Margaret Branch (1912 - 1997) social worker

In 1936 the young Margaret Johnson was an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War, and then she was in Prague in 1938 after the German invasion, where she helped Jews and other refugees escape into Poland. During WWII she was in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and was sent to France to work with the Resistance – however she was caught and tortured by the Gestapo until a bribe got her out.

From September 1941 she was Assistant Labour Manager at the Royal Ordinance Factory at Swynnerton south of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and took her husband’s name when she married Mr Branch – but the marriage did not last. From 1943 she was a journalist for a while in London.

In 1945 she went to West Germany working for the UN’s Relief and Rehabilitation Administration  (UNRRA), where she met Camilla Ruegg who became her life partner. Margaret went to Switzerland to study with the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. January- March 1955 she attended a course in Mental Hygiene at Dalhousie Medical School in New Brunswick.

By the 1960s she was a psychiatric social worker at Guy’s Hospital in London. She worked in children’s therapy and she and Ruegg founded the National Association of Gifted Children, and worked also on the BBC TV 'Lifeline' & 'Face-to-Face', Series.

By the late 1960s she was working at Guys liaising with trans and intersex people – of whom the best known is Peter Sterling. She gave a paper on her work at the First International Symposium on Gender Identity, London, 25-27 July 1969, and again at the Second at Elsinore, 12-14 September 1971. 

Margaret in 1966

Later she worked as a counsellor for all LGBT individuals , and appointments co-ordinator at the Albany Trust, and worked on the Gay Bereavement Project helpline in 1980.

• “News”. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 46,2,February 1955: 91.
• Margaret Branch & Aubrey Cash. Gifted Children. Recognising and Developing Exceptional Children. Souvenir, 1966.
• Margaret Hall. “Too clever .. the boy they put into the dunces’ class”. Daily Mirror, 1 April 1966: 7.
• Sheila McGregor. “Unmasking high Intelligence”. The Birmingham Post, April 20, 1966: 4. Review of Gifted Children.
• Margaret Branch. “Social Aspects of Transsexualism”. First International Symposium on Gender Identity, London, 25 July 1969.
• Margaret Branch. “The Role of the Psychiatric Social Worker in the Rehabilitation of Transsexuals. Second International Symposium on Gender Identity, Elsinore, 13 September 1971.
• Peter Stirling. So Different: an Extraordinary Autobiography. Simon & Schuster, 1989.
• Antony Grey. Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation. Sinclair Stevenson, 1992: 218.
• Callum Burroughs. “The spy who went on to become a therapist at Guy’s”. Southwark News, March 17, 2016: 22. Online. 
• “In Search of a Remarkable ‘Rose’ “.The Stone and Eccleshall Gazette, 22 August 2016. Online.

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Ed Knox, a relative of Camilla Ruegg, has been working on a much anticipated biography for some years now.

Romy Haag (1951 - ) actor, singer, nightclub owner.

Edouard Frans Verbaarsschott was born in Scheveningen, in the Netherlands. He was an intersex child and was bullied at school for his effeminate looks.

At 13 he left school and worked with Circus Strassburger as a clown.

At 16 Romy was working as a female impersonator at the Club Alcazar and Le Carrousel in Paris.

After a friend set their apartment on fire, she stowed away on a merchant ship to the US, and found work performing at Fire Island and Atlantic City, where she met and loved a Berlin street singer and they moved to West Berlin together.

At the age of 23, they opened a nightclub, Chez Romy Haag featuring Disco and mainly transgender artists – one of whom was Peki d’Oslo (Amanda Lear) whom Haag had met in Paris. The club became the place for celebrities to go. David Bowie and Mick Jagger had affairs with Romy. She released her first single, “Liege-Samba”, in 1977, and her first album, So Bin Ich, in 1981.

In 1983 she sold her nightclub and spent a year touring the world. On return she had sex-change surgery in Switzerland.

She then toured with her stage act. She has been in 26 films, mainly German, including Mascara, 1987, with Charlotte Rampling and Eva Robin’s. She has released 17 albums.

In the mid-1980s she was the lead figure of Queen Zero, a performance-art video intallation at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1997 she received the Jackie O. Music Award in New York for her interpretations of Berthold Brecht’s music. Also the same year she was awarded the Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival for lifetime achievements in GLBT film. In 1999 she published her autobiography.

• Romy Haag with Martin Schacht. Eine frau und mehr. Berlin: Quadriga 319 pp 1999. Autobiography.

www.romyhaag.de    EN.Wikipedia.

Joseph Doucé (1945 – 1990) pastor, facilitator.

Joseph Doucé was raised Catholic in Sint-Truiden, in Flemish Belgium. During his military service he chose to serve in a Francophone regiment.

After a year of pastoral studies at the Catholic Europaseminär at Stenonius College, he converted to the Baptist faith. After studies in Switzerland, he became a pastor and served parishes in Lens, Belgium and Bethune, over the border in France,  from 1970-4. Aware of his own homosexuality he studied pastoral and psychological needs of sexual minorities at the Free University in Amsterdam 1974-6, partially supported by a grant from the World Council of Churches.

In 1976 he moved to Paris and opened the Centre de Christ Libérateur (CCL) at first in a porn cinema. The World Council of Churches would have financed him, but was vetoed by the French Protestants. CCL had support groups for gays and lesbians, trans persons, S&M persons and pedophiles. It published ILIA (Il Libère, Il Aime=He Liberates, He Loves).
 
He became a French citizen in 1982. He was a founding member of the International Gay Association (IGA later ILGA), a member of HBIGDA (now WPATH), active in Forum des Groupes Chrétiens Gais d’Europe and was one of the first in France to educate about the new AIDS disease. In 1986 he self-published La Question transsexuelle with an Introduction by Louis Gooren (soon to be Professor of Transsexology at the Free University in Amsterdam). He also published on pedophilia and sadomasochism and gay couples.

There was a dinner-meeting for transsexuals the first Tuesday of every month, and a helpline every Monday evening. One of the more than 500 transsexuals who came through CCL was Tom Reucher (who later founded l’Association du Syndrome de Benjamin and l’ExisTrans).

In the late 1980s Doucé and his lover, Guy Bondar, opened a bookshop, Autres Cultures, in central Paris. He became a member of the Commission des liberté au Sénat, and in September 1989 he was able to get the European Parliament to pass a Resolution condemning discrimination against transsexuals, and later the same month Recommendation 1117 to the Council of Europe to call on member states to permit legal changes of gender and first names for transsexuals.

On 19 July 1990, two men showed police badges and asked him to go with them. In late October his decomposed body was found in the forest of Rambouillet outside Paris. It is claimed that he was taken by the political police, Renseignements Généraux (RG). RG section leader Jean-Marc Dufourg was questioned about Douce’s death, fired and convicted of misuse of a firearm, but never officially admitted to be Doucé’s murderer.

• Joseph Doucé. La Question transsexuelle. Paris: Luminière et justice. 1986.
• Françoise d'Eaubonne. Le Scandale d'une disparition: vie et oeuvre du pasteur Doucé. Paris: Éd. du Libre arbitre, 1990.
• Bernard Violet,. Mort d'un pasteur: l'affaire Doucé. Paris: Fayard, 1994.
• Matt & Andrej Koymasky.  “Joseph Doucé”.  The memorial hall.  Sept 2, 2002.  http://andrejkoymasky.com/mem/douc/douc1.html.
• Tom Reucher. “Joseph Doucé” . Transidentité: le site de Tom Reucher. 04/12/2003. http://syndromedebenjamin.free.fr/accueil/joseph-douce.htm.
• Maxime Foerster. Histoire des transsexuels en France. Paris: Harmatten 2003. Beziers: H&O 2006: Chapitre six : Le Centre du Christ : Libérateur.
• “Joseph Doucé”. Religious Archives Network. 3/23/2007. www.lgbtran.org/Profile.aspx?ID=184.
• “Le pasteur Doucé, assassinat ou « bavure » ? ”  Bakchick Info. 8 nov 2007. www.bakchich.info/article1866.html.

 FR.Wikipedia       EN.Wikipedia.