Lucy Lawson (Hicks) (Anderson) (1886 - 1954) cook, madam

Tobias Lawson was born in Waddy, Kentucky. By the time she started school, she was insisting on wearing dresses, and called herself Lucy. Her mother took her to a physician and was advised to raise the child as a girl.

Lucy Lawson left school at fifteen, and worked as a domestic servant. In her twenties, Lucy moved to Pecos, Texas and worked in a hotel for a decade. In 1920 Lucy married Clarence Hicks in Silver City, New Mexico, and then moved to Oxnard, California.

Mrs Hicks worked as a cook and nanny, in particular for the Donlon family. She won prizes in cooking competitions. She saved her money and purchased a downtown property. In 1929 she divorced Mr Hicks. There was less work available during the Depression years, and by the Second World War, Lucy was running a bordello, and was frequently arrested for being a madam.


One of her girls contracted a venereal disease, and the entire house was medically examined, which led to the discovery that Lucy was male-bodied. In 1944 Lucy married Reuben Anderson, a soldier stationed in New York.

In 1945 Mrs Anderson was convicted of perjury in that in applying for a marriage license she had sworn that there were “no legal objections to the marriage". She was sentenced to ten years probation. Challenging the doctors who had proclaimed that she was male, She insisted: “I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman. I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman".

In 1946 both Lucy and Reuben were convicted and imprisoned for fraud in that Lucy had received payments as the wife of a soldier. After release Lucy attempted to return to Oxnard, but the local police chief warned her to stay away.

Lucy Anderson spent the remainder of her life in Los Angeles until her death in 1954, at age 68.

* not the parliamentarian

• “Sin & Soufflé”. Time, 5 November 1945, 24. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,852379,00.html.
  
• Frank P. Barajas, Work and Leisure in La Colonia: Class, Generation, and Interethnic Alliances among Mexicanos in Oxnard, California, 189-1945. Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2001.
  
• Jeffrey Wayne Maulhardt. Oxnard: 1941-2004. Arcadia Publishing, 2005: 8,89.
  
• Kevin Leonard. "Anderson, Lucy Hicks [Tobias Lawson] (1886-1954)". Black Past. www.blackpast.org/aaw/anderson-lucy-hicks-1886-1954.
  
• Jedwardnajera. "Remembering Lucy Hicks'. Jedwardnajera's Blog, February 8, 2012. https://jedwardnajera.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/remembering-lucy-hicks.
  

LegacyProjectChicago
____________________________________________________________

It is very noteworthy that a doctor in the 1890s suggested that a trans girl actually be raised as a girl.

Lucy was quite a woman. She was 58 when Reuben married her.

There is no mention of whether Lucy was allowed to sell her house in downtown Oxnard, or was otherwise compensated for its loss.

Was she sent to a women's prison?

p89 of Oxnard: 1941-2004.

Brian Belovitch (1956 -) housewife, performer.

Brian was raised in Rhode Island. When still a teenager she decided that she was a woman, and became Tish Gervais.


Still in Rhode Island, Tish married her boyfriend, Denny, and for five years lived as his wife on a US Army base in Germany, where she was the Tupperware representative.

When the marriage broke up, Tish was a model, a lounge, and then a disco singer. And finally a prostitute. She appears in Split: William to Chrysis: Portrait of a Drag Queen,1991, the documentary about International Chrysis, and in Silent Prey, 1997, a thriller set in a convent school, as the Mother Superior.

She had never gone through with genital surgery, and in middle age decided to return to being a man. Brian turned his life into performance art in an Off-Broadway production in 2000, called Boys Don’t Wear Lipstick.

He is one of the contributors to Daylle Schwartz’s book, Straight Talk with Gay Guys: What Girlfriends Can't Tell You and Straight Men Won't, 2007.

• Keith Greer (dir). Boys Don't Wear Lipstick. Scr: Brian Belovitch, with Brian Belovitch. Play. Players Theatre. New York. 90 mins Oct-Nov 2000
• D.J.R Bruckner. “The Man That Almost Got Away”. New York Times. Oct 31, 2000.

Mrs Noonan (? - 1878) army wife.

Image from New York`s National Police Gazette, 15 Feb 1879.

Mrs Noonan was the company laundress with the American Seventh Cavalry (the one that became famous because of General Custer and Little Big Horn). She had joined the company in Kentucky and followed it north to Fort Lincoln (map). She was always heavily veiled, and from 1868 to 1873 was married first to a man named Clifford, and then to James Nash. She always stayed on when her husbands were discharged. She did not get on too well with the other women who regarded her as 'something' between a man and a woman.

In 1873 she had married Corporal John Noonan, a Mexican, and was living with him at Fort Meade, Dakota Territory. While the corporal was away on a campaign, Mrs Noonan died, and on being laid out by the other garrison women it was discovered that she was a 'man'. Noonan's comrades ridiculed him. He deserted, and two days later he committed suicide with his revolver. These events became national headlines.

• Brigadier General Edward S. Godfrey. General Sully's Expedition Against the Southern Plains Indians, 1868.
• Don Rickey, Jr. Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay; the enlisted soldier fighting the Indian wars. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1963: 170-1.
• Jonathan Katz. " 'Mrs. Nash' of Custer's Seventh Cavalry". Gay American History: Lesbians And Gay Men In The U.S.A. New York: Crowell 1976. New York: A Discus Book.1978: 766,993.
• "Mrs. Corporal Noonan". State Historical Society of North Dakota. December 30, 2004. http://www.prairiepublic.org/programs/datebook/bydate/04/1204/123004.jsp

___________________________

There is a coda that appeared in the Bismarck Tribune Dec 10, 1878 (Bismark, North Dakota was the closest town of any size). A trance medium came to town, and a reporter from the newspaper asked for a private sitting. He had no particular person that he wished to contact, but the spirit of Mrs Noonan appeared, two months after her death. She explained that she was Joseph Drummond who had become a woman to hide a terrible crime committed in Washington, DC, 15 years before.