Two photos of the Australian army in the 1940s

 These two photographs are found in 

• Yorick Small.  Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 

Remembering the Cockettes

The Cockettes, the way-out San Francisco performance troope 1969-1972 features lots of drag, cross-dressing and dressing up.   Two of its members, Dahlia McGowan and Bobbi Cameron later transitioned. 

Sylvester James was also a member .   He went on to be a disco star and is especially remembered for "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)", but remained faithful to his drag heritage until his death from AIDS at age 41.

Dahlia, despite being an alumna from the American Conservatory Theatre, had to work as a stripper after surgery.  She married, but her husband died in a bike accident.

Bobbi was in  two of the Cockettes films: she played the lead role in Tricia’s Wedding, 1971, and was Cynthia in Elevator Girls in Bondage, 1972.   She was then in Alejandro Jodorowsky's cult movie The Holy Mountain, and was assistant to actress Judy Carne.    Finally, after surgery she married either a cop or a dentist in Las Vegas, and became the lead showgirl at the Tropicano.

Here is a photograph of Bobbi.

courtesy of Clay Geerdes

This is found of p327 of new luscious 50-year anniversary tribute to the troope, which has lots of pictures, and cuttings, and even more pictures.

• Fayette Hauser. The Cockettes—Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy, 1969-1972. Process Media, 2020. 

Wilhelmina Ross (? - 1991 ) performer

Tish Gervais (who many years later reverted to being Brian Belovich) was a friend when Wilhelmina chose her name, ‘Wilhelmina’ from a modelling agency active at that time and ‘Ross’ from the singer Diana Ross. Wilhelmina was part African American and part Cherokee, and was already living fulltime as female.

In 1968 Wilhelmina became involved in the Jackie Curtis play Amerika Cleopatra. There was a contretemps with Alexis del Lago who had created a special dress for Jackie, but it was Wilhelmina who was wearing it on stage. Wilhelmina was also involved in Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Jimmy Camicia founded the Hot Peaches acting troupe in 1972, with drag as a major component. Marsha P Johnson was an early recruit. Wilhelmina joined in 1973. They were skeptical about the Warhol Factory scene and satirized it as The Magic Hype drag show, starring the celebrity-obsessed sell-out Randy Whorehall. In another play, Wilhelmina played drag queen superstar Belladella Bosom with the line:

“I’m not a woman, I’m not a man, it’s my own game”. 

In 1974 Wilhelmina was one of the trans women recruited, mainly from the Gilded Grape, for the Andy Warhol / Luciano Anselmino Ladies and Gentlemen Project. Anselmino paid Warhol $900,000 for 105 paintings. However Warhol took more than 500 polaroids of 19 sitters, paying each of them only $50. This resulted in 268 canvases. Wilhelmina had the biggest presence. She was in 52 Polaroids and 73 of the paintings. The paintings were exhibited in Italy the next year, but none of the sitters were identified.

The next year Wilhelmina had a bit part in the pro-prostitution film, The Happy Hooker.

Armitstead quotes Jimmy Camicia that Wilhelmina

“had a very bad ending, addicted to crack cocaine and sleeping on the streets. She didn’t want to go on welfare and pushed and pushed until she got a job, but they gave her a really hard time and finally she couldn’t take it any more.”

Some of the 1974 pictures were shown in 1997 at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, and Camicia came forward to identify Wilhelmina. The full collection was exhibited in Pittsburgh, London and elsewhere in 2018-20. This time the sitters were identified, following careful research.

• Craig B Highberger. Superstar in a Housedress: The Life and Legend of Jackie Curtis. Penguin, 2005: 7, 88
• Jonathan Katz. “From Warhol to Mapplethorpe: Postmodernity in two Acts”. In Patricia Hickson (ed). Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls. Yale University Press, 2015: 23-4, 36, 65-7.
• Brian Belovitch. Trans Figured: My Journey from Boy to Girl to Woman to Man. Skyhorse Publishing, 2018: 78. 
• Elizabeth Hoover. “Andy Warhol's Trans Subjects Finally Get Named”. PaperMag, 24 August 2018. Online. 
• Claire Armitstead. “'Andy allowed everyone to be beautiful': Warhol’s unseen drag queens”. The Observer, 8 Mar 2010. Online.

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2 photographs from The Other Paris

The Other Paris by Luc Sante, 2015 is a recent book that tells many interesting anecdotes about Paris, but has very little to say about its trans traditions.   Homosexuality is stuck in as the last part of the chapter on prostitution, and trans only passingly within that.

However it does contains two photographs of interest.

Note: the word 'pederast' was used in French without necessarily implying intergenerational relationships.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 12 November 1954

There were years when the police harassed and even arrested those 'cross-dressed' at New York's National Variety Artists' Carnival and Costume Ball.   At the other times the Ball winners were noted in the straight press.

Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s

Three trans women - said to be prostitutes - at the  Marienkasino.

Trans women at the Eldorado Nightclub

 Hansi Sturm, Miss Eldorado, 1926.


All images from:
Robert Beachy. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. Knopf, 2014.

Note Herman von Teschenberg's transvestity is not mentioned, Dörchen Richter,  Charlotte Charlaque are not mentioned at all.  Lili Elvenes (Elbe) is not named.

Newsarticle  

Barneys New York - Brothers, Sisters, Sons, & Daughters: The Film

I missed this when it came out in February, but it is certainly worth watching.

Directed by Bruce Weber

With Candy Darling,   Flawless Sabrina
 
and

Arin Andrews
Edie Charles
Valentijn de Hingh
Ashley de la Cruz
Sawyer Devuyst
Peche Di
Dezjorn Gauthier
Trevon Haynes
Katie Hill
Eve Lindley
Niki M’nray
Ryley Pogensky
Ines Rau
May Simon
Ahya Taylor
Maxie Neu
Gisele Xtravaganza

The individual portraits start at 10.00 minutes in.

Vicki Strasberg (193?–?) sex worker

Vicki took her surname in homage to Susan Strasberg, the daughter of Lee, the famous acting teacher.

Vicki was 6 feet (1.8 m), on hormones and gorging on food to be plumper and more sexually desirable, when she met photographer Diane Arbus in 1969. She lived full-time as a woman, and none of her sex customers had ever complained. She was ogled wherever she went.

Arbus commented: She had "the most unbelievable walk. I couldn't see the man in her."

Vicki knew how to use a knife, tortured her cats and once had stabbed a customer. For that she was sent to the Tombs jail.

Vicki took to Diane and gave her presents (which she had stolen from department stores). Vicki invited Diane to her birthday party, and Diane found that she was the only guest.  But she took one of her best known photographs.

• The London Magazine, 24,7-12: 75.
  
• Albert Goldbarth. Across the Layers: Poems Old and New. University of Georgia Press, 1993: 214.
  
• Patricia Bosworth. Diane Arbus: A Biography. WW Norton, 2006: 226.
  

Le Monocle, Paris 1932

Le Monocle was one of the first Parisian nightclubs for lesbians, located on Edgar-Quinet Boulevard in Montparnasse. The club was open from the 1920s and closed during the German occupation. Especially in its early days it attracted women who preferred male hairstyles and male clothing, some in suits and some in tuxedos. The initial owner who used the name Lulu, had the same taste.

The male photographer, Brassaï, came in 1932 and was permitted to take photographs.  Without his work we would not know about the club.

The name of the club came from the fact that a monocle had become a signifier of lesbianism in the preceding years.

Lulu on the left

It is apparent that many of the habitués of the club were what later generations would think of as trans men. Remember that they were doing this without male hormones which would not become available for another generation.

• Marjorie Garber. "Le Monocle de me Tante" in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992: 152-5.
  
• Brassaï translated into English by Richard Miller. "Le Monocle". In The Secret Paris of the 30s. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
  
• Florence Tamagne. A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939. New York: Algora, 2006:50.
  
• "Le Monocle". Lost Womyn's Space, July 12, 2011. http://lostwomynsspace.blogspot.ca/2011/07/le-monocle.html.
  
• "Le Monocle". The Puritan Influence, 6.06.2010. http://thepuritanimpulse.blogspot.ca/2010/06/le-monocle.html.
  

Nana (1939 - ) sex worker, performer. housewife, Place Blanche , Paris circa 1960

Nana was raised in Oran, Algeria. In 1955 she met Bambi and others in the Le Carrousel cast who were on tour. Nana realized instantly that was what she wanted to do.

There was a roundup of the queers in Oran in August 1957. However Nana had already left as her brother had told her that their parents had intended to have her locked up with the Ain Sefrah White Fathers, a Catholic order.

Nana arrived in Paris 5 August 1957, presenting as male but having already started female hormones. Nana and a friend took a room at the hotel Fairyland. The friend knew Fetiche who was a performer at Chez Madame Arthur, and Nana sewed for her in addition to working in a travel agency.

Nana's mother turned up in 1958 and took a room in the same hotel. She intended to take her son back to have him locked up by the White Fathers. However a flare-up in the ongoing War for Independence closed all the Algerian airports. Mother was able to get herself home by phoning the secretary of a minister whom she knew. Only one seat was available.

Nana was increasingly dressing as female. She left the travel-agency job, and met the Swedish photographer  Christer Strömholm.

She started to solicit in the Place Pigalle. The pimps at that time left the trans women alone for they would lose status as a man by pimping them. The police frequently arrested the trans women and charged them with being dressed as a woman outside the carnival period. As she was from Algeria she was called a 'dirty Arab'.

One summer Nana and a friend went to the South. Nana was arrested in that her ID card said that she was a man. The policeman even paid for a barber to cut her hair, and then she had to hitchhike back to Paris looking like a man in women`s clothes as those were the only clothes that she had.

In 1959 Nana created an act and obtained work at le Fifty, a cabaret on rue Fontaine. She worked in Cabarets until she was 45, but also kept working the streets.

One time a pimp slapped her and claimed that she owed 5,000 Fr for working on 'his' territory. Nana had to go and see the local godfather, and argue that she was not a woman.

Through Christer Strömholm, Nana was introduced to several artists. In 1970 Nana moved to Luxembourg to live with a boyfriend. In 1972 she had surgery with Dr Burou in Casablanca; in 1977 she met a lawyer in Lyon who was able to effect her change of Civil Status, and her name became Eva. She and her boyfriend were married in 1980.

• Hélène Hazera interviews Nana. "Aujord'hui Nana Se Raconts". In Christer Strömholm. Les Amies De Place Blanche. Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 2011: 50-9.

Nana 1959

Catherine Bruce, New York 1968

Diane Arbus is famous for her photographs of transvestites, although she didn't really take that many such photographs.  Her transvestites are rarely given names, and only a few of them look as if they could pass on the street or go shopping without drawing attention.

The major exception is Catherine Bruce, also referred to as Bruce Catherine.   Presumably her two first names.   Diane photographed Catherine on a park bench, then in her underwear as home, then as a naked man, and then as Bruce on a bench:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby

Princton was an all-male university in 1916 and for decades afterwards.   F. Scott Fitzgerald was in the Triangle Club which put on plays.  

He posed for a publicity photo for a production of The Evil Eye, which he co-wrote, which was printed in The New York Times on January 2, 1916. The newspaper called him "the most beautiful" show girl in the production.  However having failed his exams he was not allowed to perform.

Cape Town, 1950s.

'Moffies' party at Madame Costello's in Cape Town.  Photograph by Jan Berry, printed in Mark Gevisser & Edwin Cameron. Defiant Desire: Gay and lesbian lives in South Africa. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Los Angeles 1946

An arrest for the serious crime of gender expression.

The pre-title-page photograph in Lavender Los Angeles, Arcadia Publishing, 2011.

The Standish Hotel, Hull, Quebec, Halloween, 1950

Photograph by Michael Berens, held in the Library and Archives Canada.

A club in Monmartre, circa 1930

All persons are female bodied.


















Taken from p62-3 of Peter Ackroyd's Dressing Up. A bad book in many ways, but a good source of photographs.

Sydney, NSW - 1942

Neville McQuade (18) and Lewis Stanley Keith (19).
 
A photograph of this same pair appears in the newspaper Truth, of 14 June 1942, taken after they had appeared at North Sydney Police Court on charges of being idle and disorderley persons, having insufficient means of support, and with having goods in their possession - including a military uniform and an American dollar bill - believed to be stolen. After being remanded in custody for a week, both were released on bonds. Of the photographs, McQuade later said to a Truth correspondent: 'We were bundled out of the police cell, and snapped immediately. My friend and I had no chance to fix our hair or arrange our make-up. We were half asleep and my turban was on the wrong side.'

McQuade told the paper of his ambition to be a professional female impersonator, and spoke of his admiration for his mentor, Lea Sonia, who had been killed not long before getting off a tram in the wartime 'brownout'.

I have copied this from http://www.flickr.com/photos/hab3045/1087993211/in/set-72157601380954383/

New York pickpocket 1941

The history of transpeople can be taunting. Some persons, who presumably live a life of several decades and repeatably express their transgender personality, even in periods of repression, literally have only a few moments of fame, often because they have been arrested. Then they disappear back into the darkness.


One such was a person charged with being a pickpocket who was arrested in New York in 1941, and who just happened to be photographed by the freelance photographer Weegee (Usher later Arthur Fellig 1899 - 1968). She co-operated with Weegee by lifting her skirt, and we have the photograph, but we do not know even her name.


. http://elainearmen.blogspot.com/2008/09/naked-city-by-arthur-fellig.html.