Anderson Toone (1958–) drag king, performer, musician.

Annie Toone ran away at 16 and played drums and harmonica in New York, and then at 19 in San Francisco for blues legend Mike Bloomfield and beat poet Bob Kaufman.

At 21, she moved to New York, and in partnership with Jordy Mark performed the review Sex & Drag & Rock n Role at the 1^st Women's One World (WOW) Festival. They sang as both men and women, switching gender onstage. This led to meetings with Adele Bertei and Kathy Rey and the founding of postpunk group The Bloods, an all-butch cross-dressed band. The Bloods, along with Jayne County and Phranc, were the only out queer acts in New York at that time. Adele and Toone, as men in tuxedos, performed as dancers at CBGBs and other New York clubs. They opened for The Clash, and played with Richard Hell and most of the 1980s New Wave musicians. After a European tour, they played at the 2^nd WOW Festival. In 1982 The Bloods fell apart while in Amsterdam.

Toone formed Idiotsavant with German drummer Leroi Pink who also passed as a man, and they were much featured in the European press for their gender play. The Dutch magazine Homologie ran a comic strip for two years based on Toone in real life. In 1985 Toone moved to London and was in Chain Reaction with Della Disgrace, Sophie Moorcock and Billy Goodfellow. They mainly performed genderfuck for lesbian audiences. Toone was then in the Well-Oiled Sisters. In 1990 Toone was featured in The Observer, and described as a cross-dressing gender bender, trans and a top.

By 1992 Toone was in San Francisco, with a band called The Bucktooth Varmints, and singing dyke-a-billy songs from a passing perspective. In late 1993 Toone and Elvis Herselvis (Leigh Crow) began working together. In 1995 he was featured in a SF Weekly cover story on drag kings, and produced an all-drag Queer Ole Opry. Leigh Crow and Toone were the first drag kings to appear at Wigstock and Trannyshack, and also at the first FTM Conference of the Americas. In 1996 the all-drag musical Hillbillies on the Moon, starring Toone and Leigh Crow, opened in San Francisco, and was featured on the cover of the San Francisco Bay Times.

In 1996 Toone taught himself web coding and created the Toone in Space, and later Madkats, "where drag is king". The Drag King Book, 1998, acknowledged Toone as a founding father, but does not otherwise feature him.

In 2001 he created the trans-art website, and the first version of The Drag King Timeline. He acted as Drag Dad to Carlos & Ken Las Vegas who invited him into the Las Vegas chapter of the Imperial Court. He wrote for and was features editor of Kingdom magazine, where he notably wrote a profile of singer Gladys Bentley, and later an overview of what he dubbed the SF dragcore. In 2002 he gave the keynote address at the International Drag King Extravaganza (IDKE) conference.

In 2003 Toone, after years of contemplation, decided to medically transition. His first name Anderson contains the German 'anders' for different, and is the Swedish form of Andrew which means manly.

In New York in 2004 Anderson performed as the Very Reverend Buck Shot, store-front preacher of the Gospel of Transensual Love. In 2007 he was featured in the film Riot Acts, a documentary about trans music, and presented and performed at the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta.

• Yvonne Roberts. "A whip away from plain old vanilla". The Observer, 5 August 1990.
  
• Amy Linn. "Drag King: Sometimes girls will be boys". SF Weekly, 27 September 1995.
  
• Del Lagrace Volcano & Judith Halberstam. The Drag King Book. London: Serpent's Tail, 1999: 7, 22.
  
• Jacob Anderson Minahull. "Genre Fluid Performer Marches To Own Toone". San Francisco Bay Times, July 12, 2007.
  
• www.andersontoone.com.
  
• Diane Torr & Stephen J. Bottoms. Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender As Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010: 27, 66, 67, 129.
  
• Kate Davy. Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers: Staging the Unimaginable at the WOW Café Theatre. University of Michigan Press, 2011: viii, 17, 18, 27, 35, 52, 61, 66, 67, 71, 178, 185, 187, 204, 210.
  

IMDB   SoundCloud   QueerMusicHeritage
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The IMDB entry for Anderson Toone is dreadfully deficient.  In addition to appearing in Riot Acts, Toone:

• did part of the soundtrack for Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, 1983
• did the soundtrack for Michelle Baughan’s Jake’s Progress, 1987
• with the Well-Oiled Sisters appeared in Channel Four’s Stand on your Man, 1990 (on women in country music)
• The Sisters performed music for and appeared in the BBC comedy Came Out, It Rained, Went Back In Again, also 1990.
• contributed to the soundtrack of Channel Four’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow, 1994 (the 25th anniversary of Stonewall).

Nicole Murray Ramirez (194? - ) sex worker, changeback, LGBT and Latino activist

Ramirez was a Catholic alter boy, and initially wanted to be a priest. But being gay did not become so.

She was a sex worker in Los Angeles under the name Lolita, and then was working towards transgender surgery as Nicole. However she realized that she was not a female trapped in a male body, and became a drag queen instead. While hooking in San Diego she was picked up by a serial killer who had killed hookers and trans women, and was left for dead, and escaped only in that she was on Quaaludes.

Most of her boyfriends were marines who were bottoms. Ramirez changed his legal name to Nicole even though he did not proceed to a gender change.

In 1972 Nicole organized a successful boycott of local bars that refuse to admit trans women.

In 1974 he founded Teddy Roosevelt Republican Club, and his drag persona, the Empress of the Imperial Court de San Diego, rode in San Diego’s first Pride parade in an open vehicle amid jeers from hostile spectators. He was among the few to take the microphone and speak at the rally in the park immediately following. Regarding that day he said:

“It was a scary and lonely march down Broadway … nobody applauded. And most gay people didn’t come out to the sidelines because they were afraid".

In 1977 he was active against Anita Bryant-led Save Our Children which was really an attempt to reverse gay rights to non-discrimination, and in 1978 against the Briggs Initiative in California which would have banned gay and lesbian teachers, and was a friend and co-activist with Harvey Milk before his assassination in 1978.

On July 14 1990 Nicole became Empress de San Diego XIX in the Imperial Court Coronation.

Nicole knew Andrew Cunanan who went on a murder spree in 1997, and is quoted in most accounts of the spree.

In 1993 Nicole was on the national executive and emcee for the April 26 gay and lesbian March on Washington. In 1998 he was co-chair of National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization.

In 2003 Nicole was appointed to San Diego Human Relations Commission. In 2004 Nicole was the Pride Grand Marshall for the 30^th anniversary Pride March. In 2006 he was appointed a City Commissioner.

In 2007 at a Coronation Ball in Seattle, on Feb. 17, José Sarria formally handed leadership of the Imperial Court System over to Nicole, and she assumed the title “Queen Mother of the Americas”.

In 2010 Nicole completed an unprecedented 4^th one-year term as chair of San Diego Human Right Commission. He has also been a national board member of the Harvey Milk Foundation, and has served a four year term on the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

He has a column in the San Diego LGBT Weekly.

• "Nicole Murray Ramirez named LGBT person of the year". San Diego LGBT Weekly, June 20^th, 2011. http://lgbtweekly.com/2011/06/20/nicole-murray-ramirez-named-lgbt-person-of-the-year.
  
• "Local legend celebrates unknown anniversary of birth". San Diego LGBT Weekly, December 5^th 2011. http://lgbtweekly.com/2011/12/05/local-legend-celebrates-unknown-anniversary-of-birth.
  
• LamdaArchive San Diego: Timeline. www.lambdaarchives.us/timelines/lgbt/timeline1970.htm.
  

  IMPERIAL COURT TRANS HEROES.

The Wikipedia article on Nicole says that he was born in 1921, which would make him 91 years old, and also that he was 40+ going on 50 when he was a trans sex worker in Los Angeles. If so he must have a youth elixar to stay so young.

Vicki Marlane (1934 - 2011) performer

After being raised by alcoholic farmers in Minnesota, Vicki started as a dancer in a Minnesota gay bar in 1950. Vicki was then employed by Hedy Jo Star and toured the carnival circuit as a female impersonator. She also worked for a while as an alligator women.

She worked and was arrested as a call-girl in Florida. She toured nightclubs across the US sometimes using the name Mister Peel. Vicki settled in San Francisco and played a variety of clubs.

After surgical completion in the early 1980s she retired temporarily and went to live in San Diego with a friend. When the friend died she returned to San Francisco, where in 1998 she organized a show called Girls Just Wanna Have Fun who performed in the Tenderloin. This later became the The Hot Boxx Girls . She was known as the Lady with the Liquid Spine for her body flexibility while lip syncing.

In 2003 she was a Grand Marshall at San Francisco Pride. She performed at Imperial Court events and in Trannyshack. In 2009 she was named Best Drag Queen by SF Weekly, and a documentary, Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, was made about her life and performance.

She died at age 76.

++In 2014 San Francisco renamed the 100 block of Turk Street after her.

• Michelle Lawler (dir). Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight. With Vicki Marlane. US 54 mins 2009.
• Malia Wollan. “Kicking Back and Kicking Off the Heels”. New York Times, November 29, 2009. www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/us/29sfroutines.html.
• Jay Barmann. “Local Legend and Pioneering Transgendered Performer Vicki Marlane Dies at 76”. SFist, July 5, 2011. http://sfist.com/2011/07/05/local_legend_vicki_marlane_die.php.
• “Vicki Marlane, 1934-2011”. San Francisco Bay Guardian, 07.05.11. www.sfbg.com/noise/2011/07/05/vicki-marlane-1934-2011.

Allyson Allante (1955 - ) performer.

Raised in Long Beach, Long Island, New York, Allyson Anderson was 14 when she was at the Stonewall Tavern on June 27, 1969, and apprehended on the first night of the riots.


She took her name from two Lana Turner films: the daughter Allison in Peyton Place, 1957, and Holly Anderson in Madame X, 1966. She became Mrs Allante by marriage. She has been married to men three times.

In more recent years she has been active in the Stonewall Veterans Association, and has been elected Queen and president of the Imperial Queens and Kings of New York.

She was the only real Stonewall transgender person to appear in the 1996 Stonewall film.

In 1997 she was the only trans person to speak before the New York City Council on Domestic Partnership Law.

• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 92-3.
• Jean Marie Stein. “From Stonewall the Rebellion to Stonewall the Movie & All Parts in Between”. Transgender Tapestry. Summer 1997. Online at www.stonewallvets.org/QueenAllyson.htm

StonewallVeterans

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She is not mentioned in either Martin Duberman’s nor David Carter’s book on Stonewall.

José Sarria (1922 - 2013) caterer, drag performer, activist.

José was born in San Francisco, the child of unmarried Columbian and Nicaraguan immigrants. He was raised by his mother and then by his godmother for whom his mother worked as a live-in domestic. They combined their households and moved to Redwood City during the Depression of the 1930s.

They both indulged his fondness for dressing in their clothes, and encouraged his singing. He took lessons from a retired opera singer. In addition to English and his native Spanish, he also learned French and German.

His first lover was Paul Kolish, an Austrian refugee whom he tutored.


Sarria enlisted in the US Army during World War II, despite his short height, by seducing the major at the recruiting station. He was assigned to the Signals Corps. He was rejected for Intelligence for unstated reasons (probably for being fey), and was trained as a cook. He became a major’s orderly, and after the occupation of Berlin he managed an officers’ mess hall. He was discharged at the rank of Staff Sergeant.

Back in San Francisco Kolish was killed by a drunken driver on Christmas Day 1947. José enrolled in teacher training, but after being arrested for solicitation in a police sting in a hotel, he was now ineligible for certification as a teacher.

He found a lover, Jimmy Moore, who worked as a waiter and greeter at The Black Cat Bar, in San Francisco’s North Beach. José subbed for his lover at the bar. From there he started singing, moved onto the stage, and performed camp versions of operatic arias in drag. He continued performing until the bar closed in 1963. He would close the evening with a singing of “God save us Nelly Queens”.

In the 1950s, when cross-dressing was still illegal he distributed badges stating “I am a boy”, so that fellow drag queens could not be accused of “intent to deceive”. The police regularly raided gay bars and charged everyone found inside. José urged that they plead not guilty which overloaded the courts and judges started demanding actual evidence.

In 1961 he ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, winning nearly 6,000 votes. This makes him the first openly transgender, and the first openly gay person to run for public office. His campaign helped later gay campaigns, in particular that of Harvey Milk.

He was a co-founder of the League for Civil Education (LCE) which provided educational programs and support for those caught in police raids; of the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) which organized both social and political events; and of the Tavern Guild, the first gay business association which helped co-ordinate bar owners against police harassment.

José was crowned Queen of the Beaux Arts Ball in 1964, and took the name the Widow Norton (a reference to Joshua Norton, the self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States in San Francisco,1859). This led to the founding of the Imperial Court System which now has chapters across North America and puts on balls and raises money for charity.

Also in 1964 José went into partnership with restaurateur Pierre Parker who held the French food concession for the World’s Fairs. They worked the fairs in New York, 1964, Montreal, 1967, San Antonio, 1968, and Spokane 1974. Then they both retired to Phoenix, Arizona.

José returned to San Francisco in 1977 to endorse Harvey Milk running for the Board of Supervisors.

Mama José and other of the Court appear in the opening of the 1995 film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
 
Sarria's lifetime of activism was commemorated when the city of San Francisco renamed a section of 16th Street in the Castro "José Sarria Court".

He died at age 90.

• Randy Schilts. The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. New York: St Martin’s Press. Xvii, 388 pp 1982. London: Penguin 1993: 51-7.
• “Interview with Jose Sarria, A.K.A. the Widow Norton, the first Empress of San Francisco and founder of the Imperial Court System”. Seattle Gay News, 2/21/92.
• José Sarria as told to Michael Robert Gorman. The Empress Is a Man: Stories from the Life of José Sarria. New York: Haworth Press. xvi, 278 pp 1998.
• José Sarria. “Oral History” in Nan Alamilla Boyd. Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. University of California Press 2005: 20-4, 57-62, 210-12, 220-2.
•  Christine Sismondo.  "The Queen of San Francisco:The first openly gay U.S. political candidate works to save a slice of gay history".  The Atlantic, November 2011.  www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/the-queen-of-san-francisco/308660.
• “Empress I Jose”. International Court System. www.impcourt.org/icis/who/founder.html. 

EN.WIKIPEDIA   QUEER MUSIC HERITAGE  IMDB  OUTHISTORY   GLBTQ   IMPERIAL COURT TRANS HEROES

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It seems to me that José Sarria parallells Virginia Prince. They were both active in the 1960s, one in each of the two major California cities, they were both persecuted by the prudish legal system, they both founded a system of social groups for transgender expression, neither became post-operative, both groups came to be seen as slightly embarrassing by more out transgenders of later generations. Both are still living.

Both Susan Stryker's Transgender History and Joanne Meyerowitz' How Sex Changed talk about Virginia Prince and are totally silent about José Sarria. Why is this? Is José Sarria not transgender enough? Are we discriminating on such a basis?

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A US company had a concession for French food at the World's Fairs! I wonder what the real French though about that. For some reason, all the World's Fairs 1964-74 were held in only two countries: the US and Canada.

Michelle DuBarry (1931 - ) performer.

Russel Alldread was born in Bowmanville, Ontario. His boy soprano won him first prize at the 1939 Port Hope Music Festival, singing “Cobbler, Cobbler Mend My Shoe”.

He did his first drag on his uncle’s farm at age 9. His high school years were filled with operettas and stage shows. With a friend he attended a school dance in drag.

His first job was at General Motors. His first relationship which lasted three years was with Stanley St John, the Toronto orchestra leader. He left to marry a woman, and for a job as a ladies shoe salesman. They married in 1957, Russel gave away all his femme stuff, and his drag mentor, Murray Burbidge made the bride’s gown. The wife left him for another man.

From the early 1960s drag shows were being put on in Toronto coffee houses.  Murray Burbidge was one of the first to perform in full drag, and made Russel his first dress. Russel’s first stage name was Anita Modé. By 1969, he formed a touring group, Phase One, with Lonny Roberts and Jamie Durette. They renamed her Michelle (to be orally gender neutral) and DuBarry (from the 1943 film, Du Barry Was a Lady).


Roberts and Durette moved to Vancouver, and DuBarry formed a new troupe with Rusty Ryan and Tammy Autumn as The Great Impostors, which toured Canada in the 1970s and 1980s.

Michelle is an active member of the Trillium Monarchist Society: in 1992, she was crowned Empress VI of Toronto. She had a cameo in the film Fluff, 2003, and was Grand Marshall at Toronto’s Pride Parade 2007.

In 2015, Michelle was proclaimed the Oldest Performing Drag Queen by the Guinness Book of Records.

• Christopher Richards. “Michelle DuBarry Drag Legend / Was, and is, a lady”. Xtra. Nov 29 2001. http://archives.xtra.ca/Story.aspx?s=1446971. 
• Verity Stevenson.  "Toronto’s oldest drag queen takes world record".  The Star, Nov 29 2015.  www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/11/29/torontos-oldest-drag-queen-takes-world-record.html.
  

www.michelledubarry.com

James Herndon (1889 – 1983) orderly.

As a child James was taken to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky for an eye injury and left there.

He became friendly with the hospital superintendent, who provided a room. He began by delivering the hospital mail, and playing his ukulele for the patients. In his teens he learned the profession of orderly, and worked at the hospital as an orderly for the next 40 years. He was regarded as the best orderly at the hospital and trained new orderlies.

He eventually moved to a home in the black neighborhood close to the university, which he filled with antiques. Given that all of his working life was under segregation, he had a relatively good income for an African-American. He did various shades of drag, using the names ‘Sweet Evening Breeze’ and ‘Miss Sweets’, and was rumored to be a ‘hermaphrodite’. Sometimes his dress was a mix of male and female.


He frequented the local tearooms, and his home was a gay meeting place. He was one of the few older black gays to socialize in the white gay bar scene. His triumph was a drag show at the Woodland Auditorium where he was lowered from the ceiling in a basket and danced the ‘Passion Dance of the Bongo Bangoes’.

Around 1960 he and a teenaged drag, Leigh Angelique, were arrested for wearing makeup. They performed a mini-drag show for the guards, who tipped them, and spoke to the judge on their behalf. Sweets spoke up against the discrimination that women could wear make-up but men could not, and the case was dismissed.

He was active in the Pleasant Green Baptist Church and left it a bequest in his will. The Imperial Court of Kentucky named its highest award the James Herndon Award, and the Lexington Men’s Chorus named its singing ensemble Sweet Evening Breeze in his honor. He appears as a character in Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree, 1979.

*Not the California teacher and writer, nor the media psychologist, nor the gospel singer.

• Jeff Jones. “Sweet Evening Breeze”. Gay Kentucky. Nov 14, 1997. www.geocities.com/unusualkentucky/herndon.html.
• Jeffery Alan Jones. “James Herndon of Kentucky: An Uncommon Life” in Blacklines, Chicago: Lambda Publications, Spring 1997.

Stormé DeLarverié (1920 - 2014) singer, gender impersonator.

++Updated May 2014, June 2017.

K. Stormé DeLarverié was born in New Orleans.

She was a jazz singer as Stormy Dale in the '40s, and the sole male impersonator in the Jewel Box

from Avery Willard - Female impersonation

Revue 1955-1969. After starting with the show he began to dress in men's clothing offstage also. However he pointed out that his voice and movements as a male impersonator were the same as when she was a big band singer in the 40s. He also makes a point of not being bothered about whether people address her as 'Sir' or 'Madame'.

He was photographed by Diane Arbus.

Stormé was present at the Stonewall riot, where he hit back at a cop who hit him at the start.  Shortly afterwards his wife dies, and he quit at the Jewel Box Revue.

He was recognized as a transgender actor. In his 80s he worked as a bouncer at a Manhattan lesbian bar.  He lived for many decades in the Chelsea Hotel in lower Manhattan. 

SAGE Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 (given to recognize the accomplishments of LGBT seniors). Vice-president of the Stonewall Veterans' Association 1998 -2000. In the Imperial Queens & Kings of Greater New York, Stormé has won election many times the title of "Imperial King".


Stormé is ignored in Martin Duberman’s Stonewall, and on the Stonewall Wiki page and in the 1995 film.  Stormé is also ignored in the otherwise comprehensive Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen. 1992 by Linda Dahl.

James Lough p 164

In later years  Stormé developed mental health problems.  In 2009 the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged was appointed his legal guardian, and he was hospitalized as a woman.  He was then almost always indoors until friends and gay and lesbian activists arranged with JASA to take him out now and then.

He died at age 93.  

• AveryWillard. Female Impersonation. Regiment, 1971: 59-64.
• Michelle Parkerson (dir). Stormé: Lady of the Jewel Box. US 21 mins 1987.
• Elizabeth Drorbaugh. “Sliding Scales: Notes on Stormé DeLarverie and the Jewel Box Revue, the cross-dressed woman on the contemporary stage, and the invert”. In Lesley Feris (ed). Crossing the stage : controversies on cross-dressing. London & New York: Routledge. 1993.
• Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 153. 
• Patricia Bosworth. Diane Arbus: A Biography. W.W. Norton, 2005: 162-3..
• Manny Fernandez.  "A Stonewall Veteran, 89, Misses the Parade". The New York Times, June 27, 2010.   Online.
• James Lough. This Ain't No Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel, 1980-1995 : an Oral History. 2013:164.
• Lynn de la Cruz.  "Stonewall Veteran, Drag King Icon Stormé DeLarverie Dies At 93".   Advocate, May 27 2014.   Online.

StonewallVeterans