Latina Seville (1940 - ) performer

The boy who later grew up to be Latina Seville was pretty and grew neither body nor facial hair, and because of this was called ‘fruit’ or ‘queer’ at school, often by the same bullies who made passes when they were alone. 

Age 16 having dropped out of school and gone to New York, she became Latina Seville, found work as a female impersonator, and lived fulltime as female. She was recruited by the Jewel Box Revue, and with them travelled across the USA. As also happened at Le Carrousel in Paris, conversation among the Jewel Box performers often drifted to discussions about sex changes, especially with Dr Borou in Casablanca. 

She often felt lonely and had difficulties relating to men, and thought that it would be easier as a completed woman. She wrote to Dr Burou giving a complete medical history. He accepted her and gave her a date in July 1963 – she was then 22. She saved up, got a passport and went. 

The bill was $2,500. She was told no sex for six months after the operation. She recuperated at her mother’s, and practiced Flamenco dancing. Under the impression that being post-op she could no longer work as a female impersonator, she became a stripper with a Flamenco opening. This went well and her salary doubled and then tripled. But she could not handle the men who were pushy about making passes. 

After six months she had a close male friend make love to her, but experienced no pleasure. She thought that perhaps she still thought like a man, and started seeing psychiatrists who advised that she adjust to herself.

At age 25 she wrote an account of herself for the National Insider, saying that she wanted to be a man again. As they often did, the National Insider recycled her article in a book later that year as a supplement to Abby Sinclair’s autobiography and an essay by Carlson Wade mainly about eunuchs and castratos.

She was not heard of again.

• Latina Seville. “I Want to be a Man Again”. The National Insider, 6,7, Feb 14 & 6,8 Feb 21, 1965.
• Latina Seville “I Want to be Male Again” in Abby Sinclair, George Griffith, Carlson Wade & Latina Seville. I Was Male. Novel Books. 95 pp 1965.
• Liam Oliver Lair. Disciplining Diagnoses: Sexology, Eugenics, and Trans* Subjectivities. PhD thesis, University of Kansas, 2016 : 147n95.

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Remember this is 1963-5.   The amount of information available to prospective trans women was miniscule compared to what we have today.  Obviously she did need advice from someone who had already transitioned.   She also needed advice from women (cis or trans) on how to handle pushy men.  

Do women think differently than men do?  She writes: "Maybe this is because I still think like a man.  I know what they are thinking, I know what they want from me.  Many guys have asked me how I got so hip, how I know just what they're going to say before they say it."  This is learned anticipation.  There are many cis women who can do it - especially prostitutes, but not only prostitutes.

If you are not the party type, or not good at socializing, and end up feeling lonely, a gender change will not change that.

$2,500 in 1963 is almost $25,000 today.

Pre-Stonewall Trans peer-support groups

Outside of Europe and the Americas peer-supporting trans groups have thrived for millennia, the Hijra in India and the Kathaoy in Thailand being the best known. Many of the First Nations across the Americas had two-spirit roles with community support, but were repressed by European colonialism. The major trans community in the Roman Empire was the Cybele worshipping gallae, but they were repressed in the 4th century with the Christianisation of the Empire.

This account is of the recovery of trans communities in Europe and North America.

Peer-support groups as we know them do not appear until after WWII, but earlier trans persons sought out each other at clubs and balls and in select publications, and also found each other in unexpected places like POW camps. The major Female Impersonation nightclubs are also listed here, even where cross-dressed customers were discouraged, in that there was often back-stage peer support and information exchange for the performers re clothing and makeup, and later hormones and surgeries.

See also Three Centuries of Police raids.

1709 onwards Molly Houses

A new development in the early 18th century was that of houses where queers, some of them transvesting, sought their own kind. Their dressing was distinctly different from the cis cross-dressing found in the masquerade balls, and their gender-role sexual activities were very different from the heteronormative sodomy that had been common until that time. 

1860s Fanny and Stella

Fanny and Stella were the best known of a circle of trans women who frequented fashionable places in and around London, until Fanny and Stella were charged with 'conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence'. Sodomy was not proved, and their acquittal established that transvesting was not a crime in England. GVWW

1897 - 1917 Storyville, New Orleans

The District, a 38-block area, was designated as the part of the city in which prostitution would be tolerated. This had been proposed by Alderman Sidney Story and the area became known as Storyville. Miss Big Nelly was the Madam of a gay brothel. The Frenchman’s was a small jazz club which was popular with trans women. The District played an important part in the evolution of early jazz, and was an area where queer persons were more comfortable.

1914 - 1918 Prisoner-of-war camps

All-male POW camps had theatricals and needed persons to play female roles - some of whom stayed in role off-stage. A major example was the German officer Emmerich Laschitz held in the Siberian camp of Achinsk until 1920.

1919 - 1933 Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Berlin

In addition to Magnus Hirschfeld’s general support for trans persons, some also lived at the Institut, of whom the best known are Dörchen Richter, Toni Ebel and Charlotte Charlaque.

1920s Club D’Eon in Berlin

A transvestite social club. Hirschfeld’s associate Felix Abraham was on the committee.

1922 - 1923 Eldorado, Berlin

Three dance halls opened sequentially and run by Ludwig Konjetschni, where trans persons were welcome. GVWW.

1923 - 1941 London Life

The major British publication between the wars that paid attention to cross-dressing and similar topics and printed readers’ letters on such. Google Books.

1923 - 1938 the Faggots’ Ball or the Dance of the Fairies at the Hamilton Lodge, Manhattan.

This became the most popular gay event in town, attended by both black and white queers, and also artists and writers. About 800 attended in 1925 and fifteen hundred in 1926. Growing numbers of spectators attended not to dance but just to gawk, particularly at those in dresses. Three thousand spectators in 1929 watched two thousand dancers, and in the next few years a total of up to seven thousand spectators and dancers attended. GVWW.

1926 DamenKlub Violetta, Berlin

Run by female transvestite Lotte Hahm.

1929 Transvestitenvereinigung D`Eon, Berlin

Founded by Lotte Hahm for both male and female transvestites. This was so successful that a few weeks later they had to find a larger meeting place. Later the Association had its own dance events at Violetta. Its events were reported in Die Freundin.

1930s - The Lady Austin Balls, London

Mainly “Hotel Staff Dances” in private ballrooms attended by domestic servants and hotel staff, mainly men, but many cross-dressed. In 1932 it was raided and 33 men and 1 woman were arrested. GVWW,

1933 - 1940 La Paloma Club, outside Miami

A club of which it was said that the clientele included “homosexuals in evening gowns, trousered lesbians, and prostitutes”. It acquired nationwide fame in1937 when it was raided by the Ku Klux Klan. It was finally closed on charges of under-age heterosexuality. GVWW.

1933 - 1999 Finocchio’s, San Francisco

The most glamorous of the US Female Impersonation clubs, popular with celebrities and with tourists. It ran for 66 years, and most professional drag artists appeared there. GVWW.

1935 - 1950s. The Finnie Balls, Chicago

Following the raid on the Cabin Inn, Alfred Finnie organized a small extra ball on the South Side at 25¢ to get in, mainly attended by blacks. Each year it grew, and by the 1950s Finnie’s Balls attracted thousands both gay and straight, black and white, and was featured in Jet and Ebony magazines. Apart from the balls, Alfred worked as a club doorman and street hustler. He was killed in a gambling brawl in 1943, but the balls continued in his name. GVWW.

1939 - 1945 WWII Prisoner-of-war camps

As in WWI, all-male POW camps had theatricals and needed persons to play female roles - some of whom stayed in role off-stage. A major example was Bobbie Spong in Changai camp, Singapore.

1939-1972 The Jewel Box Revue, touring US

The Revue toured for 30 years, was racially integrated and was the best known drag show of its kind in the US. GVWW.

Mid 1940s - 1975 The Phil Black Funmaker Balls, Manhattan

The precursor of the later Voguing balls. GVWW.

1944 - mid 1950s Soldiers-in-Skirts Revues, England touring

About the only option in England at the time where assigned males could wear female clothes outside their homes. You had to have some inclination, if not actual talent, towards singing and dancing, although you did not have to have actually served in the forces. The first such show was actually a US import, Irving Berlins' This is the Army, which played the London Palladium for four nights in 1944. The initial idea had been to put men into dresses to make them look dreadful, but that soon started to change because the audience liked the prettiest ones best - which much suited the performers.  GVWW.

1947 - 1985 Le Carousel and Madame Arthur, Paris

Two clubs owned by Marcel Ouizman. While originally the performers had been the type who changed to male clothing before leaving, increasingly they were replaced by trans women who lived as women full time, took hormones and went to Casablanca for surgery. They were a community that shared advice and support, and exchanged addresses of doctors and electrolysists. Hormones were available in pharmacies without a prescription at that time. They also toured five continents, bringing an inconceivable example to countries where transgender surgery was not at all available.

1946 - 1956 The Garden of Allah, Seattle. 1946-1956

Seattle's most popular gay cabaret and one of the first gay-owned gay bars in the US. Local talent was encouraged. Unlike Finocchio’s in San Francisco, local queers were encouraged to attend, and amateur night contestants were often encouraged to become performers. GVWW.

1945 - 1981 Marie Schwidenhammer, Paris

After release from a German concentration camp and a forced resignation from the French Army, Schwidenhammer started living as female. She obtained diplomas in para-medical specialities and practiced as a masseuse therapist nurse, mainly in Paris. She was in contact with most French transsexuals and transvestites. It was she who happened to meet La Carousel star Coccinelle by chance on a train, and informed her of hormones, and of the possibility of transition. GVWW.

1944 - 1978 Louise Lawrence, San Francisco

The mother of trans organizing in the US. She networked with the performers at Finocchio’s, the homophile Mattachine Society, and educated professionals Karl Bowman, Alfred Kinsey and Harry Benjamin, and put trans women in touch with each other. GVWW.

1949 -1972 Club My-O-My, New Orleans

A performance venue in the West End of the city on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. This was far enough out to avoid city rules and police harassment. For several decades it was a popular tourist stop. In 1972 the building was destroyed in a fire.  White performers and audience only. 

1945 -1969 the Dew Drop Inn, New Orleans

Renowned for music, drag and cross-dressing by performers, bar staff and customers. Patsy Vidalia hosted the Gay Halloween Ball each year. Unlike Club My-O-My not racially segregated.

1946 - 1973 Justice Weekly

A Toronto Tabloid that was published weekly with accounts of international criminal trials, but also accounts of and letters from readers re homosexuality, cross-dressing and fetishism.

195? - 1963 Chevalier D’Eon Resort, NY State

A country home in the Catskills, owned by Susanna Valenti and her wife Marie. It was an isolated 150 acres with a main house, a barn and several snug but unheated bungalows. For $25 ($200 in 2022 money) a weekend visitor from the city got food and board and lessons in passing as female. Of particular note is the gathering there of 71 transvestites at Halloween 1962 dominated by Virginia Prince. GVWW.

1958 - 2008 Chez Nous, Berlin

A nightclub at Marburger Straße 14 in Charlottenburg, the oldest surviving Travestietheater in West Germany. It was featured in the Michael Caine/Harry Palmer espionage film Funeral in Berlin, 1966. GVWW.

1959 - 1967 National Pageants, 1959, US touring

Jack Doroshow/Flawless Sabrina, drag performer and organizer of pageants. Through his company, The Nationals Academy, Jack organized 46 pageants a year from 1959-1967. As local laws almost always prohibited cross-dressing, he would meet with officials and propose a charitable donation, and in return the town would pass a variance to permit the pageant. Usually the town officials did not understand that local people would be performing. The 1967 finals held in New York was a much bigger affair. The Muscular Dystrophy Association was announced as the charity, and Lady Bird Johnson, the President’s wife, and Robert Kennedy as co-sponsors, but they quickly dropped out as the nature of the event became clearer. The event was filmed as The Queen, 1968, which was a sensation at the Cannes International Film Festival. GVWW.

1959 - 1986 Transvestia Newsletter

Published by Virginia Prince and sold by subscription and later in adult book stores. It would become influential in introducing heterosexual transvestites to each other.

1960 Hose and Heels Club, Los Angeles

The first group organized by Virginia Prince.

1962 Full Personality Expression (FPR), Los Angeles and then nation wide.

Virginia Prince attempted to organize Transvestia's readership into a nationwide group. FP (from FemmePersonator) also stood for Full Personality. What was needed was Full Personality Expression (FPE). That was Hellenized into Phi Pi Epsilon in the fashion of university sororities. The Hose and Heel Club became the Alpha Chapter. Homosexuals, transsexuals and fetishists were not admitted. Soon afterward there were three other FPE chapters: Beta in Chicago, Delta in Cleveland, and Theta in Madison, Wisconsin. GVWW.

1960s Stella Minge was running the last Molly House in Silvertown, London.

A queen herself, she often encouraged younger queens. GVWW.

1964 - 1969 Casa Susanna, NY State

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. GVWW.

1964 - 1977 Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF)

Reed Erickson, trans man, scion of wealth, philanthropist, founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), financed entirely by himself. He employed Zelda Suplee to run the EEF. She met with transsexuals and others who asked for help, and Erickson made the final decision whom to donate to. The EEF financed gay and trans organizations, and research into New Age activities such as acupuncture, homeopathy, dolphin communication and altered states of consciousness. The EEF published booklets on various aspects of transsexuality, sponsored addresses to various professionals, and sponsored two of John Money’s books, and three of Vern Bullough’s. It donated money to the Harry Benjamin Foundation, until Erickson fell out with Benjamin in 1968. It subsidized the transsexuality program at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic. It sponsored three symposia that grew into the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA).         GVWW.

1965 l'Aide aux Malades Hormonaux (Amaho), Paris

Marie Schwidenhammer managed to register under the French law re voluntary associations.

1965 Dewey’s Coffee Shop, Philadelphia

Dewey's was a Philadelphia chain restaurant. The Dewey's at 208 S 13th St was the 'fag' branch where drags queens, hustlers, lesbian and cops ate and drank side by side. The other branches, especially the 17th St branch wanted it that only the 13th St branch be so. They started refusing service to known homosexuals and "persons wearing non-conformist clothing". 150 protesters staged a sit-in and the police were called. 3 protesters were arrested. At a second sit-in a week later the police declined to take any action, and the management agreed to end discrimination.

1965 onwards. Beaumont Society, England

Alice Purnell, Alga Campbell from Dublin, Giselle, a US expatriate, and Sylvia Carter, met in 1965 and agreed to found the Beaumont Society which was initially much the same as Prince’s FPE.

1966 Compton’s Cafeteria, San Francisco

This branch of Compton's was one of few places in the city where trans persons could go. However the staff started calling the police to arrest trans persons. By August a picket was launched. One night friction exploded into riot, dishes were smashed and the windows were smashed. The next night was a repeat.

1967 Change: Our Goal

A peer-support group in San Francisco. However it lasted only a year or so.

1968-1973 National Transsexual Counseling Unit

A peer-run counseling service established in San Francisco. Funded by EEF.

--------------------

Of course, after Stonewall, many peer support groups were founded. 

Abby Sinclair (1938 - ) performer

Sinclair was raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn. By age 14 Sinclair was starting to be perceived as gender variant, and at age 17 left home and found work as a female impersonator at the Circus Bar in Miami.  

However the club closed after two years, and Sinclair returned home, and found a sympathetic doctor who found female hormones in a blood sample.  Sinclair was then drafted, and explained the circumstances to the medical officer.  

“I was told I would get a discharge, not because I wasn’t physically fit to serve, but for psychological reasons.  I Waited four months to be processed out and then suddenly I learned that my company was being sent to Trieste.”  

An officer in Trieste was sympathetic and arranged for Sinclair to serve as a hospital orderly.

After discharge Sinclair rented an apartment in Manhattan, and found work as a female impersonator in clubs on Long Island and in the Catskills, sometimes with the Jewel Box Revue.  This was supplemented by work as a photographer’s model, usually in furs – this paid up to $70 an hour. She was by now taking female hormones, and having electrolysis to remove facial hair, and she had been told of the outstanding work of Dr Burou in Casablanca.

They corresponded, and then Abby with a female friend for support travelled to Casablanca.  The operation cost $5,000. A few weeks later, they were in Paris. Abby even had a brief fling with a count who took her to the Riviera.

Back in Manhattan, Abby became a stripper – one known to be transsexual.  In Summer 1965 Female Mimics magazine ran a photo-spread on her and announced that she was to wed a New York Lawyer.

• Watson Crews. “Sex Change Breaks Up Old Gang of His (Hers)”. New York Sunday News, 43, 47, March 22, 1964: 1-3,26.  Online.
• “MD’s Knife Changed my Sex”.  The National Insider, 5, 14, Oct 18, 1964.
• Abby Sinclair, George Griffith, Carlson Wade & Latina Seville. I Was Male. Novel Books. 95 pp 1965.
• “Abby Sinclair .. Ex-GI now a Bride-to-be”.  Female Mimics, 1, 6, August 1965: 54-63”. Online.
• “Dear Abby: A Change is Gonna Come”.  Pulp International, Oct 18 2011. Online. 
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard University Press, 2002: 199-201.

-------

$70 in 1963 is equivalent to $580 now.

$5000.00 is equivalent to $42,000 now.

Jackie Starr (1912 – 1986) performer

Jack Starr grew up on a farm in the US Midwest. His parents encouraged his desire to be an actor, and he studied voice, acting and classical ballet. His elder sister was dressing him in female clothing from age five.

By the age of 14 he was doing drag in mob-controlled speakeasies in Chicago: both solo and in the line of chorines. He played the drag circuit in the 1930s, and did a tour of South America, and of Europe. Jackie met a Prince who wanted to take her home.

“I was tempted but I’m glad I didn’t because he was killed in a coup and I’d have been killed too.”

In Washington DC Jackie went out with senators. Later she moved to Greenwich Village, and tried acting and singing. She also did ballet, both as male and as female. She was one of only a few men in the US who could dance en pointe. She was a fill-in for the noted stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, and she also danced as a Rockette at the Radio City Music Hall (and was also married briefly to another Rockette).

In the late 1930s, Starr was one of the first artists to join the Jewel Box Review. Starr was one of only a few Jewel Box Revue artists to be dating a woman. He married a second woman, and they had a child.

Starr was in the merchant marine during WWII.

Jackie on the cover 

When the Garden of Allah in Seattle opened in late 1946, Starr was quickly signed up as the headliner. By this time Starr was in her mid-30s, and was regarded as past her peak, although she gave class to the show. She stayed for the full ten years of the club’s existence. She could make a striptease last twenty minutes, finishing in a g-string. Walter Winchel, the syndicated columnist called Jackie "the most beautiful man in America".

Bill Scott and his wife, known as Sister Faye, were street preachers, although most donations to their mission went to Faye’s heroin habit. Bill was devastated when she left town without him (she later died in a car accident, while high). Bill was both bisexual and homophobic, and also worked as a trucker.

He was in recoil from a sex-only affair with a gay man, when he found himself in the Garden of Allah and Jackie was on stage. They married. They had a formal wedding and reception, in the home of a friend who played the part of a minister. Performer Skippy LaRue was the maid of honor and a lesbian the best man. They partied till 9am, and afterwards the couple had a big fight.

However the marriage persisted. Jackie, as the woman, ran their daily affairs and the apartment, however sexually she was the top.

Jackie & Bill's wedding

Later Scott also married a woman who was supposed to inherit, with the idea of spending the money on Jackie. The inheritance never happened, and the second wife died. Scott moved back in with Jackie, and they ran a restaurant together.

Towards the end Scott had to have both legs amputated, and Jackie took care of him till he died in the late 1960s.

Jackie lived the last ten years of her life in a mobile home near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. She was as meticulous as ever in her appearance, and when she and her friends went to the Golden Crown drag bar in Seattle, the younger generation of drag performers would crowd around.

She died age 74.

• Don Paulson & and Roger Simpson. An Evening at the Garden of Allah: A Gay Cabaret in Seattle. Columbia University Press, 1996: 151-163.
• Mara Dauphin. “ ‘A Bit of Woman in Every Man’: Creating Queer Community in Female Impersonation”. Valley Humanities Review, Spring 2012. PDF.

_________________

Jackie Starr was a pre-eminent female impersonator 1930s-1950s, and yet there is - until now - no web page for her.  Queer Musical Heritage has a page but it only reproduces a few show bills; Lawrence Senelick's The Changing Room says not a word about her; likewise F Michael Moore's Drag! Male and Female Impersonators on Stage, Screen and Television.  

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.

________________________________

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.

Chris Moore (1920 - 1975) sailor, performer

Chris, originally from California, was four and a half years in the US Army, and then was a merchant seaman. He lived a year in east Asia. He then settled in New York.

In the mid 1960s, he took up female impersonation, and appeared with Frank Bennet in the Follies Mantisque. This led to work with the Jewel Box Revue, at first doing a comedy strip. However it was discovered that he could impersonate Ethel Merman rather well, and started singing songs from Gypsy. He then added Marlene Dietriche and Bette Davis to his repertoire. He used a special heavy makeup to hide the tattoo on his upper arm. He was also partially blind and required thick glasses.

He met Lee Brewster and Vicky West in the Mattachine Society, and left with them to found the Queens Liberation Front. In 1971 Chris won the Most Outstanding Performance at the April in Paris Ball, and again at Lee's Mardi Gras Ball.

Chris was a constant at QLF parties, but after a few years she was diagnosed with cancer. She was able to fight it for over five years. Lee Brewster put on a special ball for Chris so that she could perform and be the star, and Vicky drew her for the cover of Drag magazine.

• Avery Willard. Female Impersonation. New York: Regiment Publications, 1971: 26-9. Online
  
• “Six Foot Chris Moore”. Female Impersonators, 2, Summer 1969: 18-21. Online
  
• Cover. Drag, 3,11, 1973. Online
  
• “Chris Moore Revue”. In Lee G Brewster's Mardi Gras Ball, 1974: 4-7. Online
  
• Veronica Vera interviews Bebe Scarpe about the late Vicky West. “Forever Mardi Gras”. Transgender Tapestry, 111, Winter 2006/7: 32-43. Online
  
• “The Kurt Mann Story”. Queer Music Heritage. http://www.queermusicheritage.com/fem-mann1.html.
• "The Glamorous Chris Moore Dead at 55".  Drag, 5, 19, 1975. Online. 

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!

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.

Harvey Goodwin (1912 – 1992) performer

Harvey Wilson Goodman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He suffered from tuberculosis from an early age. He was interested in theatre and his father made a makeshift stage for him out of canvas and drapery.

After he graduated from high school in 1930, he quickly made his way to Washington, DC where he was employed as a clerk in the Bureau of Public Health. He also studied music and dance, and built up a female wardrobe. He first appeared as a female impersonator at a dance recital in 1933.

The City Slicker, 1936

He resigned from the Bureau of Public Health in 1934 when he was hired by Club Richmond in New York City, where he adopted the stage name of Harvey Lee. Lee played the part of a female performer in a Warner Bros-Vitaphone movie, The City Slicker. He was billed as the male Jean Harlow.

However in 1936 he was rushed to hospital with a 104-degree fever and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was in a sanatorium until 1941. Harvey then returned to Arkansas and worked as a clerk at an army base.

Word got out about his show-biz experience and he was coaxed to perform, which his drag persona did in 1942 at the Arkansas Ordnance Plant to a capacity crowd of 5000 with two full orchestras. He did three more victory balls.  In 1943 he moved to San Francisco and became a performer at Finocchio's night club. In 1945 Harvey acquired a white borzoi (Russian wolfhound) whom he then featured in his act. He toured with the Jewel Box Revue, performed at the My-O-My club in New Orleans and the Moroccan Village in New York, and won first prize for female

impersonation at the 1952 Mummers Parade in Philadelphia.

In 1952 he had another bout of tuberculosis. Until 1957 he worked in clerical positions in New York. Harvey Lee performed on stage in France and Germany, but he returned to clerical work again the next year. In 1964 Lee returned to Finocchio's to be the MC, and then worked sporadically in California. He retired in 1984.

After the 1989 San Francisco earthquake Goodwin returned to Little Rock, where he was honored as a judge of the Miss Gay Arkansas Pageants.

He died at age 81.

• Vincent Astor. “The Incomparable Mr. Harvey Lee.” The Triangle Journal, July 1992: 20.
  
• "Biographical Note". Harvey Goodwin Collection, 1913–1992. Center for Arkansas History and Culture. University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Little Rock, Arkansas. www.ark-cat.com/browse/fulldetail.aspx?id=1636.
  
• Brock Thompson,. The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2010: 35-8, 61-2
  
• Kaye M. Lundgren. "Harvey Wilson Goodwin (1912 – 1992) aka: Harvey Lee". The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, 2013. www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=6510.
  
• Vincent Astor. "Harvey Lee". Find a Grave, 2007. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=21546691.
  

Tony Sinclair (192?–2017) performer, costumier

Tony Morrison grew up in Cincinnati, where one of his friends was Robin Price, who also became a professional female impersonator. As a teenager Tony made a living as a female stripper. He joined the Jewel Box Revue as Tony Sinclair when it played in Cincinnati in the early 1950s, and toured with them for over a year. He then played at the Jewel Box Theater in Kansas City.

He arrived in Oklahoma in the late 1950s, where it is rumored that he lived and worked as a woman before becoming known as a female impersonator. Tony put on the Les Girls Revue at the Inferno club with female dancers. He quickly made a reputation for wardrobe design and sewing, and made specialized costumes for strippers and showgirls including Dallas legend Candy Barr. He also borrowed outfits from Payton-Marcus department store where he worked during the day.  In his own performances he was often taken as a woman until he took off his wig at the end of the act. He was also still working as a female stripper.

Tony’s male persona was one of the few out gay men in Oklahoma City in the 1960s. He never hid his sexual orientation nor his love of drag. He was active in the gay community, and was an early role model.

Les Girls Revue toured Oklahoma and Texas, and was considered locally as a rival to the Jewel Box Revue. Once they were doing a sold-out show in Fort Worth during a local election, and the Texas Rangers, the Texas Liquor Board etc raided and arrested the entire cast.

In 1969 as advertising for a new straight nightclub, Tony was photographed reclining on a chair under the theme “unusual floor shows”. The staff at the Daily Oklahoman didn’t get the joke and ran the advertisement in the women’s section.

In the 1970s Tony ran his own club. He was still performing in the 2000s.

*Not Toni Morrison the novelist. Not the footballer, nor the spokesman for Tanqueray gin.

• Pat Record. "City Drag Queen Struts His Stuff". The Oklahoman, Aug 19, 1984. www.newsok.com/article/2078461.
• David de Alba interviews Robin Price. www.david-de-alba.com/Price.htm.
• Ginger Lamar “About Tony Sinclair”. www.gingerlamar.com/speaks/b.html.
• Aaron Lee Bachhofer. The Emergence and Evolution of the Gay and Bisexual Male Subculture in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1998-2005. PhD University of Central Oklahoma, 2006: 136-143, 145, 147, 187, 191, 283.

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.

The Jewel Box Revue

Founded in Miami in 1939 by lovers Doc Brenner and Danny Brown, the Jewel Box Revue toured for 30 years and was the best known drag show of its kind in the US.

They preferred the terms ‘feminine impressionists’ and ‘femme mimics’. Although the management and performers were gay, the show was aimed at straight audiences, winning acceptance through comedy. The performers would tell interviewers of wives and girlfriends, but they were largely mythical. Brenner performed in the earlier show, while Brown MC’d. Then they introduced male-impersonators, Mickey Mercer and Tommy Williams, to be MC, an innovation that was copied by drag clubs everywhere. The Revue then went a step further in 1955 hiring the Afro-American Stormé DeLarverie to MC. The Revue, almost uniquely at that time, employed white, black, Latino and native performers. It made an unprecedented tour of the black theater circuit.

Artists who performed with the troupe include: Lynne Carter, who was often billed as the star, International Chrysis, Ricky Rene, Terry Noel, T.C. Jones, Lavern Cummings, Tony Midnite, Angie Stardust, Perry Desmond, Holly White,  Kim August, Tobi Marsh, Gayle Sherman, Harvey Goodwin, Libby Reynolds, Chris Moore, Betty and many others.

The Revue closed in the early 1970s.

• J.D. Doyle . “The Jewel Box Revue”. Queer Music Heritage. www.queermusicheritage.us/fem-jewl.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.  Online. 
• Jim Beaux.  "International Chrysis".   The Transsexual Erotica Archive of Magazines and Films, 05 August 2013.  

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.

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   

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.