Potassa de la Fayette (195? - ) model

Potassa was a star in the early days of New York's Studio 54, 1977-8, where she was noted when on the dance floor, and liked to pick up straight Wall-Street type guys and take them to a balcony for oral sex.


Said to be from Santo Domingo, she was photographed by Andy Warhol – in the nude displaying her more than average male endowment.

She was also in the Salvador Dali set, and was seen with him around town.

It is not recorded what happened to her later.

• Anthony Haden-Guest. The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. William Morrow, 1997: 113.
• Peter Conrad. “Studio 54: heady daze of disco decadence – in pictures”. The Guardian, 14 Mar 2015. Online.
• Brian Belovitch. Trans Figured: My Journey from Boy to Girl to Woman to Man. Skyhorse Publishing, 2018: 96.

Manuela Trasobares Haro (1962 - ) artist, singer, politician.

Trasobares was born in Figueres, also the birth place of Salvador Dalí. She transitioned surgically in London at the age of 17.

Manuela was trained as an artist by Dali, and then at the Sant Jordi Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Universidad de Barcelona. She also trained in music at the conservatory in Sofia, Bulgaria, and sang with the National Theatre of Sofia, and the Opera Theatre in Plovdiv. She was eliminated from several international singing competition, despite her obvious training, because of her gender status.

Her style as an artist has gone from surrealism to hyperrealism.

She was also an activist for transsexual rights. She married a man in 2006, and almost all the 900 residents of Geldo in Castellón, the village where she lives, attended the ceremony.

In 2007, she ran successfully as a Democratic Republican Action candidate for a council seat in Geldo making her the first trans person in Spain to hold elected office.

Also that year, two of her sculptures on religious themes were excluded from the Espai D´Art Contemporani de Castelló, because of pressure from a traditionalist Carlist group.

In 2008, she ran unsuccessfully for the national Parliament as a Republican Left candidate.

• "Spain local election sees first transsexual woman as councillor". Typically Spanish, May 30, 2007. www.typicallyspanish.com/news/publish/article_10722.shtml.

http://manuelatrasobares.blogia.com     ES.WIKIPEDIA. 

Yeda Brown (194?–) performer.

Brown was raised in Bagé, in Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil.  His father was a military officer, and as a familial duty he did apply for military service, but was rejected.

The name ‘Yeda’ was picked in homage to Ieda Vargas, who was Miss Universe 1963, and also from Rio Grande Do Sul.

In 1967 Yeda moved to Rio de Janeiro and became a performer with Rogéria at the Teatro Rival. She was part of the show, Les Girls, and toured in Uruguay and Argentina.

In 1974 she moved to Paris, and performed at Madame Arthur's and Le Carrousel. In 1975 she completed her transition with Dr Michel Seghers in Brussels, and her father paid for the surgery.

Afterwards she moved to Spain, where she was the first known surgically completed transsexual, and became famous on stage, screen and record. She had a small part in the ground-breaking El Transexual, 1977, that was partially inspired by the story of Lorena Capelli who died of peritonitis after an illegal sex change (the only kind in Spain at that time).

Yeda became known as El Cuerpo de Oro and Musa da Transição , and was taken up by Salvador Dali, who declared her to be his new muse. She partied with Boy George and David Bowie. Yeda returned to Brazil several times in the late 1990s to get her documentation changed. She lived in Barcelona, and then in Madrid.

• Yeda Brown, la última musa de Dalí. 5 de maio de 2008. http://yedabrownmusadedali.blogspot.com/2008/05/yeda-brown-la-musa-de-dal.html.
• Jim Beaux. “Brazil: Yeda Brown, the Muse of Salvador Dali”. Trans Mirror. 7 June 2009. http://transmirror.blogspot.com/2009/06/brazil-yeda-brown-muse-of-salvador-dali.html.

International Chrysis (1951 – 1990) performer.

Revised January 2014.

Billy Schumacher was raised in Brooklyn. A performer noted for her beauty, Billy became Chrysis from the age of twelve, and was soon entering pageants and performing. She took up with Kim Christy. They shared an apartment in Manahattan below Houston Street. They met sex magazine pioneer and editor of Exotique magazine, Lenny Burtman, who arranged photo-shoots and other favors. Chrysis and Kim appeared together in Female Mimics.  They had uncredited mufti cameos in the chorus line of the film, The Queen, 1968.

By the mid-70s Chrysis was a drag celebrity, and had performed at the Jewel Box Review and other major venues, including in Europe, especially Berlin and she was a long-time friend of Salvador Dali.   In 1976 she was on the cover of Whitehouse, the UK magazine named antagonistically after the anti-porn crusader. Despite the claim on the cover that "This Woman is a Man", that was the first time that an out trans woman was on a magazine cover.

In 1982 she was the woman in the Van Halen video to their cover of "(Oh) Pretty Woman".  She reveals herself herself as a non-standard women by taking off her wig.  It played a few times on MTV but was pulled after complaints about the non-consensual fondling by little people.



Many accounts mention that she was a sexual top with the New Jersey college boys that she liked to pick up.

She headlined in Jesus Chrysis Superstar and The Last temptation of Chrysis. She was in the drag acting troupe, Hot Peaches, was to be found at the Pyramid Club and performed at Wigstock.

Her best-known movie role was as a witness to be eliminated in Q & A, which was released in 1990, a month after she died, at age 39, from cancer caused by the seepage of silicon from her breasts. Her friend, the singer Pete Burns, named one of his groups, International Chrysis, after her.

The documentary Split was actually proposed by Chrysis herself, but not completed until after her death.

*Not the powerboat racer.

• "This is Chrysis". In George Alpert. The Queens. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975.  
• Ellen Fisher Turk & Andrew Weeks (dir). Split: William to Chrysis: Portrait of a Drag Queen. Scr: Dan Chayefshy. US 60 mins 1992. Special Jury Award at the Berlin Film Festival.
• Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. London & New York: Routledge xvi, 540 pp 2000: 433.
• “International Chrysis”. Endless Night.  http://motherboardsnyc.hoop.la/topic/international-chrysis?nc=1. 
• Jim Beaux.  "International Chrysis".   The Transsexual Erotica Archive of Magazines and Films, 05 August 2013.  www.hungdevils.com/index.php?/topic/18134-the-transsexual-erotica-archive-of-magazines-and-films-we-need-your-help/page-3.

EN.WIKIPEDIA       IMDB    FACEBOOK      BACKINTHEGAYS    

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Jim Beaux' article contains: "Kim Christy's commentary points out that when she was in hospital dying, she hated the fact that the staff used her male name. She had a couple of roles where she portrayed a woman, who at the end would pull her hair off to reveal a man, and she disliked the endings both times."   This raises the question: what was her female name, as opposed to her performance name?  As with Sir Lady Java, we have a male name and a performance name.  But the female name, the one that was presumably on her driving licence and tax return, that is, her real name, remains unknown.

Mario Montez (1935 - 2013) underground film actor

++updated March 2014

René Rivera was a Puerto Rican New Yorker, born 1935, a drag performer, with a day job as a postal worker or maybe as shipping clerk, who appeared in many New York under-ground films and avant-garde plays in the period 1963-6, working with the seminal directors of the genre: Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Bill Vehr, Charles Ludlam, Avery Willard and Andy Warhol. He designed and sewed most of his costumes, and often those of his co-actors.

He was cast-listed as Dolores Flores in Flaming Creatures, 1963, his debut, an underground film of an extended party on the roof of the Windsor cinema in New York's Lower East Side with lots of drag and nudity, and where Flores dances a fandango. The film became famous when New York City police seized the print at the premier.

He then became Mario Montez in homage to the 1940s film star, Maria Montez. Mario's characters were all much alike: flamboyant and narcissistic, and as the milieu was one where acting per se was suspect, Mario mainly played Mario - no matter the character's name. The distinction observed between cross-acting and androgynous characters loses its meaning in these films.

The only film where Mario is actually stated to be a 'man' is in Warhol's Screen Test Number 2, 1965, with Salvador Dalí and Lou Reed, where he is confronted about his gender and must admit that he is male, but he does so, he says, only because he is a woman. This was redone the next year on stage by the Ridiculous Theatre Company, again with Montez.

Mario was a guest performer singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" in the seminal film The Queen, 1968, hosted by Jack Doroshow (Sabrina).

In  1977, René moved to Orlando, Florida where he worked in clerical jobs.   In 2006 he was featured in a documentary about filmmaker Jack Smith.  In the last few years of his life he again appeared in avant-garde films, and was honored:  March 2010, Montez was honored by Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race; February 2012, Montez was honored with the Special Teddy Award 2012 at the Berlinale for her outstanding role in underground film history.

He died of a stroke in 2013, aged 78. 

• Avery Willard. Female Impersonation. New York: Regiment Publications. 95 pp 1971: 11-15. Online at: www.queermusicheritage.us/fem-willard4.html.
• “Mario Montez”. WarholStars. www.warholstars.org/warholfilm/warhol5.html.

EN.WIKIPEDIA   

Amanda Lear (?1939 - ) performer.

Revised 4 Dec 2009, 31 Jan 2010.

Amanda has given out different years (1941, 1945 and even 1948) and places (Hong Kong, Saigon) for her birth.

The most likely story is that she was born Alain Tapp in 1939. He was raised bilingual in French and English, and became fluent also in Italian, Spanish and German as a teenager.

By 1958 Alain was a performer at Le Carrousel in Paris under the name Peki d’Oslo. Peki was a room mate of April Ashley for a Le Carrousel tour of Italy. Alain as Peki is also remembered by Romy Haag from when she performed at Haag’s nightclub and at Chez Nous in Berlin in the early 1960s. Record producer Simon Napier-Bell also met Peki when she was first in London, and then years later made a record with Amanda.

She became a long-time friend of Salvador Dalí, who may have paid for her operation with Dr Burou in 1963. Some say that her name = ‘a man’ + ‘dali’ or ‘L’amant Dali” (this latter the title of one of her books).

In 1965 after working with Ricky Renee in Berlin and at Raymond's Revue Bar in London, Peki became Amanda and studied at St Martin’s College of Art in London, and became acquainted with Marianne Faithfull and Keith Moon.

Desiring a UK passport she and April went to a pub in Notting Hill and found a Mr Lear, an Scottish architecture student, who was willing to wed Amanda for ₤50. Mr Lear was dumped right after the ceremony, but Amanda has kept his name to this day.

She became a disco star in the 70s. At this time there were rumours that she was transsexual, but she consistently denied them. She has claimed that the sex-change was merely a publicity stunt thought up by Salvador Dali. In her disco song, ‘Fabulous Lover, Love Me”, she sings: “the surgeon made me so well that you could not tell that I was not somebody else".

She is the model with the black panther on the cover of the Roxy Music album, For Your Pleasure. She dated Brian Jones, Bryan Ferry and David Bowie. She modelled nude for Playboy in 1977.

In 1979 she married Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle, the former beloved for two decades of French writer Roger Peyrefitte, and himself the owner of Le Bronx, one of Paris’ first openly gay nightclubs. He and Amanda were together for 21 years until he died in a fire at their farmhouse near Avignon.

She has released 13 albums and over 50 singles, with sales in the millions. She has written three books about her life with Salvador Dalí. She has hosted long-running television shows in Germany and Italy. She has exhibited her own paintings and gives lectures on Dalí.

In 2006 she was made a Chevalière in the l'Ordre National des Arts et des Lettres.

In 2007 she created a kerfuffle when she refused to perform or appear on stage in Milan because she would be next to a group of transsexuals. She was reported to say ‘Tenete lontani i trans’ (keep the transies far away).

In 2008-9 her Wikipedia page was revised to remove all suggestions that she is transsexual, and in 2009 she published an autobiography with the the tantalizing title of Je ne suis pas celle que vous croyez..

• Amanda Lear.  Wer Hat Angst Vor Amanda Lear? Berengaria Editions Germany/France. 1979.
• Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley. April Ashley's Odyssey. London: Jonathan Cape viii, 287 pp 16 plates 1982: 69,70,120,178-180,196, 241,268. London: Arrow 1983. Also online at www.antijen.org/Aprilv1.
•  Amanda Lear. My Life with Dali. London: Virgin Books Ltd, 1985.
  
•  Amanda Lear. Persistence of Memory: A Personal Biography of Salvador Dali. Bethesda, Md: National Press, 1987.
• Amanda Lear. L'amant-Dalí. Paris: M. Lafon, 1994.
• Ian Gibson. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. Faber and Faber. 1997: 527-536
• Romy Haag with Martin Schacht. Eine frau und mehr. Berlin: Quadriga 319 pp 1999.
• Andrew Anthony.  “At the court of Queen Lear”.  The Observer.  24 December 2000.  www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2000/dec/24/focus.news.
• Simon Napier-Bell.  “Daily post to March 2007”. www.simonnapierbell.com/correspondence_oc06_ma07.html. 
  
• “Amanda Lear”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Lear.
• Annie Richards. “Fabulous Amanda”. Second Type Women. http://transwoman.tripod.com/gallery-amanda.htm.
• “Amanda Lear Biography”. www.netcomuk.co.uk/~lenin/AMANDA_LEAR.html.
  
• http://amandalear.tripod.com.
•  Amanda Lear. Je ne suis pas du tout celle que vous croyez. Paris: Hors collection, 2009.

The greatest artist of the 20th century

One of the most colourful figures in the scene around transgender persons is the Marquis of Pubol, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, best known as Savador Dalí. The artist and filmmaker.

His 1929 film with Louis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, contains a character described as a 'hermaphrodite'.

He offered to do a painting of April Ashley as Hermaphroditos but she did not want to immortalized in her half-way status.

From the 1960s he was and remained a friend and mentor of Amanda Lear, and rumours say that he paid for her operation with Dr Burou in Casablanca in 1963. She lived with him and his wife for many years. Some say that her name = ‘a man’ + ‘dali’ or "L’amant Dali”.

In 1965 Mario Montez the New York underground film female impersonator made his iconic Andy Warhol film, Screen test Number 2. the one where he confronted about his gender and admits that he is a man, but he does so, he says, only because he is a woman. Savador Dalí was present and is in the film.

In the late 1970s he trained Manuela Trasobares Haro (who had transitioned at the age of 15) as an artist.

Also in the 1970s had his own set in New York.   Most famously he was a friend of International Chrysis, the New York drag celebrity, best known for her role in Sidney Lumet's 1990 film Q & A.  He appears in the 1992 documentary film about her life, Split: William to Chrysis: Portrait of a Drag Queen.    

Anthony Haden-Guest describes the scene.  Potassa de la Fayette "was often part of the entourage of Salvador Dalí. If any 'ism' ruled in Studio, it was voyeurism. Most went to see or be seen. Dalí, a veteran of the human gaze, would go with people he needed to impress. A man who liked a hectic sort of order, he would follow a routine, dining first —Trader Vic’s was a favorite spot—with his considerable retinue of regulars before going on to the club. 'There were always three or four transvestites,' says Roger de Cabrol, a designer and regular himself. “Potassa. There was
this French transvestite, very pretty, named Pascale."

Dalí was also seen at the GG Barnum Room with Ava Hollywood.

In the late 1970s, Dalí was close to the Brazilian 'trans diva', Yeda Brown. He introduced her to musicians and the press called her ‘the muse of Dalí’.

• Anthony Haden-Guest. The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. William Morrow, 1997: 113.