Wilhelmina Ross (? - 1991 ) performer

Tish Gervais (who many years later reverted to being Brian Belovich) was a friend when Wilhelmina chose her name, ‘Wilhelmina’ from a modelling agency active at that time and ‘Ross’ from the singer Diana Ross. Wilhelmina was part African American and part Cherokee, and was already living fulltime as female.

In 1968 Wilhelmina became involved in the Jackie Curtis play Amerika Cleopatra. There was a contretemps with Alexis del Lago who had created a special dress for Jackie, but it was Wilhelmina who was wearing it on stage. Wilhelmina was also involved in Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Jimmy Camicia founded the Hot Peaches acting troupe in 1972, with drag as a major component. Marsha P Johnson was an early recruit. Wilhelmina joined in 1973. They were skeptical about the Warhol Factory scene and satirized it as The Magic Hype drag show, starring the celebrity-obsessed sell-out Randy Whorehall. In another play, Wilhelmina played drag queen superstar Belladella Bosom with the line:

“I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, it’s my own game”. 

In 1974 Wilhelmina was one of the trans women recruited, mainly from the Gilded Grape, for the Andy Warhol / Luciano Anselmino Ladies and Gentlemen Project. Anselmino paid Warhol $900,000 for 105 paintings. However Warhol took more than 500 polaroids of 19 sitters, paying each of them only $50. This resulted in 268 canvases. Wilhelmina had the biggest presence. She was in 52 Polaroids and 73 of the paintings. The paintings were exhibited in Italy the next year, but none of the sitters were identified.

The next year Wilhelmina had a bit part in the pro-prostitution film, The Happy Hooker.

Armitstead quotes Jimmy Camicia that Wilhelmina

“had a very bad ending, addicted to crack cocaine and sleeping on the streets. She didn’t want to go on welfare and pushed and pushed until she got a job, but they gave her a really hard time and finally she couldn’t take it any more.”

Some of the 1974 pictures were shown in 1997 at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and Camicia came forward to identify Wilhelmina. The full collection was exhibited in Pittsburgh, London and elsewhere in 2018-20. This time the sitters were identified, following careful research.

• Craig B Highberger. Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis. Penguin, 2005: 7, 88
• Jonathan Katz. “From Warhol to Mapplethorpe: Postmodernity in two Acts”. In Patricia Hickson (ed). Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls. Yale University Press, 2015: 23-4, 36, 65-7.
• Brian Belovitch. Trans Figured: My Journey from Boy to Girl to Woman to Man. Skyhorse Publishing, 2018: 78. 
• Elizabeth Hoover. “Andy Warhol's Trans Subjects Finally Get Named”. PaperMag, 24 August 2018. Online. 
• Claire Armitstead. “'Andy allowed everyone to be beautiful': Warhol’s unseen drag queens”. The Observer, 8 Mar 2010. Online.

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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.  Online. 
• Jim Beaux.  "International Chrysis".   The Transsexual Erotica Archive of Magazines and Films, 05 August 2013.  

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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.

Bette Bourne (1939 - 2024) performer.

Peter Bourne was born in the east end of London. He studied at the central School of Speech and Drama in the 1960s, and subsequently toured with Ian McKellan doing Shakespeare. He also had small parts in the television series The Prisoner and The Avengers.

He then dropped out and became a Radical Feminist activist during the days of the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s. With a group of similar-minded radical drag queens he set up a squat in a disused film studio in Notting Hill.

When the New York gay cabaret group, Hot Peaches, played London in 1976, Bourne pestered them until he was taken into the troupe, and toured Europe with them. When they returned to New York, Bette, as he now was, was the main founder of Bloolips, the charity-shop drag review that kept going into the 1990s.

With the decline of Bloolips, Bette has found parts in more orthodox theatre. In 1989 he played with Regina Fong in Neil Bartlett’s Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep about 19^th-century artist Simeon Solomon. He was one of the three actors who portrayed La Zambinella in the 1990 theatre version of Balzac's Sarassine, and played a somewhat controversial role as the gay drag queen supporting hetero-sexuality in A Little Bit of Lippy, 1992. In 1999 he played Quentin Crisp in the stage version of Resident Alien, having visited Crisp in his New York apartment. He has also played The Nurse in an all-male production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theatre. He was in the stage version of Mother Clap’s Molly House, which was directed by Mark Ravenhill, who in 2009 put on a version of Bette’s life, A Life in Three Acts, in Edinburgh.

Bette died at the age of 84

• Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984: 96-7, 102-3
• Rupert Smith. 'Straight theatre is all fake' The Guardian. Dec 5, 2005. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1657761,00.html
• Chris Bernard (dir). A Little Bit of Lippy. Scr: Martyn Hesford, with Bette Bourne as Venus Lamour. UK 75 mins 1992.
• Mark Ravenhill. “The fabulous life of Bette Bourne”. The Guardian. 23 August 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/23/bette-bourne-mark-ravenhill. 

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Obviously the term 'Radical Feminist" as it was used in London GLF in the early 1970s has a very different meaning from how it was used by Janice Raymond and her ilk.

Marsha P. Johnson (1944 - 1992) activist, drag mother.

Malcolm Michaels, Jr. grew up in Hoboken and Elizabeth, both in New Jersey. Malcolm would transform to Marsha on the commuter train into New York.


In 1966, Marsha moved to Manhattan for good. She was well-known in New York drag and arts scenes from the 1960s to the 90s. Sometimes she worked as a waitress, but usually she worked the streets. She was known for helping other transvestites and street people, was regarded as a drag mother, and in particular was a mentor to the young Sylvia Rivera. She panhandled and was often on roller skates. She was deeply religious and had visions.

In the early days she was known as Black Marsha, but then dropped the ‘Black’, and became Marsha P. Johnson. The P. as she loved to explain, including on one occasion to a judge, stood for “Pay it no mind”. The judge laughed and let her go.

She participated in the Stonewall riots in 1969, where she was observed dropping a heavy weight onto a police car. She was co-founder with Sylvia of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) and was active in STAR House which attempted to feed the homeless and the street transies.


She was also a performer and a member of Hot Peaches, and did a London tour with them. She never got a female passport, and had to do male drag to go through immigration. She was photographed by Andy Warhol.

By 1979 she acknowledged several attempts on her life by johns, eight nervous breakdowns and innumerable arrests – after one hundred she stopped counting.

Marsha was rightly regarded as generous through the decades, but when Malcolm took over he could be quite nasty, and might even pick a fight with someone who said hello to him.

Marsha was probably murdered: her body was found floating in the Hudson River shortly after the 1992 Pride March, but the police declined to investigate.

Antony Hegarty’s band, Antony and the Johnsons, is named in tribute to Marsha.

• • Bob Kohler. “Rapping with a Street Transvestite Revolutionary: An Interview with Marcia [sic] Johnson” in Karla Jay and Allen Young. Out of the closets: voices of gay liberation. New York, Douglas Book Corp. 1972. New York : Pyramid Books, c1974. New York: Jove Publications, 1977.
  • Martin B Duberman. Stonewall. New York : Dutton, c1993. New York: Plume, xix,330 pp. 1994: 67-8,188,190,191,192, 204,235,237,251-5,259. 
  • Julian Fleisher. The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide. New York: Riverhead Book. 1996: 35-6, 39,59-62. 
  • Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 130-1.
  • David Carter. Stonewall : the riots that sparked the gay revolution. New York : St. Martin's Press 2004. New York: Griffin 2005: 61, 65-6,162,188, 261.
  • Susan Stryker. Transgender History. Seal Press. 190 pp 2008: 86.
  • Amy Coleman. “The legendary Marsha P.Johnson…The Queen Mother”. www.amy-coleman.com/cab.htm#marshap.
  • “Marsha” TransyHouse. www.transyhouse.org/Marsha.htm. 
  • Michael Kasino (dir).   Pay It No Mind: Marsha P. Johnson, with Marsha P. Johnson, David Carter.  US 54 mins 2012.

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