Ina Barton (1934 - 1974) friend of April Ashley

In the best trans (auto)biographies there are accounts of other trans persons, who are otherwise unknown. This is one such.

-----

Ina, who was from Newcastle, and April Ashley first met in 1955. Ina was then still in male mode – in fact doing National Service in the RAF. Ina was introduced into the house in London where April was living with other gender variant persons. April was at that time going by the unisex name of Toni, and was androgynous in appearance. This was before she went to France. While others were cruising for men, Ina did not. As April wrote: “Ina however was a true transsexual and very unhappy, as I had been in the Merchant Navy. He didn't want to be discharged for being a homosexual because he didn't consider himself one.”

In 1960, after being a star in Paris, and after going to Dr Burou in Casablanca, April was back in London, modelling and being filmed for her very small part in The Road to Hong Kong. Ina had been accepted at Charing Cross. April commented: “Ina Barton who was in the throes of a marathon sex transformation, the specialty of London's Charing Cross Hospital.  They insist on lengthy intervals between each stage and use skin grafts from the legs which leave tell-tale scars on the thighs. So much messier than Dr Burou's technique. But her doctor, John Randell, was very solicitous for her well-being and wrote her letters which began, 'My dearest Galatea...'”.

In 1962 April and Ina were sharing a flat in South Kensington.  This was after April had been outed in The People newspaper, and The News of the World had had run her story in six parts.  Ina went to Spain with April. On a previous trip they had gotten into a drunken slap fight about who was to drive. This time April did drive, but Ina freaked out when April mentioned that she’d never taken a test and didn’t have a license. In the commotion they went over a small cliff .

When Ina’s surgeries at Charing Cross were complete, April took her to Jersey for a week. They rented bicycles. On the second day Ina fell heavily on the cross bar and her vulva was enlarged. She left immediately and returned to London to see her own doctor.

After the trauma of Corbett v Corbett in 1970 , April rallied by opening a restaurant just round the corner from Harrods, that was an immediate sensation, and continued to run it for five years until she had a heart attack. During this time Ina was having problems of her own, and passed on. April: “Ina Barton had recently died from a combination of booze and pills. I believe an open verdict was recorded but that's splitting hairs - in effect she killed herself.”

• Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley. April Ashley's Odyssey. Jonathan Cape, 1982: 46, 104, 139, 140, 156, 257. Also Online.

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

In April's second autobiography, The First Lady, the 1955 meeting and Ina's death are mentioned but not the other incidents. 

Elliot Blackstone (1924 – 2006) police officer, trans ally.

From Chinook, Montana, Elliott Blackstone served in the US Navy during the Second World War. In 1949 he joined the San Francisco Police Department.

In 1961-2 there was a 'gayola' scandal about police taking payoffs from gay bars. One reaction to this was that José Sarria set a precedent by running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Another was that Blackstone was assigned as the police department's first liaison officer with the homophile community. He worked with the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, he helped to end entrapment in public toilets, he trained police recruits by bringing in gays, lesbians and trans people to talk about themselves.

In 1965 the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) had negotiated with Blackstone so that they could hold a gay New Year's ball; however others in the police force had different ideas and it was raided anyway. Even Mrs Blackstone was taken to be a drag queen and shoved about.

In August 1966 there was a riot at Compton's Cafeteria, and Blackstone attempted to moderate between the queens and the security people. Later Blackstone met Louise Ergestrasse (Durkin), the first transsexual to use that term to him. She got him a copy of Harry Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon, and he began to arrange help. He persuaded the Center for Special Problems, part of the city Department of Public Health, and they began to offer hormones, counseling and referrals. Benjamin came and trained the staff, and worked with Blackstone. Blackstone gave lectures to fellow police officers.

He encouraged transsexuals to organize as Change: Our Goal (COG) and attended their meetings. With Blackstone's support COG dissuaded the police from arresting people for using the 'wrong' toilets or being cross-dressed. He helped to establish an anti-poverty office that employed transsexuals. He collected donations at his church to pay for hormones for transsexuals who could not afford them. The office provided ID cards that enabled trans persons to open bank accounts and obtain employment. After Reed Erickson's EEF funded the National Transsexual Counseling Unit (NTCU) in San Francisco, Blackstone managed its office as part of his police liaison role. EEF provided funds so that he could attend professional development and criminal justice conventions across the US and in Europe to give his views on police mistreatment of transsexual minorities. In the office he worked with individuals who were having problems with the law or their employers. He gave a presentation to every San Francisco Police Academy Class.


However in 1973 a police agent persuaded an NTCU employee to bring cocaine on to the premises, which were then raided. Drugs were also planted in Blackstone's desk. He was then assigned to another job. Within two years Blackstone had retired and NTCU was no more.

Blackstone had been 26 years with the force. He was presented with a plaque: "Many thanks, The Transsexual Community of San Francisco". At age 81 he became the first retired officer to receive a commendation from the Police Commission, and was a grand marshal at the 2006 San Francisco Pride parade. He died a few months later of a stroke.

* Not the mountaineer.

• "Police Liaison". Life, 31 Dec 1971. http://bit.ly/gkBA9p.
  
• Antony Grey. Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992: 144-5.
  
• Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. “Mtf Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966-1975: Commentary and Interview with Elliot Blackstone”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. The Transgender Issue edited by Susan Stryker. 4,2 1998: 349-372.
  
• Nan Alamilla Boyd. Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. University of California Press 2003: 196, 198.
  
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 229-30, 231, 232, 257.
• Kevin Davis.  "Retired SF cop to help lead parade". The Bay Area Reporter, 6/22/206.  www.ebar.com/pride/article.php?sec=pride&article=33.
• Wyatt Buchanan. "Pride parade salute for an unlikely ally: Police officer who reached out in 1960s to be grand marshal". San Francisco Chronicle, June 23, 2006. www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/23/BAG7KJILMR17.DTL.
• Susan Stryker. Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008: 75,76,81,92.
  
• Josh Sides. Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco. Oxford University Press, 2009: 101.
• Suzan Cooke. "HBS? Count me out". Women Born Transsexual, 8/25/2009.  http://womenborntranssexual.com/2009/08/25/hbs-count-me-out.
• Suzan Cooke. "Compton’s Cafeteria: Transsexual and Transgender People’s Stonewall". Women Born Transsexual, 08/28/2012. http://womenborntranssexual.com/2012/08/28/comptons-cafeteria-transsexual-and-transgender-peoples-stonewall.
  
• Stephen. "Born On this Day – November 30^th … Elliot Blackstone". Post Apocalyptic Bohemian, November 30, 2012. http://nopoboho.blogspot.ca/2012/11/born-on-this-day-november-30th-elliot.html.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA.
____________________________________________________________

Joanne Meyerowitz says (p257) that the two trans women arrested in 1973 were Suzan Cooke and Janice Maxwell who were there running NTCU. However Suzan's own account does not say that. Cooke: "Elliott Blackstone remained a constant, a supporter who was too often paternalistic and too often clueless but nonetheless stood by us."

Zelda R. Suplee (1908 - 1989) Director of Erickson Educational Foundation.

Updated 15 March 2012, 2 Feb 2013, 15 October 2013, 21March 2016.

Zelda was raised in New York City, and did a BA at New Jersey College for Women (now part of Rutgers University).

She was a keen nudist. With her then husband, Reed Suplee (1916-86), she owned and managed three nudist camps in the period 1930s – 1950s, and was in Doris Wishman’s Diary of a Nudist, 1961, and also in The Moving Finger, 1963 and The Parisienne and the Prudes, 1964 – all nudist films. She was the first full-frontal nude in Playboy magazine (in black-and-white).

For 17 years she was editor and researcher of True Story, True Detective and Master Detective Magazine.  She was a consulting sexologist, an hypnotist and one of the first to do past-life regressing, and was interested in all kinds of health and psychic phenomena. 

In 1965, after Reed Erickson had founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), he hired Zelda to run it. From her office in New York she and lesbian feminist activist Phyllis Saperstein (they had met in a nudist camp) managed the daily operations, and the contacts with transsexuals who asked for help. Erickson made the final decisions about who and what he funded, but spent much of his time in Baton Rouge and then Mexico with his family.

In 1969 EEF and the Albany Trust co-sponsored a symposium, “The First International Congress on Gender Identity" in London.  Zelda was the co-ordinator. In 1971 she was part of the First National Conference on Religion and the Homosexual, which took part in New York, and several time attended police conventions where EEF pamphlets were distributed.  She compiled the EEF newsletter 1969-76 which reported the ongoing dialogue between EEF, trans people and associated professionals.  In 1971 EEF sponsored production of a 28-minute docuentary, I am Not This Body, which featured a discussion in the EEF office between Zelda, Leo Wollman, two trans women and actress Pamela Lincoln (who was purportedly seeking information about transsexuals).

Also around that time Zelda introduced Doris Wishman, whom she had known since Diary of a Nudist, to Leo Wollman, which resulted in the film Adam or Eve, 1971, which was later recut with additional footage and finally released as Let Me Die a Woman, 1978.

Zelda was also Erickson's contact with psychic research and healing. In 1971 her apartment was the location for pioneering infrared photography of psychic energy.  In 1976 she was given a pre-publication copy of the book, A Course in Miracles, which she passed on to Reed who financed its printing.

Zelda was the public face of EEF until it closed in 1977.

In 1981, at the 7th International Gender Dysphoria Symposium, HBIGDA presented lifetime achievement awards to Reed Erickson, Zelda  and Harry Benjamin.

In 1983 she moved to Los Angeles to handle Erickson's dealings with ONE Inc..

Zelda introduced Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna to some of the transsexuals whom they interviewed for their book, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, 1985.

After EEF, she moved to Galveston to start the Janus Information Facility (JIF) with Paul Walker who was a co-founder of HBIGDA.

She died aged 81 in Los Angeles.

• Doris Wishman (dir).  Diary of a Nudist, with Zelda R Suplee as the camp director.  US 72 mins 1961.  
• Nicholas Ghosh.  "Tribute to Zelda R. Suplee".  Gender Review, December 1978.  
• Walter J. Meyer,  Paul A. Walker & Zelda R. Suplee. 1981. "A Survey of Transsexual Hormonal Treatment in Twenty Gender‐treatment Centers". Journal of Sex Research, 17, 4: 344-349.  Abstract
• Suzanne J. Kessler &Wendy MacKenna. Gender: A Ethnomethodological Approach. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987: xiii. 
• Ingo Swann. Remote Viewing: The Real Story: An Autobiographical Memoir. 1996: Chp 5. www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/RealStoryCh5.html.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 211-2 ,216, 227, 231, 236, 239-240, 257, 280.
• Andy Humm & Joan Nixon. “Phyllis Saperstein Recalled”. Gay City. 12/29/2005. gaycitynews.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=17007725. 
• Michael J. Bowen.  " 'StrangerHer': The Peculiar Saga of Let Me Die a Woman".  Booklet included in Synapse DVD release of Let Me Die a Woman, 2005. 
• Aaron Devor. "Building a Better World for Transpeople: Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation".  International Journal of Transgenderism, 10, 1, 2006: 47-68.  
•  "'What's My Line?' segment from the 50s (60s)?".   Clothes Free Forum, April 2008.  www.clothesfreeforum.com/archive/index.php/t-12092.html.  
• C. Todd White. Pre-Gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009: 204. 

IMDB     

This clip is of Zelda, using the pseudonym Yolande Reed, when she appeared on What's My Line in 1953.