked heroin for the Genovese family though Lower East Side and Greenwich Village bars including the 82 Club (run by his cousin Anna Genovese (née Giovaninna Petillo).

He was arrested for violation of parole in June 1958, and on narcotics charges. He was returned to Clinton Correctional Facility for another nine years.

Gagliodotto was among 19 arrested in 1965 charged with being part of a $90-million-a-year narcotics ring. The defense attorney filed multiple motions and three years passed. Gagliodotto was particularly edgy, and was addicted to his product, the heroin. He accused two colleagues of stealing from him and executed them. The others thought that he had gone too far. Petillo, newly released from prison, agreed to deal with him, and took along his cousin Eddie Vassallo. Gagliodotto did not suspect his old partner, but Petillo and Vassallo, using a plastic bag, strangled him, and then left him on the street. The morgue doctors did not pay enough attention and put it down to a heart attack, until rumors reached the FBI and the job was done properly. However nobody was ever charged.

Petillo now, in the late 1960s, became involved in pornography until the business was sold to the Gambino family.

David, age 61, married for a second time in 1969 to Phyllis aged 19. They went on honeymoon to Italy and Greece. On a second trip to Italy in January 1973, David and Phyllis were arrested on arrival and quickly deported back to the US.

From 1975, Petillo lived in Brick Township, New Jersey, and was building up a new criminal crew, and running adult bookstores and gay health spas. In February 1980, after a dispute about ownership and profits, Petillo and three others shot and killed his cousin Edward Vassallo.

Petillo fled the US via Mexico after the murder. The FBI and Interpol tracked him as he moved between luxury hotels in Germany, Greece, Singapore, Bali, Hong Kong, and Hawaii. The trail ended three days after Christmas in 1983 when Petillo collapsed and died while staying in the resort town of Málaga, Spain, on the Mediterranean coast. He was 75. His body was returned to New York City for burial.

• John Martin. “Dewey’s Vice Raids Peril Police Jobs », Daily News, February 4, 1936.
• “Vice Ring Links Half of Nation”. The Reading Times, May 12, 1936.
• Tom Renner. “Mobster Reported Slain”. NY Newsday, August 28, 1968.
• Dorothy Hinchcliff. “Witness tells of carrying out mob’s orders to kill”. Asbury Park Press, May 19, 1982.
• “David Petillo”. "The FBI Files: David Petillo Did It in Drag". Friends of Ours: Mostly About Organized Crime,12/20/2010. Archive. 
• Eric Ferrara. “Petillo, David Silvio” in Manhattan Mafia Guide: Hits, Homes & Headquarters. History Press, 2011: 122-4.
• Phillip Crawford, The Mafia and the Gays. Kindle, 2015: 85-6.
• Jerry Capeci & Tom Robbins. Mob Boss: The Life of Little Al D’Arco the man who brought down the Mafia. St Martin’s Press, 2013.
• Jim Elledge. The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago’s First Century. Chicago Review Press, 2018: 82.

Wikitree(David Silvio Petillo, Antonio Petillo)

IT.Wikipedia(Dave Petillo)

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David’s family name is sometimes given as Betillo. Wikipedia spells it so when writing about Lucky Luciano. 

Neither Petillo nor Betillo is listed among the notable inmates on the Wikipedia page on Sing Sing prison.

Petillo almost certainly was not permitted to transvest while in prison, and there is no mention of any action afterwards. Therefore he had stopped by the age of 28.

See also The Murderers amongst us.

Sylvia Rivera Part IV: Other activities to 1973

Part I: beginnings
Part II:  GAA & Weinstein Hall
Part III: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
Part IV:  Other activities to 1973
Part V:  Later years

Young Lords and the Black Panthers

Sylvia was also involved with Puerto Rican and black youth activism, with the Young Lords and the Black Panthers.

While GLF had openly supported The Panthers, had helped them with bail money etc, there was a constant problem with the Panthers’ homophobia. They had been confronted on this issue by GLF at a rally at New Haven on 1 May 1970. Shortly afterwards Panther Huey Newton published an admonishment that militant blacks should acknowledge their insecurities about homosexuality.

The GLF was invited to send a delegation to a Panther convention in Philadelphia, and Sylvia was chosen as part of the delegation. Huey even remembered her from a demonstration in New York.

New York City Council's General Welfare committee

In late 1971, GAA succeeded, after lobbying and protesting, in getting the New York City Council's General Welfare committee to discuss the problems faced by gays and transvestites. GAA equivocated and for a while agreed to the removal of transvestite protections. However it ultimately endorsed them.

Lee Brewster, Bebe, and Sylvia argued transvestites “were being used as scapegoats by the gay movement” seeking to explain its failure to get the asked-for protections.

Sylvia, usually an extemporaneous speaker, had had her face bruised after a confrontation with police at a recent demonstration, wore a conservative dress and her hair in a bun, and read in muted fashion, a statement based on STAR’s platform.

The bill was was not passed even in 1973, when it went forward with the caveat that nothing in the definition of sexual orientation “shall be construed to bear upon the standards of attire or dress code".

There was an impromptu blockade of Brooklyn Bridge, and Sylvia and others were arrested. A few days later, during a protest at City Hall, Sylvia in polyester bell-bottoms, fortified by speedballs and a few drinks, kicked off her heels, and scaled the outside of the building.

Part VI: 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day

At the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day (CSLD), the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the tensions within the gay movement that would lead to separatisms were becoming apparent.

The CSLD committee, mainly GAA members, attempted a harmonious march and rally by focusing on entertainment and speakers not involved in the city’s infighting.

Of the traditional drag show nightclubs, only Club 82 was left and it was ceding the stage to the emerging glam, glitter and punk scene. However there were still some showgirls left and Bebe Scarpi went and got them to march – in costume. Prominent were International Chrysis and Jean Chandler. Old-style performer Ty Bennett was conveyed in a convertible.

Lee in tiara; Sylvia in jumpsuit

Sylvia, wearing a jumpsuit that had belonged to the now deceased June from StarHouse, and not a listed speaker, pushed her way on to the stage, and gave an impassioned speech for Gay Power:

“They’ve been beaten up and raped. And they have had to spend much of their money in jail to get their self home and to try to get their sex change. The women have tried to fight for their sex changes or to become women of the Women’s Liberation and they write S.T.A.R., not the women’s group. They do not write women. They do not write men. They write S.T.A.R. because we’re trying to do something for them.”

Jean O’Leary of Lesbian Feminist Liberation insisted on an opportunity to reply. She asserted biological sex, and that Sylvia was “a genital male”. She read a statement on behalf of 100 women that read, in part,

"We support the right of every person to dress in the way that she or he wishes. But we are opposed to the exploitation of women by men for entertainment or profit."

She was booed and MC, Vito Russo, the film historian, asked the crowd to let her continue. Lee Brewster, jumped onstage and responded,

"You go to bars because of what drag queens did for you, and these bitches tell us to quit being ourselves!”

The situation was calmed only when performer Bette Midler took to the stage and sang.


All this angry public confrontation left Sylvia in such a state that she attempted suicide.

Betty (?1938 - ?) female impersonator, salesgirl, model

Betty was raised in the US Northwest, one of five children. He was initially permitted to dress as a girl, but his parents divorced when he was five, and the step-father objected to the cross-dressing.

At 15, Betty was raped. At 16 she read about Christine Jorgensen and knew what she wanted. She had seen the Jewel Box Review when it came to town, and a close friend had obtained a position there as a chorus boy. After winning first prize at a local Halloween ball she sent photographs to the friend at Jewel Box Review, and got back a wire from the manager offering a job.

She grew her hair to shoulder length, which led to complications when out in male guise – this being over a decade before men began growing their hair long. After a two-month club residency, the troupe played Betty’s home town, and then she was laid off.

She asked her parents to permit that she have a sex change – she being a minor – but they refused, and at their request she visited a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist discovered what Betty already knew: she was androphilic and desperately wanted to become a woman. She continued to find find work as a female impersonator.

At age 20, after a period of despondency at not having a female body, he decided to return to being a man, cut his hair short and then volunteered to join the US Navy. He was almost rejected when the medical inspection discovered the old rape, but he asserted that he had been a victim, and was accepted. He was assigned to record keeping, and deployed to Japan, where he quickly discovered the gay bars, and then a male geisha house. Citing his female impersonator experience, he was taken on as a male geisha. She had a thrill when several of her shipmates came into the bar, but they did not recognize her. Back in the US he had an affair with a man in Oklahoma City.

One day after being honorably discharged she was back on the stage as a female impersonator. During a nine-month engagement at a “well-known club” in New York, she met two performers who had transitioned, and knew instantly that she wanted to do the same. She grew her hair again, and started going out as a woman, quite successfully even before starting female hormones. When her show went on tour, she stayed in New York to continue hormone treatment. She found another job as an impersonator-dancer at a “major nightspot”.

Late in 1961 she was invited to the table of a man, an ambassador of a Latin American country, who invited her first to have a drink, and then offered to pay for her transformation. He “took me to an internationally famous endocrinologist, whose prices I could never have afforded”. She also underwent electrolysis to eliminate her facial hair.

A year later, July 1962, she was ready for surgery, and the ambassador arranged a trip to Casablanca. In Paris she was joined by another impersonator making the same journey. The cost at the Casablanca clinic was US$1250. The operation apparently went well. However a week later when she was back in Paris, she suffered continual vaginal bleeding, and went to a US hospital. A week of douching fixed the problem. On return to the US, Betty felt obliged to explain to immigration why she had only female clothes in her suitcase: that she was a professional female impersonator.

For a few months she worked as a prostitute, “to prove to myself that I was really a woman”, but then found such work distasteful. She worked as a salesgirl, and as a fashion model. She finally won acceptance from her mother and step-father. She started writing, with the aid of professional writer, her autobiography. During the mid-1960s she acted as a confessor and adviser to other transsexuals in the city.

• Harry Benjamin. The Transsexual Phenomenon. Julian Press, 1966. Warner Books Edition 1977: 239-255, 308-313.

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The Transsexual Lives Appendix to Harry Benjamin’s book by REL Masters says that “Betty” is a pseudonym, although she uses it for herself in her autobiographical segment. Other than that we do not have a name for her.

It is a problem for the historian that Betty does not give the name of the clubs where she works, or the doctors that she went to, although the “internationally famous endocrinologist, whose prices I could never have afforded” is obviously Benjamin and the surgeon in Casablanca is obviously Dr Burou. If there is any information about her after 1966, it is not found in that we do not have her name. Is the “well-known club” in New York the 82 Club?

Jan Morris also had need of further medical attention after returning from Dr Burou’s clinic.

One wonders if the unnamed ambassador asked for anything, sexual of otherwise in return. However we have come across another rich man, Rex/Gloria who paid for younger trans women to go to Dr Burou without such requests.

The information about Betty is in two parts. An excerpt from her unpublished autobiography, and a clinical overview by Masters. Despite having her account to consult, Masters is sloppy with facts. He puts her first attempt at surgery, which was vetoed by the parents, before the first period of working as an impersonator; he says that Betty joined the Army rather than the Navy. Also he continues to refer to Betty as ‘he’ even after surgery.

We have no information about Betty after Benjamin's book in 1966.

Tobi Marsh (1938 – 2012) performer

John Dale Harvey was raised in Greeneville, Tennessee until age 12 when his family moved to Cincinnati.

As a teenager he started working as a amateur female impersonator, and at 19 was a member of the Jewel Box Review - where he took the name Tobi Marsh. He joined just after Dorian Wayne left creating a vacancy. In the early 1960s he was engaged at Club 82 where Tony Midnite was doing the costumes.

Tobi's lover was the 6'5" (1.96m) Yale-educated lawyer Sandy. Sandy liked to say that he was five foot 17 inches. He was a regular in Virginia Prince's FPE organization in New York, where he rarely wore female clothing, but did show photographs of himself so dressed.  He was also part of the local bondage community.

Tobi had a part in the 1971 film, The Love Thrill Murders/Sweet Savior with Troy Donahue, as a hair-dresser in drag who is killed. He was also in Devil in High Heels, Grand Illusion, The Bedroom Window 1987.

Tobi did an European tour appearing at Chez Nous in Berlin (where his landlord subjected him to homophobic abuse), Madame Arthur's and Le Carrousel in Paris, but came home disillusioned:

"The local entertainers were resentful of Americans working in their countries. The standard of living was below par for an American. I cancelled my contract and came home."

Tobi retired age 55. John Harvey died aged 74 from complications after a car accident.

• Darrell Raynor. A Year Among the Girls. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1966. New York: Lancer Books, 1968: 88.
  
• Kate Cummings. Katherine's Diary- the Story of a Transsexual. William Heinemann Australia 1992. Revised and updated 2008: 134, 148, 195-9, 218-9, 221, 224.
• "The Kings & Queens of Middle Tennessee, Or, a Brief History of Drag - in Nashville". Out & About Nashville, May 5, 2012. http://www.outandaboutnashville.com/story/kings-queens-middle-tennessee. 
• Wayne Anderson. "Hidden History: Tobi Marsh & Club 82". Huffington Post, 06/14/2012. www.huffingtonpost.com/wayne-anderson/hidden-history-tobi-marsh_b_1592620.html. 
• Wayne Anderson. "A Legend Leaves the Stage". Huffington Post, 11/16/2012. www.huffingtonpost.com/wayne-anderson/a-legend-leaves-the-stage_b_2143342.html. 
• R. Kurt Johnson. "An American Drag Queen in West Berlin: The Negotiation of Homosexual Identity, Transgressive Behavior and Social Acceptance in late 1960s and early 1970s West Germany". Sexuality and Culture, 16,2,2012: 187-204.
  

Queer Music Heritage    De Alba    IMDB

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One presumes that Prince was not informed about Sandy.   While male lovers of trans women are mainly straight, in the 1960s Sandy would have been taken as gay for having Tobi as a lover.  And into bondage too!

Kim Christy (1950 - ) performer, editor, adult film producer

Kim was raised in the Bronx, New York. By age 14 he was going out in semi-drag. He 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.

The photograph in Life Magazine: Kim with back to camera, Chrysis at front

Kim 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.


Kim and Chrysis had uncredited roles in the chorus line in the 1967 contest that became the film, The Queen. In 1968 a photograph of Kim and Chrysis appeared in Female Mimics. By 1969 Kim was being kept by an oil tycoon.

Kim with her mother

She also starting doing photography for Eros Publishing Company, which published Eros, Mode Avantgarde, Hooker and Exposé. When Female Mimics was relaunched in 1973, the first issue featured Kim winning a Los Angeles beauty contest. In 1979 Kim became editor of Female Mimics,which was owned by Jennifer Jordan, one of Lenny Burtman's ex-wives, and the name was changed to International Female Mimics. The transsexual content was increased and eventually explicit photographs were introduced. Kim also became editor of Exotique, a revival of Burtman's pioneering fetish magazine from the 1950s.

Also in 1979 Kim was in Los Angeles doing a photo-shoot when he discovered Sulka in the audience. The next year he put her in the film Dream Lovers, and then after her surgery, in The Transformation of Sulka, 1981, and Sulka's Wedding, 1983. He became a major producer of she-male and fetish porn – spanning 8mm, VHS and DVD. He also made straight porn.

In FMI, 11,1, 1980

++Kim had reverted to male as Ken Olsen.  He met and married a woman. Their marriage has lasted: they now have grandchildren.

In 1998 Kim/Ken won an award as Best Fetish Producer. The same year he edited the original run of Exotique in book form. In 2001 he edited The Christy Report, a historical survey of sex and fetish images. He was inducted into Adult Video News (AVN) Hall Of Fame in 2004, the first transgender person to be so.

“I am married to my wife. I am with her. Something I learned from all my years working with clients all over the world: Men and women can both be very fluid in their sexuality. Plus things like certain sexual scenarios can engage a person deeply for a time. Sometimes it’s same-sex activity. Some people stay attracted to one gender or another all their lives. I was with men — when I lived as a woman — who never would have called themselves gay, but they were not unhappy about my extra parts at all. Like I said, back then we did not name things so much. I never thought of any of the things I did as who I was. They were things I liked. Things I did.”

*Not the horse exhibitor.  Not Ken Olsen the sound engineer.

• James Mills.  "The Detective:  a good cop fights for law but the deck is stacked against him". Life, 3 Dec 1965: 90d-132.  http://bit.ly/1cJ6A0B.
• "These are the twins - Kim and Bobbie".  Final section in George Alpert. The Queens. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. 
• "Kim Christy".   Guys in Drag, 1,4,1977: 3-4.
• "Meet your Editor: 'Kim Christy's' Personal Photo Album".  Female Mimics International, 11,1, Winter 1980: 6-11.  Online.   
• Kim Christy (ed). Letters to Kim Christy. North Hollywood, Calif: Leoram Productions, 1986.
  
• Kim Christy (ed). The complete reprint of Exotique: the first 36 issues, 1951-1957. Köln: Taschen, 1998.
  
• Kim Christy & John Quinn. The Christy Report. Taschen, 2001. Review.
  
• Christopher Harrity. "Kim Christy's Lost World". The Advocate, February 12 2011.http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/photography/2011/02/12/kim-christys-lost-world.
  
• Ms Bob. "Female Mimics Magazine — Part 1, The Early Years". TG Forum, Jan 16, 2012. www.tgforum.com/wordpress/index.php/female-mimics-magazine-part-1-the-early-years.
  
• Jim Beaux. "Leonard Burtman, 1921 – 1994", "Jennifer Jordan 1938 - ????", "Kim Christy" The Transsexual Erotica Archive of Magazines and Films, May 2013. http://www.hungdevils.com/index.php?/topic/18134-the-transsexual-erotica-archive-of-magazines-and-films-we-need-your-help/page-2.
  
• www.kimchristy.com.
  

IMDB   IAFD
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The Internet Adult Film Database (IAFD) entry on Kim is a bit dubious.   See Jim Beaux’ comments.  The image supposedly of Kim is actually of Carnal Candy in a 1984 film.  It lists Kim’s years active as performer: 1984-2001 – except that Kim never performed in any adult films.

Ms Bob wrote a 3-part history of Female Mimics for TG Forum.  Bob lists Kim as appearing in the magazine, but says nothing at all about Kim becoming the editor.

I couldn’t find any photographs of Kim after the early 1970s. 

In the Advocate  article, Kim says that her aunt and then her mother recognized her in the Life Magazine photograph.  As she has her back turned, how could they be sure?

Gayle Sherman (1940 - 2019) performer.

Original September 2010; revised September 2013.  My original version was based simply on a reading of Gayle's autobiography.   Since then more information has emerged, particularly in the Chicago Whispers book and on Queer Music Heritage.

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Gary Paradis, from Ohio, was raised by an aunt after both parents died in a car crash. At age 16, Gary went to live with relatives in New York, and based on appearance alone was able to get a job, using the name Gayle Sherman, in the chorus line at the Jewel Box Revue.

Later she worked at the 82 Club and then at a small club in Toledo featuring 4 strippers and 2 female impersonators, but the club did not say which was which. A customer fell in love with Gayle, and then killed himself in a car accident when he finally realized that that she was one of the female impersonators.

Gayle moved to Chicago and became a star at the Nite Life, Chicago's longest-running drag bar (early 1940s – 1981). She was mentored by Tony Midnite. Nightlife magazine ran with a cover photograph of Gayle in July 1963 advertising the show at the Nite Life with Vicki Marlane. She was said to be a twin for Sophia Loren.

In 1963 the National Insider ran a 4-part series on her life that was reprinted as a Novel paperback the next year. 

Gayle replaced Tony at the Blue Dahlia, a straight club. She was able to charge $100 just to

accompany business men on dates and no more. On her own time she dated women. She was working off the books and therefore could not have a bank account. She always paid cash, even when on one occasion she bought $2,400 of furniture.

After surgery Gayle was not allowed to work any more as a female impersonator, and so changed her name to Brandy Alexander and became a stripper. With implants her breast measurement was 48" (122 cm) and she performed as Alexandra 'The Great 48'.  She often worked between films in porn cinemas, but when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley pulled their licenses, she got a gig in Hawai'i, and was featured in Confidential Magazine three years later.

She retired from performing at age 48.

She became a cosmetologist.

Gayle died in 2019 at age 79.

*Not Gayle Sherman the 1990s stuntwoman, nor the harpist, nor the wife of Pastor Paul Sherman.

Not the Brandy Alexander of New York, also a drag performer, and mentioned on p157-8 of Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On.

• Gayle Sherman. "I Want to be a Woman". National Insider, 3,17, Oct 27, 1963. Reprinted in I Want to be a Woman!: The True Autobiography of Female Impersonator Gayle Sherman. Chicago: Novel Books 1964. 
•  Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.  Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 184, 199, 323, 325.
• Sukie de la Croix. " Talking to Viki St. John about the 1960s Part 6". Windy City Media, 2001-01-10. www.windycitymediagroup.com/m/APParticle.php?AID=24378&i=22&s=News.
• Sukie de la Croix. "Whispers". Windy City Times, 2001-04-04 and 2001-04-25. www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=32850.    www.windycitytimes.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=24912.
• St. Sukie De la Croix. Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012: 240-2.

 BURLESK    QUEER MUSIC HERITAGE
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Gayle’s autobiography is only 36 pages long.  She was not even 20 when she wrote it.  The book also contains a similarly short account by a British trans man, and an essay ‘As the Experts See It’, by the then ubiquitous hack writer Carlson Wade, which will strike modern readers as particularly badly informed.  The next year, 1965, Novel Books put out a similar collection, I Was Male: two autobiographical accounts by trans women, one in regret, and an ‘expert’ essay by Carlson Wade and George Griffith.

I obtained I Want to be a Woman through interlibrary loan.  The copy is stamped IFGE on the title page and the side, although it is now owned by a university library.

Joanne Meyerowitz (How Sex Changed:184) mentions Gayle merely to quote her as an example of transsexual separation: ‘I wasn’t then and I’m not now a transvestite. I don’t get sexual pleasure out of dressing as a woman.’   This has been repeated (e.g. Robert Hill, ‘As a man I exist; as a woman I live’: 141).  Whatever Gayle’s opinions may have been later in life, it is a bit much for academics to build generalizations on casual comments by persons hardly out of teenage.

Not to question Gayle’s narrative, but the tale of a parviscient punter at a drag revue who falls in love with a drag performer and comes to a bad end is an old tale.  The classic telling is Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine, 1830.  This of course was over-analyzed to death by Roland Barth in S/Z, 1970.

$2,400 in the mid 1960s would be $17,000 today.   To pay that amount in cash today would probably initiate a criminal investigation.

Thank you  Morgan Stevens.

Susanna Valenti (192? - 1996) translator, broadcaster, activist.

++ Updated April 2014, December 2017..

Tito Valenti emigrated to the US from Latin America in the mid-1940s.

Katherine Cummings says that Tito worked as a law court translator, however Darrell Raynor says that he was “a radio commentator who is well known internationally” and that he had interviewed the President and top generals, and Hugo Beigel says that he was a writer and dancer.

Valenti consulted a doctor in the late 1940s about his desires to cross-dress. The doctor showed understanding, and introduced him to another transvestite, the first that he had met.

Valenti’s second wife, Marie, ran a wig boutique in New York at 507 5th Avenue, advertised it in Transvestia, and introduced many of her clients to Susanna, her husband’s other persona. Indeed Susanna also had met her when looking for a wig. Marie also catered to professional female impersonators and was regarded as one of the better wig-makers in New York.  

With the profits from her wig business, Marie purchased, in the mid 1950s, a country home in the Catskills, which she and Susanna called Chevalier D’Eon Resort. It was an isolated 150 acres with a main house, a barn and several snug but unheated bungalows.  For $25 ($190 in 2011 money) a weekend visitor from the city got food and board and lessons in passing as female. There were too few transvestite visitors to make a profit for the Valentis, and most weekends the resort was rented to regular guests. However Susanna did her impersonation show even for these.

Susanna in 1961

Susanna published her address in Transvestia and hosted transvestite social events in her spacious New York apartment at 875 West End Ave. From there, Susanna and others went to the drag shows at the 82 Club, and the drag balls put on by the Phil Black and by the National Variety Artists. A few entered the beauty contests at the drag balls but in competition with the gay world and professional impersonators they rarely won. Susanna relished the crowds and the cameras at the entrance to the drag balls.

As Susanna, she wrote 53 opinion columns, “Susanna Says” for Virginia Prince's Transvestia magazine, from 1960 to 1970. She was known as more easy going than Prince.  She coined the metaphor of the ‘girl-within’, that became popular among Transvestia readers. She is quoted as saying:

“Let us, for heaven’s sake, strive to forge a nice, clean cut, real person out of ‘the girl-within.’ Let’s give her a personality of her own. If possible, let’s give her even different tastes than those of ‘the guy within.’”

Like Prince she believed in a dual personality that could be developed and worked on.

In 1961 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.

++One person in regular attendance was the professional photographer later known as Andrea Malick.  She took still photographs and later made movies both at the resort and at Marie's wig store in New York.

Of particular note is the gathering of 71 transvestites at the Chevalier D’Eon Resort for Halloween 1962, held a day after the New York police unusually raided the annual National Variety Artists costume ball and 30 cross-dressed "men" were arrested. 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.

Halloween 1962: Virginia at left, Felicity at right.

Both Virginia and Susanna were upset by one guest who not only did not bother to shave, he also smoked a cigar. This brought Susanna closer to Virginia’s point of view that a cultivation of ‘inner femininity’ distinguished true transvestites from drag queens and fetishists. She expressed this opinion in her column several times.  Initially 'fetishism' had been equated with partial dressing, but FPE increasingly identified as fetishistic those who fully dressed as female but failed or didn’t bother to fashion themselves as truly feminine.  A few years later Sheila Niles would propose the term ‘whole girl fetishist’.

In 1963, Susanna and Marie sold their resort property as it was unprofitable. In early 1964 they bought another 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.


In 1965 Hugo Beigel wrote an article for Siobhan Frederick’s Turnabout, a New York alternative to Transvestia. In “The Myth of the Latent Femininity in the Male” Dr Beigel 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. Her position was that

“a congenital predisposition (genes, chromosomes, hormones, chemical patterns, etc.) in the TV makes him gravitate towards these diverse elements which, together, spell femininity in our time ... no matter what social and psychological elements play on a boy, he will not be a TV unless he carries within his body the biological seed of TVism”.

From this she argued that transvestism could not be cured, and it was not a behavioral disorder.

“But how about the thousands of TVs who do not feel the need to go to a mental doctor. How about us, who feel that dressing gives us serenity, calm, contentment, happiness?”

In 1966 the noted photographer Walter Rutter came and took a series of photographs at Casa Susanna.

In 1968 Susanna responded in her column to Prince’s recent appearance on the Alan Burke television show. Burke pushed the line that a transvestite taking hormones and considering surgery was close to being a transsexual. Prince replied that she would not have the operation for anything. Susanna commented:

“Such a statement marks the boundary between the TV and the TS. The TV rejects the thought of surgery. He enjoys living the two sides of the human coin.”

However she estimated that she personally knew a dozen transvestites who had had surgery.

“I met them all before the sex change, and some of them, at first, did not know they were TS’s, they only knew that they enjoyed dressing and would feel much happier as girls than in their male role.”

However she believed that many who did think themselves as transsexuals were mistaken. She also criticized transsexuals as a group as not being able to pass:

“Very few of the TS’s I know have learned to move and gesture with that suppleness that is exclusively female”.

The next year she continued:

“Society insists upon females behaving like ladies—and this is where our TS and pseudo TS friends fail in a most regrettable way. I am thinking right now of several instances whereby people continue to ‘read’ a TS as being a man even AFTER the operation”.

Susanna doubted Harry Benjamin’s statement that he knew of no one who had undergone the operation and was disappointed. Instead, Susanna could imagine few successful scenarios for post-operative transsexuals.

By 1968 Susanna had decided to live full-time as female. She started getting to know the merchants and others in Hunter and surrounding towns. She avoided going in with other transvestites as they might ‘blow her cover’. In 1969 she had her ears pierced, took voice lessons and told her three step-grandchildren.

In the October 1969 Transvestia she announced what she was doing. She had lost the “fabulous thrill” that comes with the transformation from ‘him’ to ‘her’ but it was becoming increasingly agonizing for her to make the switch back to ‘him’.

She planned to quit her job in the city and run Casa Valenti as a year-round bed-and-breakfast. She was criticized, as Virginia Prince had been two years earlier making a similar announcement, for failing to maintain the balance. In her last column, January 1970, Susanna spoke about the support from family and friends, and her ability to pass. She said nothing about her relationship with Marie, or what Marie thought about what she was doing. Susanna did provide an article for the 100th issue of Transvestia in 1979 on accomplishments in heterosexual transvestism, but said nothing of her own situation.

Nothing is known of her after that, and it is not known when Susanna died. Katherine Cummings mentions that Marie died in a domestic accident, but doesn’t say when.  Both Marie and Susanna died in November 1996, a week apart.

++An exhibition of Walter Rutter's photographs of Casa Susanna was held in Fall 2003 at the Laurence Miller Gallery in New York City.

In the 2000s, Robert Swope discovered hundreds of photographs at the 26th Street flea market in New York. He instantly read the photographs as of men dressed as women, and purchased them. He and his partner, Michel Hurst arranged the photographs as a book, and when it was published in 2005, it became a fashion item and was sold in design stores.

Robert Hill, working on his PhD about Virginia Prince and Tri-Ess, found the book in a Borders store, and contacted Swope and Hurst through their publisher, and was able to connect the photographs to his own work.

Hurst and Swope were commissioned by a Hollywood studio to write a treatment, and dreamt of cis male stars.  Presumably the film was lost in pre-production hell, as the film people say.

In 2014 Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy, La Cage Aux Folles, Kinky Boots, Hairspray) turned Casa Susanna into a Broadway play, Casa Valentina.

• Darrell Raynor. A Year Among the Girls. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1966. New York: Lancer Books, 1968:32, 41-2, 44-5, 63-4, 110-4, 116-130.
• Hugo G. Beigel. "A Weekend in Alice's Wonderland". The Journal of Sex Research, 5,2, 1969: 108-122.
• Kate Cummings. Katherine's Diary- the Story of a Transsexual. William Heinemann Australia 1992. Revised and updated 2008: 130-4, 142, 147-9, 151, 195.
• Michel Hurst & Robert Swope (eds). Casa Susanna. PowerHouse Books. 156 pp 2005.
• Robert Hill. Susanna Valenti. www.freewebs.com/a2goblue.
• Walter Rutter. “The Girls of Casa Susanna”. Laurence Miller Gallery Exhibition. 1966. www.laurencemillergallery.com/rutter_exhibition.htm.
• Penelope Green. “A Safe House for the Girl Within”. The New York Times. Sept 7, 2006. www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/garden/07trann.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=65cb0552fd285f7a&ex=1315281600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
• Robert S. Hill. ‘As a man I exist; as a woman I live’: Heterosexual Transvestism and the Contours of Gender and Sexuality in Postwar America. PhD Dissertation. University of Michigan. 2007: 182-190, 363-385.
• Jay Blotcher. “Queens of the Catskills: Casa Susanna”. Chronogram, March 29, 2007. www.chronogram.com/issue/2007/4/Community+Notebook/Queens-of-the-Catskills
• Patrick Healy.  "Clothes Make the Man: ‘Casa Valentina,’ Fierstein’s Play About ’60s Cross-Dressers". New York Times, April 10, 2014.  www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/theater/casa-valentina-fiersteins-play-about-60s-cross-dressers.html?_r=0.
• Paul Moakley.  "Casa Susanna: Photographs From a 1950s Transvestite Hideaway".  Time, April 14, 2014. http://lightbox.time.com/2014/04/14/casa-susanna.
• Isabelle Bonnet. Les Photographies des Travestis de La Casa Susanna. Mémoire de Master 1, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, 2015.

_________________________________________________________________________________


What is it with New York Route 23A?   Casa Susanna was outside the village of Hunter.   Continue 15-20 km east on the 23A and you come to Palenville where you can find the Cybele Maetreum and the same distance again gets you to the village of Catskill which is where Dawn Langley Simmons fled to in 1973.

I have no reason to think that this Robert Swope is the one fired in 2000 for criticizing the Vagina Monologues.

The distinction between transvestite and drag queen that I mainly use is that a transvestite wishes to pass and a drag queen likes to be read.    Given Susanna’s stage performances and her thrill in running the gauntlet into the drag balls, we can see quite a bit of drag queen in Susanna.

FPE/Tri-Ess is of course known for its homophobia, so it is a nice irony that a gay couple found and published the photographs.  (Original meaning of nice = fine or subtle).


Don’t you just love it that the HBS narrative, of we the true trans are congenital and those we don’t like are fetishists, is found full-blown in FPE in the early 1960s.  They did it first.

++Walter Rutter's photographs have almost completely disappeared from the web.   A few can be seen here.

++Bonnet include an anecdote about Susanna Valenti that I have never seen anywhere else: "What is strange is, when I was in Manhattan in the early 80’s, in between gigs, sometimes, I would cater private parties for extra money. I was asked to cater several parties for a Lady Susanna over a period of a couple of years. I was paid well and told not to speak of it. I swear, I believe Lady Susanna was Tito… [...] All attendees at the parties were cross dressers and straight businessmen, from cab drivers to Wall Street. [...] If I remember correctly, her place was a townhouse in Chelsea. The interior was all red and black with lots of silk and velvet like a bordello."   Of all people this is a quote from the real-estate agent who is selling what used to be Casa Susanna!   We have no information about Susanna after 1970, and thus the anecdote is intriguing.  However the source is such that it is what a court of law would dismiss as hearsay.

Tony Midnite (1926 - 2009) performer, costumier, activist.

Tony Murdoch was born in Texas. He was working in munitions in San Francisco during World War II when, being under aged, he used fake ID to see the impersonator show at Finocchio’s, and was sure that he could do better.

After the war he started performing as Tony Midnite in Galveston and then played clubs in many US cities. He joined The Jewel Box Revue in 1948, but later left to begin a career as a costume designer.  He was a friend and colleague of Hedy Jo Star.

He opened a studio in Chicago in 1952. He defied the Chicago Police Department which did not want impersonation acts in the city by booking The Jewel Box Revue for two weeks, and it was so successful that it stayed for eight months.

Tony returned to The Jewel Box Revue in 1958 and refit the entire show with costumes, which they wore for their Broadway appearance. He then relocated to New York, appearing at 82 Club. He did the costumes for the road shows of Gypsy and Carnival!, for the Metropolitan Opera and some television shows.

In 1964 he returned to Chicago and started his own show, which included Gayle Sherman. He was active in the gay movement there. He was part of the local demonstration against anti-gay advocate Anita Bryant in 1977, and again against the police harassment while Jane Byrne was Chicago’s mayor. He was a book reviewer for several publications.

Tony was inducted into Chicago’s Gay & Lesbian Hall of Fame in 1996.

He moved to Las Vegas in 2000 and did the planning for the 2001 Jewel Box reunion.

He died age 82.

• James T. Sears. Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South. Rutgers University Press 421 pp 2001: 78-9, 81.
• “Passages: Tony Midnite”. Windy City Times, 2009-09-09,. www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=22835

 DAVID DE ALBA     CHICAGO GL HALL OF FAME.

Angie Stardust (1939 - 2007) performer.

Mel Michaels was born in Norfolk, Virginia and raised in Harlem, New York. She started performing at age 14. She was a singer and a drag artiste and was in the Jewel Box Revue in the late 1950s, early 1960s. She was the first black star at the 82 Club. 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". 

She performed in Cannes, Marseilles, Paris and Berlin.

From 1974 she has been a resident of Germany. She was in four German films in the 1970s and 1980s: Inspektor Perrak greift ein, 1970, Die Alptraumfrau (Nightmare Woman) 1981, Stadt der Verlorenen Seelen (City of Lost Souls) 1983 and Eine Handvoll Vergnügen (Crazy Boys) 1987.  ++She completed her womanhood in the mid 1980s.

She ran a nightclub on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn at Spielbudenplatz 27-28 upstairs in Schmidts Tivoli Theatre from 1990, but later had to give it up because of ill-health, although it is still named after her.

She died aged 67.

• Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995: 147-8. 
• “Angie’s Nightclub” www.schmidts.de/index.php?id=85. No longer available.
• “Angie Stardust ist tot”. Hamburger Abendblatt. 31 Oktober 2007. www.abendblatt.de/nachrichten/nachrichten-des-tages/article499619/Angie-Stardust-ist-tot.html.
• “Abschied von Angie Stardust im Angie's”. Welt Online. 31.10.07. www.welt.de/regionales/hamburg/article1318164/Abschied_von_Angie_Stardust_im_Angies.html. 

IMDB   

Dorian Wayne (1936 - 2015) female impersonator.

Revised April 2020.

Rick Colantino was a drag performer as Dorian Wayne, mainly in the late 1950s/ early 1960s, initially in southern Florida. He also worked with the jewel Box Review and at 82 Club and elsewhere.

He starred in She Man, 1967, as a drag-dominatrix who blackmailed others into feminization; The Blue Sextet, 1971, and The Doors of Jessica Prine. 1976.

He then became a dresser and worked on Broadway until retirement.

As Dominita in She Man

He spent his last days in rural New York State.  He died age 78.

• Laurie Ann.  "TVideo reviews: She Man".  Ladylike, 25, 1995: 29-30.  Online.  
• Joe E. Jeffreys (dir). Dorian: A Picture, narrated by Rick Colantino, with clips of Rick Colantino/Dorian Wayne. US 6 mins 2008.

IMDB    TGForum    Queer Music Heritage   FastPeopleSearch   

82 Club

A night club at 82 E. 4^th St, between 2^nd Ave and the Bowery in Manhattan. It was also called Club 82, and had previously been the Rainbow Inn.

It opened in 1953 after the 181, at that number on Second Avenue, around the corner, lost its liquor license after being mentioned in USA Confidential as a gay club. Both clubs had the same management, personnel and style.

Mobster Vito Genovese had bought up gay bars in the Greenwich Village area in the 1930s. He had married his second wife Anna after having her husband murdered because she could not get a divorce. She was lesbian, and he was okay with that. The original manager of Club 82 was Steve Franse. Don Vito, on the run in Italy from a murder charge, had left Franse to assist and watch over his wife. When she publicly divorced him in 1953, he had Franse killed.

82 Club became New York’s major drag revue. Ty Bennett was the headliner for a decade from 1958.  The waiters were women dressed as men. As was usual with such clubs, some performers moved on to living full-time as female, in some cases with transgender surgery, but others chose to continue going home as men. The performers were permitted to mingle with the guests during intermissions, but wearing trousers. The teenage Harvey Fierstein hung out there in 1965. The club was briefly featured in the 1968 Rod Steiger film, No Way to Treat a Lady. Show-biz royalty flocked to the club. Legend has it that Errol Flynn played piano there with his penis.

After Stonewall, the business drifted away, when people could be more open on the streets. At this time the club was run by two butch dykes, Tommy who worked the door and Butchie who ran the bar.

As the club had an outcast image, punk and early glitter and glam kids started going there from 1972. Another Pretty Face were the house band in 1973. For the Christopher Street Liberation Day in June 1973, Bebe Scarpinato went to the 82 Club and got the remaining showgirls, in full regalia to march behind an 82 Club banner.

The New York Dolls started to perform at 82 Club. For their first show, April 17, 1974, they performed in drag, except for Johnny Thunders who refused. They were followed by Wayne County (later to be Jayne) and short-lived glitter bands like Teenage Lust and Harlots of 42^nd Street. David Bowie and Lou Reed and his trans lover Rachel were encountered there.

The rock bands stopped in 1976, and it continued as a disco bar until it closed in 1978. Later it became the Film Forum, an art cinema. In 1992 it became the Bijou Cinema. After renovation in 2006, it reopened as a gay sex club and porn theatre.

Performers included Terry Noel, Minette, Sonne Teal, Kim August,  Tobi Marsh, Hans Crystal, Kim Christy, Gayle Sherman, Dorian Wayne, Tony Midnight, Betty.

• Signed D.C. "What a drag -- too many snags". It's all the streets you crossed not so long ago. Sept 4, 2005. http://streetsyoucrossed.blogspot.com/2005/09/what-drag-too-many-snags.html.
• "Genovese Crime Family". History of Gay Bars in New York City. Dec 26, 2007. http://bitterqueen.typepad.com/history_of_gay_bars_in_ne/genovese_crime_family.
• J.D. Doyle. "Club 82". Queer Music Heritage. www.queermusicheritage.us/fem-cl82.html.

Terry Noel (1936 - ) performer, housewife, programmer/analyst.

From a small town in Kentucky, Terry won a Halloween contest in 1958, and sent the photographs to The Jewel Box Revue and was hired as a performer. From 1960 she worked at Club 82 in New York City, where she dated actor Jim Hutton.

She took female hormones for only 18 months, starting in 1961. She was on the cover of Female Mimics in 1963.

She had been scheduled to have genital surgery at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn in 1964, but the surgeon felt wrong and she cancelled. She did have the operation the next year with Dr Trowbridge in Illinois. Her mother took the surgeon’s and psychiatrist’s letters to the county clerk and got Terry’s birth certificate re-issued. However there were complication with her bladder that continued until she had extra surgery in Yonkers.

She continued at the Club 82 until she found an office job as a typist. In 1969 she moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where she married a US naval officer, and was with him and his son for 14 years without either knowing her past.

After divorce she retrained as a computer programmer/ analyst, and then worked for the US federal government.

She retired in 1997.

*Not the New York DJ.

• J.D. Doyle (ed). “Terry Noel”. Queer Music Heritage. www.queermusicheritage.us/fem-terrynoel.html.
• Vicki Rene. “Interview with a Superstar!: Terry Noel” http://www.vickirene.net/intterry.htm.