Virginia Prince (1912 - 2009): Part 1 - Youth and First marriage

See also:  Did Virginia Prince have Harry Benjamin Syndrome?
and The Myth That Transgender is a Princian Concept.

Previously in April 2008, I wrote an account of Virginia Prince, who started life as Arnold Lowman. With all due modesty I think that it still stands as the best short account of her.  I wrote it based mainly on the books by Richard Docter, Richard Ekins and Vern Bullough.  Particularly after I wrote my TG, Words and Concepts series, I realized that my account of Prince could be much improved.  This realization was further developed by reading Robert Hill’s dissertation which is largely based on a close reading of Transvestia magazine.   One problem with most accounts of Virginia Prince is that they are not integrated into GLBT and general history.  Hence I have included background events below, mainly of what else was going on in Los Angeles, but also elsewhere when it seemed appropriate, to give a contextualization.

Part 1 – Youth and First marriage
Bibliography
Part II – Second Marriage
Part III – Femmiphilic activist
Part IV – Full-time Living
Part V – Transgenderist dowager
Jargon terms and general comments

Charles Leroy Lowman (1879-1977) was born in Park Ridge, Illinois. Both his paternal grandparents were physicians. He trained as doctor at the University of Southern California, interned at California Lutheran Hospital and studied orthopedic surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Children’s Hospital in Boston. In 1909 he started a small out-patient clinic for handicapped children, and was the only orthopedist between San Francisco and New Orleans, traveling through five states to practice. He married Elizabeth Hudson Arnold (1882-1968), the daughter of a prosperous Indiana farmer and Ella Gifford Ferris, who was a cousin of George Ferris, the inventor the Big Wheel that first appeared at the 1893 Chicago Exposition¹. Charles and Elizabeth Lowman had two children: Arnold born in 1912 and Elizabeth born four years later.²

The owner of the building where Charles Lowman had his clinic made an offer that if Lowman could establish a functioning hospital within 15 years, he would donate clear title to the building and its gardens. This was done and further expansion of the Los Angeles Orthopedic Hospital was being discussed when the 15 years had passed in 1922. Lowman pioneered aquatherapy for poliomyelitis patients, and devised motor-driven lifts to get the patients in and out of the water. He pioneered fascia lata strap transplants which enabled wheelchair-bound patients to walk with crutches.

Elizabeth Sr contributed to the home by shrewd investments in property and stocks. For grades 3-7 Arnold was transferred from his local public school to the residential Glendora Foothill Christian School, fifty miles to the east. On Thanksgiving Day in his seventh grade, the school burnt down, and he was transferred back to a local school.

Arnold developed a fixation with high-heeled shoes. They were of course not welcome in the home of an orthopedist. He moved on to his mother's clothes, and then started collecting his own. By the age of 12 Arnold was an accomplished cross-dresser and could pass in public as a girl. He used the name Muriel.(Docter:41-2)    As Prince wrote in 1979:

"Starting at the age of about twelve I found myself fascinated with wearing my mother's clothes on all occasions when the family would be out. It was sexually exciting and thrilling but it was also frightening and it gave rise to a tremendous load of guilt and shame. With that kind of pressure I should have quit – and I did – many times, I felt terrible about it, guilt ridden and wondering what was wrong with me – an otherwise normal, functional boy. For a while I supposed that I must be a homosexual – though I had no interest in boys sexually. When I got that straightened out in my head I decided that I must be psychopathic. But on the other hand, I was an intelligent, above-average student, an athlete, member of clubs, etc. But even if I was not either of those two two things surely I must be the only otherwise normal boy who was so weird as to want to wear girl's clothes. I went through adolescence with those worries, and I kept on dressing on every occasion when I thought I could do so safely. While it started out as an erotic experience each time, there came a time when, after eroticism had run its course, I discovered that there was still a very special pleasure in 'being' a 'girl'. Instead of just being an erotically aroused male in a dress, I found that I was somehow different. I did not know for years what was going on – or more properly what was coming out. It was that part of myself that had been hidden and suppressed in all my growing years – just as it is in all men. It was my other half, that half that when openly expressed is termed feminine."

In 1922, the Los Angeles City Council had revised its anti-masquerading law of 1898. It now stated that if one dressed in the clothes of the opposite sex on the streets, a penalty of up to six-months in jail or a fine of up to $500 could be imposed. By 1924 the Los Angeles drag culture was dominated by Clarabelle, who was regarded as the queen mother of Bunker Hill. Arnold never spoke of this. That was also the year that male-impersonator Jean Southern accosted a police officer who failed to read her, and the encounter made headlines in the Los Angeles Times. Julian Eltinge was the US's top female impersonator and was playing to sell-out audiences at the Los Angeles Orpheum Theater.

Charles Lowman was a prolific author and innovator in the field of orthopedic medicine. He published A Collection of Papers Dealing with Some Physical, Educational, Physiotherapeutic & Orthopaedic Problems in 1924, persuaded the California legislature to provide teachers for handicapped children in hospital in 1927 and co-published Corrective Physical Education for Groups: A Text Book of Organization, Theory, and Practice in 1928.

At age 18, in drag, Arnold won a prize for best costume at his church Halloween party. He did his BA at Pomona College, Los Angeles where by chance he shared a dorm with Edward Richards, the future Barbara Wilcox, although they did not know each other.

Whether young Arnold knew or not, 1932 was a peak year for pansy revues (which featured female impersonation) with appearances in Los Angeles by Karyl Norman and Jean Malin, and the next year Hollywood made a record number of films with pansy content. However, from 1932 onwards, and especially after the end of Alcohol Prohibition in 1933, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) started busting the pansy clubs. BBB's Cellar and Jimmie's Back Yard were raided repeatedly. The raid on The Big House in fall 1932 met resistance: the patrons fought back and a female impersonator attempted to escape through a window. The bar, renamed Buddy's Rendezvous, reopened, and the police returned eight months later and arrested five transvestites on vagrancy charges. In November 1933 another raid on Jimmie's Back Yard resulted in 90-day sentences for the owner, the mistress of ceremonies and the piano player. Three other female impersonators were each sentenced to six months – the maximum penalty. Harold Brown, arrested on suspicion of posing as a narcotics officer, was discovered to be female bodied and got a suspended 30-day sentence for masquerading. Three pansy bars were shut down in 1936, and another three the next year. Frank Shaw, the Los Angeles Mayor, ran a notably corrupt administration from 1933 until he was recalled in 1938. He was opposed by Clifford Clinton, a restaurateur, who with others filed a grand jury report that led to the recall. Part of Shaw's fight back was to step up the attack on 'sex pervert' bars. This was reinforced in 1937 by a national sex panic after children were killed in New York, and J Edgar Hoover declared 'War on the Sex Criminal'. In 1940 even Julian Eltinge was prevented from appearing on stage in Los Angeles in female clothes, and was obliged to do his act in a tuxedo with his dresses on mannequins.

However private parties in Hollywood and even public appearances by its stars were another matter. Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburn were known for their male attire, both on screen and when out socializing. Film director, Dorothy Arzner, the only female director in Hollywood, was known for dressing in men's clothes. In 1937, Howard Greer, the Hollywood fashion designer who did the costumes for Bringing Up Baby and My Favorite Wife, threw a drag party at which he hired female impersonators to sing a Cole Porter song in front of the real Cole Porter (Gay LA: 46) In 1938 Los Angeles resident Michael Higgins was arrested on charges of grand theft and fraud, and discovered to be female-bodied.

Meanwhile Arnold graduated from Pomona College in 1935 and did postgraduate studies in pharmacology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Charles Lowman published Balance skills in physical education in 1935, and the next year Arnold co-published with a fellow student a paper on lactic dehydrogenase. In 1937 Charles Lowman published The Therapeutic Theatre, and contributed to Technique of Underwater Gymnastics; A Study in Practical Application. Arnold's MS thesis was on lactic dehydrogenase, and the fellow student and he published a book on the topic in 1939. Arnold's PhD thesis, Carbohydrate Metabolism and Its Relation to the Cancer Problem, was completed in the same year.

Elizabeth followed her brother to Pomona College and then Berkeley. She later met and married a mining engineer, and they moved to Nevada. They had three children.

Fletcher Bowron, who was mayor of Los Angeles 1938-53, had a particular antipathy to women in trousers. In 1942 he declared to the city council that he loathed "to see masculine women much more than feminine traits in men" and got them to pass a regulation barring female employees at City Hall from wearing pants.

In 1941 Arnold outed himself as a transvestite to his father after a trip to San Francisco, by being his femme self when his father arrived to pick him up. This was just before his first marriage, to Dorothy Shepherd (1909 – 1985) a secretary from Anoka, Minnesota, whom he had met at church. The wedding was held in the Lowman home, the day after Arnold burned all his female clothing. Mr and Mrs Lowman then moved to San Francisco where Arnold had a job with Del Monte Foods, and later on a medical research project for one of his professors who was now at the University of California Medical School at San Francisco.

Arnold researched transvestism in the medical library. He noted two case studies of interest being presented in the psychiatry department, and attended both. The first was by Barbara Wilcox who had been his classmate at Pomona College, and was by then living as a woman and had petitioned the Superior Court of California to change her name and to become legally a woman. The second presentation was by Louise Lawrence, the pioneering transvestite organizer who put transvestites in touch with each other, and with sympathetic doctors. Either Arnold badgered the lecture organizer to reveal Louise's home address, and Louise took in the nervous young man on her doorstep (Stryker, 2005: xv); or he sneaked a look in the case file to obtain her address, and telephoned and asked to meet (Docter: 45). In either case Lawrence introduced Virginia Prince as Arnold named himself (he lived on Prince Street) to other transvestites in San Francisco, and provided contacts in Los Angeles. Through her he became a patient of Karl Bowman of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic, the seventh psychiatrist that he consulted, who told him to “relax and learn to accept yourself” (TV&Wife: 5-6). She also introduced him, in the late 1940s, to a doctor who spent each summer in San Francisco, and was starting to build a practice with transvestite clients: Harry Benjamin.

In 1945 the millionaire Howard Hughes went to San Francisco's famous Finocchio's female impersonation revue and night club where he met performer Pussy Katt. Shortly afterwards he flew her to Mexico City for an operation that made her America's first surgical transsexual. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, Clarabelle, the queen of Bunker Hill was no more. Her successors were Wilhemena, and then Carioca (who later died on an operating table in Calexico). The inter-racial Club Alabam on Los Angeles' Central Avenue continued to sponsor an annual drag ball contest.

When the research project was over Arnold and Dorothy returned to Los Angeles where Arnold found work as a chemist. Their only son, Brent, was born in 1946. For the first five or six years of their marriage, Arnold kept his cross-dressing from Dorothy, but then got it into his head that he was going as a half man/half woman to the church Halloween party. Dorothy was not thrilled. Afterward they had a long talk and agreed that Arnold was not to dress in her presence, but that she would do his clothing shopping, to avoid one risk. Then Arnold got to be Virginia about once every two weeks. He started spending time with Edith Ferguson and other transvestites. They attended meetings at the Long Beach home of Joan Thornton, who shared the same interest.

Virginia Prince, 1948.  Plate 1 in JJ Allen, The Man in the Red Velvet Dress

William Parker (played by Nick Nolte in the film Gangster Squad) was Los Angeles Police Chief from 1950 until his death in 1966. He repeatedly sent his men to raid gay and lesbian bars and to treat gays and lesbians as if they were criminals. So many arrests occurred that an entire section of the Lincoln Heights jail was reserved for gay and trans inmates, nicknamed the "fruit tank". One case that made the newspapers in 1950 was of three Negro domestic servants who were arrested for dressing as female.

That year two lesbians, in separate cases, challenged the Los Angeles anti-masquerading law, and in both cases the courts declared that cross-dressing alone did not constitute guilt under the ordinance unless there was further intent to conceal one's identity. However the LAPD and the local politicians simply ignored these two rulings.

By 1951 Dorothy Lowman felt unable to cope with her husband’s cross-dressing, and saw a psychiatrist who explained that Arnold was homosexual. She sued for divorce mainly citing her husband’s “admitted propensity for feminine apparel”. Arnold was ordered to pay $50 a month for his son’s support and $50 for his wife’s. His transvestism was publicized during the proceedings, which led to contacts with more transvestites. (Docter: 29-35, 47-8)

One who did not establish contact was Gigi Hemingway who was arrested en femme in the women’s restroom of a Los Angeles movie theater. Many gays and trans were incarcerated in Atasceradero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility, which came to be known as the 'Dachau for queers'. Atasceradero was frequently visited by Dr Walter Freeman who specialized in ice-pick lobotomies. This was done through the eye socket. Of the 4,000 patients he treated this way, over 30% were diagnosed as homosexual (which included transvestites).  Another of his victims may have been the film star, Francis Farmer.

Charles Lowman co-published Therapeutic Use of Pools and Tanks in 1952. The same year the group meeting at Joan Thornton’s created a mimeographed newsletter: Transvestia: Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress – a name suggested by Joan, who was the major editor. The initial subscription list was built around Louise Lawrence’s address book, and the subscription list for Edith Ferguson’s instruction course. Arnold contributed under the name Muriel. While only two issues were made, they were mailed to all the cross-dressers that they could identify in the United States and to sympathetic doctors and sexologists including Alfred Kinsey. Without paid subscriptions, the project proved to be too expensive to continue. This was at the same time as the fledgling homophile organization, ONE, Inc started selling its magazine. The first attempt to ban it by the US Post Office occurred a year later. At the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine Elmer Belt had started doing controversial sex change operations.

For the group at Joan Thornton's, there was a question of who was a transvestite. Louise Lawrence had written that the group includes "heterosexuals, there are definite fetishists, sadists, masochists, voyeurs, homosexuals, etc.", and Edith Ferguson had previously been a female impersonator. However there were cross-dressers who were not invited such as fellow Angeleno and heterosexual Edward D. Wood, Angeleno Sascha Brastoff, José Sarria who was starting to organize fellow drag queens in San Francisco, and the majority of female impersonators, such as those who performed at Finocchio's in San Francisco. Nor was the invitation extended to female cross-dressers. While Lowman maintained that women were free to wear what they liked, many women in Los Angeles, mainly lesbians, were being arrested for 'masquerading' and dumped in the Daddy Tank at Lincoln Heights jail. One of these was Nancy Valverde who was arrested many times in this period.

In 1953 when Arnold was attempting to modify his visiting rights and reduce his alimony, he was again named in the press as a transvestite and his father threatened to disown him. This was at the same time that Christine Jorgensen was in the news after returning from Denmark, and it was announced that Bela Lugosi’s next film would be called Transvestite. The director, Edward D Wood, announced that the film, which was eventually called Glen or Glenda, would have no relation to the transvestite divorce story then in the Los Angeles newspapers. The judge ruled in favor of Arnold who was allowed custody one day a week and alternate holidays, increased the son’s support to $60 and discontinued the alimony payments. However Dorothy moved back to Minnesota with Brent. Arnold called on her some years later. They had a cordial evening, but then never saw each other again.

Harry Benjamin had helped Lowman with “parental and marital problems” (TV&Wife: 6, Ekins & King, 2006: 81), and put him on female hormones, which he continued for a few years. As Virginia, Arnold wrote to Christine Jorgensen that he had "a missionary complex" and hoped to "alleviate the lot of our kind in the social scheme" (quoted in Meyerowitz:182). Benjamin arranged for Virginia to have a personal interview with Christine and her mother while they were in Los Angeles ( Ekins & King, 2006: 235n4; Docter 2008:xii). As Prince later admitted, at this time he was considering sexual surgery: "If I had had the money at the time, I would have taken the boat to Europe". ("The Life and Times of Virginia", Transvestia, 100, 1979; TS&PseudoTS :271).

In 1954 the LAPD raided LaVie Cafe in Altadena and arrested five 'men' for wearing women's clothes. Tamara Rees, another ex-GI turned female was in town to do a burlesque show. Elmer Belt discontinued doing sex-change operations after a committee of doctors decided against it, but restarted a few years later.

---

 1. Docter:18 says that George Washington Ferris was Arnold's great-great grandfather. As George Ferris lived 1859-96 this seemed improbable. With the aid of genealogy sites I was able to construct the following:

                                        Silvanus Ferris (1773-1861)
                                                        |
                                          _______________________
                                          |                                   |
            Henry Ferris (1809 -1891)                       George Ferris (1818 - 1895)
                                          |                                    |
            Ella Ferris Arnold (1842 – 1929)               George Ferris (1859 – 1896)
                                          |
            Elizabeth Arnold (1899 - 1968)
                                          |
                       Arnold Lowman

Hence George Ferris was Arnold's grandmother's cousin. While he built the first Ferris Wheel, he died alone and impoverished, of typhoid at age 37.

2. Docter:19 says that the Lowmans lived at 123 South Hobart Avenue until Arnold was eight. According to Google Maps, there is no such address. It must be South Hobart Boulevard. However ferristree.com says that the first address was 7121 Senalda Road which is in the Hollywood Hills.

They then moved to 867 Victoria Avenue "two blocks off Wilshire Boulevard … in the Hancock Park neighborhood". There is such an address, in the Venice district. However South Victoria Avenue is close to Wilshire Boulevard.

_________________

Arnold went to a Christian School, met his wife in church, did his early drag appearances at church Halloween socials, and as we will see in Part II the first meeting of the Hose and Heel club was in a church building. After that we hear no more about any involvement with a church.

Arnold completed his PhD in 1939 at the age of 27. The US joined WWII two years later. There is no mention in any of the sources that he was called to be inducted into the military. Did the military not want qualified pharmacists? It is difficult to believe that the Arnold who had not yet met Louise Lawrence avoided service by confessing his transvestism, and being refused.

For some reason the Find-a-Grave page on Elizabeth Arnold does not link to either husband or children (although it does say "cremains buried with the Prince family - Ferris family relations ").

Gloria Hemingway (1931 - 2001) writer, doctor.

Gregory Hemingway (Gigi) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest son of Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961), the novelist. Gigi was raised by a nursemaid until he was twelve, as his mother, Pauline Pfeiffer (1895 – 1951), Ernest’s second wife, showed little interest.

He was trying on his mother’s clothes from age four, but it wasn’t until age ten, on a trip to Cuba, that Ernest walked in and discovered him. He stood there frozen and then turned and left. That was the same year that Ernest started encouraging him to get drunk daily on hard liquor. A few months later when the boys had returned to their mother, Ernest wrote to his ex-wife about Gigi that

father and son in Cuba

“He has the biggest dark side in the family except me and you and I’m not in the family. He keeps it so concealed that you never know about it and maybe that way it will back up on him”.

The next summer Ernest taught Gigi to shoot and entered him in competition against Cuba’s finest marksmen. When he was 14, Gigi stole some lingerie from his newest stepmother, Ernest’s fourth and final wife Mary Welsh (1908 – 1986), and said nothing when her maid was accused and dismissed.

In 1950 Gregory dropped out of college, and briefly took up Dianetics. In 1951, aged 19 he married Jane, and was working in an aircraft factory in Los Angeles.  He sometimes borrowed Jane’s things, and in the evening of September 29, due to become a father in two months, he was arrested en femme in the women’s restroom of a movie theater (in his 1976 book he described it as a drug arrest).

His mother, Pauline, flew down from San Francisco and stayed with her sister, Jinny Pfeiffer and her lover Laura Archera, the violinist and film producer (they would later enter into a polyamory arrangement with Aldous Huxley). Pauline already had a stomach pain. She failed to get Gigi out of jail, and had a very emotional phone call with Ernest. She was rushed to hospital a few hours later and died on the operating table, on October 1.

Gigi was then released. Ernest told Gigi re his arrest: “Well it killed mother”. This caused a rupture between father and son.  However Gregory started to write again after Ernest had two back-to-back airplane crashes in east Africa in 1954, and sent a congratulatory wire when he won the Nobel Prize later the same year.

Gregory drank a lot throughout most of the fifties, he could not hold a job, and he lost his wife after a disastrous trip to Africa. He joined the army on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s death, October 1, 1956, but was soon sent home for psychological instability. He was diagnosed and hospitalized with schizophrenia, and had electroshock treatments. In between treatments, Gigi and Ernest drove down to Key West, their last time together.

Yet he also completed pre-med at ULCA, and in 1960, at the age of 29, was accepted at the University of Miami Medical School. He requested a copy of the autopsy on his mother, and found that she had a pheochromocytoma tumor on an adrenal gland. The phone call with Ernest caused the tumor to secrete large amounts of adrenaline, and then to stop. Her blood pressure went up to 300, and then dropped to zero, and she died of shock.

Gigi wrote to his father to explain, and to transfer the blame. Ernest committed suicide nine months later. Gigi attended his father’s funeral and met Valerie Danby Smith (1940 – ), who had been Ernest’s last secretary.  They married in 1966, even though he was still married to Alice, his second wife who had just given birth to his fourth child, and though Valerie had had a child by Irish playwright Brendan Behan in the meanwhile.  Gigi and Valerie married again the next year when a divorce had been sorted out, and remained married for 20 years.

For a decade they lived mainly in New York. Gregory was a physician, but without enthusiasm, at Standard Oil, General Motors and McGraw-Hill publishers. Sometime he was hospitalized and had more shock treatments. He would buy female clothing at Saks Fifth Avenue, wear them once and dump them. He also borrowed his wife’s things, but she said, in the Colapinto Rolling Stone article, that she never saw him cross-dressed. However in 1974 he read Jan Morris’ Conundrum and talked to Valerie about having the same surgery.  Valerie wrote:

"I never had it in my heart to be angry with Greg, except momentarily, for he suffered far more than anyone I have known. (Running: 294)”

Gregory published an autobiography in 1976 with a preface by Norman Mailer. It was a critical success but did not discuss his gender problems.

He was then 44. He became a general practitioner in Fort Benton, Montana (population 1500), and stayed for a year. From 1978-83 he was a country doctor in Jordan, Montana (population 600), the sole MD for an area the size of Connecticut. The population appreciated his hard work and dedication.

Valerie and their two children came west in 1980 and settled in Bozeman, 320 miles away. Gregory was expected every other weekend. He would often stop in a motel to dress. He even appeared in the cowboy bar in Jordan in drag. The locals pretended not to notice. In the Spring of 1983 Gigi was arrested after trying on clothes in a boutique and smearing them with makeup. He’d ruined over $1,000 of merchandise.

Later that year he took leave to run in the Boston Marathon, but didn’t show up, didn’t return when expected. He then got a job in Missoula, Montana, and started divorce proceedings. He was going out en femme more and more, and was so when his son John (his second child with Jane) came to visit in 1985. Gigi demanded entrance to a women’s exercise class and then kicked in the door at a restaurant when they wouldn’t serve him. He was sentenced to six months, and served two weeks. Nine months later, again in drag, he kicked in another door and threw a rock though a window. He was referred for psychiatric treatment and later lost his license to practice medicine in Montana.

He managed to escape to Florida. He studied for the Florida medical license, but then dropped out. In 1987 Gigi first met Paul Hendrickson.

“I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying not to be a transvestite. It’s a combination of things. The problems are twofold - no, they’re threefold. First, You’ve got this father who’s supermasculine, but who’s somehow protesting it all the time, he’s worried to death about it, never mind that he actually is very masculine, more masculine than anyone else around, in fact. But worried about it all the same--and therefore worried about his sons and their masculinity. Secondly, you start playing around with your mother’s stockings one day when you’re about four year’s old . Maybe it all starts with something as innocent as this. And why do you do this? Who knows? But it must have something to do with the fact that your mother doesn’t seem to love you enough. Or that’s your perception of it . Her maternal instincts just aren’t very strong .... You think that she loves your older brother Patrick more. So maybe you’re putting on her clothes in the first place because you somehow think that you’ll be able to win her that way, get close to her. But then, you see, it starts to feel sexy for its own sake, just to have those things on. It’s erotic, it arouses you. The third thing is your own heightened awareness to everything around you. You’re a writer’s son, after all. You take in a lot more. (Hendrickson, 2011: 383-4)”.

In 1987 Paul Hendrickson’s articles on the Hemingways in The Washington Post revealed Gigi’s semi-secret for the first time in a national publication. As this was shortly after the drastically cut-down posthumous first publication of Ernest’s The Garden of Eden, in which a male-female couple exchange clothes and identities, questions were raised in the press re how much of the father was in the son. Gloria played to this when in an interview with the short-lived magazine, Fame, she asked the rhetorical question:

“What’s wrong with the family? My God! Is he doing this too?”.

Gloria and Ida two years after Gloria's surgery

In 1988, Gigi had a single breast implant on the left side. In 1991 he met Ida Mae Galliher (1941 – ) in the ladies room of a bar in Coconut Grove, Miami, and 21 months later they were married in his boyhood home which had been a National Historic Landmark since 1968.

In 1995, Gregory and Ida divorced; Gregory, now Gloria, had surgery with Stanley Biber; as Gregory attended the First International Hemingway Colloguium in Havana; and back in Coconut Grove, Gloria made a scene on a bus and resisted arrest.

Gregory, and Ida remarried in 1997 in Washington State. It was more frequently Gregory rather than Gloria who appeared in public.

mugshot after last arrest

In 2001 Gloria was arrested outside a state park for indecent exposure and resisting arrest. She was nude but carrying a dress and high-heel shoes. She died of hypertension and cardiovascular disease on the fifth day of incarceration in the Miami-Dade Women's Detention Center. Her death at age 69 was 50 years to the day from her mother’s death.

Gloria left $7 million to Ida, but the children challenged the will on the grounds that same-sex marriage is not legal in Florida. The parties eventually reached an undisclosed settlement.

• Gregory H. Hemingway. Papa: A Personal memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1976.
• Ernest Hemingway. The Garden of Eden. New York: C. Scribner's, 1986.
• Paul Hendrickson. “The Hemingway Heritage: Papa's three sons are still living in conflict with the powerful image of that famous and macho writer” The Washington Post August 23, 1987.
• Kenneth Lynn. Hemingway Harvard University Press 1987: 403,418-9,499-502,561-4.
• Gerald Clarke, "The Sons Almost Rise". Fame, September 1989: 108.
• Lorian Hemingway (G’s first child). Walk on Water: A Memoir. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
• John Colapinto. “The Good Son.” Rolling Stone 5 September 2002: 60–65.
• Valerie Hemingway (G’s third wife). Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004.
• John Hemingway (G’s second child). Strange Tribe: a Family Memoir. The Lyons Press, 2007.
• Lynn Conway (ed). "The Strange Saga of Gregory Hemingway". http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/GregoryHemingway.html#anc.
• Paul Hendrickson. Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011: 15, 297-9, 382-5, 386, 390-2, 397, 400, 403-53, 493, 496, 498.

____________________________________________________________

I previously, in June 2008, published a much shorter version.  My first draft had been based mainly on Paul Hendrickson’s Washington Post article.  I recently noticed reviews of Hendrickson’s new book, and realized that it went into a lot more detail about Gloria.  I was one of the first to borrow the book from my local library, and it is the major basis of this revised version.  I did not realize that Hendrickson was the same writer as the Washington Post article until part way through the book.

None of the Wikipedia articles on the three towns in Montana where Gregory worked mention him among the notable residents.  The Wikipedia article on Pauline Pfeiffer says nothing about her unusual death.  The Wikipedia article on Laura Archera completely fails to mention her long-time lover Jinny Pfeiffer – which is outrageous.  The Aldous Huxley article does not mention her either.  If I were doing a blog on polyamory, I would certainly do an article on the three of them.

I failed to find any mention in Hendrickson’s book of electrolysis or female hormones.  From this I assume that Gloria did not do either, even though as a doctor she could have self prescribed hormones.  It is quite possible that if Gloria were on estrogen she would not have been arrested so often.

The discussion in Hendrickson of Gloria's visit to Dr Biber is very brief, and the others don't even name the surgeon.   Hendrickson doesn't ask the questions that those who know of sex-change surgery would ask. There is no mention of psychiatrists' letters, nor of Biber's reaction to her not being on estrogens. What does he mean by 'a series of operations'?

Of Ernest’s three sons, Gregory was the only one to have a career, and he had the most children: eight if you included Brendan, who was named after his father.  His two brothers had one and three children respectively.

Pauline Pfeiffer was Catholic.  Ernest Hemingway converted to Catholicism (but not to the Catholic notion of marriage for life) in order to marry her in 1927.  While Ernest supported the elected government in the Spanish Civil War, Pauline’s Catholicism led her to support the fascist insurgents.   Her reward for this was, because she was divorced, to be denied both a Catholic Mass and burial in a Catholic cemetery.

Edith Ferguson (188? - 196?) female impersonator, instructor.

++Revised March 2013 to correct who was behind the 1952 Transvestia.

Edith Ferguson (or Enid Foreman) was a female impersonator, and perhaps also a lawyer, in southern California, who retired in the early 1950s.

Edith advertised in Billboard and Variety magazine offering ‘personalized instruction’ in female impersonation. For a fee of a few hundred dollars she sent 50 or more mimeographed lectures on how to do makeup, how to wear clothes, how to sound and appear like a woman.

Edith, Muriel (later known as Virginia Prince) and other transvestites started meeting at the Long Beach home of Joan Thornton.  In 1952, they started a mimegraphed newsletter which they called Transvestia.  The initial subscription list was built around Louise Lawrence’s address book, and the subscription list for Edith’s instruction course.  However when Prince restarted Transvestia in 1960, Edith and Joan were no longer involved.

She spoke out against transsexual surgery, but hoped that the Christine Jorgensen publicity might ‘redound to the benefit of transvestites in general’.

• Darrell Raynor. A Year Among the Girls. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1966. New York: Lancer Books, 1968: 105-6.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press, 2002: 180-1.

__________________________________________________________________________________

A few hundred dollars in the early 1950s would be a few thousands now.

Diane Kearny (1940 - ) HBS activist.

Revised 4 Dec 2009, September 2013.

See also A short History of (Harry) Benjamin Syndrome.

Kearny was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and as a teenager corresponded with Virginia Prince – who told her that anyone wanting a sex change was delusional.

Diane was a friend of the pioneering transsexual and prostitute, Patricia Morgan, and knew some of the drag performers at the 82 Club. She was down the street when the Stonewall riot erupted in 1969.

Later, as Diane, she was a patient of Harry Benjamin and Charles Ihlenfeld. She had only one psychiatric interview, and then had surgery with Roberto Granato Sr in 1972 in Brooklyn.

Being Catholic, she then successfully applied to have the name and gender on her baptismal certificate amended.

In 1984 she married.  They were married for 22 years before she was widowed. Diane ran her own business.

In 2004 Diane set up WATS, a transsexual forum.  In 2006 she encountered  Charlotte Goiar on the Australian WOMAN forums, and adopted Goiar's concept of Harry Benjamin Syndrome. Goiar participated in her forum, and she  and others set up harrybenjaminsyndrome-info.org, (which became derelict around 2008), and then harrybenjaminsyndrome.org (which also became derelict in 2010). Goiar and Kerny separated and each maintained a web site and a forum. Kearny's site contained material from Goiar’s www.shb-info.org, with small changes, and included a very similar Standards of Care.  Her Yahoo forum differed from Goiars in admitting only post-operative women, and harrybenjaminsyndrome.org, unlike www.shb-info.org, was in English only. The site defined HBS:

"Harry Benjamin's Syndrome (HBS) is a congenital intersex condition that develops before birth, involving the differentiation between male and female. It is believed that every 1/30,000 is born with this condition. Therefore a girl with Harry Benjamin's Syndrome would have a females brain sex but her genitals would appear male. The boys born under this condition have female genitalia even though their brains are male. So far it’s impossible to diagnose this condition at the moment of birth causing the babies to be raised in the wrong gender role. There are figures that confuse the rarity of HBS by including in the numbers those under the transgender umbrella who are not HBS or even true transsexuals but are better aligned with fetishists who 'went all the way' such as the autogynephilic thereby making it seem that the number of 1/2500 might be better applied."

Despite Diane’s Catholicism, the site had a religion tab that was heavily Protestant in that it cites the Bible but no Popes or theologians.  " In this way God is pleased for He sees a lessoning of suffering in His name by all who feel that in His eyes they did right and not a wrong".

Diane wrote to the American Psychological Association (included on the web page), and the press in general. In 2007, she and the others made a presentation at a WPATH Symposium in Chicago.


*Not the Diane Kearney who argued that Thomas Pynchon was Wanda Tinasky; nor the Hollywood costume and wardrobe person.

Diane, sometimes using the surname Logan, commented on various websites:

• Diane Logan.  "transgender Confusion".  San Francisco Bay Times.  Aug 31, 2006. www.sfbaytimes.com/index.php?sec=article&article_id=5465.  "Most transsexuals I know are not a result of being a crossdresser or a fetishist. They are people who knew from a very early age that something was wrong and bore the pain of that truth until relief was attained in the form of surgery. They did not link up with transgender behavior, which is obviously a satisfying sexual release, but had to bring their body and brain into harmony in order to simply survive. That is what transsexual actually is and so far removed from all of those transgenders I came across during my years before and since my surgery in 1972. Transgenderism has become farcical and in no way should be seen as being in any way, shape or form somewhat like the medical condition of transsexualism, or as we prefer to call it, Harry Benjamin Syndrome"
• Diane Kearny. Comment on “Transgender Folly”. The Jewish Press. Nov 15 2006. http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/19917/Transgender_Folly.htm."Direct your angst toward those who use the confusion of transgenderism to further their forced imposition upon society. This proposal, if one looks closely, is a gay/lesbian/bi/transgender law. It allows people to simply identify as the opposite sex when not that sex at all. It will confuse the issue and even permit deceptive same sex marriages."
• Diane Kearny. Letters to the Editor. Salon.com. July-Sept 2007. http://letters.salon.com/8405f1978f69d63678799623f1e75cdd/author/.   "I had my corrective surgery in a Brooklyn, N.Y. hospital over 30 years ago. Of course I was considered to be in medical need whereas now with the influx of so many under the transgender umbrella we too are falsely listed as having some sort of dysphoria. Does this sound like someone suffering a mental disorder: graduated from college, legally married to the man I met 30 years ago, opened and ran my own business for 20 yrs, built up a comfortable circle of friends and had been certified physically and mentally a female in a County Hospital which was the requirement of the Health Dept. Board before they would change my birth certificate. All that is done so how then am I thrown under the transgender umbrella with fetishists and sex deviants as if I might be cousined to them? No, I refuse to accept that and will fight it to my dying days. I am not a trans anything...I am a woman."
• Diane Kearny. Comments on “Roman Catholicism And Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS)”. TS-Si. 18 Dec 2007. http://ts-si.org/the-discussion/2798-briefing-roman-catholicism-and-harry-benjamin-syndrome-hbs.html. "This is simply one of the area's where the TG's and our forced attachment to their banner has hurt many who have had surgery. Remember please that McHugh comes from a long line of radical functionaries at Johns Hopkins where the issue of gender has been placed in the pot of confusion not the least of which is exampled by the likes of Money who believed much like McHugh that brain sex is pliable. ".
• Diane Kearny. Comment on “With Apologies to Radical Feminists”. The Transadvocate. Feb 9, 2008. www.transadvocate.com/with-apologies-to-radical-feminists.htm#high_1."I have been attacked before and by the ignorant who take out of context things I have said and things doctors have advised me as facts on the one hand and possibilities on the other. I ignore their ignorance for I truly understand their need to demean all of us who might suggest they have no affinity with us in their attempt to use our medical legitimacy as cover for their own fetishism. That bothers them for they know deep down their masking deception has no connection with our reality."
• Diane Kearny. Comments on “Uh oh". The Billerico Project. May 5-13, 2008. http://www.bilerico.com/2008/05/uh-oh.php.   "Let the fetishists and the week-end thrill seekers keep transgender. I will not accept that term unless every other woman on the planet does as well."
• Diana.  Profile.  Creative Loafing Tampa. http://tampa.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Profile?oid=oid%3A354758.  "Those of us who had corrective surgery did not change our gender, it was inborn"
• Diane L. Logan.  "Few facts ignored about health care bill".  Lewistown Sentinel.  Sept 25, 2009. http://mobile.lewistownsentinel.com/page/wap.home/?id=515436.  "I am continually amazed that so many of the radical liberals attack everyone who is opposed to the Obama health care boondoggle. Recently argued by a reader were the so-called lies being perpetrated by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Beck, Newt Gingrich, Hannity and the very long list of those who are vocal in addressing opposition to a plan that is falsely labeled as a “HEALTH plan” when, in fact, it is, but a political means to place power in the hands of the socialists in our government. Some like one of the czars, Van Jones, are even admitted communists."

See also the two comments below that are emails received from Diane after the first tentative draft of this article.

____________________________________________________________________

I believe that the Catholic Church never reissues baptismal certificates for transsexuals any more. After all, their official position, as advised by Paul McHugh, is that there is no such thing as changing sex.

Back in 1960, Jacqueline Dufresnoy was required to be re-baptised.

Diane insists that she never changed her gender although she lived as male for three decades.  She is of course failing to distinguish between 'gender' and 'gender identity'.  

Prince's reply to a teenaged trans girl was, obviously, rude and insensitive.  However Diane is still referring to Prince as "Charles (Virginia) Prince" apparently assuming that "Charles Prince" was Virginia's male-name (it was merely a temporary pen name) and falsely crediting her with coining 'transgender' .  I gather that Diane has not read either Richard Docter's nor my accounts of Prince, nor either my or Cristan Williams' accounts of the history of the term 'transgender'.   There are several serious criticisms of Virginia Prince, but Diane neither contributes to the criticism of Prince nor helps her own case by repeating  misinformation.  As I wrote here: "One can see why Yvonne Cook-Riley and Kimberleigh Richards wanted to credit Prince with something that she never did, and never could have. It is an irony of note that Diane Kearny, Suzan Cooke, Jenifer Usher and Cathryn Platine all want to support Cook-Riley and Richards in this endeavor.

Charlotte Goiar (1972 - ) HBS activist.

Revised 4 Nov 2009, 2 Dec 2009, 13 March 2012, 7 September 2013, 2 April 2018.

See also A short History of (Harry) Benjamin Syndrome
        and Numbers and HBS. 

Charlotte is a resident of Vigo in Galicia. She was diagnosed by the school psychologist as a trans child at age 7, and from age 16 was on hormonal therapy from the Vigo hospital - the first such patient to be so treated in Vigo.  However she met much derision at school from both students and teachers and was unable to complete high school.   Since 1991 she has been in psychiatric treatment, and living on welfare. 

In the early 2000s Goiar proposed the concept of Síndrome de Harry Benjamin (Harry Benjamin Syndrome). The term had been pioneered by Tom Reucher in Paris with an inclusivist meaning, but Goiar changed the meaning to exclude most trans persons.   She set up www.shb-info.org in 2005, and while posting on the Australian WOMAN forum encountered Diane Kearny in the US, who had similar opinions.  They initially worked together, but then split and in competition both set up web sites, Yahoo forums and Standards of Care.

In 2004, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) became the government, and quickly implemented gay marriage, but kept delaying the promised Ley de Identidad de Género (Gender Identity Law) until prominent trans woman and PSOE activist Carla Antonelli threatened a hunger strike and this attracted international press attention.  The law was passed in 2007, and Carla, Charlotte and many others were able to change their legal name and gender as surgery was not a requirement.

A decree by the previous government in 1995 had prohibited public health services from paying for transgender surgery. This was rescinded, also in 2007. By then, Andalusia had already been performing these operations for eight years, and this region was later joined by Madrid, Catalonia and the Basque Country. Aragon and Extremadura paid to have patients treated elsewhere. However Galicia and other regions did what they could to avoid offering transgender surgery.
Charlotte described HBS: ¹

 "Harry Benjamin Syndrome  (HBS) is an intersex condition developed in the very early stages of pregnancy affecting the physical process of differentiation between male and female. In this patients, the brain develops as a certain sex but the rest of the body takes on the physical characteristics of the opposite sex. Genetic aetiology for this condition had been showed also by modern medical research. 

Today, what was  previously known as  intense True Transsexualism is  considered by medical res earch experts in this area as a physiological condition of birth, which is both neurological and genetic in origin, and therefore an inborn intersex condition (physiological).  That is  why by following the medical naming conventions in regard to physiologically intersexed states  or syndromes, the condition formerly known as intense True Transsexualism (Type VI on the diagnosis table of Harry Benjamin), must be named Harry Benjamin Syndrome.

Since people with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are conventional in their gender identity and expression, like most members of society, these people need a physical rehabilitation of their endocrine system and phenotype in order to function in society as any other average person.

They are not seeking to defy social norms of gender or sexuality as is the case of transgender and most who call themselves transsexuals .

People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome as  a group are naturally opposed to ambiguous groups of sex and/or gender such as  transgender persons and most who call themselves transsexuals. People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are not a part of a supposed continuum with these other states of sexual or gender-related ambiguity.

Despite the confusion in terminology with the old concept of True "Transsexualism", persons with Harry Benjamin Syndrome (which in reality is a type of intersex condition) should not be confused with transgenderism and other ambiguous sexual states in general.

People born with Harry Benjamin Syndrome are persons with a binary gender orientation of either Man or Woman, as  any other average person in society. Their identity is woman or man, never "transsexual".  Therefore they need a complete physical rehabilitation in order to function sexually and develop socially as any other average person in our society.

People with Harry Benjamin Syndrome repudiate sexual ambiguity and don't feel identified with sexually ambiguous labels like "transsexual"  or "transgender"  which neither define nor represent them."

Initially Goiar claimed that 1:500 are HBS, but has been reducing the frequency and on 2009 said  that HBS is "an extremely rare condition [1:100,000]" (which would mean that HBS persons are only a fraction of 1% of transsexuals). She is further contentious in that she and her movement have become known for disparaging other trans persons, even post-ops, and GLBT persons in general.

Despite Charlotte’s on-going non-surgical status, the Spanish HBS movement was critical of the UK and Spanish laws permitting gender change without surgery, and most well-known transsexual activists have been disparaged on her forum in that they are not anti-transgender (that is against all trans persons who are not HBS). Carla Antonelli was criticized for representing Spanish transsexuals despite being non-op – but Charlotte’s continuing pre-op status was not mentioned. Charlotte expressed approval of the situation for transsexuals in Iran. She objected to the term ‘transsexuality’, as opposed to 'transsexualism', as pejorative in that she took it to imply a choice.

Charlotte Goiar became a member of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a Church of Scientology front organization that uses Thomas Szasz as a spokesman.  For several years she featured a 90 minute CCHR video on her HBS home page.  Further, Charlotte proclaimed that she was a licensed Human Rights Investigator:  this was only a CCHR bestowed title.

In 2008 Charlotte was assigned a court-appointed counsel, and with his help, induced a Vigo judge to recognize her problem, and rule that her "anxious-depressive syndrome" was caused by her discomfort with her body.  However the court ruled against her request for surgery in that such surgery was not available in Galicia.

Charlotte was antagonistic to the STP 2012 depathologization campaign by other transsexuals, and emphasized in contrast that HBS want medical repathologization. A petition sponsored by SHB-Info.org was signed by 500 persons and was sent to the World Health Organization asking that transsexualism be recognized, not as a psychological disorder, but as a medical one.

The HBS forum was discontinued and closed in 2011.

In 2012, her mother - the one person who had stood with her – died. Charlotte underwent a religious crisis:

“I had never imagined and I still do not understand what guilt I have of being born with this pathology, and the hatred that it awakens in so many people. I felt so vulnerable. … Through a Christian English friend, little by little I began to study some Christian texts. This was how, little by little, I found relief in God, as a way to leave the course of everything in the hands of a force superior to me, so I began to read the Bible for the first time shortly after turning 40 years old.”

She became a cristiana metodista (Methodist). ²

Charlotte won a ruling in the Galician High Court that Servizo Galego de Saúde (SERGAS), the Galician Health Service, should pay for her to have genital surgery.  However the Galician government appealed to the Spanish Supreme Court, which in turn also found in Goiar's favour in May 2013.  By September, as SERGAS had taken no steps to conform with the ruling, Goiar went to the press. SERGAS then wasted almost two years sending Charlotte to public clinics in Málaga and Barcelona that did not do the required type of operation. In 2015, at age 42, Charlotte finally had surgery in the private Instituto de Cirurxía Plástica, Barcelona, with Dr Iván Mañero - the only clinic in Spain to offer colovaginoplasty. Before the operation she asked for pastoral accompaniment, which led to her meeting Carlos Osma of Christianos Gays.

http://shb-info.org was taken down that year.

In 2017, Charlotte allied herself with the ultra-Catholic Hazte Oír and its opposition to sex education and to ‘gender ideology’. She is also claiming that the new ICD-11 term Gender Incongruence is the same thing as HBS.

•  www.shb-info.org/goiar.html. Taken down 2015
•  www.myspace.com/goiar REMOVED early 2009.
• Laura Amato. Laura's Harry Benjamin Syndrome HBS: A Peer Review http://harrybenjaminsyndrome-not-transsexual.com. 
• http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/HarryBenjaminsSyndrome.  Closed in 2011. 
• Ángel Paniagua.  "Primera condena al Sergas a pagar una operación de cambio de sexo: El Tribunal Superior da la razón a una viguesa que sufre transexualismo".  La Voz de Galicia, 13 de marzo de 2012.  www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/sociedad/2012/03/13/primera-condena-sergas-pagar-operacion-cambio-sexo/0003_201203G13P28991.htm.
• "El Supremo ratifica la condena a Galicia a pagar una operación de cambio de sexo".  20minutos, 01,09.2013.  www.20minutos.es/noticia/1907927/0/supremo-ratifica/condena-galicia-pagar/operacion-cambio-sexo. 
• Silvia Pontevedra.  "Unprecedented legal victory as health service is made to cover gender reassignment".  El Pais In English, 6 Sep 2013.  http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/09/06/inenglish/1378470581_127491.html?rel=rosEP.
• “A xustiza obriga a Xunta a pagarlle a operación de cambio de sexo á viguesa Charlotte Goiar”. Praza Publica, 18, Xulli 2014. http://praza.gal/movementos-sociais/7568/a-xustiza-obriga-a-xunta-a-pagarlle-a-operacion-de-cambio-de-sexo-a-viguesa-charlotte-goiar.
• Carlos Osma. “Charlotte Goiar: "El prejuicio es humano, no es de Dios, Dios es amor". Una cristiana que hace unos meses se sometió a una operación de reasignación de sexo y ha querido compartir con nosotros su experiencia.” Homoprostestantes, 2016/07. https://homoprotestantes.blogspot.ca/2016/07/el-prejuicio-es-humano-no-es-de-dios.html.
• Elena Ocampo. “La viguesa Charlotte, primera en lograr un cambio de sexo en el Supremo, apoya a Hazte Oír: Miembros del colectivo LGTBI gallego, ‘indignados’ tras su respaldo público a la plataforma ultracatólica”. Faro de Vigo, 09.03.2017. www.farodevigo.es/sociedad/2017/03/09/viguesa-charlotte-goiar-primera-mujer/1637862.html.
• “Charlotte Goiar, primera mujer trans en reasignar su sexo con el respaldo del Supremo apoya a Hazte Oír”. Cristianos Gays, 14 de marzo de 2017. http://www.cristianosgays.com/tags/charlotte-goiar.
• “Charlotte Goiar: ‘El matrimonio homosexual debería tener otro nombre, porque matrimonio viene de madre’ “. Actuall, 11/07/2017. www.actuall.com/entrevista/familia/charlotte-goiar-matrimonio-homosexual-deberia-nombre-matrimonio-viene-madre/

_____________

1. Goiar rephrased her description of HBS several times. This version was written for the short-lived Google Knol, and later added to www.shb-info.org.
2. Translation from Carlos Osma’s blog.

www.shb-info.org is now derelict.


According to the Spanish newspapers Charlotte at 41, despite being on female hormones since age 16 and legally female since the Ley de Identidad de Género in 2007, still has no work experience. Surgery will of course make her feel more confident, and the legal precedent she has set does far more good than all the HBS stuff, but as any cis woman would tell her, being a 40+ woman with neither job nor life partner is not an easy road.




What would the actual Harry Benjamin have thought of the HBS movement? He writes with regret of intolerance: “Too many individuals are that way; what they do not like must be forbidden and punished. Then they are satisfied. I have even met transvestites who dislike (or pretend to dislike) transsexualism so much that they are against estrogen treatment and operation (for reasons of self protection?). There are also transsexuals who dislike transvestites as well as homosexuals. Intolerance can be found in strange quarters.” The Transsexual Phenomenon, p114-5 of the Warner Books 1977 edition.

Surely, those who organize in his name, should respect his sentiment.

Carla Antonelli (1959 - ) actress, activist.

Revised 4 Nov 2009, 5 Feb 2011, June 2015.

Delgado Gómez was born in  Güímar, Tenerife. He was trained at the Conservatorio de Música y Arte Dramático in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He then moved to Madrid, and as the Francoist vagrancy laws, under which one could be imprisoned merely for being gay or trans, were modified in 1979, Gómez as Carla Antonelli was able to transition by age 20.

She recorded a television documentary on transsexuality in 1980 for TVE-2, but the censors withheld it until after the attempted coup by Colonel Antonio Tejero in 1981.

She was active for 10 years with Grupo de Gays, Lesbianas y Transexuales del PSOE (Socialist Workers' Party of Spain), and notably campaigned for and helped to draft the Ley de Identidad de Género (Gender Identity Law).

Carla's extensive web site was one of the first to feature positive images of trans women, and is the most popular trans site in Spain. This inspired Lynn Conway's TS Women Successes page in 2000, and Carla was one of the first trans women featured on Lynn's site, but after complaints that she is not post-operative, and the mediation of June Hingle, she was removed. However Lynn still gives a special thanks to Carla.

In 2003 she was honoured by the  Colectivo de Transexuales de Madrid.

In 2004, PSOE became the government, and quickly implemented gay marriage, but kept delaying the Gender Identity Law until Antonelli threatened a hunger strike and this attracted international press attention.  After the Ley de Identidad de Género was passed in 2007, she was the first in the Madrid area to change her legal identity.

She then resigned her position as the co-ordinator of the GLT group but continues to support PSOE. She also agitated against the prohibition of prostitution in that many trans women can find no other employment. At that time she began to record the television series Antena 3.

She continued as spokesperson of the LGTB Federation and of the Madrid Transsexual Collective after violent attacks by NeoNazis. She has lectured at universities and at the Congress of Sexology. She was invited by transsexual groups in Venezuela, Chile and Mexico, appearing on television, in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and at the Univerity of Merida.

She was awarded the Baeza Award for visibility. In 2009 the municipality of Güímar, Tenerife gave her a lifetime award.

The Spanish HBS people, and Charlotte Goiar in particular, do not care for transsexuals to be represented by a non-op person, and even object that the Ley de Identidad de Género permits one to change one's name and gender in the Civil Registry without undergoing surgery. A Carla-Antonelli.blogspot.com was set up by an anonymous third party which pretended to be by Carla and that she was a prostitute and that she was transphobic. After a couple of years of harassment, Carla complained to the police in May 2009.

Carla has played in 6 movies and 3 television series and is often seen on Spanish television and on the stage.

From 2011-15 she was a PSOE List member of the Madrid Assembly, where she was feisty in raising trans and LGBT issues, but often did not get the support of even her own party.

• www.carlaantonelli.com.
• Lynn Conway. "Acknowledgements". Transsexual Women's Successes: Links and Photos. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSsuccesses.html.
• Carla Antonelli. "Denuncias en Guardia Civil, Policia Nacional y Juzgado". Diario Digital Transexual, 05 May 2009. www.carlaantonelli.com/foros/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=13740.
• Miriam Rubio. "La denuncia por acoso de Carla Antonelli". Vanitatis, 08/05/2009. http://www.vanitatis.com/cache/2009/05/08/noticias_5_denuncia_acoso_carla_antonelli.html.
• June Hingle. Comments on Another Senseless Gay Slaying. Aria Blue, 10/04/2010. http://ariablue.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/another-senseless-gay-slaying.  No Longer Available
• June Hingle. Comments on Charlotte Goiar. A Gender Variance Who's Who, 7/1/11. http://zagria.blogspot.com/2009/03/charlotte-goiar-1972-hbs-activist.html.
• "Carla Antonelli se despide como diputada de la IX legislatura de la Asamblea de Madrid defendiendo una vez más los derechos LGTB".  Doz Manzanas, 13 marzo 2015.  www.dosmanzanas.com/2015/03/carla-antonelli-se-despide-como-diputada-de-la-ix-legislatura-de-la-asamblea-de-madrid-defendiendo-una-vez-mas-los-derechos-lgtb.html.

VICKI RENE   ES.WIKIPEDIA    IMDB   BRIANNA AUSTIN

_____________________________________________________________________________


June Hingle maintains that the dissension between Charlotte and Carla was created by Mariana Casas writing under various names.

June, who was also featured early in Lynn Conway's TS Women Successes page, asked to be removed in that she does not like to be regarded as a post-op transsexual.

IMDB gives Carla's birth year as 1970.  That would make her 10 years old when she was in the first television documentary.

The es.wikipedia article says nothing about the feud with HBS.

There is no Wikipedia page on the Spanish Ley de Identidad de Género.

(Comment update April 2016:   IMDB still gives Carla's birth year as 1970.   Most of the comments below are sour grapes by HBS persons.   Maybe I should remove them as HBS imploded some years back.  See my Short History of HBS.   I leave them for now for historical reasons.)

Dan Dailey (1915 – 1978) dancer, actor.

++ revised  24/01/11 to incorporate more sources, and to resort the facts chronologically.

Dailey was born and raised in New York City. He appeared in a minstrel show, and then in vaudeville before his first Broadway show in 1937. He was signed by MGM in 1940.

He served in the US Signal Corps during the Second World War and was discharged as a Captain.

In 1946 he was taking Linda Darnell's dresses from the Fox wardrobe department. Howard Hughes made him return them, but gave him a gift certificate for $5,000 at a leading department store.

He was teamed with Betty Grable in Mother Wore Tights, 1947.  He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in When My Baby Smiles at Me, 1948 – also with Grable. It is said that she also lent him some of her screen wardrobe - the best couture that Hollywood had to offer.  Dan became one of the top male leads at Twentieth Century Fox in the early 1950s.

Andre Previn, the composer, tells in his biography how Dailey turned up drunk and in female clothing for the press screening of It's Always Fair Weather in 1954.  Dailey co-starred with Johnnie Ray in There's No Business Like Show Business the same year, and was close to him afterwards. There were rumors that they were more than friends.

He married his fourth wife, Gwen Carter, in February 1955. In June Inside magazine wrote that "After every binge he shows up around the film colony, decked from head to toe in outlandish female attire". In September that year Uncensored ran an article dispelling the rumors that he was a transvestite (which was a way of repeating the stories without being sued).

In January 1957 Confidential ran "The Night Dan Dailey was Dolly Dawn" claiming that he had danced in a pink tulle dress in a New York gay bar the previous March. Betty tried to save Dailey's career by pointing to his wife and family, but his film career was essentially over by that point, although he continued in television into the 1970s.

In 1976, actress cum gossip columnist Joyce Haber was on television promoting her novel about Hollywood, The Users. Asked to dish some gossip, she mentioned that one of the top dancer-actors was a closet transvestite with a costly and beautiful wardrobe that many women would envy.

After the suicide of his only son (from his third marriage), he was an embittered alcoholic. He died three years later, just after he had played boyfriend Clyde Tolson in The Private Files of J.Edgar Hoover, 1977. He appeared in over 60 films.

• "The Night Dan Dailey was Dolly Dawn". Confidential. Jan 1957.
• Spero Pastos. Pin-Up: The Tragedy of Betty Grable.  Putnam, 1986: 76-7.
• Andre Previn. No Minor Chords: my days in Hollywood. Doubleday 1991. Toronto & London: Bantam 1993:64
• Boze Hadleigh. The Vinyl Closet: Gays in the Music World. Los Hombres Press, 1991:229-30. Republished as Sing out! : gays and lesbians in the music world. Barricade Books 1997,  Robson Books 1999.
• William J. Mann. Behind the Screen: How gays and lesbians shaped Hollywood. Viking, 2001: 314-5.
• Darwin Porter. Howard Hughes, Hell’s Angel: America’s Notorious Bisexual Billionaire, The Secret Life of the U.S. Emperor.  Blood Moon Productions 2005: 630.

EN.Wikipedia

Willow Arune (1946 - ) lawyer, entrepreneur

Revised March 2009 to reflect Willow's feedback.

William Orobko was a lawyer, an entrepreneur and a television host. He was married to a woman and they had three children and a large house in West Vancouver. He had been an active nudist in the 1960s. He was also a bibliographer (he wrote a bibliography of the novels of C.S. Foster).

He gave up the law after a heart attack at age 32, and wrote a book on commuter cycling in Calgary. He also wrote a book on the law for musicians.

In 1995 he went to Thailand and became involved in a dubious $1million financial transaction with two Americans who turned out to have forged documents. All three were arrested. William was repeatedly raped by the guards in a Bangkok prison. Even after release on bail, the Thai authorities held on to his passport, and he could not return to Canada until Preston Manning, the leader of the Canadian Reform Party, went to Thailand and took up his case. He was for a while a fugitive from Thailand.

On return to Canada, he sought psychological counselling, and decided to become a woman. He says that he was not a crossdresser before this point.


He temporarily lived in Kelowna, and became a patient at the Vancouver Clinic. William transitioned to Willow. She was able to get permanent disability welfare for post-traumatic stress resulting from the incarceration on top of her earlier health problems. She has become a major apologist for Michael Bailey, and is antagonistic to Andrea James, Lynn Conway, and Deirdre McCloskey. She and her new female partner now live in Prince George in northern British Columbia.

• John Gradon. “Free at Last”. Calgary Herald Nov 24, 1996. Online at http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.srs/browse_frm/thread/a98cafa0a9ab92b1/2cea0815a3897799?.
• Don Plant. “Willow sculpts a life”. The Kelowna Daily Courier. Jan 27, 1999. Online at: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/Reader/Chicago%20Reader.12-12-03.html#anchor256362.
• Lynn Conway. “Who is Arune?”. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/Reader/Chicago%20Reader.12-12-03.html#anchor29531.
• Willow Arune. “I am Arune”. The Autogynephilia Resource. 6/6/04. www.autogynephilia.org/I%20AM%20ARUNE.htm

Books:

• William Orobko. The Musician's Handbook: A Practical Guide to the Law and Business of Music. International Self-Counsel Press, 1985.
• William Orobko. Commuting by Bike. Rocky Mountain Books, 1995.