Barbara de Lamere (1940 - ) proof-reader, magazine editor

Most of the trans women in New York in the 1970s who are written about did not get as far as completion surgery. One who did so was Barbara de Lamere who transitioned at work in the late 1970s, and had surgery in 1982. She retained her job at Kaye Scholer law firm. She became active in The Gay Veterans Association and the Irish and Lesbian Gay Organization.

Enid & Barbara

She had been born as Eddie Dame and mainly raised in New York City. Eddie was in the US Air Force (1959-63) where he found a male lover, Larry. They continued as a gay couple after leaving the Air Force, until Larry married a woman in 1967 saying that he wanted children. However, they continued to meet for sex until Eddie became Barbara in 1982. Eddie had been transvesting since the age of 3, and continued even though Larry was uncomfortable with it. 

In 1967 Eddie joined Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company and was given the stage name of Bunny Eisenhower. The same year he met Enid Jacobs who accepted Eddie’s cross-dressing. Eddie gave up acting. In 1970 Eddie and Enid were married. The same year Eddie was a co-founder with Lee Brewster, Bebe Scarpinato (a teacher), Vicky West (artist) and Chris Moore (a Jewel Box Revue performer) of the Queens' Liberation Front, where he used his stage name, and photographs of Bunny are in Drag magazine 1,1. His affair with Larry continued. The QLF agitated and several New York ordinances that constricted transvesting were removed.

Enid and Eddie were divorced in 1977. Enid kept Eddie’s surname, even after she remarried. 

Eddie started social transition.  In 1982 Eddie took the name Barbara de Lamere and had completion surgery.  The sexual affair with Larry ended.

Enid gained a PhD in English from Rutgers University in 1983, and taught there and at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She became known as a poet, and with her new husband Donald Lev edited Home Planet News, a literary review. Enid and Barbara remained good friends and Barbara was well-known to Enid’s family. Barbara was Associate Editor at the Home Planet News using the name Careufel de Lamiere.

Arthur David Kahn (1920-2009) was a communist author and politician, journalist, classics scholar and professor, and gay rights activist. He had been an officer in the OSS, and was a war interrogator in Germany from 1945. Back in the US he was involved in the Communist Party and the Progressive Party and blacklisted. In the 1960s he did a PhD in Philosophy, and then taught English and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Later Kahn helped found and later chair the Classics department at the new Brock University in Ontario. (Books by Kahn)

In the early 1990s after interviews and the subsequent book Aids, The Winter War: A Testing of America, published 1993, his interest turned to gay activists in New York City. One of the interviewees was Barbara de Lamere. The resulting book was The Many Faces of Gay: Activists Who Are Changing the Nation, 1997. As a courtesy to protect Enid’s privacy, he gave her name as Esther.

Enid died in 2003, and The Academy of American Poets each year bestows the Enid Dame Memorial Poetry Prize for the best poem by an undergraduate. Tributes.

Barbara/Careufel then became Executive Editor along with Donald Lev.

Susan Stryker’s Transgender History came out in 2008. Presumably she had not read Kahn’s book. She simply wrote: “More significant was the Queens’ Liberation Front (QLF), founded by drag queen Lee Brewster and heterosexual transvestite Bunny Eisenhower”. That is it. Stryker gave only Barbara’s short lived stage name, and a very incorrect and unneeded sexual orientation.

In 2015 I wrote up and published an account mainly based on Kahn’s book.

The second edition of Stryker’s book came out in 2017, with the QLF sentence unchanged.

In March 2021, Enid’s brother commented on my account, mainly to criticize that I had Barbara’s wife’s name wrong - that she was Enid not Esther. That enabled me to google Enid Dame and I found an interesting poet.

DeDe Jacobs-Komisar, Enid’s niece then posted and gave interesting information about how Barbara was welcomed by the Jacobs family even after transition.

The third edition of Styker’s book came out in 2026. Again the with the QLF sentence unchanged, and no other mention of Barbara.

• “Drag Queens Demonstrate”. Drag: a magazine about the transvestite, 1,1: 1970: 6-7. 3 photographs of Bunny.
• Arthur David Kahn. The Many Faces of Gay: Activists Who Are Changing the Nation. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1997: 3, 15-20, 266-9.
• Barbara writing as Careufel de Lamiere. “Remembering Enid”. Home Planet News, 10 March 2003. Online.
• Susan Stryker. Transgender History. Seal Press, 2008: 87. 2nd edition, 2017:111. 3rd edition, 2026: 74.
• Zagria. “Susan Stryker: Transgender History – a review”. April 2010. Online.
• Madeline Tiger & DeDe Jacobs-Komisar. “How Enid Dame led us beyond paradigms”. Bridges, 16,1, Spring 2011.
• Zagria. “Barbara de Lamere previously known as Bunny Eisenhower”. September 2015, revised March 2021. Online.
• DeDe Jacobs-Komisar. Comment online.

---

On page ix-x in the Preface, Kahn wrote: “ three interviewees asked to be identified solely by their first names; others are represented under first-name pseudonyms”. So is Barbara de Lamere a pseudonym? Well, we know that she wrote under the name Careufel de Lamiere. However DeDe Jacobs-Komisar’s comment clarifies that she was indeed known as Barbara de Lamere.

Pyander, a transvesting ingle in 1599

• 

  Thomas Middleton
  

   Thomas Middleton.“Satire 5 - Ingling Pyander” in MicroCynicon: Six Snarling Satires. 1599.

A work of poetic satire by the English playwright who was then 18. Later he wrote plays and other
poems, many of which include gender swapping plots, and sex between men.

“Ingle” was used in different ways in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, but more often than not it was a term for what we would call queer. It was especially applied to pretty young men who might be kept or might be whores. The terms “catamite” and “ganymede” were near synonyms. The verb form, ‘to ingle’ usually means to have anal sex with an ingle, or for an ingle to have sex. Some ingles transvested.

In recent decades, Middleton’s poem has become a topic for theses and books, and is used by some writers to argue that transvesting ingles were common on the streets of London in the 1590s. While Middleton used female pronouns for Pyander, none of the modern commentators do. Nor do most of them seem to have read anything about trans sex workers for comparison. Certainly no trans person seems to have commented on Pyander.

This essay will be a survey of the major writing about Pyander. Are they cisplaining? Did Middleton base his poem on an actual person? What is the order of events in the poem? Poetry, of course, is harder than prose to pin down. Poetic License is a term coined to excuse poetry.

Excerpts from the poem

The 5th satire is a 99-line poem. Click for the full poem).

The most relevant lines are:

The still memorial, if I aim aright, Is a pale chequer'd black hermaphrodite.

Sometimes he jets it like a gentleman,

Other whiles much like a wanton courtesan;

But, truth to tell, a man or woman whether,

I cannot say, she's excellent at either;

But if report may certify a truth,

She's neither of either, but a cheating youth. (lines 21-8)

…

Of beauty's counterfeits affords not one

So like a lovely smiling paragon,

As is Pyander in a nymph’s attire

Whose rolling eye sets gazers hearts on fire,

Whose cherry lip, black brow, and smiles procure

Lust-burning buzzards to the tempting lure.

And suffer not Pyander's sin appear?

I will, I will. Your reason? Why, I'll tell,

Because time was I lov'd Pyander well;

True love indeed will hate love's black defame,

So loathes my soul to seek Pyander's shame. (lines 31-42)

…

I spied Pyander in a nymph's attire:

No nymph more fair than did Pyander seem,

Had not Pyander then Pyander been;

No lady with a fairer face more grac'd,

But that Pyander's self himself defac'd;

Never was boy so pleasing to the heart

As was Pyander for a woman's part;

Never did woman foster such another (lines 63-70)

…

That force perforce I must Pyander prove:

The issue of which proof did testify

Ingling Pyander's damnèd villany.

I lov'd indeed, and, to my mickle cost,

I lov'd Pyander, so my labour lost (lines 75-9)

…

Trust not a painted puppet, as I've done,

Who far more doted than Pygmalion:

The streets are full of juggling parasites

With the true shape of virgins' counterfeits:

But if of force you must a hackney hire,

Be curious in your choice, the best will tire;

The best is bad, therefore hire none at all;

Better to go on foot than ride and fall. (lines 92-9)

(Note: ‘hackney’ was a 16^th century term for a whore, in that like a hackney carriage she could be hired.)

History

The archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London issued an order prohibiting the printing of any satires whatever including this one. They required that the published satires of Thomas Middleton, Joseph Hall, John Marston, Thomas Nashe, and others be burned. This was done 4 June 1599 in a Bonfire at the Stationers’ Hall.

The history of the late 16^th century and indeed the whole of the 17^th century records very few male-born persons in female attire except on the stage where boy-actresses played all the female parts until 1672. There were of course plentiful female-born persons discovered and even arrested in male attire: “female husbands”, those seeking a man’s wage and so on (and the interesting question is which of them should we regard as trans in the modern sense?).

One of the very few mentions of a male-born person transvesting is this poem of Middleton’s. The poem is designated by Middleton as satire, and taken so by the bishops who burnt his work. The obvious question is: is Pyander based on a real-life person or incident in the street, or is she just a poetic fiction?

Alan Bray

The gay historian, Bray, in his pioneering Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 1982, compares Pyander to the mollies of the early 18^th century.

“Transvestism of this kind [18^th century] had a function crucially different from that of Elizabethan or Jacobean London. Transvestism itself was not new, as one can see from the extensive contemporary description of it in Thomas Middleton's Micro-Cynicon published in 1599; but the significance given to it a century later was radically different. … Transvestism was as common in Elizabethan London as it was to be a century later, but there are sharp differences between transvestism in the two periods; and one of them is present in Middleton's reference to the streets as the haunt of transvestites. Transvestism in the eighteenth-century molly houses was something that took place behind closed doors: it had nothing to do with the streets. The transvestism Thomas Middleton is describing was intended to deceive: that of an eighteenth-century molly house was not; it was quite obviously a man dressed in women's clothes. What then was its purpose? The answer is in the other major difference between Middleton's tale and the conditions of the eighteenth century: Middleton's tale is not concerned with homosexuality. The whole point of the story is that the transvestite was trying to avoid sexual intercourse so as to avoid being discovered. His motives were apparently mercenary, leading to the suggestion - which is probably the best explanation of the sexual ambiguity of the story - that Middleton looked on transvestism as a vice in its own right.”

“extensive contemporary description”? One reference in a satirical poem?

Bray was writing, and pioneering, in 1982, so I don’t want to be too critical. However later academics criticise the uncritical use of 20^th-century terms as ‘presentism’. Nobody in 1599 would understand words such as ‘transvestism’ (which did not come into English use until the late 18^th century, taken from Italian and French usage) and ‘homosexuality’ (coined in the late 19^th century). The verb form ‘transvesting’ is noted in dictionaries as first being used in 1652, and presumably was used verbally before anyone wrote it down. So it would be more suitable. Middleton used the verb term ‘ingling’: Bray is aware of the word, but does not use it.

“Middleton's tale is not concerned with homosexuality. The whole point of the story is that the transvestite was trying to avoid sexual intercourse so as to avoid being discovered. His motives were apparently mercenary”.

This is a very problematic sentence. Some 21^st century trans prostitutes regard themselves as gay, some as transgender, some as both, some otherwise. Is it not likely that such a person would deliver sex if the man indicated that he wanted such, but flip to a simple demand for money if not? Of course it is not “concerned with homosexuality”. Neither party has such a concept. Bray does not seem to understand how a transvesting ingle or a modern trans sex worker needs to be adaptable, nor what her motivation would be.

Note that Bray uses male pronouns for Pyander, despite the fact that the narrator uses female:

“But, truth to tell, a man or woman whether,

I cannot say, she's excellent at either;

But if report may certify a truth,

She's neither of either, but a cheating youth.”

Secondly Bray does not make any allowance for the narrator (Middleton?) rewriting the encounter to diminish his interest in having sex with an ingle. Nor that he declares that he had loved her. Is he a reliable narrator?

It is surprising that Bray who was a GLF activist who must have met trans women in London in the 1970s does not even consider that Pyander could be trans.

Bray is cited by all the writers below.

Marjorie Garber,

Garber, a decade later, sort-of summarised what Bray had to say.

“During the period 1580 to 1620, as we have already noted, some women as well as men cross-dressed publicly in London, whether for fashion, for comfort, for pleasure, as a stratagem that facilitated theft of other crime, or as a cultural sign of their social position, high or low.”

She concludes that Pyander

“is not, or not self-evidently, a homosexual but rather a trickster seeking to rob his unwary partner”.

Like Bray she uses male pronouns, is disinterested in any dissimulating done by the narrator and that the narrator says that he loved her.

Rictor Norton

The gay historian, Norton, writing at the same time as Garber, sees through the narrator.

“The author for a time ‘loved Pyander well’, but stung by the pricks of conscience, and the fact that Pyander spent all his money and then deserted him, he repents, and confesses his sin by writing this ‘snarling satire’. This may well be a completely fictional creation based more upon Juvenal’s Satires than upon life in London, but the author seems to expect his readers to recognise such characters as Pyander.”

Norton avoids pronouns for Pyander. He reads in the poem as Bray and Garber did not, that the narrator had taken Pyander as a mistress, until his money ran out and she left. This is completely different from seeing her as a trickster. A cis female mistress may have done likewise without being put down as a trickster.

Bruce Smith

Smith writing two years after Norton had seen it differently:

“The spiral of power and pleasure that locks the satirist and the satirized in a furious embrace is especially tight.” The Author “owns up himself to the vices he lambastes in others”. Because the narrator “actually participated in what he writes about, however, the emphasis falls not on the cozener but on the cozened. What we see from that subjective vantage point is a jolting discrepancy between appearance and reality.”

Again no consideration that Pyander might be trans.

Michael Shapiro

Shapiro, writing four years after Norton, comments:

“There is far less evidence of male cross-dressing in the early modern period than there is of women wearing male apparel, either in literature or in life. … Some English literary works allude to male cross-dressing. The fifth satire of Middleton’s Microcynicon (1599) features Ingling Pyander, a male transvestite posing as a female prostitute … Perhaps such literary figures were modelled on actual male transvestites, but I know of no corroborating non-literary evidence.”

Again the statement that the narrator had taken her as a mistress is ignored, but he makes the important point that there is no evidence of such persons in real life.

Herbert Jack Heller

Heller, a year later, starts by pointing out the unusual narrator. The satire “differs from the other five satires by the involvement of the narrator in the situation he describes. It is unclear whether there is a single narrator or several in Microcynicon, but in the previous four satires, the narrator is an observer, not a participant.” He again sees the narrator as a victim: “His complaint is that he had fallen in love with Pyander, unaware that ‘she’ is a cross-dressing boy”. However. like Smith he sees the poem “implicates its narrator, perhaps more so than even Pyander himself. Any confusion the narrator can raise about Pyander's sex or activities might also serve to diminish the reader's sense of his own culpability. But the narrator is not exonerated.” And even “ while the narrator considers Pyander's parentage, we quickly learn that he is the son of a prostitute that even the narrator has consorted with”.

Heller addresses the unreliability of the narration: “The narrator does not indicate whether his sexual union with Pyander occurred just after they met in the street, or how long it was until ‘So far entangled was my soul by love,/ That force perforce I must Pyander prove’ (74-75). But however long this took, the narrator would have us believe that he always took Pyander for a woman.” Except that he also says: "Sometimes he jets it like a gentleman,/ Otherwhiles much like a wanton courtesan " (23-24), and what are we to make of "time was [he] loved Pyander well ”(40)? Which would imply passage of time between their first meeting and the narrator complaining that he has been cozened

Which is how Norton (not mentioned in Heller) had presented it.

But why quotation marks around ‘she’?

Dimitris Savvidis

Savvidis, 14 years later than Heller, but unaware of his thesis/book and of Norton’s comments, returns to Bray’s model:

“the potential client is deceived by the transvestite prostitute, who manages to lure him to an act that did not match with what the client had in mind. Middleton’s hermaphrodite has a different service to offer, not so much an offer that involves the sexual act per se but a different aesthetic of the sexual experience”.

He also thinks that the narrator actually takes Pyander to be a cis woman. However he rejects Bray’s assumption that they did not have sex - after all one of the meanings of the verb ‘to ingle’ is to have anal sex.

Randolph Trumbach

Trumbach finds yet another reading:

“Middleton bitterly tells of a man who has fallen in love with a boy he then encounters ‘ingling’ or whoring in the street dressed in ‘a nymphs attire’”.

This removes Heller’s quandary of how long is the period from the encounter in the street to the end of their affair, in that for him the street scene comes after, not before.

------

Trumbach and Norton are the only two writers here who have some idea of what it was to be a transvesting ingle.

None of these writers use the word ‘transvesting’. It has fallen out of use, but it is period appropriate and is easily understood.

Most of the writers refuse female pronouns for Pyander - to the point of rudeness.

It is noteworthy that the authors who assume that Pyander was based on an actual person, do not put her name/pseudonym in their index, as they thereby should.

----

• Alan Bray. Homosexuality on Renaissance England, Columbia University Press, 1982:87-88.
• Majorie Garber. Vested interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. Rutledge, 1992: 29-30.
• Rictor Norton. Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830. GMP, 1992: 19.
• Bruce R Smith. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics. The University of Chicago Press, 1994: 181-2.
• Michael Shapiro. Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines & Female Pages. The University of Michigan Press, 1996: 29.
• Herbert Jack Heller, Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton's City Comedies. PhD thesis, Louisiana State University, 1997: 180-7. Online.
• Dimitris Savvidis. Male prostitution and the homoerotic sex-market in Early Modern England. PhD Thesis, University of Sussex, 2011: 31-2, 101-7. Online.
• Randolph Trumbach. “From Age to Gender, c1500-1750: From the adolescent male to the adult effeminate body”. In Sarah Toulalan & Kate Fisher (eds) The Routledge History of Sex and the Body.Routledge, 2013: 129.

A Ma'dan mustergil (1917–?) landowner, poet.

Her father was a rich Sheik of the Ma'dan معدان‎, the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet. She was then the only child her parents had together, but her father had had five sons with his first wife, and her mother had had a son and daughter with her first husband.

Her father's mother raised her. She was moderately deformed. Already as a child, she wanted to live as a boy, and as Ma'dan had a tradition of mustergil (comparable to the Sworn Virgins in Albania/Kosova) it was permitted.

"A family is proud of a girl who wants to live like a boy".

 The mustergil carried weapons and went on hunts.

When he was 20 or so in 1937-8 (AH 1355), his mother was murdered by the second husband's family. His young brother had become the father's favourite, and the elder brothers feared for their inheritance. They did not kill the boy because he was their blood, but the mother was an outsider. The killing was supposed to bring the father to his senses, that he should devote himself to his elder sons. This did not happen, but neither was the murder avenged, on the pretence that the killer was unknown. The mother's first husband's clan did want to get involved as a vendetta would bring government intervention. The mustergil never forgave this lapse, and wrote ridiculing and insulting poems to goad the family. In time the murderer was himself murdered, but not by the family of the first husband.

The father moved both the mustergil and her grandmother to another village where he could keep a better eye on them. The mustergil owned some land in usufruct on which 50-60 rice-growing families lived. The mustergil was afraid that he would lose it, so she applied to the authorities in Basra, who ruled that he would have to pay tenure-fees until 1945, but would then gain the legal title. He erected a meeting house as a male sheik would do, and had coffee distributed to the men of the village.

The mustergil wore male outer and undergarments, but had hair long like a woman and a female kerchief. This retention of token female appearance was because he prayed every day to Allah, and if he did not do so as a woman, prayers would have no consequence.

At harvest-time the mustergil inspected the crop and took a share, and paid the tax to the government.

The mustergil was the only female-born person of the Ma'dan that the sociologists met who could read and write. Poetry was a family tradition: both he father and the mother's first husband were famous local poets, and the half-brother on her mother's side gained national fame for his poetry.

• Sigrid Westphal-Hellbusch. „Transvestiten bei Arabischen Stämmen“. Sociologus, n.f.6,1, 1956. Berlin. Reprinted as „Transvestiten: Institutionalisierte Möglichkeiten des Ablehnens üblicher Frauen- und Männerrollen im Süd-Irak“ in Brigitta Häuser-Schäublin, Hrsg. Ethnologische Frauen-Forschung: Ansätze, Methoden, Resultate. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1991. S. 176-189. Translated into English by Bradley Rose as "Institutionalized Gender-Crossing in Southern Iraq" in Stephen O. Murray & Will Roscoe. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature. New York University Press, 1997: 233-243.
  
• "Transgender im Süd-Irak (1956)". rhizom, 2.August 2011. http://rhizom.blogsport.eu/2011/08/02/transgender-im-sud-irak-1956.
  
  ___________________________________________________________________________
  
  The paper by Westphal-Hellbusch seems to be all that we have about the mustergil.
  
  The person described here takes up most of the paper.   It is unfortunate that he is not given a name.   There may well be good reasons for hiding his name, although given the social prominence of the family it is unlikely that local persons do not recognize who he is.    Either way, if it were deemed cautious not to give the real  name, a pseudonym would have been useful for reference.
  
  As we are not given the person's name, we don't actually whether the person took a male name at any stage. 
  
  The person would seem to be untypical of mustergils in general, both by the family wealth and by the fact of being literate.  Thus, despite Westphal-Hellbusch's paper, we actually know almost nothing about most mustergils.  By extension we do not know how or if they survived following Saddam's murderous attacks on them after the first Gulf War.
  
  "he prayed every day to Allah, and if he did not do so as a woman, prayers would have no consequence".   And yet, what must have been his greatest prayer, that the mother's murder be avenged, had no consequence.
  
  The person was Shi'a, and would look to Iran for religious guidance.   However this is 30 years prior to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomein's 1983 fatwa that recognized gender changes, after which a similar person would no longer have been required to pray as a woman.
  
  The Albanian/Kosovan Sworn Virgins that I have discussed fought and suffered as men in the Second World War.  In April 1941 the Iraqis arose and overthrew the Hashemite monarchy that the British had imposed on them without consultation.   The subsequent Anglo-Iraqi War was won by the British and the Hashemites re-imposed.   There is no mention that this person even participated.
  
  She was proficient in the use of arms.  It could be said that if the mustergil were a cis man of the same class in that culture, he would have killed the mother's murderer himself.   To get upset because no man steps forward to give you vengeance is a stereotypical woman's role.  However traditional third-gender roles often combine limited tolerance with behaviour limits.   We know so little about mustergils that it is unknown whether such were permitted to partake in feuds or vendettas. 
  

Paola Revenioti Πάολα Ρεβενιώτη (1959–) poet, photographer, sex worker, activist.

Revenioti was born and raised in Piraeus, the port of Athens. His father was a factory worker, his mother a hairdresser. His father's family regarded his homosexuality as shameful and he joined the navy academy at 13 to escape. That is where he first had sex.

He was expelled three years later and moved to Exarchia, in downtown Athens and lived as female. She made a living as a sex worker.

"I've met all sorts of people, from murderers to saints. I have seen the secrets of the Greek man, I've seen as few saw."

In the 1980s Paola was involved in many protests against state repression and for gay and trans (parendytikon) rights. In 1985 she published a collection of poetry Σαλτάρισμα (Saltarisma). From 1986-92 she published Kraximo, a 'trans-anarchist fanzine' which ran articles about gay and trans rights and photographs of her tricks.

In 1990 Paola became the first trans candidate for the Οικολόγων Εναλλακτικών (Alternate Ecological Party), and was one of the founders of the Greek version of ACT UP. In 1992 she was a prime mover in Athens' first gay pride, which was done without there being any gay organizations to support it. In 2003 she was elected as the president of the SATTE= Σωματείου Αλληλεγγύης Τραβεστί Τρανσέξουαλ Ελλάδος (Solidarity Association of Greek Transsexuals and Transvestites).

In 2008 she was a co-author of Η ιστορία του λεσβιακού, γκέι, αμφί και τρανς κινήματος στην Ελλάδα: μια πρώτη αποτίμηση(The history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans movement in Greece: a first assessment), and appeared in the short film, Κι αν είναι αλήθεια; (What if it is true?).

In October 2013 she had an exhibition of her photographs in London.

• Еγο Лэтяο. "An afternoon cup of coffee with Paola ". Ough, 21/05/2012. www.ough.gr/index.php?mod=articles&op=view&id=899&lang=en.
  
• "Πάολα: ένας θρύλος του αντεργκράουντ μιλά στη LiFO: Με αφορμή μια έκθεση με φωτογραφίες της που ξεκινά στις 17 Ιανουαρίου στην γκαλερί The Breeder ". LiFo, 8.1.2013. www.lifo.gr/mag/features/3572.
  
• Hannah Lack. "Paola Revenioti: The Greek transgender activist on blowing up sexual taboos in the name of art". Dazed Digital, 2013-05-07. www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/16110/1/paola-revenioti.
  
• Marina Fokidis. "Paola Revenioti". Frieze, 155, May 2013. www.frieze.com/issue/review/paola-revenioti.
  
• Jean Paul Zapata. "Trans artist sex worker shows off lovers in London photo exhibit: Trans artist and prostitute Paola Revenioti shares photos of her former lovers and clients from 19 October to 3 November at East London’s George and Dragon gay bar". Gay Star News, 18 October 2013. www.gaystarnews.com/article/trans-artist-sex-worker-shows-lovers-london-photo-exhibit181013.
  

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Alice Purnell (1943 - ) chemist, activist, nurse, counsellor, poet

++February 2015 - revised after feedback from Alice.


Purnell was conceived in a haystack in the Wirral during an air-raid. He was sexually and physically abused at prep school by the headmaster who was later convicted. His parents had a 'messy horrid' divorce when he was doing his O-level examinations.

He felt confused in that he felt that he should be a girl but was not attracted to men. He developed an alternate identity as Anne who, by the age of 15, socialized only with people who knew nothing of Purnell's male life.

Purnell did a degree in chemistry. He found love with a woman to whom he explained about Anne. She accepted this side of him, but asked that Anne change her name as her sister was also Anne. Purnell had been called Dormouse at school, and, in homage to Lewis Carroll, became Alice.

They were living in Sussex. One evening on the way home from work as a research chemist, Purnell encountered, before the police arrived, a trans girl who had hanged herself in a tree. Her father showed up and expressed anger but not sorrow. Purnell felt that he could easily have been that trans girl, and this led to becoming a volunteer with the Samaritans, the advice line for those at risk of suicide. She found that a third of calls on the line featured gender difficulties.

Alice did not know how to express her femininity until she found a a copy of Virginia Prince's Transvestia in a sex-book shop in London's Soho. She used the Transvestia contact system to find like-minded persons, and became a member of the European Chapter of Virginia Prince's FPE.


Alice, Alga Campbell from Dublin, Giselle, a US expatriate, and Sylvia Carter, met in 1965 and agreed to found the Beaumont Society (named after the 18^th century transvestite pioneer). The membership numbering was started at 100 (which was assigned to Alice, and then issued back and forth from that to give the impression of greater membership. Initially there were almost as many overseas members as in the UK, with some in Malaysia, Kenya and other parts of the Commonwealth. Alice became the overseas contact person because of her French. Regional contacts were appointed but were often the only member in their region.

After an initial meeting in Hampstead, the first full meeting was held in Southampton in 1966 with 12 in attendance including two wives.

Purnell had been attending the Charing Cross Hospital Gender Clinic under the care of Dr Randell, and that same year was offered surgery.  However Purnell married his lover instead after five years together. They had two daughters and a son.

Following the practice of Prince in the US, new members had to be vetted, and the application form explicitly stated that no hint of overt gayness would be tolerated.

"It was also risky meeting others to sponsor them. I remember a character from Gibraltar who was very cagey indeed, who I arranged via the contact system to sponsor so she could attend meetings when in the UK; (you could not do so if not sponsored as they were often in people's homes). At the meeting in a car park this person told me my date & place of birth, schools and University, bank balance and workplace. I was horrified. He had discovered all this via our Secret Service for whom he worked in the Colony. He said he did this to secure his own confidentiality in case we breached his. I felt disinclined to sponsor him and was really horrified that even then governments held so much info' on all of us. I did sponsor him after discussion with Alga. It was a bit of a mutual standoff, but what an invasion of my own privacy!"

Alice, Alga, Virginia, Sylvia - 1971

In 1969 Virginia Prince visited the Beaumont Society in London, Leicester and Scotland. On her return in 1971 she stayed with Alice.

Alice was on BBC Radio 4 with agony aunt Claire Raynor. She attended the TV/TS conferences at Leeds University in 1974, and Leicester University in 1975 – the latter was organized by the Beaumont Society. Also in 1975, Alice was a co-founder of the Beaumont Trust, a registered charity, which separately from the Beaumont Society, set up a helpline and published educational booklets on transgender topics. In 1976 Alice became Vice-President of the Beaumont Society, and President a year later.

In 1977, Alice trained as a nurse, specializing in geriatric services. She then worked as such for 26 years, at one time becoming a matron, ++including nursing support for transgender surgery.

She ++finally had surgery in 1982 after the dissolution of her marriage, and remained President of the Beaumont Society until 1984. She also worked with Judy Cousins at SHAFT. She researched the then literature on trans topics and was disappointed. She joined HBIGDA (now WPATH) and attended its European meetings. She found that they were dominated by US concerns and that the Standards of Care were mainly to protect the surgeons, and that the emphasis was on psychiatry rather than on psychology/counselling. Using the contacts that she had made she organized the first of the GENDYS conferences which was held at Manchester University in 1990. This was intended as a British conference, and deliberately brought together each type of professional who deals with trans persons, and each type of trans person. There were a further seven GENDYS conferences held every two years. Alice edited all the GENDYS Conference Reports and often contributed papers.

Alice in 2011

After obtaining a masters degree in counselling and psychology, she co-founded Gender Trust and subsidized it in its first year. It was intended to help transgender rather than transvestite persons, and was, like the Beaumont Trust, a registered charity. However after a year the legal counsel to the Gender Trust was insisting that the trustees were to view her counselling notes. She regarded this potential breach of confidentiality re those she had counselled to be outrageous and resigned from Gender Trust. She also took them to court to establish that the copyright to the 2005 book was hers, and was not held by the Trust.  ++She estimates that she has counselled around 500 trans persons.  

She is also a poet, a dog lover and a fossil collector. She has lived most of her life in Sussex.

Alice Purnell was made an OBE in the 2012 New Years Honours List: "For services to Transgender People".

• Alice Purnell. "Why does transexuality exist?" and "TV, TG, TS – What's in a label?" in Michael Trevor Haslam. Transvestism: A Guide. Beaumont Trust, 1993.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 1^st International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1991.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 2^nd International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1993.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 3^rd International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1995.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 4^th International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1996.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 5^th International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 1999.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Gendys 2K: Sixth International Gender Conference Report. London: BM Gendys, 2001.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.). Conference Report of the 7th International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys,2002.
  
• A. Purnell (ed.), Conference Report of the 8th International Gender Dysphoria Conference. London: BM Gendys, 2004.
  
• Alice Purnell. Transexed and Transgendered People: A Guide. Gendys Conferences, 2005.
  
• Alice L100. "A History of the Beaumont Society". Beaumont Magazine, 13,4, 2005. Online at: www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/6971183/a-short-beaumont-history-the-beaumont-society.
  
• Alice Kelly Purnell. Be the Flame Not the Moth: An Anthology of Poems (and Some Prose). Golden Flower Press, 2010.
  
• Alice Purnell & Jed Bland (ed). Trans in the Twenty First Century: Concerning Gender Diversity. Beaumont Trust, 2011.
  
• "New year honours for Brighton and Hove LGBT supporters". Brighton and Hove News, December 31^st, 2011. www.brightonandhovenews.org/2011/12/31/new-year-honours-for-brighton-and-hove-lgbt-supporters/12027.
• email from Alice Purnall, 7 Feb 2015

Christine Burns interviewed Alice Purnell,20 May 2013




_________________________________________________________________________________

We have a list of the 4 founders of the Beaumont Society, but we still don't have a list of the 12 founders of the Hose and Heel Club.

Alice says that the Beaumont Society was never really anti-gay, merely obliged to distance itself from being perceived as gay because of the laws at the time.  Whether you buy this or regard it as a post-facto PR position, the Beaumont Society has grown away from its Princian origins.  The interview with Christine Burns contains none of the mean spirited rhetoric that Prince herself retained till the end.

Note that Alice uses 'transgender' as a umbrella term apart from transvestites.  You find the same usage with Katherine Cummings, the Australian FPE alumna.   The sterile debate re transgender=heterosexual transvestite is mainly a US hangup.

++In the initial verion of this article I had assumed that Alice was non-op because a) she was president of a Princian organization and b) there was no statment to the contrary.   However it has now been clarified that the assumption was not so, and statements have been added in the narrative above.


Dallas Denny has an essay, Consumer relations: WPATH’s evolving relations with those it serves, in which she mentions that as late as 1989 she was still getting a run-around attempting to join HBIGDA. Alice had joined a few years earlier, but apparently in stealth.

Garrett Oppenheim (1911 - 1995) writer, hypnotist, counselor, sexologist

Garrett or James Jr was the son of James Oppenheim more (1882 – 1932) poet, novelist and Jungian.

Garrett, a polio survivor, was a poet associated with the surrealist school in the 1930s and a short-story writer from the 1930s-50s. He married in 1947 and became a journalist for the New York Herald-Tribune, which led to him becoming acquainted with Dr Leo Wollman.

The Herald-Tribune ceased publication in 1966. Oppenheim became a hypnotist and sex counselor, operating from his home in Tappan, New York. For a while he was the associate editor of Venture, a slick travel magazine. He was then employed by Medical Economics Magazine in New Jersey to help develop a cassette tape program for medical professionals on such subjects as malpractice and office management.

Oppenheim and his second wife Fae Robin founded an organization called “Confide Consulting Service” - later "Confide Personal Counseling Services, Inc". Clients would phone their recording machine to recite their problems for up to 20 minutes, or send in a cassette tape, and get back a six or seven page reply suggesting a solution. The price was $25 ($119 in today's money). Confide became known as specializing in transvestites and put out a 54-minute cassette on the subject giving advice on hormones, make up and much else ($12=$57 in today's money). They had sold 100 by August 1974 "half of them have been to doctors and therapists". The tape concludes: "Our most valuable piece of advice for transvestites is enjoy!" Confide also published a newsletter, Transition, specifically for transvestites and transsexuals.

In 1974 Garrett told the Village Voice:

"My father was a psychoanalyst, and I've spent most of my life writing about doctor-patient relationships. In the course of my research, wandering around hospitals and talking with people in the profession, I discovered that I have a knack for counseling. Maybe it's because I had polio, but people always tended to open up to me. … There's one index to our effectiveness. We've advised more than 500 cases, and only one person asked for his fee to be returned. As it turned out, he sent back our check a week later. … Fifteen to 20 per cent of our cases were transvestites. And what they told us didn't match what the textbooks told us. We subsequently found that many TVs simply don't go to doctors."

Charles Ihlenfeld arranged for Oppenheim to have an interview with then 89-year old Harry Benjamin, who took a shine to Oppenheim and agreed (as he did for many transsexual and transvestite groups) to be listed on it’s board of directors. Oppenheim was then able to get Richard Green, John Money and Charles Ihlenfield to likewise agree.

Lynda Frank, a devout Princian ("In 2002, I escorted her [Virginia Prince] for three days at the IFGE Convention in Philadelphia and was overwhelmed with her enthusiasm, intelligence and willingness to help anyone who sought her out"), discovered Lee Brewster's Mardi Gras Emporium via an advertisement in the Village Voice, and purchased Prince's The Transvestite and His Wife. Frank's wife, who worked at a crisis hotline discovered Leo Wollman. Later Frank visited Wollman, was diagnosed as a transvestite and referred to Oppenheim's group. Eventually Frank joined the group which consisted of "transsexuals, male-to-females and female-to-males, and a few transvestites, one was Roger Peo … We were with this group about two years. For the first six months I attended by myself, during which time Garrett's wife, Fay, took me into New York City to Muriel Olive's Boutique to buy a padded girdle and a bra".

Around 1980 Oppenheim declared himself to be a psychotherapist with a PhD from the then new Columbia Pacific University, an unaccredited distance learning school in California (which was closed by court order in 2000 and it is misdemeanor in some US States to cite its degrees on a resume.) He opened an office in Hartsdale, NY. Dr Oppenheim referred trans persons to Leo Wollman, Diane Miller, MD, and endocrinologist Walter Futterweit, MD, both working on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.


In 1985, Dick Teresi & Kathleen McAuliffe wrote an article for Omni magazine on the topic of male pregnancy:

"Garrett Oppenheim, a psychotherapist in Tappan, New York, says male pregnancy 'would be the most magnificent breakthrough since the sex-change program came into effect'. As director of Confide-personal Counseling Services, Inc., Oppenheim evaluates and counsels those who apply for a sex change, to help them decide whether they should undergo the necessary hormonal treatment and surgery. There are approximately 20,000 transsexuals in the world today. 'And most transsexuals want to experience womanhood in all its facets', Oppenheim says." (Teresi p181).

In 1986 Oppenheim published a paper, "The snowball effect of the 'real-life test' for sex reassignment" in which he argued against the assumption that a real-life test gives an opportunity for reversal. Rather it confirms the patient on her way.

Oppenheim was also active in past life regressions, and his prime case, mentioned in many books, is that in 1986, a woman known by the pseudonym "Monica" was regressed by Oppenheim. Monica discovered a previous existence as a man named John Ralph Wainwright who lived in the southwestern U.S. She knew that John grew up in Wisconsin, Arizona and had vague memories of brothers and sisters. As a young man he became a deputy sheriff and married the daughter of a bank president. According the Monica's "memory," John was killed in the line of duty - shot by three men he had once sent to jail - and died on July 7, 1907.

Oppenheim also used his hypnosis abilities in working with polio patients.

Garrett Oppenheim died in New Jersey at age 83.

*Not the Seattle lawyer

Oppenheim's publications not including his poetry or his journalism:

• Image and Dust. New York: Priv. printed by the International Press, 1932.
  
• "Queen for a Night". All-Story Love Stories, May 16 1936.
  
• "The Goodly Portion". The Educational Portion, 2,1, 1937. "If we were once convinced of that truth, we might acquire more respect for the writers and thinkers of the past and less tendency to ridicule them shamefully for occupying a small place in our curriculum alongside of modern textbook makers who depend upon those same writers and thinkers ... "
  
• "Old Style" All-Story Love Stories, Sep 5 1936.
  
• "Reunion" All-Story Love Stories, Sep 12 1936.
  
• "The Message" All-Story Love Stories, Jun 26 1937.
  
• "The Punishing of Eddie Jungle-Spit" Liberty, May 1950, reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1951.
  
• "How to Make a Decision" Bluebook, Oct 1955.
  
• "What Youth Can Do When Grownups Help," Parents Magazine 34, March 1959: 88-89, 125;
  
• "Teen-age Drinking Can Spell Disaster". Parents' Magazine, 1961.
  
• With Fae Robin. The Male Transvestite-a Confide Cassette. N.Y.,Personal Counseling Services, 1974.
  
• (ed) Transition. Tappan NY: Confide – Personal Counseling Services, 1978.
  
• "The snowball effect of the 'real-life test' for sex reassignment". Journal of Sex Education & Therapy, 12,2, 1986:12-14.
  
• "Foreword" to Sister Mary Elizabeth. Legal Aspects of Transsexualism. J2CP Information Service, 1988. Online at: www.transgendercare.com/guidance/resources/legal_aspects_ts.htm. And at: http://heartcorps.com/journeys/everything/legal.htm.
  
• "Memorial for Harry Benjamin". Archives of Sexual Behavior, 17,1,1988: 6-9.
  
• "For whom regression therapy is not suitable". Tasso International. www.tassointernational.com/for-whom-regression-therapy-is-not-suitable.
  
• Who Were You Before You Were You?: The Casebook of a Past-Life Therapist. New York: Carlton Press, 1990.
  
• "What do I do now?" Journal of Hypnotism, 9,1, 1994.
  
• With Gwen Oppenheim. The Golden Handicap: A Spiritual Quest : a Polio Victim Asks, "Why?" and Turns His Life Around. Virginia Beach, Va: A.R.E. Press, 1993.
  

Other sources:

• John Dalmas. "Confide ...". The Evening News, Sep 25, 1972. Online at: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=heNfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=h20NAAAAIBAJ&pg=2908%2C4293361.
  
• "Scenes". The Village Voice, August 29, 1974. Online at: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zeJLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=74sDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6232%2C3702764.
  
• Dick Teresi & Kathleen McAuliffe. ""Male Pregnancy", Omni, 8, 1985. Reprinted in Patrick D Hopkins (ed), Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology. Indiana University Press, 1999: 180-1.
  
• Lynda Frank. "Pilgrimage" in J. Ari Kane-Demaios & Vern L. Bullough (eds) Crossing Sexual Boundaries: Transgender Journeys, Uncharted Paths Prometheus Books, 2006: 248-269.
  
• Stephen Wagner. "The Mystery of Past Life Recall". About.Com Paranormal Phenomena. http://paranormal.about.com/od/reincarnation/a/The-Mystery-Of-Past-Life-Recall.htm.
  

Julian Schutting (1937 - ) academic, poet.

Jutta Schutting was born in Amstetten in Lower Austria. In despair at being female she attempted suicide at 16.

She trained as a photographer and then read history and German at Vienna University. From 1965 to 1987 she was a college teacher.

From 1973 Schutting was a published writer of prose, poetry and philosophy. In 1989 he transitioned to male. He did this to realize "Übereinstimmung mit meinem lebenslangen Lebensgefühl (my lifelong sense of life)“ and also said: "Ich werde ein bißchen mehr der Mann, der ich schon immer gewesen bin. ('I'm a little more of the man I've been always been)".

Julian has won several prizes for his novels.

• Harriet Murphy (ed) Critical Essays on Julian Schutting, Riverside CA, Ariadne Press, 2000.
• "Dichter Julian Schutting ist heute 75". NOE, 25.20.2012. http://noe.orf.at/news/stories/2556037.
  

DE.WIKIPEDIA       IMDB     GOODREADS

Esdras Parra (1939 – 2004) writer, translator, painter.

Parra was born in Santa Cruz de Mora, Estado Mérida, Venezuela. He was a poet, essayist, narrator, translator and painter.

In the sixties he published novels: El insurgente (The Rebel),1967, Por el norte el mar de las Antillas (On the sea north of the West), 1968, Juego limpio (Fair Play), 1968. He was a co-founder of the magazine Imagen, where he was the editor for several years, and he was a major presence in the Venezuelan literary world.

After transition to female in Europe, Esdras was silent for many years, until she was awarded the Poetry Award of the Biennial Mariano Picón Salas of Merida (1993) with Este suelo secreto (This Secret Land), 1995. And she published two more poems: Antigüedad del frío (Seniority of cold), 2001, and Aún no (Not yet), 2004.

At her death she left several poems and unpublished texts and drawings.

• “Esdras Parra:  Personajes en la Historia del Transexualismp”. Reflexiones de una Diva, 1.2.07. http://divarios.blogspot.com/2007/02/esdras-parra-perdonajes-en-la-histoia.html

 TRANS.ILGA    ES.WIKIPEDIA

Max Wolf Valerio (1957 - ) poet.

Anita Valerio was born in New Mexico to a father of Spanish descent and a Kainai (Blackfoot) mother from Alberta. She was active in the American Indian Movement as an adolescent, and visited the Pine Ridge Reservation when it was under siege by the FBI after the Wounded Knee occupation.

She was a punk rocker and a poet, was an out lesbian for 14 years, and contributed a chapter to the influential feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back.

At age 32, the transition to Max began: he identified with a quote from Carl Jung: “Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do”.   On the effect of testosterone:

"I came into transition feeling very strongly that I was not going to 'buy' into what I thought were 'masculine' or male behaviors, many of which I found repugnant . I had that feminist background you know! I also just thought that so many of these feelings or behaviors were caused only by socialization. The revelation of the testosterone for me, was that the truth was so much more complex. Ultimately, this gradual change in perception was very humbling. I had to find that I was wrong, and that many of these feelings are fed by testosterone and not simply by socialization as I had thought."

During transition and after, Max was friends with Viviane Namaste, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Margaret O’Hartigan, Anne Ogborn and Gianna Israel.

Max lives in San Francisco and after doing genealogical research found that he is also part Sephardic Jewish and part northern European. He is a poet, essayist and actor, with a taste for the transgressive. He has worked with beats and punk bands.

Max's autobiographical book, The Testosterone Files, was a Lambda Finalist in 2006.

Max is featured in the documentaries Female Misbehavior, 1992, You Don’t Know Dick, 1996, and Gendernauts, 1999, Unhung Heroes, 2002.

“Certainly, in the beginning, I missed being identifiably queer, although I also hung out a lot at first with gay men, and often, people mistook me for gay. It was a long process of adjustment though, to accept being seen as just another straight guy. Although, I think I still give off something of the bohemian and the punk, it never really goes away. And, in the transworld, my views are often iconoclastic and quite contrary to the accepted ‘line’...

 My gender freakiness is now more stealth, and as such, I think it actually has even more power to upset people and open them to new possibilities. When people find out I am a transman, they find it to be extremely shocking and yes, it ruptures their view of the strict binary. In some ways, being just an ordinary appearing man is even more disruptive of their perspective. They expect me to look androgynous and since I do not, their minds are completely blown. So, there is provocative power in my seeming ’normalcy’. Believe me, I love that! I still do love being provocative. (Boyd)”

His day job is software sales.

• ·         Anita Valerio. “It's In My Blood, My Face- My Mother's Voice, The Way I Sweat”. In Cherrie Moraga (ed). This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Persephone Press, 1983.
  ·       Leslie Feinberg. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Beacon Press, 1996: 142.
  ·         Max Valerio, “Emerging Fragments”. HaLapid, Spring 2000. www.cryptojews.com/EmergingFragments.htm.
  ·         Max Valerio. “ ‘Now That You’re a White Man’: Changing Sex in a Postmodern World -- Being, Becoming, and Borders”. In Gloria Anzaldúa & AnaLouise Keating (ed). This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Routledge, 2002.
  ·         Max Valerio. The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male. Seal Press 280 pp 2006. Excerpts at: http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2007/07/on-testosterone.html.
  ·         Faye Flam. “Transsexual describes female-to-male transformation.”. The Seattle Times, May 3, 2006. Online  
  ·         Helen Boyd. “Five Questions With ....Max Wolf Valerio”. en|Gender, Nov 29, 2006. www.myhusbandbetty.com/2006/11/29/five-questions-with-max-wolf-valerio.
• www.maxwolfvalerio.com      Alchetron  

________________________________________________________________________________

Trans men differ in how they react to testosterone.  However if the effects are as Max says, does this mean that hormonally changed trans men are a different gender variation from those who transitioned in earlier decades and centuries when hormones were not available?

Nelly Fonseca (1920 – 1963) poet.

Nelly Fonseca Recavarren was born in La Libertad, Peru, in 1922 (although some say 1920 or even 1914). At the age of nine she fell down stairs, broke her spine and was confined to a wheelchair.

Fonseca then took the name Carlos Alberto Fonseca, wore men's clothes and cut his hair short. Carlos Fonesco became a major Peruvian poet in the 1930s and 1940s. He also wrote journalism and was was awarded literary prizes.

In 1955 he published poems as Nelly Fonseca.

Around 1960, after being operated upon for a tumour, Fonesco returned to dressing as a woman.

* Not Carlos Alberto Fonseca Amador, the Sandinista.

 TRANS.ILGA   DE.WIKIPEDIA.

Anderson Bigode Herzer (1962 – 1982) poet.

Sandra Mara Herzer was born in Rolândia, state of Paraná, Brazil. Her father was killed in a bar when she was four. Her mother, a prostitute, handed the child over to the state orphanage, and died shortly after. In the school records, Sandra was a difficult student often in fights, using drugs and alcohol.

However she published a book of poems, A queda para o alto (descending upwards). Sandra went through a period of identifying as a lesbian, but at age 14 adopted the name Anderson Bigode Herzer. (Anderson is common male first name in Brazil; Bigode= mustache).

At age 17 he was mentored by Eduardo Suplicy, a Parliamentary deputado, who was touched by Herzer’s poems, and hired him to work in his office.

However, Herzer was traumatized by his upbringing and jumped from the Viaduto 23 de Maio in downtown São Paulo. He died from his injuries.

His life, based on his writing, was turned into the film Vera, 1987.

• Sandra Mara Herzer. A queda para o alto. Petropolis: Vozes 1986.
• Sergio Toledo (dir & scr). Vera. From the writings of Anderson Bigode Herzer, with Ana Beatriz Nogueira as Vera Bauer. Brazil 85 mins 1987.
• José Carlos A. Brito. “O suicídio em poetas jovens, como Sandra (Anderson) Herzer, vulgo Bigode”. Revista de Cultura #47. www.revista.agulha.nom.br/ag47bigode.htm.

 EN.Wikipedia.