Candy Lee (193? - ) female impersonator, bartender, Mardi Gras, muse to Tennessee Williams

The first gay 'krewe' – of the krewes that put on the New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations – was the Yuga Krewe, founded in 1958. The name is an exoticism referring to the Kali Yuga of Hinduism. It was also a gay in-joke to refer to it as KY (after the branded lubricant), and perhaps Yuga is a play on (are) you gay? The Krewe had grown out of the Steamboat Club, a gay social organization. These were the years when gay organizations had to be discreet; Mayor deLesseps Story Morrison and Louisiana district attorney Richard Dowling pursued an anti-gay clean-up, supposedly for the tourists, and a crackdown ensued. The first two Yuga Balls were held in a private house on Carrollton Avenue, but the neighbors had become irate. The third Yuga Ball in 1960 was held in a jazz club, Mama Lou’s on Lake Pontchartrain, reached by a wooden walkway that proved quite difficult for those who came in high heels. The fourth and fifth Yuga Balls were held in the suburb Metairie in a school that had a large dance studio, and was surrounded by a wooded area close to the lake. The second gay krewe, that of Petronius, held its first ball in 1962 at the same location. However the Yuga Ball a week later was raided by the Parish Police. Some managed to flee, but many were arrested in what the police dubbed a ‘lewd stag party’. Those arrested had their names printed in the newspapers and thus most lost their jobs.

Candy Lee had started a career as a female impersonator at the Club My-O-My on Lake Pontchartrain. She also worked as a bartender at Bacino’s bar, and was an acquaintance of playwright Tennessee Williams when he returned to the city in the late 1950s.

Williams wrote an one-act play, And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens in 1958, which is said to be inspired by the life of Candy. The play’s protagonist, an interior decorator who sometimes cross-dresses, is called Candy, and is about to turn 35. Her older lover who set her up in business has left her for a younger man. Candy picks up a sailor, Karl, in a gay bar. She spends money on him, and he then beats her up and steals more. This was the first play by Williams with explicit gay characters, and was never performed during his lifetime.

The real Candy Lee had been arrested five times at Bacino’s in 1958, as had the other bartenders. She was also one of the founder members of the Yuga Krewe. However she did not get on with the other members, and by the early 1960s had been banned from the balls. The word is that she called the police on the 1962 Fifth Yuga Ball.

• Michael Paller. Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality and Mid-Twentieth-Century Broadway Drama. Palgrave MacMillan, 2005: 133-7, 246n45n47. Discussion of the play.
• Howard Philips Smith. Unveiling the Muse: The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans. University Press of Mississippi, 2017: Chp 1 The Royal Krewe of Yuga and the Birth of Gay Carnival.

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Clay Shaw, New Orleans business man and prominent in the city’s gay scene was likely a member of the Yuga Krewe. He is best known as the only person to be prosecuted for the assassination of US President Kennedy (Tommy Lee Jones portrayed Shaw in Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.)

Leynon (192? – 195?) performer

Leynon, from Mexico, was a well-known performer in US female-impersonation nightclubs in the 1950s. When Perry Desmond was hired for a first chance as a performer at New Orleans’ My-O-My Club in 1956, Leynon stepped in to help Desmond with make-up and costume.

Desmond records that she was viciously murdered in a transphobic hate crime in Mexico a few years later.

• Perry Desmond & Dr. R. L. Hymers. Perry: A Transformed Transsexual. Impact Christian Books. 2004: 31-2.

Queer Music Heritage.

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.
  

Perry Desmond (1936 - 1984) performer, prostitute, sailor, beautician, occult retailer, pastor.

Perry was born and raised in Louisiana. His father was a pilot on a Mississippi River boat who was frequently drunk. His mother beat him once when she came home early and found him dressed in her clothes, but his great-aunt Edna let him dress up in her room. He was subjected to homophobic bullying at school, even in front of teachers who took no notice.

When he reached puberty several of the other boys, who had been rude to him, volunteered him as the one who would be sexually passive.

At Louisiana State University he found his first gay friends, but was ejected for being gay. He found a lover in Baton Rouge until his mother interfered. He then went to Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafeyette) and found another lover before being kicked out for doing so. In New Orleans he became a waiter and a prostitute, and as a kept boy started wearing female clothing full time, until his mother interfered.

He then joined the US Navy where he was a nurse, and married a woman from high school. However he found himself unable to have sex with her. He then told the Navy doctors that he was a woman, and was discharged within a week.

He returned to waiting, and did his first drag show at the My-O-My Club on Lake Ponchatrain. He was recruited for the Jewel Box Review because his size allowed him to take over the costumes of one who had left. He quit the Revue when his father was in hospital.


After that he opened a beauty salon, but then performed in various drag clubs. An agent in New York named him ‘The South’s Most Beautiful Boy’. In 1958 he and 142 others were arrested at a big costume ball at the Manhattan Center in New York. At the same time he came down with jaundice.

One day on the street he met an old friend who was close to completing transition, and demanded the name of her doctor. Perry then started on hormones injections from Dr Ritter in New York (probably Dr Benito Rish) , and started electrolysis. She also bleached her hair. She had a nose job and silicone injections.

Once she had breasts she passed easily as a woman, and went back to a mix of hooking and running a beauty salon. She gave that up to be a kept woman, but after a year of two-timing her husband, left him for the other man, Wayne.

In 1968 her father died, and she bought male clothing to attend his funeral.

She opened a new beauty salon in a haunted ante-bellum house in New Orleans, and then became a self-taught astrologer, and did lots of drugs. Her business evolved into an occult shop called The Age of Aquarius. She had her fortune read two or three times every day and constantly recalculated her horoscope.

After seven years together, Wayne beat her up and took off. Perry consulted a witch who sold her a spell to get Wayne to return.

After ten years on hormones, she contacted Dr Murphy Seeling in New York to be castrated. Wayne returned to go with her, and while she was there she had facial silicone implants as well. Seeling’s operation resulted in a painful abscess.

The next time that Wayne took off, Perry attempted suicide. Afterwards she bailed him out of jail and took him to a rehabilitation ward. In that ward Wayne embraced Jesus. After he got out, Wayne would not live with Perry because that would be a sin. He kept sending Christian leaflets to Perry and tried to get Perry to go to his church.

Perry found herself a new younger lover, but after a year of conflict with Wayne the new lover left for a ‘real woman’. This was 1974. Then her mother died, and wished to remember Perry ‘as you were’.

After an abortive visit to Wayne’s church she read the literature he had been sending to her, and approached the Baptist Church next to the laundromat. The minister visited her at home, and she converted, and was persuaded that to God she was still a man.

Perry reverted to male clothing, and he became a minister, and a celebrity on the Christian circuit. He became a pioneer in the Exodus movement. He supported the Anita Bryant crusade. He died of a heart attack at age 48.

*Not the singer, Perry Desmond-Davies   

• Randy Hammer.  "Brother Perry Trades Satin for Tracts". Pensacola News Journal (Florida), Jul 3, 1976: 28.
• James E Adams. "Transsexual wants to be male again". St Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct 7, 1976: 57. 
• Lester Lee & Good News Gang. And such were some of you (1st Cor. 6:11) : introducing Perry Desmond and the Good News Gang. New Orleans: Good News 1976.
• Perry Desmond & Dr. R. L. Hymers. Perry: A Transformed Transsexual. Ironton, MO: Metamorphis Books, 137 pp1978. Impact Christian Books 133 pp 2004.
• April Kupfer.  " 'Tranformed transsexual' begins life as a man again".  The Orlando Sentinel, Mar 31, 1979: 25. 
• Robin Witt.  "Cal Expo Evangelist Perry Desmond calls himself 'Eunuch for the Lord' ".  The Sacramento Bee, Jun 30, 1979: 23. 
• Elizabeth Mehren.  "Ex-gay wants a Humility Week".  The Tribune (Oakland), Jul 1, 1979: 12.  
• Lenita Powers. "Former gay delivers message of salvation".  Reno Gazette-Journal, Oct 27, 1980: 17. 
• Keith Lawrence.  "Evangelist abandons trsnssexual lifestyle to preach gospel".  Messenger-Inquirer (Kentucky), May 8, 1982: 8. 
• Perry Desmond. “The Final Transformation”.  No longer available.

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Both Drs Ritter and Seeling are obscure. I cannot find any other information about them, nor any other transsexuals who used their service.

At the end of the book Perry issues a blanket forgiveness to the homophobic bullies and other who made his life difficult. Surely even within Christianity, forgiveness should only follow repentance -- which does not seem to apply here. This is more serious than it sounds in my summary of Perry's life. He mentions two female impersonators who were his friends, and who were murdered in really horrible ways by homophobes. Are we to take it that he forgives these murderers too?

From the way that Perry chooses Dr Ritter we see that she is impulsive on making such a choice. Therefore it is not strange that she chose a church equally impulsively. This is a shame for there are churches that accept transsexuals, but they are not usually the one next to the laundromat. It is an enormous pity that Perry did not find a trans-positive church before changing back.