This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.

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Showing posts with label Wigstock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wigstock. Show all posts

28 September 2015

Jayne County (1947 - ) Part III: London and Berlin

Part I: Atlanta
Part II: New York City
Part III:  London and Berlin

Wayne debuted at London's Roxy in March 1977, and renamed the band to The Electric Chairs. New Musical Express journalist Julie Burchill (who in later years would express anti-trans opinions) was very supportive of the band. They were the only punk act at the Reading Festival that year and played to an antagonistic audience.

After a gig with Adam and the Ants, Wayne was introduced to Derek Jarman who cast her as a transvestite rock star in his film Jubilee.

Safari Records signed the group who put out their first album, although the more controversial tracks were kept apart for a special EP, Blatantly Offenzive. Wayne's transition can be seen on the album covers of the first three albums. On The Electric Chairs, 1978, Wayne has a masculine appearance; on Man Enough to be a Woman, 1978, the two personae are juxtaposed; on Things Your Mother Never Told You, 1979, there is only a feminine version.


The second album, which was also issued under the name Storm the Gates of Heaven, contains "Man enough to be a Woman" but also songs against organized religion as well as a statement about County's belief in a god.
"When we recorded the second album, I was beginning to feel very strongly that I wanted to take the transsexual thing a lot further; I'd stopped doing hormones for a while and really toned down my appearance, but I wasn't happy with that. I'd got a lot of attention with the Electric Chairs, and I decided it was time to come out and be the first up-front transsexual in a rock band. The music press was really interested and supportive for a while; they'd never had this before, and they could see me changing right before their very eyes."(p126)
After a European tour for the second album, County stopped in West Berlin for a fortnight before returning to London for a nose job. However she ran into the wrong immigration official, was detained overnight and returned to West Berlin.

There, she was introduced to Romy Haag and her club. She had her nose done by a doctor on the Kurfürstendamm, who had worked on several trans women. When County returned to England at the end of Summer 1978, press reports suggested that she had had the full sex change, but she tired of explaining and let people assume as they liked.
"It bothered people. There was a distinct cooling of attitude, even among the fans; underneath that liberal attitude exterior, a lot of punk fans were really straight-down-the-line conservatives, and they hated the fact that I was actually living out the implications of my songs. Some of them even said 'You've betrayed your sex'." (p131)
Late in the year the band went to a farm in Wales to write the third album. Things Your Mother Never Told You came out to good reviews and was followed by a gruelling tour of Europe.

In Late summer 1979, Wayne fled to New York and decided that it was time to change her name to Jayne. She founded a new band, played CBGBs and toured. She also toned down her appearance.

Early 1980 Jayne returned to West Berlin to be in a play with Romy Haag. The play was a success, but Jayne and Romy fell out and remained so for many years. Jayne lived with PJ from San Francisco who had been in the Angels of Light before moving to West Berlin. However PJ decided not to continue as a woman and after being sacked by Romy returned to living as a male, and then her Turkish boyfriend did not want her any more.
"It was during my time in Berlin that I came closest to the idea of having a full sex change; it certainly would have been easy enough to arrange, and it's what everyone expected me to do. … The only reason that I can see for having the full change is so that you can move to a different town and marry a man and live completely as a woman, without anyone ever knowing what you are. But I don't think I could do that. Let's face it, if people know you're a sex change you'll never be accepted as a woman. … I'm happy in between the sexes; I'm comfortable and I actually like the idea. … I certainly wouldn't be happy with idea of being a man, and I don't consider myself a man, but I'm not going to try and convince myself that I'm really a woman." (p138-9)
Jayne was friends with Zazie de Paris (Solange Dymenzstein). She starred in Rock & Roll Peepshow. She also did a St Patricks Day concert at a US Army Base.

Jayne was introduced to the Latvian-born director Rosa von Praunheim and was cast in the film Stadt der Verlorenen Seele (City of Lost Souls) 1982 with Angie Stardust and Tara O'Hara.

In 1983, Leee arranged a gig in New York, and Jayne put on Rock & Roll Peepshow at the Pyramid, which led to the show Les Girls with Holly Woodlawn and Alexis del Lago, and International Chrysis.

Then Jayne returned to Germany for the City of Lost Souls tour, which was followed bt time in London where she was booked at the Fridge in Brixton, and she encountered Alan/Lanah Pelley during his transsexual phase.

She stayed in England until 1987. She recorded a couple of albums but they were not promoted.

On return to New York, Jayne took up with drag performer Constance Cooper, who introduced her to Sally's Hideaway off Times Square.

Jayne had not been home for 20 years. She phoned her mother and proposed a visit. She got a gig at Atlanta's Club Rio and attempted to find those she knew from the 1960s, but could find only Diamond Lil. She was introduced to the rising stars RuPaul and Deandra Peak.

To visit her parents she really dressed down. She ended up staying the summer.
"However much I may be Jayne County, my old personality, Wayne, is still there; it never goes away. … Jayne County is the one who's out there hustling and trying to do something with her career. But when I get home alone I can't wait to get the wig and make-up off, to put on an old t-shirt and my reading glasses and read my religious books or my history books or a horror novel, to eat cookies and drink tea." (p164-5)
Afterwards Jayne did a gig in Tel Aviv, and then returned to London for another four years. She became a regular at the Apollo Club in Wardour Street, where she met met old-time transvestites such as Francis Bacon, the painter.

She returned to New York at the end of 1992, and was in the Wigstock film, 1995. Her autobiography Man Enough to be a Woman came out the same year.

In 2014 Jayne was banned from Facebook for using the word 'tranny' a word that she has been using for 40 years. She spoke back in an article in Queerty:
"Tranny is not a slur word and I resent anyone trying to make it one. It’s the intent behind the word, rather than the word itself, that can be sometimes offensive. It may be a silly word, but it’s certainly not worthy enough to be banned. That is censorship, pure and simple and no better than right-wing Christian extremists or any other tyrants, who want to force their narrow-minded, conservative opinions on others."

Jayne has also been posting controversial opinions on FaceBook and on her blog,   rockandrollantirepublikkkanleague.    An article in Haaretz interprets them as simple support for Israel, but they are also anti-Republican.  
www.jaynecounty.com    EN.Wikipedia    QMH   ArtofExmouth    IMDB      rockandrollantirepublikkkanleague      FaceBook     


German television, Rockpalast 19/12/1978
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10 October 2014

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 1st 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 2nd 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).
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24 January 2013

Candis Cayne (1971–) dancer, actress.

Brendan McDaniel and her twin brother were born in California and raised in Maui, Hawai’i to parents who were teachers. In her late teens McDaniel was trained as a dancer in Los Angeles, and then moved to New York and won a scholarship to Steps Dance Studio.

McDaniel ran into Sherry Vine, whom she had previously met in Los Angeles, and was introduced to the New York drag scene. Her first job in drag was selling cigarettes and candy at the Roxy. She then started performing at Boy Bar as Candis Cayne. Candis, performed at the Wigstock drag festival with an elaborately choreographed act and then was asked to do the choreography in the film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, 1995. She acted in Stonewall, and performed in Wigstock, both also 1995. At her performances in New York she would talk about her transition, and a tip bucket went around to pay for her surgeries. Candis completed transition in 1996.

She was the title character in the film Mob Queen, 1998. In 2001 she was the winner of the Miss Continental USA pageant for transgender performers. From 2002 she was informally married to Marco McDermett, a New York DJ who worked with her in her show, and had a child from a previous marriage.

She was in one episode of CSI: NY in 2007 and was a recurring character in Dirty Sexy Money, also 2007, and in Season 6 of Nip/Tuck. In all of her films she has played transgender characters. She continues to appear in film and television and does live shows in New York and Los Angeles. Her marriage to Marco broke up in 2010
EN.WIKIPEDIA.    IMDB


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There is a question of how, if she became a woman in 1996, she was able to enter the Miss Continental USA pageant in 2001.  However unlike Miss Gay USofA or Miss Gay America which bar transgender contestants and/or those on female hormones,  Miss Continental USA encourages such contestants.

Of course Candis was not the first trans women to play a trans woman in a television series.  There were a dozen of so previously – see especially Carlotta in Number 96, in 1973.  See my detailed list.
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Location New York, USA

01 April 2011

Chloe Dzubilo (1960 - 2011) equestrian, performer, activist, artist

Chloe as Keith was a teenage champion equestrian in Connecticut.

Chloe moved to Manhattan's East Village in 1982. She briefly worked at Studio 54. She became the ad director at the art magazine, East Village Eye, at a time when the local art scene was taking off. She became the partner of Bobby Bradley, one of the founders of the drag club, Pyramid, and was with him for nine years until he died of AIDS.

Chloe wrote and performed in a band with Antony Hegarty, and was the lead singer for the punk band, Transisters, which did songs about sexual abuse and being transgender.

She was photographed by Nan Goldin, Alice O'Malley, and Tanyth Berkeley, and also by David Armstrong, Steven Klein, and Michael Sharky. She was diagnosed as HIV+ in 1987, and later suffered from avascular necrosis. In 1993 she completed her transition to Chloe.

In 1995 she was in the Wigstock movie. She also acted in Visiting Desire, 1996, Gang Girls 2000, 1999, and Rock Star, 2004.

She was a long-time volunteer at the LGBT Community Center's Gender Identity Project. She was also part of Transsexual Menace, and directed one of the first federally funded HIV prevention program for transgender sex workers in 1997.

Chloe studied at the Parsons School of Design, and completed an associate degree in Gender Studies at the City University of New York in 1999.

Chloe encountered much ignorance and sheer prejudice by health professionals treating trans persons even when the problem was neither HIV nor specifically trans issues, including sudden dropping of treatment and refusals to answer.

As she was an AIDS activist, Mayor Bloomberg put her on New York’s HIV planning board, where she pushed to separate trans from gays in the HIV statistics.

Still an avid equestrian, Chloe launched Equi-Aids, a charity that gave inner-city kids the experience of horseback riding.

She was on the cover of POZ magazine in August 2004 as "Trannie get your gun", a theme that she proposed. In the article she declined to identify as female, preferring to stay outside the 'binary gender construct'.

Later that year she had the hip replacement required by her avascular necrosis.

In the L Magazine in 2006 she is quoted:
“I don’t get into political discussions at dinner often anymore, cause I want to embrace everyone no matter what. ‘Political’ for me is when I walk out of my house. If I can make an impact with my allies who share my views and/or pose questions to people, then that is maybe the best I can do politically. Love seems to be political to me these days, and has for many years. That loving somebody is so political, is such a heartbreaking truth.”
In 2007 she married trans man, performer T De Long (Chloe being legally a man and T a woman). She was rebuilding relationships with her family. Her visual art was becoming known, even internationally. In January 2011 she co-curated an exhibition of trans art, including some of her own drawings.

She was living at an HIV/AIDS residence and her prescription dosage had been raised after a brief hospitalization. She left around 2.00 am, wandered into a closed subway station and ended up underneath a service train. She was aged 50.

Here is one of her poems:
Ain’t nothing like knowin’ what it feels like…when you slip thru the cracks of society, political niceties, political correctness, health care, housing, employment, wealth, shoe stores, subways, family outings, holidays,
systems, systems, Systems. Ain’t nothing like knowing these facts deep in one’s bones. When you’re transsexual.
Ain’t nothing like knowing triumph over all of these adversities.”
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    12 August 2010

    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.
    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.
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    05 August 2010

    Dorian Corey (1937 – 1993) performer.

    Frederick Legg was raised in Buffalo, New York State. He was a mother from the age of eight when his own mother, divorced and remarried, gave him the new baby to look after.  His first paid job was window dressing in a Buffalo department store.


    Legg studied at the Parsons School of Design. In the 1960s she was part of the female-impersonation act, The Pearl Box Review, where she performed with a live boa constrictor.  She got breast implants and took female hormones, and broke off contact with her family.

    In the 1970s, as Dorian Corey, she was a major participant in New York drag balls, often in very extravagant costumes, sometimes multiple costumes worn over each other. In the late 1970s, her boyfriend ran off with all her ball earnings.  However her next husband, Leon, stayed with her all the rest of her life.  Dorian was the founder of the voguing house of Corey, and holder of over 50 grand prizes from the voguing balls. She was house mother to Angie Xtravaganza, who later became a mother of her own house. Dorian also performed at Wigstock and was featured in Paris is Burning, 1990.

    In later years, she was a regular performer at Sally's II, off Times Square, across from The New York Times.

    Corey has attained a posthumous notoriety in that after her death from AIDS, friends cleaning out her Harlem apartment found not only an expensive wardrobe, but also a trunk containing a mummified body that had been dead for about 25 years. The police eventually were able to extract fingerprints, and identified Robert Worley, who had an arrest for rape and assault. It is assumed that Corey killed the burglar in self-defense, but it is also said that it was her boyfriend who had turned abusive. In either case, she had no idea how to get rid of a body. She moved twice with the body in the trunk. This was turned into a play, Out of the Bag, by Reg Flowers.
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