Famila (1980 - 2004) hijra activist.

Famila, from Bangalore, was a chela to Revathi. She was intelligent and vocal and passed easily. She had surgery at age 19.

She left sex work and became an activist for hijras working for Sangama.

She was featured in the BBC documentary India’s Ladyboys, and in 2004 came second at the Koovagam festival beauty contest, although as a feminist she did believe in beauty contests, but it was a platform to talk about hijra rights.

However the strain of the life got to her, and she committed suicide at age 24.

• India’s Ladyboys. With Famila. BBC3 UK 60 mins 2005.
• Paddy Maguire. “Ms World”.  BBC News, 2004.  Online at: http://www.thewe.cc/contents/more/archive/aruvani.html
• Sonia Faleiro.“Middle Sex”. Elle April 2007. Online at http://soniafaleiro.blogspot.com/2007/04/middle-sex.html.

Raymond De Montmorency Lecky Browne-Lecky (1881 - 1961) amateur thespian.

Raymond Browne-Lecky of Flintimara, Warrenpoint, County Down, was an enthusiastic actor in charitable productions, usually arranged by his mother.


Most of his roles were those of females. He impressed the local critics, and then when appearing in Dublin he overcame prejudices against female impersonations. His most successful role was taken to be that of the eponymous lead in Lady Audley's Secret. He also appeared as the self descriptive Mrs Gushington Nervesby.

Irish Society revealed that he had his dresses made by 'Mrs Slyne of Grafton Street', and he wore the family jewels on stage. He was contrasted to his mother who affected plain linen collars and sensible country clothes.


He retained a interest in theatre all his life, and after 1911 when he and his father moved to Ecclesville, Fintona, County Tyrone he had a private theatre built. However he gave up the female parts after his mid-twenties.

• Roger Baker. Drag: a History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. cassell. 1994: 151-4.
• "Ecclesville". McClintock of Seskinore. www.mcclintockofseskinore.co.uk/page20.html. 

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Roger Baker explains the role of Lady Audley: "a pretty blonde bigamist who deserts her child, murders her first husband and has similar plans for her second - clearly the kind of role that any self-repecting drag queen would die for".

Gene Armstrong (1898 - 1962) and Noel Armstrong (1900 - 1968)

Geneva and Nola of Anderson, Indiana, who had four elder brothers, were 33 and 31 when their mother died in 1931.

They then switched to dressing as men, explained that they had only recently learned that they were men, and that their mother, desperate for daughters, had raised them as girls. They asked a court to change their names to Noel and Gene.

++Gene married and became father to a daughter and stepdaughter.  He became co-owner of the local potato chip company.

++He died in 1964; Noel died in 1968.

• “Miscellany, Dec 7, 1931”. Dec 07, 1931. Time.   Archive.
• L.H.Hamsley. “Imposters in Petticoats”. In David O. Cauldwell (ed). Transvestism … men in female dress. New York: Sexology Corporation. 1956: 63.
• "Gene Armstrong". Anderson Herald Buletin, Oct 23, 1962: 15.

Find a Grave(Gene D Armstrong) Find a Grave(Noel W Armstrong)

Thanks to researcher Kyle Phalen for finding the Find a Grave sites.

Caroline Matilda Oldenburg (1751 - 1775) Queen.

Caroline was the youngest child of Frederick Hanover, the English Prince of Wales, who died three months before her birth. Her brother George became king of the United Kingdom and Hanover in 1760 as George III.


In 1766 when she was 15, she was sent to Copenhagen to marry her cousin Christian Oldenburg the king of Denmark and Norway. Like her brother George, Christian was subject to bouts of mental instability. He also spurned and neglected Caroline Mathilde. However in 1768 they had a son, Frederick.

Later that year, Christian made a tour of Europe and returned with the Prussian doctor and philospher Johann Friedrich Struensee, who had been appointed State Counsellor and the king’s personal physician. He had a positive influence on the king, and at first reconciled Christian and Caroline Mathilde.

However the King’s mental health deteriorated. Struensee became the effective ruler and issued 1069 reforming cabinet orders (more than three a day). Struensee and Caroline Mathilde became lovers. Her second child, Louise, is taken to be fathered by Struensee, but is officially a child of the king.

Queen Caroline Mathilde was frequently seen in frock-coat and vest, leather trousers, high boots and spurs and a man's hat on loose unpowdered hair, and was often seen on horse-back so dressed. She even dressed in this manner to state occasions.

In January 1772 Caroline Mathilde and Struensee were arrested in the middle of the night after a masked ball. In April she was divorced and deported to Celle in Hanover. Struensee was executed.

Caroline Mathilde never saw her children again. She died of scarlet fever at age 24.

• Magnus Hirschfeld translated from the German by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress Prometheus Books. 1991: 374.

EN.Wikipedia.

Marion Bodmer (1910 - 1981) lawyer.

Marion’s parents in rural Pennsylvania, wanting a girl, announced their baby to be so, and then were embarrassed to switch the child to boys clothing. They had named the child Marion as it is fitting to both sexes.

Marion’s ‘boyish’ ability in sports led the neighbors to suspect that she might not be a girl. They explained the situation to Marion at age 9. He threw a tantrum and wept, but his parents persuaded him to continue. They considered moving to another place where Marion could start over as a boy, but Mr Bodmer had acquired considerable property and become Chief Burgess.

Marion continued through high school as a girl, as a good student and for three years was on the girls’ basketball team, however the other girls considered that she played like a boy and her nickname was Gus. 

At age 19 Marion switched to male clothing with the intention of entering the legal profession, and to that end registered at a preparatory school in Allentown for the summer, and Dickenson law School in the fall.

He married a Turkish-born doctor and they lived in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania and had two children.

• “ 'Girl' For 19 Years Revealed As Man; Marion Bodmer of Selinsgrove, Pa., Graduated From Female High School, Changes Attire”. July 14, 1929. The New York Times.
• “ ‘Girl’ for 19 Years, Boy To Stay in Allentown”. The Reading Eagle. July 16, 1929. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=FJAzAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KeEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4342,2840616&dq=marion+bodmer+pennsylvania&hl=en.
• L.H.Hamsley. “Imposters in Petticoats”. In David O. Cauldwell (ed). Tranvestism … men in female dress. New York: Sexology Corporation. 1956: 63.

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This story, which resembles fantasies found in transvestite fiction, was actually reported in the US national press at the time.

Thank you to Kathy Padilla for the photograph and the obituary of Marion's wife.

Marion is on the right in the front row in the photograph.

Henry Wriothesley (1573 – 1624) aristocrat.

Henry Wriothesley was raised in Sussex. He became the 3^rd Earl of Southampton at age 8 when his father died. He graduated from Cambridge with an MA in 1585, and was presented at Court at age 17. He became a favourite of the Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, and became a friend of Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex.

He became a patron of poets: Thomas Nashe, Gervase Markham, Barnebe Barnes, and most famously William Shakespeare. Venus and Adonis, 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece, 1594, are explicitly dedicated to the teenage Wriothesley, and it is argued that the Sonnets were addressed to him. He was known as ‘Rose’ to those who dared. It has been argued that the family name was pronounced ‘Rose-ly’, and its heraldic devices included roses. Sonnet 95 alludes to ‘thy budding name’. Rose, en femme, posed for a portrait that has been dated to 1590-3 based on the expensive lace collar on his dress. Sonnet 20 addresses him thus:

'A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion”.

In 1596 and 1597 Wriothesley sailed with Devereux to Cadiz and the Azores. In 1598 he married the pregnant Elizabeth Vernon, one of the Queen’s waiting women, for which they were both briefly imprisoned. In 1599 he went to Ireland with Devereux as part of the suppression of Tyrone’s Rebellion (Cogadh na Naoi mBliana, known in England as the Nine Year’s War). Southampton had an affair with Piers Edmunds, a fellow officer, and won a victory at Arklow in County Wicklow.

Devereux returned to England to a show trial and then attempted rebellion. Wriothesley was involved in this and they were both sentenced to death. Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, intervened to obtain commutation to life imprisonment for Wriothesley. When James Stuart became King of England, Wriothesley was released and recalled to Court.

He was a volunteer on the Protestant side in Germany in 1614. He financed the first tinplate mill in England, He participated in the East India Company, the New England Company and was active in the Virginia Company. In 1624 he and his elder son volunteered to fight for the United Provinces of the Netherlands against Spain. Both came down with fever and shortly died.

• “Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wriothesley,_3rd_Earl_of_Southampton
• Anthony Holden. “That’s no lady, that’s …”. The Observer. 21 April 2002. http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Observer/documents/2002/04/20/obs.ore.020421.005.pdf and www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/apr/21/artsandhumanities.highereducation.
• Rodney Bolt. History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe. Harper Collins Publishers. 2004: 158-161,345

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.

Kalemba (185? - 1871) harpist and singer.

Kalemba was a harpist and singer in the kingdom of Buganda.

One day in 1871, while he was performing for Zansanze, a senior princess of the royal family, Luwedde came for a visit. Luwedde was a niece of the king and one of the wives of the prime minister, Mukase. It was hardly possible for Kalemba to refuse Luwedde's statement of her desire for him.

It being necessary to be discreet, it was arranged that Zansanze would visit Luwedde in her personal compound. She arrived with eight other women, one of whom was Kalemba suitably attired. After the departure of the group minus one, Luwedde announced to her husband that her period was about to start and she was left alone for several days.

The difficulty was in getting Kalemba out again. Mukase intercepted the messenger woman who was sent to set up the exit, and upon having the couple found and brought to him, Mukase ordered the youth's head to be removed, and Luwedde to be smeared with his blood.

He was also insisting that she carry the head when she went to visit her uncle, but his advisors suggested that this might not be in accord with his longevity as prime minister.

• Eli Sagan. At The Dawn Of Tyranny: The Origins Of Individualism, Political Oppression, And The State. London: Faber And Faber. New York : Knopf. xxiii, 420 pp 16 plates. 1985: xi-xiii.

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This of course is in accord with traditional Ugandan values, unlike the love that they legislate against against these days pretending that it never existed before the Europeans came.

Birdy Rivera (194? - ) street queen.

Robert Rivera came from a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx.

While his Jewish father had a male lover, Robert’s parents did not want him around. At age eleven, he became the lover of Joe, a police officer. Joe, who became his legal guardian, insisted that Birdy wear dresses, and also beat him.

Birdy and other gays at school formed a gang, the Commando Queens. They staked a claim to Riker’s, a restaurant at Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue, which they took over from the winos.

He was at Stonewall.

*Not the DJ.
*No known relation to Sylvia Rivera

• David Carter. Stonewall : the riots that sparked the gay revolution. New York : St. Martin's Press 2004. New York: Griffin 2005: 59-60,167,177,179.
• David Isay & Michael Schirker (producer). “Remembering Stonewall”. Weekend All Things Considered. July 1, 1989. Radio. Partial transcript at: http://queertoday.ning.com/profiles/blogs/remembering-stonewall-40-years.

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In the 1989 radio documentary, Birdy says that he has been cross-dressing all of his life.

Apart from the 1989 documentary, I cannot find anything about him after 1969.