The First Drafts of Trans Histories Part III: 1970 onwards

It is a cliché that journalism is the first draft of history, and so it is with trans history. The following are journalists who were in the right place at the right time and saw the potential story.

Part I: 1900-1950

Part II: 1950-1969

Part III: 1970 onwards

Arthur Bell (1939 - 1984)

Brooklyn born, Montreal raised, Arthur Bell was an early member of the New York Gay Liberation Front and a founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance, and became a journalist mainly for The Village Voice. Bell was in Europe with his lover Arthur Evans the summer of 1969, and thus was not at Stonewall.

Bell and Sylvia Rivera publicized the plight of Chris Thompson, a dancer who went for treatment for asthma at New York’s Bellevue Hospital in 1970, but was locked in the psychiatric wing for being black, gay and trans.

Bell publicized Sylvia Rivera’s trial in 1970 for soliciting signatures on a petition for gay rights, and then later her involvement in Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and then STARHouse. It is presumably the fame resulting from this that led David Isay and Martin Duberman to include her in their accounts of Stonewall (although apparently she was not actually there).

Arthur Bell chronicled STAR’s relationship to both Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance, theorizing that internal GAA ideological conflict contributed to its recalcitrance toward providing financial support.

Perhaps Bell had said too much about the hustling patterns of STAR members in that a flurry of 42nd Street arrests followed The Village Voice article “STAR Trek”.

Mafiosi Mile Umbers owned the rundown building where STAR house was located. In July 1971 he confronted them about unpaid rent and settled for eviction. His bar Christopher’s End was also raided, and Bell wrote about Umbers’ influence in straight and gay pimping and in the gay bar scene in The Village Voice, 22 July, and shortly afterwards GAA organized a protest campaign outside Christopher’s End.

In December that year, Bell wrote about the wedding of Liz Eden and John Wojtowicz/Basso, and in August 1972 John attempted what became known as the Dog Day Afternoon bank robbery which turned into a hostage situation. Bell phoned into the bank and Wojtowicz answered and gave his version of what he was doing. Bell understood that Wojtowicz had shared his plans with Mike Umbers who supplied guns in exchange for 50% of the take. Bell later that evening went on Barry Farber’s radio program to discuss what he knew about the incident. Bell also interviewed Liz.

Arthur Bell’s investigation of claims that Wojtowicz had been set up by the Gambino mafia family brought bomb threats to the Village Voice. At Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) meetings

“conservative and radical gays debated over whether Wojtowicz was a counterrevolutionary lumpen adventurer victimized by the mob or a proud gay superfly caught in an act of righteous expropriation, but the debate was inconclusive.” (Holm, 1976)

In May 1972 Bell also found time to interview the Andy Warhol ‘superstar’ Candy Darling.

In May 1979 Bell interviewed composer Wendy Carlos who had just revealed that she had transitioned some years earlier.

And later that year he wrote in support of the campaign against William Friedkin‘s film Cruising being filmed on the streets where real gay and trans persons were endangered. While the film was partially based on news articles he had written about unsolved murders of gay men, he was leaked the screenplay and deplored its negative depiction of gay men.

Arthur Bell died in 1984, age 44, from complications related to diabetes.

*Not the golfer, or the convicted murderer, or the dancer.

• Arthur Bell & Sylvia Rivera. “Chris: Gay Prisoner in Bellevue.” Gay Flames, Nov. 14, 1970. Online
• Arthur Bell. “NYU Sit-In Story.” 1970, NYPL.
• Arthur Bell. “Ray Rivera is known as.” 1970, NYPL.
• Arthur Bell. “Sylvia goes to college”. Village Voice, October 13, 1970.
• Arthur Bell. “Statement to G.A.A. About the Weinstein Sit-In.” Sept/Oct 1970, NYPL
• Arthur Bell. “STAR Trek: Transvestites in the street.” Village Voice, July 15, 1971, 1, 46.
• Arthur Bell. “Mike Umbers: The Emperor of Christopher Street”. Village Voice, July 22, 1971. Online.
• Arthur Bell. Dancing the Gay Lib Blues: A Year in the Homosexual Liberation Movement. Simon & Schuster, 1971.
• Arthur Bell. “For immediate release: Transvestite Forum to Kickoff Series on Alternate Life Styles.” March 5, 1972, NYPL.
• Arthur Bell. “Candy Darling, Where Were You the Night Jean Harlow Died”. Village Voice, May 18, 1972. Online.
• Arthur Bell. “Littlejohn & the mob: Saga of a Heist”. The Village Voice, August 31, 1972. Online.
• Eric Holm. "Dog Day Afternoon, Dog day aftertaste". Jump Cut, 10-11. 1976:3-4. Online.
• Arthur Bell. Kings Don't Mean a Thing, William Morrow and Co, 1978.
• Arthur Bell. “Wendy/Walter Carlos: a candid conversation with the “switched-on Bach” composer who, for the first time, reveals her sex-change operation and her secret life as a woman”. Playboy, May 1979. Online.
• Arthur Bell. “On ‘Cruising’: The Hollywood Hassle”. The Village Voice, September 3, 1979. Online.
• Stephen L Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: “An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail”. Routledge, 2008.
• Zagria. “Sylvia Rivera Part II: GAA & Weinstein Hall”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 8 September 2017. Online.
• Zagria. “Sylvia Rivera Part V: Later Years”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 14 September 2017. Online.
• Zagria. “Liz Eden and Dog Day Afternoon: Part I - Two Weddings and a Bank Robbery”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 22 August 2020. Online.
• EN.Wikipedia(Arthur Bell (journalist))
• Village Voice(Arthur Bell)

Kris Kirk (1950-1993)

Christopher Pious Mary Kirk (1950 – 1993) was a journalist for Gay News in the early 1980s. Later he was the first openly gay music journalist writing for Melody Maker, The Guardian and other publications. In 1984 he published Men In Frocks, with photographs by his lover Ed Heath.

The title, Men in Frocks, was of course ill-chosen. Kris, several times in the book has to apologize that a person (Poppy Cooper, Roz Kaveney, Letitia Winter) is not a man in a frock, she having become a woman. However the book is of major historical interest, and many of its observations are still valid.

The book remains the best history of drag and trans women from the 1940s to the early 1980s. In the ‘40s there was drag performance in the soldiers-in-skirts revues; in the ‘50s some went to Paris and were employed at Madame Arthur/Le Carrousel. A very small number were able to transition, and others did drag acts on the ships of the merchant navy, and there was actually still a molly house, that of Stella Minge in Silvertown, London. In the ‘60s drag shows in pubs became common, and then drag balls which attracted drag performers at first, and then trans women started coming. The ‘70s started with the Gay Liberation Front in which otherwise cis gay men did political drag. There was also a Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen group for the more committed. In the ‘80s Kirk and Heath went to the London TV/TS group and featured several of the participants in their book.

In their ‘TV & TS’ chapter Kirk discusses the differences between DQ, TV and TS. The stereotypes, and the fact that many do not fit the stereotypes. He concludes:

"If there is any one lesson to be learned from studying this field it is that the individual is individual. People define themselves and the self-definition must always takes priority over the received wisdom. I have met self-defined drag queens whom others would describe as TV either because they enjoy 'passing'; or because they 'dress' so often that it could be seen as a compulsion; or because they wear lingerie, either to turn men on or to make themselves feel sensuous. I have met drag performers who have grown to dislike drag, and men who insist on being called 'cross-dressers' because they dislike what the word 'drag' stands for, and men who wear part-drag in order to create confusion and doubt amongst others, but who would never wear full drag because that would defeat their object. I know self-defined TVs who are gay or bisexual or oscillating, some of them having learned to cross this sexuality barrier through their cross-dressing. I have met TVs who dress like drag queens and drag queens who dress like TVs, and TVs whose cross-dressing has encouraged them to question their 'male role', which in turn has made them examine their idea of 'femininity'. And perhaps most important of all, I have learned how marshy a terrain is the middle ground between our earlier clear-cut distinction between transvestites and transexuals."

In 1986, Channel 4 television broadcast a documentary-drama about Kris Kirk entitled A Boy Called Mary. In 1988 Kris and Ed moved to rural Wales to open a bookshop, but three years later Kris found that he had Aids. He went blind in 1992, and died in 1993.

• Kris Kirk with photographs by Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. Gay Men's Press 1984.
• Kris Kirk. Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk's Greatest Hits. Millivres Books, 1999.
• Zagria. “A review of Kris Kirk & Ed Heath - Men in Frocks, 1984”. Gender Variance Who’s Who 16 April 2013. Online.
• “Men in Frocks”. LGBT+ Language and Archives: Cumbria’s Queer heritage, August 3, 2020. Online.
• EN.Wikipedia(Kris Kirk)

Liz Hodgkinson (1945 -)

Liz Hodgkinson and her husband became journalists at first in North-East England. In 1970 they moved to Richmond, London and both obtained work with the national and the London papers then located in Fleet Street. Liz found work at The Sunday People, The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Times.

In Richmond she heard rumours of the local trans woman, and then encountered Roberta Betty Cowell in the post office. Betty took a shine to Liz, and made many of her documents available. They started writing a book together about Cowell's life, but in the end Betty did not approve it for publication.

Later Liz met Judy Cousins who established SHAFT (Self-Help Association For Transsexuals) in 1980, and Julia Grant who had just been featured in a BBC documentary. She wrote an account of the two for The Sun in October 1980, her first publication on trans persons.

Hodgkinson visited SHAFT and interviewed several of its members. This resulted in her 1987 book, Bodyshock (review). The book is dedicated to Judy Cousins, but an account of her life is missing in the book. However Hodgkinson also published a profile on Cousins in The Sunday People around the same time that the book came out. Likewise Betty Cowell is mentioned only in the section on birth certificates, and no profile otherwise given.

Betty Cowell had told Liz about Michael Dillon, and in researching her book Liz was introduced to Andrew Hewson, the literary agent who had taken over John Johnson Ltd, and who was holding Dillon's then unpublished autobiography and others of his documents. In addition to writing about Dillon in Bodyshock, she wrote a full-length biography of him, based on the autobiography. Her collection and the autobiography of course are a major source of Pagan Kennedy's more recent joint biography of Michael Dillon and Betty Cowell, which gives Hodgkinson only the most cursory credit.

Cowell never re-established contact with her two daughters. She died age 93 in 2011.

In 2015 there was a Channel 4 television documentary about Michael and Betty, and Hodgkinson contacted one of Cowell’s daughters, and wrote up an article for the Daily Telegraph, and issued a second edition of Michael, Née Laura, but with a slightly changed title.

• Liz Hodgkinson. “Why are Julia and Judy different from other women”. The Sun, 14 October 1980. Online.
• Liz Hodgkinson. "Father, Dear Father: Ex-officer and gentleman Judy Cousins and her daughter Penny Croucher talk to Liz Hodgkinson". The People, ?, 1987. Online.
• Liz Hodgkinson. Bodyshock: the truth about changing sex. Columbus, 1987.
• Mary Kenny. “They've looked at life from both sides now”. The Irish Independent, 26 September 1987. Review of Bodyshock.
• Liz Hodgkinson. Michael, Née Laura: The Story of the World's First Female-to-Male Transsexual. Columbus, 1989.
• Liz Hodgkinson. “Bridges across the divide to the opposite sex: how attitudes to transsexuals have changed and what help is on offer”. The Independent, 9 October 1990.
• Liz Hodgkinson. “Goodbye Samantha, hello Sam: What motivates increasing numbers of cross-dressers to escape their sex”. The Independent, 14 September 1992. Online.
• Review of Bodyshock. The Tartan Skirt, 6, April 1993. Online.
• Pagan Kennedy. The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution. Bloomsbury Press, 2007.
• Liz Hodgkinson. "The true story behind Britain's first transsexual woman". The Daily Telegraph, 24 Oct 2015. Online.
• Liz Hodgkinson. From a Girl to a Man: How Laura Became Michael. Quartet Books, 2015. A second edition of Michael, Née Laura.
• Maggie Hartford. "Liz Hodgkinson explores the history of transgender people in new book". Oxford Mail, 9th February 2016. Online.
• Zagia. “A Rereading of Liz Hodgkinson’s Bodyshock: The Truth About Changing Sex, 1987”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 5 June 2022. Online.
• EN.Wikipedia(Liz Hodgkinson)

David Batty (1974? -)

David Batty graduated BA in literature from the University of Birmingham in 1995, and BA in journalism at Cardiff University, 1997, and became a Guardian journalist in 2001. He specialises in social affairs, inequality, cultural politics, adoption and trans issues.

In 2004, as the Gender Recognition Bill was proceeding through parliament, psychiatrist Russell Reid faced a complaint to the General Medical Council (GMC) that he too easily accepted patients for hormone therapy and surgery. The complaint was brought by four of his colleagues at the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Identity Clinic, psychiatrists James Barrett, Richard Green, Donald Montgomery and senior registrar Stuart Lorimer on behalf of four of his former patients. Batty wrote this up for The Guardian in January, February and June.

Starting with some of Russell’s patients, Batty reached out and met other transsexuals, especially those with doubts or regrets. He was preparing an article on such.

In July, a few weeks after the Gender Recognition Act had been passed, Batty returned to the University of Birmingham where Chris Hyde ran the Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility (ARIF). The Guardian had actually asked ARIF to study more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals. Hyde said: "There is a huge uncertainty over whether changing someone's sex is a good or a bad thing. While no doubt great care is taken to ensure that appropriate patients undergo gender reassignment, there's still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatised - often to the point of committing suicide." He also warned that “the results of many gender reassignment studies are unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants” - and that “the high drop out rate could reflect high levels of dissatisfaction or even suicide among post-operative transsexuals”. He ignored the much higher suicide rate of those denied transition, and that it is well established that post-operatives often disappear because they are pleased and completed, not dissatisfied.

This article was later cited in various places against the acceptance of gender surgery - notably at the US Supreme Court case Joel Doe Et Al., V. Boyertown Area School District Et Al., and Pennsylvania Youth Congress Foundation, 2018 on whether trans persons are protected under Title IX. Online.

Batty followed up the article, the very next day, with a major account in the magazine supplement to The Guardian’s sister publication, The Sunday Observer, “What happens if you change your sex ... and then change your mind” with before and after photographs of some regretters. He featured Marissa who changed sex three times (m-f-m-f) having reversed after joining an evangelical church and then having regretted reversing, and Claudia, a singer, who transitioned 18 years earlier, lost her confidence to perform and only in 2004 was suing Russell Reid. Marissa and Claudia were then cited in other publications. Batty cites the ARIF estimate that 3-18% of transsexuals regret transition (most other estimates say 1-2%). He quotes the Australian changeback Alan Finch who advocates for all sex changes to be banned, and for supposed balance Batty tells of a single successful transition, that of physicist Rachael Padman.

In 2006-7 the GMC proceeded with its inquiry into Russell Reid, and Batty wrote up the developments. He profiled some of the patients under single letter pseudonyms, and Charles Kane by name. Kane was suing Reid separately. Kane who was then in his reversion-to-male phase, later also had a third sex-change again to female(m-f-m-f), and settled on the name Samantha.

Russell Reid’s practice was taken over by Richard Curtis, himself trans. In 2013 similar complaints were made as those against Russell Reid, and again it was Batty who reported this in The Guardian.

*not the footballer

• David Batty. “GMC inquiry into gender change expert”. The Guardian, 20 January 2004. Online.
• David Batty, “Sex-change patient complains to GMC”. The Guardian, 18 February 2004. Online.
• David Batty. “Inquiry into sex change specialist”, The Guardian, 19 June 2004. Online.
• David Batty. “Sex changes are not effective, say researchers”, The Guardian, 30 July 2004. Online.
• David Batty. “What happens if you change your sex ... and then change your mind: Mistaken Identity”. The Observer, 31 July 2004.
• “I need some rebuttals for this study that says sex changes are not effective”, r/asktransgender, Reddit. Online.
• David Batty. “Sex change experts should err on the side of caution”. The Guardian, 10 October 2006. Online.
• David Batty. “Psychiatrist rushed me into having sex change, says patient”. The Guardian, 26 October 2006. Online.
• Julie Bindel. “Mistaken identity”. The Guardian, 23 May 2007. Online.
• David Batty. “Sex Change Doctor Guilty Of Misconduct”. The Guardian, 25 May 2007. Online.
• David Batty. “Russell Reid inquiry: key figures”. The Guardian, 25 May 2007. Online.
• David Batty. “Sex-change doctor found guilty of misconduct”. The Guardian, 26 May 2007. Online.
• David Batty. “Doctor is accused of breaching rules on sex-change surgery”. The Guardian, 7 January 2013.
• Zagria, “Claudia (1958 - ) opera singer, drag performer”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 3 November 2008, Online.
• Zagria. “Russell Reid (1943 - ) psychiatrist”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 18 May 2010. Online.
• Zagria. “Richard Curtis (1967 - ) doctor, yacht racer”. A Gender Variance Who’s Who, 24 July 2019. Online.
• The Guardian(David Batty)
• Muck Rack(David Batty)

The First Drafts of Trans Histories Part II: 1950-1969

It is a cliché that journalism is the first draft of history, and so it is with trans history. The following are journalists who were in the right place at the right time and saw the potential story.

Part I: 1900-1950

Part II: 1950-1969

Part III: 1970 onwards

Irmis Johnson (? - ?)

Johnson was a noted journalist who had written on a variety of topics. When the Christine Jorgensen story broke in December 1952, the Hearst company negotiated an exclusive deal with Jorgensen for $20,000 and sent Johnson to Copenhagen early in 1953 to interview Christine. Christine and Irmis got on well This resulted in five consecutive weekly articles in the the American Weekly, actually written by Johnson but attributed to Jorgensen.

Later Jorgensen paid Johnson $5,000 to expand the American Weekly articles into a full autobiography, but did not like the document that Johnson produced. Jorgensen’s 1967 autobiography was written by Lois Kibbee, an actress. Kibbee did have access to Johnson’s document.

In 1969 Lyn Raskin was looking for a writer to write her biography. There were discussions with Johnson, but as there was no publishers’ advance on offer, Johnson bowed out.

• Christine Jorgensen. “The Story of my Life”. The American Weekly, February 1953 for 5 weeks. Actually written by Irmis Johnson.
• Christine Jorgensen. A Personal Autobiography. Bantam Books, 1967. Actually written by Lois Kibbee.
• Richard Docter. Becoming a Woman: A Biography of Christine Jorgensen. The Haworth Press, 2008.

Ron Kenyon (1921- ?)

In 1954, Francis Marie Jefferson, who had recently had completion surgery, moved to Port Colborne, Ontario where she had some minor operations with Dr Stuart Wilson in nearby Welland, mainly to remove scar tissue. There had been rumours that a ‘Miss X’ had had a sex change, but she was not identified until Wilson spoke to the Toronto Telegraph – with her permission he said. He gave her name as ‘Josephine Jefferson’, falsely gave her male name as ‘Kenneth Jefferson’, and claimed that she had had surgery in the US. Her real name, her correct male name and the actual Canadian surgeons who had operated on her were not given.

Wilson’s version was written up by Ron Kenyon and published in the Toronto Telegram, 19 March 1954, and was repeated in other Canadian newspapers and also in the US and Australia.

However Kenyon realised that there was something wrong with the story. The population of Port Colborne at that time was just over 8,000. So Kenyon contacted each of the Jefferson families in town, and found Francis Marie. She agreed to be interviewed, and Kenyon’s real story of Francis Marie was published in the Toronto Telegram in three issues, on page 3 in each case, March 20, 22 and 23.

• Marie Jefferson as told to Ron Kenyon. “ ‘I Felt Guilty Living as a Man’ … Marie: People who think I’m Amusing Don’t know the horror …”. The Toronto Telegram, March 20, 1954 p3.
• Marie Jefferson as told to Ron Kenyon. “ ‘Now Men whistle at me …’ I like that, too – Yet I ran out on my wedding“. The Toronto Telegram, March 22, 1954 p3.
• Marie Jefferson as told to Ron Kenyon. “ “Sex switch aids understanding: Has escaped depths of horrible despair: Home, family her aim”. The Toronto Telegram, March 23, 1954p3.
• Zagria. “Frances Marie Jefferson (1929- ?) truck driver, domestic”. Gender Variance Who’s Who, 5 June 2026. Online.

Noyes Thomas (1916-2001)

Noyes Thomas was named after Alfred Noyes the Welsh poet, his uncle.

He became a leading foreign correspondent in the 1930s. In World War II he joined the Ghurkas, served in east Asia, and rose to Lieutenant Colonel. Afterwards, he returned to the News of the World as a journalist.

In the 1960s, the News of the World, which was a Sunday paper then selling for 6d (2.5p in the new money), was the biggest-selling newspaper in the world normally selling over 8 million copies of each edition. It was known for its emphasis on sex and scandal. Its major competitor was The People, also a Sunday paper, which had outed April Ashley 19 November 1961, and destroyed her career as a model and actress.

The News of the World made the best offer for April’s story offering £3,000. April asked for £15,000. They settled at £10,000. Thomas interviewed her and “My Strange Story” ran for six Sundays May-June 1962.

The next year, the big scandal was that of Christine Keeler who had slept with both John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, and Soviet naval attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov. The News of the World paid Keeler £23,000, and Peter Earle and Noyes Thomas spirited her away so that journalists from other papers could not interview her.

However Noyes Thomas had, despite his experiences with April and Christine, a rather old-fashioned attitude to sex:

“In July 1964 the News of the World’s Noyes Thomas warned readers about the ‘creeping menace of homosexuality in Britain today’. There was, he added, ‘a vast “queer” brotherhood with tentacles reaching around the globe’.” (Joyce p167) In August he published a check list in how to spot a homosexual. (Joyce p233-4).

• Roy Kant “‘Her’ Secret is Out”. The People, 19 November 1961.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. “My Strange Life”. The News of the World. 6 May 1962.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "Goodbye M'sieu, hello Mamsells, the doctor said". News of the World, 13 May 1962.
• Noyes Thomas. “Arthur Meets Mother”, News of the World, 20 May 1962.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "Roman Scandal – hotel throws us out". News of the World, 27 May 1962.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "The Operation". News of the World, 3 June 1962.
• Noyes Thomas writing as April Ashley. "There, in a crowded pub, Arthur told me he loved me". News of the World, 10 June 1962.
• Noyes Thomas, ‘Into the Twilight World’, News of the World, 26 July 1964.
• Noyes Thomas, ‘The Men Behind the Mask’, News of the World, 2 August 1964.
• Robert Warren. “Noyes Thomas” Press Gazette, June 26, 2001. Online. Obituary.
• John-Pierre Joyce. Odd Men Out: Male Homosexuality in Britain from Wolfenden to Gay Liberation, 1954-1970. The Book Guild Ltd, 2019:167.
• Zagria. “The authors of April Ashley’s autobiographies”. Gender Variance Who’s Who, 7 August 2024. Online.

Barry Farber (1930-2020)

Farber was born in Baltimore and raised in North Carolina. He had a knack for languages, and, to varying extents, picked up 25 of them, and published a book, How to Learn Any Language. He attended the Zagreb Peace Conference, 1951 in Yugoslavia, and the 1952 Summer Olympic Games in Helsinki. As a newspaper reporter in 1956, Farber was invited by the US Air Force to cover the airlift of Hungarian refugees from the uprising in Hungary that year. By 1960 he had his first talk show; in 1962 he had an evening talk show on radio station WOR in New York, and in 1967 he became an all-night host, also on WOR.

His first wife was Norwegian, and for some years he was an advocate for Norwegian-style social democracy, and at that time supported the US Democrat Party. However in 1970 he ran for the the U.S. House of Representatives in New York City's 19th district as the candidate of the Republican and Liberal parties, and in 1977 he ran for New York City Mayor for the Conservative Party - in both cases receiving only a small percentage of the votes.

Despite his turn to the right, he - like Lyle Stuart - believed in free speech. He featured Frank Kameny the pioneer gay activist, and Anton LaVey of the Church of Satan in 1969.

Trans activist Siobhan Fredericks was interviewed July 1966. The interview was arranged by Lyle Stuart, publisher of A Year Among the Girls. Farber had done his homework well on the topic of transvestites: he'd read the book thoroughly and familiarized himself with Turnabout magazine in advance of the broadcast. He was so favorably impressed with both the book and magazine that he expanded the originally scheduled forty-five minute interview to a full ninety minutes. This was the first time a radio discussion of transvestism reached a national audience.

In June 1968 Virginia Prince was interviewed by Farber.

In March 1975, after a discussion by a Deputy Police Chief from the Times Square area, of the problems of prostitution and other illegal sexual activities in mid-town New York, there was a panel discussion of transvestism. The panel included a psychiatrist who specialized in transvestite and trans-sexual cases, a transsexual, the wife of a transvestite, a transvestite, and the proprietor of a TV boutique in mid-town Manhattan.

And, August 22, 1972, the day that John Wojtowicz did what came to be called the Dog Day Afternoon bank robbery, he was phoned in the bank by journalist Arthur Bell, who later that evening went on Farber’s program to discuss what he knew including about Wojtowicz’ trans lover Liz Eden.

Farber remained active in broadcasting until May 5, 2020, the day before his 90th birthday. On the 6th he died at home.

• Zagria. “Barry Farber (1930-2020) radio host”. Gender Variance Who’s Who 22 May 2023. Online.

Tom Buckley (1928 - 2015)

New York City born and raised, Buckley served twice in the US Army: just after WWII, and again in the Korean War. He became a New York Times correspondent, and 1966-8 he was mainly based in Saigon to report on the Vietnamese War, although when back in New York, he became involved with reporting on transsexuals.

Oct 4, 1966 a gossip column in the New York Daily News carried the item: “Making the rounds of the Manhattan clubs these nights is a stunning girl who admits she was male less than a year ago and that she underwent a sex change operation at, of all places, Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore”. This caused Dr Edgerton to get a phone call from Dr Russell Nelson, president of Johns Hopkins Hospital, to find out if the story were true. Edgerton made a tactical decision and gave an exclusive to The New York Times. Tom Buckley had already contacted Harry Benjamin about doing an article on transsexuals, and he was given the story, which ran on the front page on Nov 21, 1966. A press conference was called on the same day, where Edgerton and several colleagues announced at a press conference the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic.

Buckley continued with his project based on four patients of Harry Benjamin, and it was published in Esquire in April 1967 with a photograph of Clara Miller, but without naming her. He estimated that at that time there were 1500 persons in the world who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery, 400 in the US. He also gave a summary of the positions of Benjamin and Robert Stoller, and details about the opening of the Johns Hopkins Clinic.

In 1975 for Harry Benjamin’s 90th birthday, Buckley wrote a profile of the doctor.

• Thomas Buckley. “Johns Hopkins Begins Sex Change Surgery”. The New York Times, Nov 21, 1966.
• Tom Buckley. "The Transsexual Operation". Esquire. April 1967.
• Tom Buckley. “Transsexuality Expert, 90, Recalls ‘Maverick’ Career”. The New York Times, Jan 11, 1975.
• “Tom Buckley, Versatile and Colorful Times Reporter, Dies at 87”. The New York Times, Nov 20, 2015. Online.

DE.Wikipedia(Tom Buckley (journalist))       Muck Rack

The First Drafts of Trans Histories Part I: 1900-1950

It is a cliché that journalism is the first draft of history, and so it is with trans history. The following are journalists who were in the right place at the right time and saw the potential story,

Part I: 1900-1950

Part II: 1950-1969

Part III: 1970 onwards

Mowry Saben (1870-1950)

Saben, privately educated and fluent in Latin, French and German, and an alumnus of Harvard, started writing articles and essays for various newspapers and magazines in the 1900s, and became an established speaker travelling across the country giving lectures on Emmerson, Whitman, Goethe, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, religion and freedom.

In the early 1890s Saben, on the down low, had spent time in the Bowery and elsewhere in New York City, transvesting as a fairie or female-impersonator using the name Jennie June, and saying that her male name was Ralph Werther - and later that it was Earl Lind. She socialised at Paresis Hall, was abused by rough young men and contracted venereal diseases.

But Jennie June was, of course, also Mowry Saben, and contributed several essays about transvesting to the American Journal of Urology and Sexology, 1918-20. These essays were expanded into two books: Autobiography of an Androgyne, 1918 and The Female Impersonators, 1922 which have become the major books about gay/trans life in 1890s New York.

• Earl Lind (“Ralph Werther” – “Jennie June”) Autobiography of an Androgyne. Ed., with an Introduction by Alfred W Herzog. The Medico-Legal Journal, 1918. Reprinted Arno Press, 1975. Digital Transgender Archive. Wikisource.
• Ralph Werther-Jennie June (“Earl Lind”). The Female Impersonators; a sequel to the Autobiography of an androgyne and an account of some of the author's experiences during his six years' career as instinctive female-impersonator in New York's underworld. Ed., with an introduction, by Alfred W. Herzog. The Medico-Legal Journal. 1922. Reprinted Arno Press, 1975. Digital Transgender Archive. Wikisource.
• Zagria “Mowry Saben/Ralph Werther/Earl Lind/Jennie June (1870 - 1950) journalist, female impersonator”, Gender Variance Who’s Who April 2024. Online.

Louise (Loulou) Lassen (1876-1947)

Lassen was for many years the only female journalist at Copenhagen’s Politiken, and also wrote for the sister publication Ekstra Bladet. She was a foreign correspondent and also wrote about medical issues.

In October 1930, rumours circulated in Copenhagen about the non-appearance of Einar Wegener, to the extent that sales were not happening at Gerda Gottlieb's exhibition of paintings. Lassen had interviewed Gerda in 1927, and was now able to interview Lili Elvenes (the name that Wegener had now taken after gender surgery) and produced a short series of articles for Politiken and Ekstra Bladet. It was Loulou who proposed that Lili Elvenes be known as Lili Elbe. The first article was by Loulou about Lili and Gerda. In her write-up Loulou stressed that there was nothing homosexual in the lives of Lili and Gerda. The marriage had not been sexual, Lili had been a woman's spirit in a man's body since childhood, and more than that, that Einar and Lili were two different identities.

The second article was a transcript of a telephone call between Copenhagen's Dr Rank and Dr Kurt Warnekros, who was referred to as von Warnekros. Warnekros boasted that he had performed an unprecedented operation that the top French doctors were incapable of. There was no mention of the other trans women who had been operated on under the aegis of Magnus Hirschfeld.

• Loulou Lassen. “Et Liv gennem to Tilværelser. En Fortid som Mand og en Fremtid som Kvinde. Lili Elbe fortæller om Maleren Einar Wegener og om sig selv.” Politiken, 28 February 1931: 5–6. Online.
• Loulou Lassen. “En tragisk Livsskæbne afsluttedes i Gaar.” Politiken, 14 September 1931: 5. Online.
• Jette Drachmann Sollinge. “Loulou Lassen” Dansk Kvindebiografisk Leksikon / Pressefolk. Online.
• Zagria. “Lili Elbe, media construct” Gender Variance Who’s Who, 13 January 2015. Online.

Niels Hoyer (1884-1969)

Ernst Harthern, born Ernst Ludwig Harthern Jacobson, wrote several books under the pen-name of Neils Hoyer. He was raised in Stade, Lower Saxony, and was of Jewish descent. His father abandoned him, and his mother died when he was nine. Despite difficulties he did finally become a journalist and covered Scandinavia for German newspapers until the Nazi takeover in 1933 when his writings were banned. He escaped the German occupation of Denmark by moving to Sweden, and in 1943 was part of the team that helped the majority of Danish Jews to escape to Sweden.

Lili Elvenes had worked on an autobiography aided by her former wife, Gerda, and the journalist Loulou Lassen. In December 1930, however, an ill-intentioned article in the Danish tabloid Sandheden (‘Truth’) characterized the planned publication as a ‘scandalous book’ (‘Skandalebogen’), leading the Danish publisher to drop the book option. Elevenes then approached Harthern, who was based in Copenhagen. Using the unfinished manuscript, Harthern rewrote a new version in German. Elevenes died before it was finished. Translated into Danish and edited, this became most of Fra Mand til Kvinde: Lili Elbes Bekendelser, 1931. The German edition Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht, 1932 was not a translation from the Danish edition, but a re-editing of Harthern’s manuscript. The 1933 English Man into Woman, is a translation of the German edition.

• Lili Elbe. Fra mand til kvinde: Lili Elbes bekendelser. Hage & Clausen, 1931
• Niels Hoyer. “Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht.” Scherl Magazin, 7 May 1931: 439-446. Online.
• Lili Elbe, edited by Niels Hoyer, Ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht ; Eine Lebensbeichte ; Aus hinterlassenen Papieren. Reissner, Dresden 1932.
• Neils Hoyer (ed) translated H.J. Stenning; introd. by Norman Haire. Man into woman: an authentic record of a change of sex, London: Jarrold Publishers, 1933.
• DE.Wikipedia (Ernst Harthern)
• Pamela L Caughie. “Transgressing Translation/Translating Transgression: The Lili Elbe Digital Archive and the Modalities of Translation”, Translation and Literature, 32, 3, November 2023. Online.

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)

Born with the Hungarian name of Kösztler Artúr, he later anglicised it to Arthur Koestler.

Before Koestler became a well-known writer in the 1940s, he worked as a journalist. In 1927 he became the Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem for the Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. In 1929 he lobbied for a transfer and was sent to Paris, and in 1931 to Berlin, where he worked in a building next to Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and he spent time in the Institute. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Koestler, being Jewish, could no longer return to Germany. He returned to Paris, was active in anti-fascist movements, and later reported from both sides in the Spanish Civil War.

His cousin, Ferenc Aldor, had started a mail-order business selling sex manuals. In 1933 Aldor wanted an Encyclopedia of Sex, and needed a skilled journalist to compile it. Koestler was offered 3,000 francs but no royalties. Drawing on his knowledge of Freud, Jung, Adler, and Stekel and his reading of Paolo Mantegazza’s Die Hygiene der Liebe, Koestler buckled down and finished his part of the book in an astonishing two months. Dr Levy-Lenz from Hirschfeld’s Institute contributed two chapters, and Aldor’s brother Willy Aldor compiled two appendices. It was published in late 1933 as L’Encyclopédie de la vie sexuelle. The 1938 English edition contained material by Dr Norman Haire.

In 1935 Koestler was living in Zurich when Willy Aldor came and offered the same payment for a book on Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, which Koestler wrote in a Budapest hotel room based on the writings of Magnus Hirschfeld - a mixture of translation and precis. Geoffrey Marx claims that Koestler’s major source was Pierre Vachet’s Les Perversions Sexuelles which in turn was based on the works of Magnus Hirschfeld and Felix Abraham.

The 1936 English edition edited by Norman Haire appears to include parts of Haire’s translations of a section of Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie: Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende - which has never been published in English. Haire wrote that he had revised Koestler’s text: “amended the language and punctuation where necessary, deleted some passages, inserted some, corrected some statements, and brought the text up-to-date”.

Until 1991 when Michael Lombardi-Nash published his English translation of Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten, this was the only work in English that sexologists could consult.

• Magnus Hirschfeld. Sexualpathologie. Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierend. A Marcus & E Webers Verlag, 1918.
• Pierre Vachet. Perversions sexuelles, d’après l’enseignement du docteur Magnus Hirschfeld, par son premier assistant le docteur Félix Abraham. Paris: François Aldor, 1931.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Sexual Anomalies and Perversions: Physical and Psychological Development and Treatment : a Summary of the Works of the Late Magnus Hirschfeld. London: Francis Aldor, 1936.
• Magnus Hirschfeld. Geschlechtsanomalien und Perversionen : Ein Studienbuch für Ärzte, Juristen, Seelsorger und Pädagogen. Paris: Aldor, Villefranche-Niche, 1938.
• Michael Scammell. Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. Random House, 2009 p176-7.
• Diana Wyndham. Norman Haire and the Study of Sex. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012 p394-5.
• Zagria “Who wrote Hirschfeld’s "Sexual Anomalies and Perversions"?”. Gender Variance Who’s Who, 28 February 2013. Online.
• Zagria, “Felix Abraham. Part II: Les Perversions Sexuelles”, Gender Variance Who’s Who, 25 September 2022. Online
• Geoffrey Marx. “36. Felix Abraham II”. Online
• EN.Wikipedia(Arthur Koestler)